Just a word of warning to everyone who reads this site: don’t buy Panorama Camera for the iPhone ($2.99). It’s pretty crap, and I’ve got a review up over at Positive Machine to that effect today. Autostitch is still your best bet.
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PositiveMachine.com – iPhone app reviews
I’ve had a lot of fun writing my iPhone app reviews over these past few weeks, and many of you have said rather kind things. Most surprising of all was the number of developers who wrote me to say how much they enjoyed my comments, but could not publicly link to them because they were too crude or awesome or whatever. Well, the price for encouraging me is always a terrible one.
Today, I’m putting out a new site (PositiveMachine.com) dedicated to iPhone app reviews. All the previous ones have been republished, and new ones will no longer be appearing here and getting in the way of more important things, like what fattening crap I’ve eaten or who I got into a fight with online. There’s a new write-up of RunKeeper up now, if you’re into fitness. Even if you’re not, you might want to take a look. It’s not like you have anything better to do. I mean, dude, you’re reading my blog.Thanks again to Yi Jun for the lovely robot. His name is Optimist Prime.
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Burger King Whopper Bar Singapore opening
Photos from tonight's launch. Open to the public from tomorrow afternoon.
I have to say I'm extremely excited about the opening of the world's third Whopper Bar right here in Singapore, after the ones in Orlando and Munich. Ordering can be a little tricky, but you basically start from a 1-3 patty burger, and add on your choice of 24 condiments and premium toppings. Examples include nacho chips, fried onions, steak sauce, several kinds of cheese, cut chillies, and jalapenos. They're also the first such restaurant here to serve beer, with a can of Tiger only costing an additional $2 on top of a value meal.I had a Double Sweet Mexicana Whopper, only to be told later that it was designed to appeal to women. BK needs to do a little more market research because I don't know any women who would eat that. I'm appalled that it was even served without an ambulance standing by. Anyhow, I ordered another custom Mushroom Swiss Whopper approximation after that to wash down my two Tigers. (I didn't run all of last week for nothing.)The BK Whopper Bar concept restaurant is at Clarke Quay, beside The Arena club, and stays open till at least 3 am.
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iPhone app review: Ramp Champ
(This iPhone review and others like it have been moved to my new app review site, positivemachine.com. Why not have a look?)
Ramp Champ (Game)
Price: $1.99
What it is: A carnival of sadomasochism.Every retirement home has one old man who used to be a championship boxer, tough enough to still knock out two young men bigger than him. Likewise, every group of cowed nerds has among their numbers one who will eventually arm up and shoot up the school in a black trenchcoat. Ramp Champ has a lot in common with these people.
It lives amongst the feeble pursuits most call “casual games”, a candycoated term cooked up by executives to describe alternative entertainment for normal people – those don’t play first-person shooters and airplane simulations eight hours straight at a time – or as we like to call them, “games for pussies”. But don’t be fooled by the company it keeps. Ramp Champ is a prison-hard motherf*cker. I suspect it broke out of hardcore gaming prison and into casual gaming prison just because it was bored.
Ramp Champ is like the serial killer who wears thick glasses and tucks his striped shirt into his pants and talks with a feigned speech impediment and holds a boring desk job at a government agency, but really goes home every night and becomes like Christian Bale or something, with ripped muscles from pumping rusty iron in his basement and hunting animals in the woods naked.
So what looks like an innocent game of skeeball is actually an elaborate psychology experiment. I mean, it must be! The physics simulation suggests that you have full control over where the ball goes, if you’re good enough, and then when you need to score the most, it lets some blind Parkinson’s patient take over the shot. But sometimes, it does exactly what you expect, making the time spent smearing goat’s blood on your own face seem completely worth it. It frustrates, it makes a mockery of your so-called skills, and it’s completely addictive. I know because I’ve mastered it at the cost of my sanity.
Slammer Rating: 4/5 shivsBuy Ramp Champ in the iTunes App Store.
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Above: What you’ll see when you become a ramp champ. Each of the levels’ three goals filled in with a yellow dot.
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Peanut Butter & Condensed Milk Thick Toast
From a Hong Kong-style cafe we had a late dinner at tonight. It’s been awhile since I made myself a peanut butter sandwich, and I’ve never plastered on as much as they did here. It makes for a saturated taste sensation, like melting a block of great chocolate in your mouth after a glass of whisky, except this probably had a thousand calories from being finished with lashings of condensed milk. It was like a post-apocalyptic PB landscape turned into a nutty archipelago by tidal waves of artery-clogging dairy effluence. I say that now, as I sit here with heartburn and the weight of a distended belly on my lap, but it was really good at the time.
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Kinokuniya Moleskine notebooks
See and download the full gallery on posterousThe Kinokuniya chain of Japanese bookstores seems to have commissioned its own line of Moleskine notebooks. They carry more of those things than any other store in Singapore that I’ve seen, from the graphed sketchbooks to weekly planners. Lots of little things get on my nerves – I’ve just come to accept that this is how my life is much harder than yours – and people pronouncing the name “mohl-skin” is one of them. I don’t even like the damned things. They are the notebook equivalent of Lomo cameras, or tall burgers. The lines often aren’t drawn evenly from top to bottom (a defect that also plagues paper products from the “Prints” chain of stores in Singapore, despite their ridiculously high prices), the covers aren’t even leather (just saying, because many people seem to think they are), and the vertical elastic band isn’t as useful as, say, Ciak’s horizontal bands that can hold pens. I really miss having an Ordning & Reda store here. Those were expensive notebooks that at least came close to justifying their prices.
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FM3 Buddha Machines
Earlier today I posted a link to a New Yorker article by Sasha Frere-Jones over at Blast!, where he talks about his considerable affection for the FM3 Buddha Machine – colorful plastic modern musicboxes, decidedly low-tech and appropriately straight out of China, where their musician/makers are based.
The devices use 2 AA batteries and feature creaky, distortion-prone plastic bodies and cheap speakers, but tend to retail for many times more than what you’d imagine they cost to make. Their designs are reminiscent of little FM radios I coveted as a child, except these only play back nine looping audio tracks of under a minute each. Recently, an iPhone app has become available, bringing the cost of sorta-owning a Buddha Machine down to between SGD$3 and $8 (depending on whether a sale is on). If you want a hi-fi, free, but sadly Buddha-Machineless experience, the soundfiles are available for download at the official site.
While you’ll do just fine with one, as I did for awhile before receiving another as a gift, there’s a lot of fun in getting several to play off each other. In Frere-Jones’ interview with one of the creators, there’s mention of several hour-long “performances” in underground Chinese clubs, where audience members take turns to adjust the settings on their way to the bar. I just bought the iPhone app tonight and listened to the three of them droning on for… I don’t know how long. Both my physical boxes are Version 1.0 models; later Version 2.0 models played nine totally different tracks. The iPhone app contains all 18 sounds.
Here’s a video I took, although the sound isn’t great. Let’s see if my new Posterous account can handle this.
sangsara.net 