M.A.G. - Miko Action Game for Smartphones

"巫女 Miko" is a Japanese word describe a woman who can communucate with the spirit world of Gods, but in modern days, this word almost always means a woman who work at Shinto shirine, for example those girls who wear stunningly clean and beautiful traditional clothes, sit at the counter of shirine's office as a receptionist, sometimes help visiters buy goods. Exactly the girls you see in the blow picture.

Girls work at a shrine's store selling religious goods on New Years Eve

Not to mention, Miko is a famous object for Otaku's craving, because overlapping of sacred elements and esthetics of Japanese traditional attire stirs up something in their minds. Yes, you can guess it's a kind of forbidden adore.

"M.A.G", the title of this exciting simple scroll action shooting game, is an abbreviation of Miko Action Game.

M.A.G. for iOS

M.A.G. for Android

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Toaru Majutsu no Index Alarm App for iPhone

Cute Amine Girls games, or Moege are all about (virtual) interaction with Anime girls. Whether it's a high school drama style sweet story or SF style or an ancient saga in which usually players embark on a mission to defeat an evil empire like Final Fantasy in it's early days, what we (or I..) expect is how well the game satisfy or provoke something sexual in us with whatever stories...

But, of course not all Anime fans have sexually quirks. Just like putting intricate figure dolls on your desk shelf, you just want having fun talking to, cooking with the girls, or maybe you want them to wake you up in a dull morning...

This is again an alarm-clock app of a character from a famous anime called 'Toaru Majutsu no Index (A Forbidden Tome of A Certain Magic or A Certain Magical Index)'.

As you don't wake up and keep the girl from having breakfast (because she has to wake you up, you know she is so loyal), she is getting hungry and angry. For some reason she describe how she is hungry in numbers, like "I'm 22.5 % hungry!!". This number indicates how long you took to wake up after the alarm. Somehow her reaction may tempt you to try to leave her until she gets 100% hungry...

This app is priced at 600yen(apprx $7.5), which is a bit expensive or a right price (it also has a voice library and stock wallpapers)? How do you think?

*I could't confirm this app is available in U.S. iTunes.

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If Moe girl were living in your iPhone... - DreamClub PureClock Amane

Usually when spin-offs of gamesofts for desktop gaming consoles are released for gaming portable devices, it may end up somewhat simplified or downgraded. But sometimes things are the opposite. Sometimes portable games would get more unique and diffuse more into your life.

DreamClub PureClock Amane

This is an iOS version of "Dream Club", a famous game for Xbox360. And this might go deeper in your life than Xbox360 version. Simply because you always carry around iPhone, means you're always with Moe girl  who are always sincerely looking forward you to launching the app, too.

This was originally released as a free app, but with the new update, now we can get the full version for $6.99.

When you unlock the full feature, you can change the girl's cloths, use an alarm function, gift her presents, have more voices and more opportunities to TOUCH her (you can shake her boob by touching..).

This basically is an alarm (or clock) app. When you touch the clock in the top-left, the girl's voice will read the present time. It's fine.

Alarm just works fine, too. When the set time has come, the special voice will announce you a time.

You also can present her gifts, though it cost actual money D:
When you treat her alcohol, she got drunk lol. Maybe you shouldn't think too much. Just enjoy her cute expression ;)

Why don't you buy her cloths if you want to make her like you, or just want to see her in your favorite costumes.
You can also take a photo with her, or select a photo from Cameraroll and add her image over it. You can drag the girl's image with two finger so that nicely fit her into the photo.

The girl in this app is a main character of Xbox version. This is a game which you can virtually experiences the Japanese style cabaret club, top-notch, very expensive club. So you can see so many gorgeous Moe girls are working for this club.

