ScreenGuardz Privacy Film For The iPhone

ScreenGuardz Privacy from NLU Products aims to reduce the number of prying eyes seeing what you're doing on your iPhone. Essentially, this sticky, but non-residue-leaving film slips on the front of your iPhone, and cuts down the angle of visibility to the phone. Additionally, and harder to see in the video, the content is blurred/obscured before you are at enough of angle for the screen to be dark. Meaning that while someone familiar with the iPhone screen could still tell that you're on the Mail screen, etc., they wouldn't be able to see what you're working on.

Here's a look:

4iThumbs Tactile Keyboard for the iPhone at Macworld

The small company 4iThumbs, was showing their tactile keyboard overlay for the iPhone at Macworld. It's not designed to be a full-time keyboard replacement, but rather a training tool to allow you to get better/quicker at typing on the device. According to the creator of the overlay, you should be able to remove it after a month or two, and see optimal increases in your typing speed due to an increase in muscle memory for each key.

In using the keyboard briefly at the show, it does feel strange, as you need to touch between the raised points, rather than on them, as those coming from say, a Blackberry might expect. With that said, it did feel as if I was being more precise with where I was touching to activate each letter. Whether it really makes a difference compared to the phone's built-in error correction, will require longer testing:

Puppy Park for the iPhone and iPod Touch Video Review

Puppy Park is a straightforward strategy game, cleverly dressed up with puppies (who doesn't like puppies!?) and catchy music. The premise is simple enough: arrange a series of striped colored cards so that cards with like colors are next to each other. String together enough cards, and you move on to a progressively more difficult level.

There are three difficulty levels, but even the easy level can present quite a challenge. Puppy Park is another addictive, fun, quick iPhone game if you want a quick strategy game on the go.

(iTunes link)

Here's a look:

2010: The Year Flash Dies.

Adobe Flash, you've had a good run. You've humored us through the years with various updates. You've made our workday a little slower with buffering, and CPU overload. And in all seriousness, without you, we may have never known the words "embed code" on websites. Alas, like all good things, this too must end.

When Apple released the iPhone, and it didn't support flash, we scoffed. How dare they turn their back on the predominant 3rd party content delivery platform! This will be the Achille's heel of the iPhone! Instead, in the latest in a string of events showing just how mighty Apple has become, in announcing their support for html 5, the rest of the industry slowly started to follow suit.

And now this week, the site with the largest amount of flash-encoded content in the world, YouTube, has started making its videos available without Flash. Vimeo has announced they will follow suit, and thus begins a sudden, dizzying spiral. It will still take a few months for the death certificate to be signed. After all, we have to still rely on Flash for our live video stream, but that will all change soon enough. What YouTube(google) and Apple do, the rest of the industry surely follows.

Let's meet back at this post in a year, and see if our dear, CPU-hogging friend is still with us...

Ridge Racer Accelerated for the iPhone and iPod Touch

We briefly mentioned it a few weeks ago on DoubleTap, but here's a fuller look at Ridge Racer: Accelerated for the iPhone and iPod Touch. As mentioned in the video review, if you're looking for a racing game, you can't help but be seduced by the graphics from the screenshots, and even the intro movie for the game promises heart-pounding entertainment.

Most of that disappears shortly after your car leaves the start line. Up until the second corner, I thought "this is the best racing game yet" for the iPhone. Well, once you get to that corner, it becomes apparent that the game is hobbled either by graphics code that's not efficient enough, or graphics that are beyond the capability of the iPhone processor. Bear in mind this game was reviewed on an iPhone 3GS. Customers have also complained about the frame rate being significantly worse on older models, particularly the iPod Touch. A recent update seems to have helped many people with that issue, but our iPhone 3GS performance lagged.

The game also comes with a limited number of cars and tracks, with more tracks available for in-app purchase. Perhaps these intro tracks should be free if additional tracks will cost you more.

Still, with a few tweaks to make the graphics fly by, and some changes to the revenue model, this could be a solid racing game for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

(iTunes Link)

Here's a look: