Mac News and Rumors - iOS Blog

MacRumors: Mac News and Rumors - iOS Blog         Flapcraft Brings a Viking's Flying Dreams to Life August 29, 2011 at 4:41 PM   Flapcraft is a gorgeously drawn one-off game from the developers of Pixelmator. In it, users control a "Flapcrafter" -- a Viking who, in the absence of any wars to fight, tries to fly by standing on a log (and upgrading it with wings, rockets and other improbable things). The developers note that they aren't getting into the game business -- on the contrary, they made Flapcraft as a way of beta-testing the version 2.0 of Pixelmator, the image editing software. Oh, and just to make things clear: We are not going into the game business anytime soon. If you try to get the business logic behind Flapcraft… don't; there is none. Flapcraft was developed during beta testing of Pixelmator 2.0—well, of Pixelmator's 2.0 painting engine, to be more precise. We found that testing Pixelmator 2.0 by creating game graphics was very effective. What's more, we made ourselves comfortable with many of those great iOS technologies in the process. In fact, we handled everything ourselves in the building of Flapcraft—no third party was involved. The game is a little short, but the artwork is phenomenal and the gameplay is quite challenging. Flapcraft is a universal app, for both iPhone and iPad, and is $1.99 on the App Store. [iTunes]         Buying an iPad In a Parking Lot is a Bad Idea August 29, 2011 at 2:51 PM   Grand Prairie, Texas is experiencing an epidemic of fake Apple products -- but not the kind from a fake Apple Store. The details of this scam come from the Grand Prairie police department: A car load of two or three males will pull up to someone at a convenience store or shopping center parking lot and it's "Pssst, hey buddy. Want to buy an Apple iPad or MacBook?" They will tell the victim they are for sale for $300 each or both for $500. The Apple products are actually painted wood or loose leaf note books with the Apple logo on top and wrapped in bubble wrap. They are in a Fed Ex or Best Buy box and sealed up with tape. By the time the victim figures out the purchase wasn't what they bargained for, the crooks are long gone. Grand Prairie has had over a dozen such crimes committed since January of this year. The suspects have been mostly black males. However one offense involved a black female as well. The vehicles used vary in most cases. There appears to be several groups of thieves and sometimes the suspects never even get out of the car. The public should be advised that it is unwise to purchase anything from the trunk of a car, no matter how good the deal seems. The silver Chrysler 300 in the above picture was allegedly used in one of the offenses. Anyone who has information about the suspects should call Grand Prairie Crime Stoppers at 972-988-8477 or the Grand Prairie "Tip Line" at 972-237-8877.         Adobe's PDF Creation Service Comes to iOS August 29, 2011 at 2:02 PM   Adobe is expanding its suite of iOS apps with CreatePDF, a universal app that takes files in a number of different formats and converts them to PDFs. This ensures that formatting and document layouts are preserved when passing them on to coworkers or clients. The app uses Adobe's online PDF creation service to do the heavy lifting. Some apps, including the iWork apps from Apple, already include PDF export functionality, but CreatePDF accepts a wide variety of formats including several Adobe products: - MS Word (docx, doc), Excel (xlsx, xls), PowerPoint (pptx, ppt) - Adobe Illustrator (ai), Photoshop (psd) and InDesign (indd) - Images – JPEG, BMP, PNG, GIF, TIFF - RTF, Text and WordPerfect - OpenOffice and StarOffice documents Adobe CreatePDF is available as a universal app for iPhone and iPad for $9.99 on the App Store. [iTunes]