When you haven't use this app for a while, she would call you that she miss you... It's maybe Otaku Dream Come True for some people, but for me it's a bit scary, what if you uninstall this app? I just only could imagine a Ring like horrific scene :(

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Let's play Casino with Moe girls

Hello two dimension!! Oh you don't understand what I mean by two dimension? Basically it means cute girls in Anime or Game, which of course have two dimension body.
Anyway, whether you're a serious Otaku or just want to take a peek at Japanese modern culture or an early adopter who just want to try everything new in the market, this is my best recommendation of anime girls game which has a little eroge (Anime like porno game) flavor with high-quality graphic.

The maker of this app (Override Co.) is really famous for the quality of it's eroge games.

Anime Casino Beauty Dealers

In this game you play poker, blackjack and Indian poker with Moe characters, little cute girls. Not surprisingly the company's already released similar games as a series, and this is a second installment of this Anime Casino Dealers series.
So what the difference from the previous one?
Think about it. When you go to a strip club, though I'm quite unsure you've ever been, perhaps the most enjoyable moment there is when strippers are teasing you by taking off their cloths so too slowly, and you're watching it sipping a beer. Or... imagine there's a girl in revealing cloth in front of you, and you could make her take her cloth off, step by step, by beating her in poker..
This game or many other eroge are capturing those situations into the game screen. What matters is not you can enjoy poker itself but you can enjoy the process of girls getting naked.
The answer of the question is... no, there's no difference, except, tough this is a big exception, that girls are different.

all character has big tits in this game

This game has three characters. Madam Scarlet plays poker, Aoi, the girl in a nurse costume holding an injection needle, plays black jack, and Karen, the girl with bunny ears, plays Indian poker.

The system is just the classic way. As you win you get coins and with those coins you can take cards concealing girls' body off.

Can you see the left, second from the bottom card's price is only $1000, and the below that card is $16,000? These girls are really good at teasing you!!

$25,000!!!

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Simplicity > Usability ? - Talk About Apple's misleading message

I don't want to blame Apple. I have iPhone and I really love it. I can contact with my friends so easily with apps like WhatsApp or Skype without paying crazy amount of money to telecom companies. I listen to radio podcast, video podcast, I can take nice photos and editing them with Instagram or camera+. Most of all, without iPhone, more specifically Anki, Audiobook and NPR podcast, I would never be able to speak English fluently and never be able to get a job out here in U.S.

But come on Apple, you're like a family-run business on privacy issues, you can do it better.

This is totally a design fail, design of words. What the consequence? That makes Apple a deceiver if not a liar, or just so unprofessional, of course being unprofessional can make you a liar. Apple, You claim you're the most innovative company in the world, you're the most valuable company in the world, you want to be different from Google that you're more aesthetic, more responsible, more coherent, provide better user experience.

Please.. I really don't want to hear this kind of news.

Apple Loophole Gives Developers Access to Photos

Okay.. No wonder why this happened.

Basically this article says

Your address book is not safe
Some apps for iOS were taking people’s address book information without their knowledge.
  - But copying address book data is against Apple’s rules, and Apple is underway to fix this

Your Photos are also vulnerable
After a user allows iOS applications to have access to location information, the app can copy the user’s entire photo library, without any further notification or warning,
  - photo copying, is not specifically forbidden under Apple’s rules, so Apple did not respond yet.

The first time an application wants to use location data, for mapping
or any other purpose, Apple’s devices ask the user for permission

Why full access to Cameraroll is allowed?
On Apple devices, full access to the photo library was first permitted in 2010 when Apple released the fourth version of iOS. The change was intended to make photo apps more efficient. 

Once the data is off of the iOS device, Apple has virtually no ability to monitor or limit its use.

What developers is saying?
John Casasanta, owner of the successful iPhone app development studio Tap Tap Tap, which created the Camera+ app says,
“It’s very strange, because Apple is asking for location permission, but really what it is doing is accessing your entire photo library, The message the user is being presented with is very, very unclear.” 

What we believed Apple was doing
It was assumed that Apple would ensure that apps that inappropriately exploited it did not make it into the App Store.

