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Edward Snowden wants you to call him what he is: a trained government spy
Edward Snowden has been called a variety of things: whistleblower, patriot, traitor. But when it comes to his technical expertise, he's usually just referred to as a hacker, contractor or some flavor of system administrator. That, Snowden says, doesn't do his role and background justice. In an excerpt of an NBC interview, Snowden asserts that he's a technical expert "trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word," worked undercover and overseas for the CIA and NSA, lectured at a counterintelligence training academy and implemented systems for the government "at all levels." According to the infamous whistleblower, he qualifies as a spy in the classic sense since he "lived and worked undercover overseas -- pretending to work in a job that I'm not -- and even being assigned a name that was not mine."
Daily iPhone App: WorldCard Mobile scans your business card collection
The paper business card may go away someday if innovative apps like Bump and Evernote Hello take over, but for now we're still dealing with these little chunks of cardboard. Of course, in almost all cases it's not the physical object we care about, but rather the data printed on the card. (Some exceptions are inevitable.) Getting those inky bits converted to actual bits is easy enough with your iPhone and the right app. My default tool for business card scanning has been CardMunch, which has a number of advantages: fast, ties in easily to parent company LinkedIn, accurate (using actual humans to do the card transcription) and free. Unfortunately, CardMunch's cloud dependency means that sometimes it can get backed up, and when you're sitting on an airplane with a stack of post-conference business cards to go through, it's quite likely useless. That's where the Penpower family of contact management apps comes into play. The flagship iPhone app is the US$6.99 WorldCard Mobile, and it picks up nicely where CardMunch leaves off. You can scan your cards neatly without any network connection, and all the OCR processing is handled locally on the phone. Additional features include the ability to copy an email signature and parse it into a contact record, which is a lot more useful than I thought it would be. How good is the OCR function? Well, you can test it yourself with the app's lite version (allowing three scans the first week, and one scan per week after that). In my evaluation, I'd give it a B+ compared to the intelligent transcription of CardMunch -- keeping in mind that CardMunch also makes mistakes on some cards. Given that it's working in disconnected mode, the slight loss in accuracy seems to be a reasonable tradeoff. What's a little harder to take is WorldCard Mobile's UI, which has the same weird aesthetic and hinky buttons as a lot of other utilitarian apps on the App Store. It compares unfavorably to CardMunch's clean look, and it's most reminiscent of the early versions of Readdle's apps (which have come a long way since v1, in fairness). The lite version will let you know pretty quickly whether the look will make you nuts or not. Penpower also has a WorldCard Contacts app, which lets you keep the card images alongside your contact records but omits the OCR tool; it's $2.99. There is an iPad version, too, which costs $14.99 and doesn't quite work as advertised with the iPad 2's onboard camera, per reviewers -- it's apparently not quite high-res enough for accurate recognition. If you're a frequent business card recipient and you'd like to be mobile-enabled, check out WorldCard Mobile; start with the lite version, and if it's useful you can fork over the $7 for the full build.
Daily iPhone App: Star Marine Infinite Ammo
Glitchsoft's oddly-titled Star Marine: Infinite Ammo (more on why that's weird in a moment) is both good at bad. First, it's good at heart. Star Marine: Infinite Ammo is a Contra-style run-and-gun title that has you controlling a soldier on a spaceship among other environments. Your job is to fight through hordes of aliens and escape. The action is great and fans of the old Contra game will find a lot to enjoy. However, Star Marine has a few unfortunate issues. First of all, the controls are a little more wonky than they should be. For example, the action often gets fast and furious. When things heated up in Contra, you could duck and jump out of the way reliably. Star Marine's touch controls, by contrast, don't always get you where you need to go. I got hit by several stray bullets and alien flyers because the controls weren't quite as tight as they should be. Repetition is also an issue. While the environment options eventually expand, the first few levels are basically the same hallways and enemies over and over. An enjoyable boss battle becomes drudgery after you've done it several times. The freemium-style in-app purchase system doesn't help, either. When you discover a gun you haven't unlocked with gems you've collected, you just plain don't get it. Plus, the gems come way too slowly. If this was a freemium game, the rate might be acceptable (and I fully expect it to drop to free at some point), but for the current price of US$1.99, it's too slow. I've got one more complaint. For a game called "Infinite Ammo," there's only one gun I found that was truly infinite. Everything else, including weapons you can buy, health packs and special attacks, are limited. Despite those issues, Star Marine: Infinite Ammo can be fun. There's even a Boss Rush and Survival Mode to enjoy after you've finished the main campaign. I don't know that I'd recommend it at the $1.99 price, but this game seems made to be discounted, so keep an eye out for it. At a slightly cheaper price (or maybe if the freemium system is tweaked to be a little more forgiving), Star Machine: Infinite Ammo has a lot more going for it.
