Today's Most popular News

August 27th, 2008 at 5:35 pm

Why should you put a dent in your wallet when there are so many great free applications out there for the iPhone and iPod Touch? There are tons of games for the devices, but the vast majority of them cost money, so we’ve sorted through and located 12 totally free ones for you to throw on your gadgets and entertain yourself throughout the day.

Unlike with Firefox or WordPress addons, where we always tell you not to load everything we list, there doesn’t seem to be any problem with loading lots of iPhone or iPod Touch apps. Just make sure you have enough memory for the programs and you can easily load all 12 of these on your device.

Originally this list included Tris, but with yesterday’s news that it would be removed we took it off the list. It’s really too bad as it was a great port of the game.

Blanks - A simple word game that gives you a definition and four choices as to what the word may be. Fun and educational all at once.

Cannon Challenge - Made by the Discovery Channel, Cannon Challenge is based on their show Future Weapons, and firing a Non-Line-Of-Sight (NLOS) cannon at targets of varying distance. Equal parts addicting and challenging. As you can tell from the screenshot, the game is played entirely in the horizontal position.

Crash Landing - This game uses the iPhone and iPod Touch accelerometer to control the descent of a starship, aiming to land on the platform on the moon. If you have as much luck as I did, you’ll see the message in the above screenshot a lot.

Cube Runner - You use the accelerometer to pilot a ship through a landscape littered with mysterious polygonal cubes that have appeared. Though the ship lacks any sort of gun, it feels a bit like the classic Starfox game from the Super Nintendo system. New maps can be designed and shared with friends.

Dactyl - A fast-paced game of bomb diffusing that helps you practice your dexterity and frazzles your nerves as bombs explode.

Fire Drop - A puzzle game that tries to test your speed and your willingness to see how far you can push your luck. The more cauldrons you burn at once, the higher the score, but make sure you don’t fill the entire screen!

Fit2Vote - Politics come to iPhone gaming with Fit2Vote. You will be asked to name who said the quote, Obama or McCain, and tilt your phone to the left for the Democrat and to the right for the Republican. Once you have gotten 50 correct, you are deemed “Fit2Vote.”

Frotz - An interface for playing text-based adventure games that harken back to games like Zork, Bard’s Tale and Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy from the 1980’s.

Othello - Also known by the name “Reversi” on just about every Windows computer sold for years, it is the familiar game played on an 8 X 8 grid with the object of controlling the majority of the board at the end of the game.

SimStapler - Why risk dangerous stapler injuries by using a real stapler? SimStapler provides you with all the fun and excitement of real stapling in a fun, safe, manner. App has an old school Mac look, and with it being a red Swingline stapler, you can feel free to make Office Space jokes.

Tap Tap Revenge - The perfect free game for all of the Guitar Hero and Dance Dance Revolution fans who need a fix whenever they are away from home. A bit difficult to play on the iPod Touch as it lacks an external speaker, but works fine with headphones.

Warcraft Characters - Not so much a game in and of itself, but a way for you to look up World of Warcraft characters on the go and see their stats, skills and equipment no matter where you are.

Source:Mashable!

Lifestreaming service FriendFeed has launched a variety of widgets (available here) for showing off your activities on your own blog or website. The two most significant widgets are the Badge, which shows off all of the different services you’ve synced with the site, and the Feed Widget, which displays your most recent activities.

Personally I’m a big fan of the Badge concept (which has been tried previously by others), as it should make it super easy for people to connect with me on the various services I frequent, minus Facebook of course (unfortunately, it seems to break when I embed it here, but you can see it on the right or add me on friendfeed here).

There’s also a widget for showing your most recent status update (via Twitter or an alternative status service), a chiclet that simply links to your profile, and a “Share on FriendFeed” link you can use to encourage your readers to distribute your content on the aggregator.

While you could already do some of this on your own by using the RSS feeds that FriendFeed provides, the widgets are simply copy and paste embed code. If they prove popular, it will certainly get FriendFeed in front of a lot more eyeballs, giving the site an opportunity to gain all of those mainstream users that tech bloggers love to wax poetic about. For Facebook users, Friendfeed already has an application for showing off your activities, but its growth may be inhibited by the fact that Facebook now offers a comparable set of features.

Source:Mashable!

The recently more Web-savvy John McCain campaign has re-launched its social network – McCainSpace – and it’s actually pretty good. The site is powered by KickApps, and includes standard social networking features like forums, groups, and plenty of user-generated content.

What’s impressive about the new McCainSpace is the viral potential it unleashes for the campaign. For instance, the Groups feature includes a “Hillary Supports for McCain” – which, apparently there are still plenty of according to recent polls. There are also groups for McCain supporters in every state, allowing them to organize and discuss their campaign efforts. Meanwhile, all of the videos users upload are embeddable, meaning they can be spread via blogs and social networks. McCain introduces the social network in the video below:

While the Obama campaign has been largely praised for its use of the Web and has a strong social network of its own (My.BarackObama.com), McCain’s first attempt at online community was not a strong one. I was recently quoted as calling the first version of the site, which launched early this year, “virtually impossible to use and appear[ing] largely abandoned,” which it was.

The new site is extremely easy to use, and includes a lot of social networking best practices like allowing users to sort videos by most viewed, highest rated, and most recent. Of course, a lot of the credit here goes to KickApps, but in order to get there, the McCain camp needed to acknowledge the weakness of the initial site it built in-house.

Beyond the new social network, you might have noticed more McCain videos popping up on YouTube. The Senator has recently been using his channel on the site to spread campaign ads, including the infamous “celebrity” video that drew a response from Paris Hilton. McCain’s sudden surge on the Web is obviously quite timely as he is set to accept his party’s nomination at next week’s Republican National Convention, where he’ll have an enormous platform to promote McCainSpace.

Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 at 5:35 pm and is filed under News, social networking, politics, Political, john mccain. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Today's Most popular News

John McCain Relaunches His Social Network. It’s Surprisingly Good.

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