Why Apple is doing wrong?
Apple and app makers should be making sure people understand what they are consenting to. It is pretty obvious that they aren’t doing a good enough job of that. 

What about Android Apps?
Google declined to comment on how its Android operating system for mobile devices handles this issue. - means copying is possible without any kinds of permissions, see here.

What happened this month?
This month, Apple allowed a fake 99-cent Pokémon app into the App Store. Even though it offered only a series of Pokémon images, it became one of the most popular paid apps before it was removed by Apple.
 - this sounds too cute after reading about possible danger of being stolen photos or contact data.

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Photography goes Magical, No need to wait until crowds gone away - Scalado

Smartphone, where magic happens.
Don't say I'm being totally facetious before knowing this photo retouching app.

There are already nice photo retouching apps for iOS such as this or this, which let you easily remove objects from your photos or naturally put extra objects into your photos.

But what you see is this was merely a beginning of the magical world of smartphone's photo editing after Scalado released this app.

With this app called "Scalnado Remove" you you don't need to move your finger all over to cover the area you want to erase. Because Remove captures several images in a row, analyses them and automatically creates a composite photo devoid of unwanted details. Better yet, it highlights potential objects and lets you eliminate them manually.

The actual process of editing is introduced in this video.

The Press Release from Scalado.

Scalado, a world-leading provider of high-performance imaging technologies, applications and services for the mobile industry, have today announced the release of a new revolutionizing product named Remove. Remove is a technology that automatically highlights and removes any unwanted object from a captured photo. It is the world’s first Object removal software to be released on a mobile device.
Remove solves common photographic problems with unwanted objects in captured images, such as people getting in the way of our camera shot. Remove detects and selects the unwanted objects which simply can be removed automatically or by touching the selections on the screen or after capturing the image.

"After Zero Shutter Lag, Burst, and Rewind Scalado continue leading and changing the capturing landscape by bringing in new unique and needed capturing innovations”, says Fadi Abbas, CMO/VP BizDev and Co-founder of Scalado, -"What differentiate us is the combination of customers who believe in our superiority, leading industry partners and continuous innovations”
Last year Scalado released several innovations, e.g. the Rewind technology which allows the users to capture perfect group shots by automatically selecting the best shots in a burst and merging them into one perfect image. Rewind is already shipping in millions of mobile phones.

"Our team has been working hard to maintain its leading innovation position in the camera capturing field”, says Sami Niemi, CTO and Co-founder of Scalado, -"Remove shows that our technologies are setting the guidelines for the whole market”.
Scalado will premiere showcase Remove, the first of many new innovations planned this year, at the 2012 Mobile World Conference in Barcelona, February 27th to March 1st.

 If you read above sentences carefully, you'll understand why I used the word smartphone instead of iPhone or iOS. It says this app'll be released on a MOBILE DEVICES, and of all the review I saw so far, there are no images of this app running on iOS devices but on Androids.

Maybe the reason is because of interval length of continuous shooting of iPhone?
Anyway the engadget's hands-on review was done on Sansong' crappy galaxy phones but why don't you try it on Xperia S, that would be the best smartphone photography experience.

But I just hope they don't tease iPhone users and will release the iOS version.

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Video Compressor - iPhone app

With regard to recording quality iPhone has now become a serious competitor of digital video cameras since the introduction of iPhone 4. But what still bother us is handling the huge video data gets iPhone very slow. Sometimes you can't send videos because their size is exceeding the limit, or even if you can, it takes time. In addition to that if you want to store a lot of video data you took in your iPhone, the storage space might not be enough.

Video Compressor (free) - iTunes

Here is the good app for you. This app simply reduce the size of full HD video contents you captured with Camera app by over 90%.

When you start the app, you'll see this screen where you select the level of compression from these three.
Of course HD 720p is higher quality and bigger size video format, so there's no way that compressing into HD reduce 90% while into VGA reduce 80% is correct description. (below image is taken from the app's preview page on iTunes, but the numbers are incorrect.)
After testing both, it turns out HD reduce about 80% and VGA is 90%, so the numbers are opposite.

