Gone are the days when ordering a cup of joe was simple. Now you’re faced with an overwhelming amount of options for coffee types, drink styles, preparation methods, add-ins, leave-outs, flavor profiles, the list goes on-and-on. And God forbid you order something passé, or worse, you mispronounce it. Fortunately, there’s an app to help guide you through café confusion and introduce you to the exciting and enticing realm of espresso. If you’ve been daunted by the condensed coffee form until now and not understood how a macchiato, mocha, and mochachino differ, then Spro has the savvy you need. Straight from your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch, Spro delivers instructions on how to craft 14 different espresso-based drinks. This is useful if you dare to make it yourself, or if you’re simply curious about what goes into various concoctions. Furthermore, Spro gives you the correct pronunciation of each drink name as well as the history behind each drink, so you can at least feign the requisite knowledge and sophistication when indulging in your beverage. Spro also inspires your palate with their Drink of the Week and encourages espresso explorations with their Create-A-Drink tool, which enables you to combine various ingredients and see what happens. Whether you’re simply curious about the myriad options available at coffee shops, you are trying to enter the world of espresso, or you are a seasoned coffee snob, Spro is guaranteed to trigger your tastebuds.

The biggest buzz on the blogosphere currently revolves around a seemingly inordinate amount of funding received by the iPhone and Android application, Color. For the price tag of $41 million, Sequoia acquired Color, a social mobile app that enables users to see what pictures people are snapping within a 100-150 foot radius and also groups pictures based on who your friends are so you’re more likely to see photos of interest. Since it is certainly not the first photo-sharing app (and based on user’s reviews, not the best either), why the huge investment? Writers such as those at TechCrunch speculate that Color’s development team alone was worth the large sum (if not more). However, opinions are not conclusive about whether Color will follow through or flop. Of course, the success of it hinges on use by an extensive population, as it should not be used alone, so the main issue will be mobilizing people to make Color a part of their mobile agenda. Read the rest of this entry »

Mobicle and Innoace Co, LTD. recently announced the arrival of Special Force Gun Battle 1.0 to the App Store. An unusually tempting combination of FPS themes with a puzzle game set up, the game intrigued me. Both Mobicle and Innoace have scored hits in the past, so I was ready for another winner.
An FPS themed puzzle game seems like a sink or swim proposition, and this one swims. Special Forces Gun Battle 1.0 gets by on the addictive qualities of its multiplayer options?but it more than gets by. If you’ve got a competitive streak to feed, Gun Battle is perfect fodder. Your mission is to reassemble guns. Not just any guns, but 28 different authentic weapons, may featured in FPS games with huge fan bases.
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Welcome to Zombie Farm, an ostensibly free iPhone App Store offering from The PlayForge with a lot of potential… but it’s almost all potential and very little delivered up front.
Okay, so Zombie Farm is… Farmville with zombies. There’s no getting around that. It’s not even “like” Farmville with zombies. The PlayForge shamelessly ripped off Farmville for this crop-growing-zombie-hoarde-wrangling timesink. In a way, it’s brilliant. We all know the mindless, hypnotic draw of those Facebook apps, and we all know how kickass zombies are. Why not smash the two together? And there’s really not a thing wrong with the concept. You farm, you manage your zombie army, you conduct raids—for a basic concept it’s got a lot going for it. There are some fun fusions of the two apparently unrelated elements, too, like the tomato-head zombie mutant you might just manage to produce. But the concept isn’t fully realized in this game.
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