Daily iPhone App: Breakout Boost
Atari's been on a remixing jag lately, and I was really impressed by the recent iOS take on Asteroids. Now with Breakout Boost, Atari aims to update another old gem. Unfortunately, this one isn't quite as successful. It certainly is Breakout, as you control a little paddle across the screen, bouncing balls up to hit bricks, earn powerups, and score points. The controls are well designed for touch, too. There's a virtual handle underneath the paddle, and there's an added element of a slider that will make ball go faster (and earn more points) or go slower (and earn fewer). That's a fun mechanic, but otherwise, there's no real innovation. In fact, I've seen better Breakout clones on other platforms (including iOS). That said, Atari sidesteps most of those issues by offering up the app for free, so if you like the Breakout style of gameplay at all, you might as well download it and test it out. I'm not so sure you'll be convinced to buy any of the level packs as in-app purchases, but that's up to you -- if it floats your boat, they're there. But I'm sorry to say Asteroids Gunner did a better job of updating the Atari classic, and hopefully Atari will take those notes to heart when it decides to update any other titles (Missile Command, I hope).
Daily iPad App: eHarmony
When eHarmony first brought its iPad app to us a couple of months ago, I had the great idea (I thought) to put together a feature for TUAW around the idea of only the iPad app to access the very popular Internet dating service, find a date, and then review both the app and the date itself. So eHarmony kindly provided me with a couple months of membership, and I set to work using the iPad app to craft my profile, find some nice women to date in Los Angeles, and eventually go out with one of them. Unfortunately for eHarmony, my lack of appeal outlasted their service, and despite chatting with a few nice women, none of them wanted to meet me over dinner or drinks. But I can't fault the iPad app itself. The whole experience is really impressive, featuring an interface that I actually enjoyed using more than the official web site. If you're a real loser like me, eHarmony still won't guarantee you a girlfriend or boyfriend. But if you're already using the service and have an iPad, the app is definitely worth a look. The whole process is surprisingly quick and clean on the iPad -- the app's interface is modeled around a big circular table of sorts, with the view zooming and rotating around to look at various physical items portrayed on the screen. Your sign-in page is a notebook, for example, where you can write your name and password, and then the view zooms to another book where you can enter your information and fill out your profile with the usual dating site information (likes, dislikes, personal information and questionnaires). After it's filled out, you can browse around the rest of the site, checking out a "Book of You" that has information about your personality and who you're compatible with, and your "matches" which are laid out like a series of Polaroid photos on the wooden desktop. The physical metaphor is really effective, and the iPad is an excellent medium for browsing through photos and information. The app works smoothly (though my iPad is only WiFi, so I'm not sure how it loads over 3G), and there are lots of really fun touches, which surprised me a bit. When you first log in, there's a coffee cup on top of the screen, and you can actually play with it, causing ripples and splashes on the surface of the java. When you touch a match's picture, you don't just get transferred to their profile, their picture actually zooms over to another section of the table and then gets inserted into their profile page. This is all with sound effects, too. The app shows a surprising amount of design thought and consideration. I'd guess that's because eHarmony probably hired an experienced Mac and iOS development house to make it, but I don't know who that is (and the companies in those kinds of work-for-hire agreements don't usually talk about that anyway). At any rate, the eHarmony app is terrific, and I actually did come to prefer it to using the main web page, mostly because the web itself doesn't offer up pictures of matches before you actually go and see their profiles. There were a few settings that I had to go in and change that I couldn't on the iPad version (specifically where my matches were supposed to come from. Being in Los Angeles, I obviously wanted to meet someone who lived close to me), but when actually browsing the service and reading and responding to messages, I found being on the iPad was the ideal. The app is free, but to use it, you'll need an eHarmony membership, which comes with a few different prices. You'll have to decide for yourself whether or not that's something you're interested in. Some folks have found a lot of good relationships with apps like this, while some have a better time just going to a bar. As for me, my search continues. Ladies, if any of you are looking for a smart and funny professional blogger who knows a lot about iPhone games and enjoys running around Santa Monica, I'll be here!