?

Now you selected a compression type, then you select a video you want to compress from CameraRoll and click 'Choose'.

HD quality compression has the best result reducing almost 80% of the data size without significantly compromising the image quality - think about it, HD 720p is the recording format of iPhone4.
VGA is the quality of front camera. If you don't need to keep tiny details clear, VGA is a nice option, but you 'd better avoid Low Quality. It would hurt your eyes.

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Celsius in a badge!!!!!

It's 25 degree Celsius NOW. This is totally a new idea until now.

Icon images on iPhone screen are fixed, they never change - think about it, Weather app icon, the number below sun image stuck on 73F or 23C, Clock, always 10:15, Map always locating on Apple HQ. The only app allowed to change is Calendar, this is a special app. But think about it, you always see something on the top-right of some icons, it's a number, but it is called a Badge. iPhone use these badges to display unread message counts or items on your to-do list. But very use these to covey other information.

This app "Celsius" and "Fahrenheit" use these Badges, pop-up numbers, to introduce the current temperature.

You can add cities of your choice into the list and select the city you want to display in Badges at 'Locations' menu.

To see today's 3-hourly forecast, tap Today. In the same screen, you also can check how thick the cloud is and share the whether information via Twitter or Facebook.

Once revealed this doesn't look new at all but this must be one of the breakthrough ideas on iOS apps developing. This is the app for some reason you must want to put on your home screen.

Celsius ($0.99 ) - iTunes

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Photo collaging! with "PicFrame"

I found a nice app called PicFrame.

PicFrame - iTunes

You can make a photo collage by combining multiple photos with this app.

As it's name suggests, it is not that you can make a completely free form layout photo collage, but you can only put photos in predetermined rectangular frames.

You can move drag and move borders to resize individual photo areas.

You can change the size, round corners, rotate and mirror photo images.

In "Style" menu you can select color or pattern, and width of frame. But you can't change the color of patterns.

Completed photo collage can be saved in CameraRoll, or shared on Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and Tumblr.

There's Mac version of this app too, but basic function is same. The only difference, at least I could notice, is Mac version has more choices of frame aspects.

PicFrame - Mac App store

Here I made some examples. Hope you'll enjoy and give it a try, it's fun :)

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Vitalizing your photo with Camera+

Scenery & So Emo

What make iPhone a wonderful photography tool are a variety of line-ups of iOS Apps.

Camera Plus

I found an app called Camera+, and this very app has ended my endless journey searching for nice photo editing (mainly, effects) apps, at least for a while.

Its very easy to use as every iOS apps are.
Launch the app and take a photo or select a photo from Camera roll. Click Edit and you'll see 4 effects in the menu bar, Scenes, Adjust, Crop, FX effects, and Borders.

'FX effects' is a main feature of this App. There're 4 types of effects in the FX effects menu, Color, Retro, Special, and Analog. Each type has 9 unique effects.

original photos

Color

Retro

Special

I Love Analog (In App Purchase)

Change the intensity of effect by moving slider.

If you want more than one effect for one photo, you need to once save the photo and open it from Cameraroll.

'Scenes' is just like that familiar menu on your digital cameras. You select scene effects in accordance with the environment the photo was taken in.

Other things you can do with this app is 'Crop', 'Change angles' and add 'Borders' on photos.

You don't have to launch other apps to share edited photos. Flickr, twitter, facebook, SMS, and email are available so far.

The price of this app is only 2 USD. I think it's pretty cheap for the function of the app.

You need to pay extra money for Analog effect. If you unlock Analog effect option, you will have well-balanced analog-film-camera-like effects, and it's definitely worth the money.

It's like now you have a lot of different types of analog compact cameras with different types of films in one device which you always carry, the iPhone.

Flash, & Lo-Fi 30% 

How about giving it a try?

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