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Source: Boston.com
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ROME, Ga.—Planning to drink and drive this New Year’s? A north Georgia funeral home has a deal for you. Between now and noon Thursday, drivers can visit McGuire, Jennings and Miller Funeral Home in Rome to sign a contract stating they plan to drink or take drugs and then drive on New Year’s Eve. If they die in a wreck that day, the funeral home will give them a free burial.

Are you kidding me? Just give them an excuse. So they’re signing a contract saying that they will break the law on New Year’s Eve and will put other drivers and pedestrians at risk. How is this at all lawful? A free burial is nice, but like this? More than a little ridiculous, don’t you think?

The article also states that “funeral home officials said the program is designed to save lives by making partygoers think twice about drinking and driving.” My question is, how could it possibly do this? The person is getting a reward, i.e., less family financial hardship after death, for getting themselves killed in a DUI. I don’t see how this saves lives at all. If anything, it puts innocent drivers at risk. I’d stay off the road in this town during New Year’s Eve if I was in Rome, Georgia and this kind of thing catches on. Hopefully, people find it as ridiculous as I do.

Gravity Sling is a game in which you control an astronaut stuck in space. You pick a direction and magnitude and send him flying around the orbits of planets until he reaches his ship, trying not to crash into planets or become lost in space on the way. It’s a well made game that can make beautiful fractal shapes as the astronaut leaves a line behind him when traveling in orbit, slowly changing in color as time goes on. The game also has a nice music track and solid graphics.

What I like most about this game, though, is how they set it up. On the App Store, it’s a free download. In this free download, you get 19/109 levels to try out with a myriad of situations: one planet, multiple planets, moving planets, etc. The introductory level set gives you a taste of the game at no cost. The other 90 levels are separated into three different 30-level packs and worth $0.99 each. I love this model much more than the whole lite/full version system because, in some cases, it cuts down on the number of apps in the App Store and keeps all the reviews for the app in one place. Now, there also is a Gravity Sling Deluxe, which has all the levels already in and unlocked (and at the time of writing, it was on sale for $0.99, 66% off) for people who don’t want to deal with in-app purchases or don’t have iPhone OS 3.0 (which is required for in-app purchases). I went ahead and bought it, but then worried that it wouldn’t remember that I did all but one of the introductory levels already. Much to my surprise, it had all the data still there (most likely due to the OpenFeint system the game hooks itself up to). I found that to be awesome and I’m glad I could support the developer of such a great app.

I really hope that in-app purchases become a way to upgrade from lite to full versions of software in the future. I don’t like seeing those huge “Lite” or “Free” banners all over applications in the store. I’m happy with the way Gravity Sling’s developer has done it.

Go check it out in the App Store (regular version, deluxe version).

Lately, I’ve been playing a game on my iPhone called Home Run Battle 3D, a home run derby game with an arcade and classic mode. The classic mode is the standard derby: anything that’s not a home run is an out and you have 10 outs to hit as many home runs as possible. Unlike the arcade mode, the pitcher only throws fastballs. In arcade mode, you can also get points for hits that don’t make it out of the field of play. Items such as score doublers come up during the game which adds some variety. Also, the pitcher throws a variety of pitches in this mode which can become challenging. There is an online mode as well where you can play against other sluggers across the country. You can customize your slugger with a variety of uniforms, bats, gloves, etc. (the spiked bat in the picture is an example of the offerings). Smashing home runs out of the park is a rewarding experience and the game is really addicting.

I do have a few qualms about the experience, though. You can customize your slugger by using “gold balls” – you get them by hitting them out the park in either the classic or arcade modes, by playing online, or by completing a number of achievements. The issue I have with these gold balls is that you don’t get them very quickly and things in the game cost a lot. When you’re only getting 3-5 gold balls a game and things cost 500+ gold balls, you’ll be playing for a while before you get anything unless you complete an achievement. Also, I find it deplorable that it costs gold balls to change your slugger’s skin color or hair style. What if I want to make my slugger in his own likeness and not as a white guy with black hair? What kind of message is the game (probably unintentionally) trying to send? Also, the game’s graphics can be a little glitchy – when you hit poles, it makes the sound before it hits and the ball’s flight doesn’t change. Also, the slugger walks awkwardly when walking to the plate, and he and the pitcher stop dead when the ball is in flight, their sprites not moving at all.

Despite the game’s flaws, though, I enjoy playing it overall but I think I prefer the offline over the online play. You can check it out on the App Store; there’s a lite version, as well.

The iPhone’s mail program is solid for quick reading and replying or deleting of messages. It also does a very good job of reading a variety of attachments. However, it is a bit simplistic in some of its features. The one missing feature that bothers me the most is the ability to flag messages. Mail programs mark messages as read as soon as you open then; “read” messages can just as easily be “skimmed”. I like to be able to flag messages that I find important that I want to get back to later. That I can’t flag messages requires me to leave messages read or mark them unread again, neither of which are optimal solutions.

Another thing that bothers me about the iPhone’s mail program is its search. I’m glad Apple added a search feature so that we can find what we’re looking for; however, the search is limited to finding and reading messages. What if I am searching for messages to bulk move them? What if I am searching for messages so I can delete them? The iPhone mail program doesn’t let me do these things, requiring me to wait until I get back to my computer unless I want to manually search for each message.

The iPhone’s mail program is adequate for retrieving and quickly replying to messages. However, when something comes that you want to save for later, you have to work around its limitations of not being able to flag messages. There are also other limitations such as not being able to move messages between accounts. It’s a decent app and I’m not going to stop using it (I don’t think I have much of a choice), but it could be improved.

Source: New York Times
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Note: after writing this, Nuance put out an update that allows you to remove your contact listings from their servers and also not put them on in the first place. Problem is, whenever I download this update, it downloads 1.0.1 again and tells me I still haven’t updated the app (see my “App Store Woes” post).

From David Pogue, the author:

I tried out Dragon Dictation, a new, free…app for the iPhone from Nuance. You tap a big central Record button–and you talk. (You still have to speak the punctuation and say “new paragraph” when you want a line break.) When you tap Done, the typed transcription of what you said appears on the screen.

My brother emailed me a week or so ago and informed me of this application. I myself tried it out. It’s surprisingly accurate; I mean, it does mess up sometimes, but it’ll even give you other suggestions that, at the very worst, come quite close to what you said. It’s also (at least for now) still a free download on the App Store, so it’s a must grab. This article is actually about the privacy concerns of the application. Some users have been bothered by the fact that the application sends your audio to Nuance’s servers to transcribe it, and that the program takes the first and last names of your contacts for the purpose of recognizing these names when they are said. Pogue states that despite the power of this application, there are 1000+ one-star reviews of it. For one, reviewers on the App Store are pretty poor reviewers; they see one bad thing and think the whole application’s useless (and feel like it’s a justified way to review something) or will fill up their review with Emoji that serve no purpose but to make the review colorful. Regarding privacy concerns, Pogue says:

What I don’t understand is: Why don’t these same people worry that Verizon or AT&T is listening in to their cellphone calls every single day? Why don’t they worry that MasterCard is peeking into their buying habits? How do they know Microsoft and Apple aren’t slurping down private documents off the hard drive and laughing their heads off?

I mean, if you’re gonna be paranoid, at least be rational about it.

I find this to be a great point and one that would hopefully quell some concerns about Nuance’s practices.

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