Pop Loser

Polamatic

Polaroid is trying their hand at vintage-looking iPhone photos again with Polamatic. Effects are okay, but the frames on very cool. And it exports to pretty much everywhere, including Instagram.

Chrono Trigger

Chrono Trigger for iPhone.

Flick Home Run

Flick Home Run is my new obsession.

Apple lost another iPhone prototype in a bar, which is kind of fucking hilarious. I can confirm after running into a group of them at SXSW a few years ago that Apple employees do like to party hard.

Alt Text on the retro iPhone photography craze. (Side note: How long has it been since I linked to Alt Text? And why? It’s consistently great.)

Without the twee, self-congratulatory filters, it looked like a photo of garbage. With the twee, self-congratulatory filters it looked — well, twee and self-congratulatory. But it also looked less like a documentary of urban blight and more like — and I hate this word with a passion — art. It looked — and I hate this word even more — good.

My brain apparently loves photography that looks like a dog peed on it in 1968. This is disturbing and embarrassing to me. It’s like getting an erection at the petting zoo.

There are all kinds of rumors about the upcoming iPhone 5 and iPhone 4s, but could Apple’s most brilliant move be to offer the iPhone 3Gs as a fully subsidized option? Imagine, less then five years after launch, the iPhone goes from a magical new device completely unlike any phone we had ever seen before to the free piece-of-shit phone you get just for signing up. That’s insanity!

Subsidizing the iPhone 3GS is a way to bring in those consumers who have carrier contracts, but have never purchased a smartphone because there was always a free option available to them. It’s a way to bring in my stepfather, who refuses to buy a new car if it has automatic windows and locks. (The psychology of this, on the consumer side, doesn’t make complete sense: With an expensive two-year contract, the cost of a unit upgrade at the time of purchase is relatively minor when considered over said unit’s lifespan.) This move would allow Apple to expand its market reach and share even as new competitors continue to mount challenges to the iPhone’s supremacy.

An existentialist moment with the bird from the iPhone game Tiny Wings.

We will never outrun the night, my feathered friends, and we were fools to try for this long. We must accept this inevitable fact, just as we have accepted our eventual deaths and an understanding that our tiny wings will never grant us the true flight we’d need to escape this relentless archipelago prison.

Hype Machine Radio for the iPhone.

As my wife will confirm, I’m very much addicted to Tiny Wings. And yet, I fucking hate Tiny Wings… I hate it so much. Garrett Murray agrees in hilarious fashion. [via]

I hate this game. I hate it so much. Every time I open it, I tense up. I dread touching for sunrise. I hate the night. It’s a fucking bastard, the night. And what about the sun? The sun is a lazy bitch who only helps you out in the beginning and then no matter how well you fly it just sits up there, heavy in the sky, ready to fall at your first minor setback.

(Side note: I have NO friends on Game Center. At all. None. It turns out, I don’t actually have anyone’s email address memorized or care to look it up, and I’ve become dependent on the “Find Your Friends On Twitter/Facebook” feature of other apps. Why doesn’t Game Center have that? This, of course, means that my obsession with Tiny Wings is far more deeply rooted in my own psyche to the point of being unhealthy.)

Atari’s Greatest Hits brings 100 classic Atari games to your iPhone or iPad. There goes my weekend. [via]

Someone finally built a web interface for Instagram.

People that do not like Apple’s subscription model: Readability, Rdio and Last.fm. The New York Times has a decent break down of Apple subscriptions and Google One Pass.

Apple came knocking on Tuesday with a plan that did not so much offer terms as dictate them in granting access to Apple’s vast installed base of consumers in the App Store and growing cadre of readers on the iPad. In return, publishers would give up 30 percent off the top, control over pricing of their digital product in other realms (no undercutting the Apple price) and their direct relationship with consumers. With its enviable tandem of products that everyone wants and a store where everyone buys, Apple believes it has the leverage to tell publishers: They are our customers. You can rent them, but they will remain in our custody.

On Readability, which is a service I love and I’m kind of pissed their app is not longer happening, John Gruber can’t see the difference between their 30% cut and Apple’s. While I understand that Apple can charge whatever they want — it’s their platform — it doesn’t mean they aren’t dicks to taking such a large cut. One thing to consider is that if you need to give Apple 30% to get anything into iOS, how long until that translates to the Mac App Store? If Microsoft had tried to take a 30% cut of software and content 10-15 years ago, people would have lost their collective shit. (This post from last week is very related, in case you missed it.)

UPDATE: Wired questions how the “Apple Tax” will be applied going forward and seems to have a quote from Jobs saying it’s for publishers, not SaaS apps. This obviously makes me wonder why Readability was rejected, since they are a service, not a publisher.

Apple’s subscription plans. I’m not sure how I feel about this yet.

Are you Catholic? Do you need to confess your sins? There’s an app for that! Though it’s not entirely that easy.

The app “is not intended to function as a replacement for confession” at church,” he said in an email to CBC News.

Instead, it is supposed to help people prepare for confession and is designed to be used in the confessional, the booth in church where people sit while confessing to a priest, he said.

The app walks people through confession step by step, based on text developed in collaboration with Catholic pastor Dan Scheidt and U.S. Catholic official Thomas G. Weinandy.

It reminds users when their last confessions were and keeps track of sins they have previously confessed.

It also advertises features such as password protection to allow multiple users, a “custom examination of conscience” based on age, sex and marital status, the ability to add sins that aren’t listed and a choice of seven different acts of contrition — prayers that express sorrow for sins.

However, absolution or release from the sin can still only come from a priest.

Is Apple about to fuck up my ability to read Kindle and Kobo books on my iPad and iPhone? Looks like it.