First off I must admit, as a listener and also a broadcaster, that I love Internet radio. What I don’t like is having to be tied to the computer all the time to listen live to my favorite shows. I have spent many an hour sitting at the park while my son is at soccer practice wishing that I could listen to one of my favorites while watching the practice. Instead, I’d listen to music or some older show I’d already downloaded onto my iPhone. That was until I discovered Talk Stream Live.

Talk Stream Live is designed to allow you to listen to Internet radio talk shows live on your iPhone, iTouch and iPad. When you activate the Talk Stream Live app you immediately see a list of Internet radio shows currently streaming live—and also some replays.

Read the rest of Listen in Real Time With Talk Stream Live Internet Radio Player or discover more iPhone apps.

© 2011: written by Keith Lewis for AppCraver.

Many of us, in our efforts to live with as minimal an impact on the environment as possible, have taken measures towards living green by incorporating more choices that increase sustainability. Doing so requires making selections that assure we’re not negatively impacting a species into extinction. Further to live healthier we must feel confident that we are not consuming a product that contains high levels of hazardous chemicals such as mercury.

Seafood Watch provides the assurances we need to make a decision on the purchase of seafood at our favorite market, restaurant, or sushi bar. In the past I’ve had cards that I picked up with similar information and carried them with me until they were frayed and unreadable. I’ve also had previous success using similar seafood watch services that utilized texting. I’d text a type of seafood and quickly receive sustainability and health information back via a text message. I found Seafood Watch to be a superior option.

Read the rest of Seafood Watch is a Must-Have App for Eco-Living Foodies or discover more iPhone apps.

© 2011: written by Keith Lewis for AppCraver.

Like other ragdoll physics games that came before it, Stick Stunt Biker has a minimal appearance. The player controls a stick figure that rides atop a stick bike, up and down ramps and hills that are depicted as simple lines. The background resembles a city scape that has been doodled on graph paper. It’s like countless doodles bored students might have rendered before games like this came along to save them from their dreaded math classes.

The real charm comes not from the objects that populate the game, but from the realistic physics engine behind the scenes. The movement of the dirt bike as it leaps over hills is quite convincing. The best visuals happen when the player loses: if the bike doesn’t land correctly after a jump or wheelie, the stick figure will be thrown across the screen, tiny limbs flailing in all directions.

Read the rest of Stick Stunt Biker Easily Lands Among the Top Apps or discover more iPhone apps.

© 2010: written by Keith Lewis for AppCraver.

Nike also allows your iPhone to convey motivational messages from celebrity jocks. Some users find this motivating, I suppose. Others feel that Lance Armstrong may not, in fact, be impressed in their newfound ability to run seven miles, and therefore find it annoying. Fortunately, you can also rely on a variety of computer voices to give you motivational messages. Well, that’s the twenty-first century for ya: anybody but someone you know is supposed to be your social network, right?

Read the rest of Nike+ GPS Brings Accurate Tracking and Social Media Bragging Rights or discover more iPhone apps.

© 2010: written by Keith Lewis for AppCraver.

So, what is HDR photography anyway? HDR stands for “High Dynamic Range.” The “range” refers to the luminance of the photograph, specifically the difference between the lightest and the darkest parts of the picture. A typical photograph is at the mercy of the lighting conditions of the time and place at which it was taken. A skilled photographer might be able to reduce glare or squeeze a little more detail out of the shadows, but the result will rarely compare to the range of luminance recognized by the human eye. HDR photographs, on the other hand, more closely recreate the experience of being there.

The way HDR photography accomplishes this is a bit of cheat: HDR photographs are actually the combination of three exposures. Each exposure will capture a different level of detail, and then the exposures will be combined with an algorithm designed to retain the greatest degree of detail in each photograph. It is a complicated process, so any reader who wonders whether an iPhone app will be capable of pulling it off is justifiably skeptical. Pro HDR, however, will make short work of that skepticism.

Read the rest of With Pro HDR Camera App, iPhone Photos Rival the Real Deal or discover more iPhone apps.

© 2010: written by Keith Lewis for AppCraver.

Here’s how you make a martini. Five parts gin, one part vermouth, unless you want it dry. Then you just wave the vermouth bottle around in front of a glass. Use vodka if you want instead of gin, but there’s no such thing as an apple martini, a chocolate martini, or a goddam drink from a volcanic Greek island called a Santorinitini. It’s booze with a tiny bit of fake wine dammit. That’s what a martini is.

Try telling that to the guys at Pocket Cocktails, Inc. Their big beautiful Cocktails HD is all about “exploration.” You can pull up the drink you want by general category, like “classics” and “tropical.” You can pull up Christmas and Halloween drinks for your hoity-toity holidays with families that you wouldn’t have anymore if you really knew how to drink. You can tap your way through bartender school and learn which flags go on which drinks in joints where the health department still lets them put fruit on things.

Read the rest of Cocktails HD: Perfect For Fancy People Who Put Booze in a Glass or discover more iPhone apps.

© 2010: written by Keith Lewis for AppCraver.