Daily iPhone App: Magic Defenders
Magic Defenders isn't new, but it has claimed a lot of my iPhone gaming time lately. It's a tower defense game, so if you like that genre, odds are that you'll like this one. Instead of building towers, you play the game as a mage that's casting spells against waves of attackers. The game cycle has you casting spells using mana, killing attackers to earn XP, and then using that XP to upgrade your spells to kill attackers more quickly, earning more XP, and so on. It's a lot of fun and considering that the game has a few different heroes to play through and level up across three invasion episodes, there's plenty of content to explore. Blazing down enemies is very rewarding, as is learning how the various spells work together. You can slow enemies down with one spell, for example, freeze them in place with a second, and then nuke them all down with a third. The game's great on the iPad, too, but the drag-and-drop spell interface makes it easy on any iOS device. And at 99 cents on the App Store for a universal version, Magic Defenders is one of the best bargains out there that you might have missed the first time around. If you like tower defense games or ridiculously addictive game cycles, it's definitely worth the buck.
DIA Parrot digital photo frame by nodesign is not a digital photo frame
How do you a frame a digital photo without framing it? That's the mind-bending question considered by Parrot and the nodesign agency, and the "mysterious object" known as the DIA Parrot is their answer. Just what is it? We'll let Parrot explain. What is striking is its 10x4 inch high resolution screen. Dismantled, deconstructed, disconnected from the frame as if there was nothing behind, this screen is transparency, is light. The picture, your photo, appears through this "light box" in a brand new aesthetic dimension... "The photo frame designed by Jean-Louis Frechin is very mysterious," continues Henri Seydoux. "Jean-Louis was smart or 'crazy' enough to dismantle the LCD screen we get used to, and the result is quite simply magical. We don't see where the photo comes from... It is simply there, on this transparent and half-dismantled screen... It is prestidigitation!" Look for it to set you back $500 when it launches in February. You didn't expect a brand new aesthetic dimension to come cheap, did you?
SAFA's 3one DAP: a pointless Dia clone
Here's a strange one for you. Remember SAFA's Dia DAP? Yeah, us neither. Nevertheless, a quick search tells us that SAFA's 3one digital audio player is an identical clone to their own, not-so-memorable DAP. Same 79 x 48 x 10-mm dimensions, same 320 x 240 pixel display, same audio and video support, same MiniSD expansion, price, and battery. In fact, the only difference appears to be a circular central controller instead of a diamond. Probably the weakest justification for padding a product portfolio we've seen this side of Creative. [Via AVING]
SAFA showcases DIA media player in Korea
It's good to see SAFA back in the saddle after a long bout with silence, and the firm's latest PMP looks mighty fine, we must say. Dubbed DIA -- presumably in reference to the diamond shaped control pad -- this diminutive device boasts a 2.4-inch color LCD, plays nice with audio and video files, comes with four mini games, and is available with up to 4GB of internal capacity. Moreover, users can load the rest of their files on a miniSD card, and there's also a FM tuner and voice recorder to go along with the eight equalizer presets. Word on the street puts the 2GB iteration at ???139,000 ($151), while the 4GB version will only run you ???60,000 ($65) more. Check out a few more angles after the jump, and don't say that oh-so-shiny rear doesn't look familiar.
