Lots of app news today for both iOS and Mac alike, so we're switching gears to mostly focus on these updates today. But there is one exception: A small bit at the end discussing the impact polarized sunglasses make on our favorite devices, which is particularly extreme on any iPad held in portrait mode -- the screen goes almost completely black with sunglasses on! Not much you can do about that except rotate the screen to landscape mode, but some interesting factoids to follow for this Thursday, April 5, 2012 edition.
TwitchTV Expands Mobile Game Live Streams Onto iPad, Android Apps
TechCrunch is reporting that live video platform Justin.tv is about to grow its TwitchTV game portal into a universal app for the iPad as well as Android. The live-streaming video game community already has an existing iPhone app, but users have been demanding one for the iPad and the company claims a new universal iOS app should be hitting the App Store today. So what will you be able to do with it? Much like the web-based TwitchTV portal, you can experience live competitions for "a variety of games and platforms with top gamers, tournaments and commentary." Key features of the new apps "include the ability to view all of TwitchTV's streaming content in high definition in full landscape mode" as well as search and "the ability to browse by game or featured offerings." CEO Emmett Shear claims the bigger mobile push is "the single most requested feature by our community since we launched" -- after all, no one wants to sit at the computer and watch somebody else play video games when they can go sit in a Starbuck's across town and do the same exact thing.
Ticket to Ride Rolls Into Mac App Store
Close on the heels of last week's Retina Display upgrade for the iPad app, Ticket to Ride Online has now choo-choo chugga-chugga'ed its way onto the Mac as well, and more specifically, Apple's Mac App Store. Available today for $9.99, the Mac release brings the same award-winning gameplay and maps that Ticket to Ride players already know and love, but allows fans to compete online against opponents around the world on other Macs or even PC, Linux and iPad. Solo and online game play is included with the classic Ticket to Ride USA map, and in-app purchases are available for all digital maps and game modes released on the iPad to date. The company claims a new game starts every four seconds on their servers, so you should have no trouble finding someone to play against, whether you're on an iPad or now on the Mac as well.
ArtRage for iPad 1.4.1 Goes Retina with $4.99 Promotional Pricing
Ambient Design has announced the availability of ArtRage for iPad 1.4.1, a substantial upgrade to the award-winning realistic art painting software app. The latest update brings support for the new iPad's Retina Display, which promises to make your original creations more vibrant and realistic than ever before. Italian and Spanish localizations have also been added, along with the requisite bug fixes that make our lives just a little bit happier. And speaking of happier, ArtRage for iPad now comes with a new low introductory price of only $4.99, down from the original $6.99. We'd say you could spent that extra dough on more oil paint, but the app already has you covered there...
Ape Entertainment Announces New Sesame Street Comics
There isn't much educational ground that Sesame Street hasn't covered since its debut in 1969, but comic book fans will soon have a chance to experience a new dimension for Elmo, Big Bird and friends. Ape Entertainment has announced a partnership with the Sesame Street Workshop to introduce a full-color comic book series that will hit stores this fall, available as both standard-size editions for $3.99 and digest-sized hardcover editions for $7.99. Ape will also debut the comic books in digital form on the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch in the next few months. "We are excited about our new relationship with Sesame Workshop to bring the Sesame Street characters to comics, which is a dream come true for all of us here at Ape," said Ape Entertainment COO Brent E. Erwin. "Elmo, Big Bird, Cookie Monster, Grover, and the whole Sesame Street gang have always been a part of our lives, now we feel like a part of their family, and that's a great feeling." Part of Ape's mission is to get kids to visit their local comic book shop, which are starting to become something of a ghost town as publishers make a bigger play for digital formats. Thankfully, the technology can be used to quickly find your nearest store thanks to the online Comics Shop Locator service.
Devices and You: Polarized Sunglasses Edition
We're heading into the summer months, and that can mean only one thing: Black screens on our iPads! That is, unless you turn them to landscape mode, of course, and also assumes you're wearing polarized sunglasses, which Dr. Raymond Soneira of DisplayMate Technologies Corporation today reminded us should "only matter outdoors, although movie stars and other people also wear sunglasses indoors, so be careful." Turns out it's possible for manufacturers "to set the extinction at 45 degrees so the display looks good in both portrait and landscape modes," which works just fine on tablets like the Motorola Xoom. Dr. Ray notes that compensating films can be used to eliminate the polarized sunglasses issue almost entirely, while noting that the iPhone 4 and Samsung Galaxy Tab "have no extinction at any angle, just a small color shift." The problem is mostly limited to LCDs due to the way they use polarized light internally, which is one reason why newer OLED handsets such as the Nokia Lumia 900 being released this weekend work so well in the great outdoors (the company's Clear Black technology is the other half of that equation). Dr. Ray discusses this dilemma in more depth in his latest Display Technology Shoot-Out which pits the iPad 2 and iPhone 4 against the new iPad.
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