Just as music can simply be sound with no meaning, images can just be images. Keep those images in one spot, and you’ve got abstract art. Set them in motion, and you’ve got Cosmic Painter. This app may be what Timothy Leary was raving on about when he said computer graphics would be the next LSD.

CosmicPainter supplies motion to the canvas as you “paint” using a variety of tools, creating real-time (and very cool) animations. With a comparatively simple palette of painting tools, you create patterns against the moving background, producing ever-changing eye-candy effortlessly and intuitively. It’s painting for someone who doesn’t want to paint anything in particular. You’re just choosing whatever aesthetic effect you think will please your eye at the moment.

In a word, CosmicPainter is Art with a capital “A”: inherently meaningless, useless, and endlessly pleasing. 

Read the rest of CosmicPainter: Create Moving Art With Multi-Touch (Video Demo) or discover more iPhone apps.

© 2010: written by Keith Lewis for AppCraver.

Intuitiveness of play aside, Moto Mania is certainly a challenge. The object of the game is to navigate your bike over ramps and obstacles to complete the course in the shortest amount of the time possible. It really does feel like it is “your” bike because, at the start of play, you can customize the cycle by picking out the color of the bike’s finish and the style of the wheels. It’s a simple gimmick, to be sure, but it does help along the illusion that the bike is yours, and may get you feeling a bit more invested in getting it safely from one side of the course to the other.

Read the rest of Moto Mania: Ride, Crash and Relax for the Casual Gamer or discover more iPhone apps.

© 2010: written by Keith Lewis for AppCraver.

Solution: Angry Birds.
Residual problem: You really want to kill people, not pigs.

Better Solution: Fragger.

Fragger’s a smooth-playing, cute, physics-based slaughterhouse a la Angry Birds, but you’re throwing grenades instead of slingshotting feathered furies, at enemy people rather than pigs. Well, mainly people anyway. Sometimes your arc-enemies are bipedal aliens, but either way, you aren’t just makin’ bacon, you’re snuffing out thinking, emotive, sentient life, presumeably with families, fond recollections of childhood, favorite sports and amusement park rides, and all the rest.

Oh don’t be so maudlin. Fragger is just a video-game. They don’t plead for their lives. They don’t fire back. They don’t run away. They don’t so much as cross their fingers. Heck, they don’t even spatter when they die. They just stand there just like the piggies in Angry Birds, waiting for you to hurl grenades to dislodge their cover and then blow them up.

The materials and weapons in Fragger are not as varied as those provided in some other games, but they are plenty interesting enough for moderately addictive mayhem. The puzzles are fun to figure out, and you will find yourself trying many approaches to solve the tougher ones with the requisite number of grenades.

You launch said grenades using the same sort of device you use to kick field goals in Madden: pull back, adjust the vertical angle and power of launch, and let fly. Since this side-view game is strictly two-dimensional, there’s no chance you’ll send the shot wide right or left. It’s all about the x and y axes. One hint, and pretty much the only one you’ll need: grenades take forever to explode. Press “abort” when you know you’ve wasted one to move to your next grenade faster.

The music and sound effects are competent, and the action builds compellingly through different worlds and levels of complexity. Fragger is a very playable little time-waster free of bugs or glitches, with just enough brain-teasing to help stave off Alzheimers if you’re tired of crossword puzzles.

It’s not a lovingly rendered, deep, three-dimensional, impossible-to-put-down breakthrough in immersive gameplay and storytelling—but then, it’s not supposed to be. The worst thing you can do in Fragger is fail to kill everybody else, not die yourself. But it’s really more about the puzzles than the pulverizing, so put on your only slightly bloodthirsty thinking-cap, spend the buck, and frag away.

Or, download the free version of Fragger and give it a walk-through first.

Related posts:

1. Angry Birds: Cartoon Revenge is More Fun than Physics Class
2. Launch Penguins with YETISPORTS 1: Pingu Throw
3. Invasion of the Zakks: It’s a Zakk Attack!

3D Magic says Assault Commando is set in a South American jungle, but its look seems Asian; Perhaps we’re in Peru during the rule of Alberto Fujimori. Even at that, I’m seeing palm trees and huts here, not Japanese pagodas. The graphics actually suggest the jungle of some unnamed southeast Asian land; Hint: it rhymes with “bam.” The nice thing is, it doesn’t matter.

Whether you’re in Asia or an inexplicably Asiatic South America, Assault Commando is an old-school top-down two-stick run n gun with the feel of an arcade game. The reason the setting doesn’t matter is that the story is irrelevant. Here’s the actual plot: there’s this guy that’s you. Then there’s everything else. You destroy it. Oddly enough, in slogging through said Asian terrain in South America, you are attempting to stop one Albrecht Braun from taking over the world. Don’t ask.

Of course, destroying everything that’s not you keeps getting more difficult, as you would expect.

Read the rest of Assault Commando: If It Isn’t You, Destroy It! or discover more iPhone apps.

© 2010: written by Keith Lewis for AppCraver.