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What’s new on the app stores on Monday 6 February 2012

A selection of 13 apps for you today:

Greggs

Ah, those moments when you MUST have a piping-hot sausage roll or three, but don’t know where to go. The official iPhone app for UK bakery chain Greggs can help, with its GPS-enabled Shop Finder feature. It also promotes discounts, includes the complete menu, and social sharing features.
iPhone

Time Ducks

Frogger meets Braid meets slot machines. Intrigued? Danish developer Tough Guy Studios has released this lovingly-created line-drawing game that involves getting animals across the road, while rewinding and fast-forwarding time at will.
iPhone / iPad

Parent Bingo

Parenting can be a stressful experience. iPhone app Parent Bingo aims to help by boosting “a parent’s first line of defence – their sense of humour”. The idea: mark off parental experiences on a digital bingo card, and share with friends.
iPhone

Seesmic Ping

Social startup Seesmic’s latest Android app wants to help people schedule their posts to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, choosing when and where status updates should be made available.
Android

FourFourTwo Gallery

Magazine publisher Haymarket has a new appy spin-off from FourFourTwo magazine. This Gallery app for iPad offers football photography, from action shots to the sillier side of the game – as well as more than 200 covers from the mag itself.
iPad

Infected

Out on iOS since December 2011, Glu’s freemium action game Infected is now on Android. It sees you roaming the streets of New York killing zombies. Well, it’s more the zombies who are roaming, given that this is a tower defence-style game.
Android

iDaTank

After for a quirky yet lovely-looking Japanese robo-exploration game? Look no further than iDataTank, which has enough character to perhaps become a breakout indie hit on Android.
Android

Mr Legs

It must be the week for intriguing indie Android games. Mr Legs is the work of a new studio called James Games, and sees its long-legged hero plucking cherries on the streets of Londonium, with a characterful visual style.
Android

Rogue Racing

Another freemium game from Glu, but this time iOS-only – for now at least. Rogue Racing is a Need For Speed-style street-racing game, but reviewers on the App Store are already complaining about the gameplay and in-app purchases implementation.
iPhone / iPad

Disney Second Screen: Lady And the Tramp Edition

It’s US-only, but Disney’s latets second-screen iPad app is designed to be used during or after watching Lady and the Tramp, accessing galleries, flipbooks and playing challenges.
iPad

Pet Shop Story: Valentine’s Day

The new fashion for iOS freemium social games seems to be launching calendar-focused spin-offs. Lots had Christmas editions, but now TeamLava’s Pet Shop Story has got in first with a Valentine’s Day version. A pet shop with a “Kitty Kissing Booth”? Sounds illegal.
iPhone / iPad

My Country: Sports Edition

There’s also the genre-based spin-off, as seen in this new Android game from Cooper Media: a sporty offshoot from its My Country freemium game. The idea: build the perfect sports village, with tennis courts, stadia and swimming pools. Bonuses feed back into the main game too.
Android

ARWedding Japan

And finally, (virtual) hats off to the Japanese couple who have released an augmented reality Android app just for guests coming to their wedding reception: “Just hold the camera up to the QR code to see your gift!”
Android

What’s new on the app stores on Monday 6 February 2012

A selection of 13 apps for you today:

Greggs

Ah, those moments when you MUST have a piping-hot sausage roll or three, but don’t know where to go. The official iPhone app for UK bakery chain Greggs can help, with its GPS-enabled Shop Finder feature. It also promotes discounts, includes the complete menu, and social sharing features.
iPhone

Time Ducks

Frogger meets Braid meets slot machines. Intrigued? Danish developer Tough Guy Studios has released this lovingly-created line-drawing game that involves getting animals across the road, while rewinding and fast-forwarding time at will.
iPhone / iPad

Parent Bingo

Parenting can be a stressful experience. iPhone app Parent Bingo aims to help by boosting “a parent’s first line of defence – their sense of humour”. The idea: mark off parental experiences on a digital bingo card, and share with friends.
iPhone

Seesmic Ping

Social startup Seesmic’s latest Android app wants to help people schedule their posts to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, choosing when and where status updates should be made available.
Android

FourFourTwo Gallery

Magazine publisher Haymarket has a new appy spin-off from FourFourTwo magazine. This Gallery app for iPad offers football photography, from action shots to the sillier side of the game – as well as more than 200 covers from the mag itself.
iPad

Infected

Out on iOS since December 2011, Glu’s freemium action game Infected is now on Android. It sees you roaming the streets of New York killing zombies. Well, it’s more the zombies who are roaming, given that this is a tower defence-style game.
Android

iDaTank

After for a quirky yet lovely-looking Japanese robo-exploration game? Look no further than iDataTank, which has enough character to perhaps become a breakout indie hit on Android.
Android

Mr Legs

It must be the week for intriguing indie Android games. Mr Legs is the work of a new studio called James Games, and sees its long-legged hero plucking cherries on the streets of Londonium, with a characterful visual style.
Android

Rogue Racing

Another freemium game from Glu, but this time iOS-only – for now at least. Rogue Racing is a Need For Speed-style street-racing game, but reviewers on the App Store are already complaining about the gameplay and in-app purchases implementation.
iPhone / iPad

Disney Second Screen: Lady And the Tramp Edition

It’s US-only, but Disney’s latets second-screen iPad app is designed to be used during or after watching Lady and the Tramp, accessing galleries, flipbooks and playing challenges.
iPad

Pet Shop Story: Valentine’s Day

The new fashion for iOS freemium social games seems to be launching calendar-focused spin-offs. Lots had Christmas editions, but now TeamLava’s Pet Shop Story has got in first with a Valentine’s Day version. A pet shop with a “Kitty Kissing Booth”? Sounds illegal.
iPhone / iPad

My Country: Sports Edition

There’s also the genre-based spin-off, as seen in this new Android game from Cooper Media: a sporty offshoot from its My Country freemium game. The idea: build the perfect sports village, with tennis courts, stadia and swimming pools. Bonuses feed back into the main game too.
Android

ARWedding Japan

And finally, (virtual) hats off to the Japanese couple who have released an augmented reality Android app just for guests coming to their wedding reception: “Just hold the camera up to the QR code to see your gift!”
Android

iPhone, Distinctive Developments, 69p

Perpetual motion games have proved a big hit on mobiles – thriving on bursts of intensely pressured gameplay in the object-hurtles-towards-dangerous-obstacle mould, with only the player’s hand-eye co-ordination to prolong the agony. My Army (iPhone, Distinctive Developments, 69p) pushes this further. With a top-down perspective reminiscent of Cannon Fodder, a squadron of four soldiers heads into enemy territory.

To start, you tilt the iPhone to manoeuvre around obstacles, barbed wire and mines, before hails of gunfire are added, then rockets and bombs that must be swept from the screen. Returning fire is vital for buying time – but ammo is limited and crates must be collected to replenish supplies. Dead soldiers can be replaced with rescued PoWs but once all the men are down it’s game over.

Repeated attempts to top that high score inevitably follow, along with much tilting, swiping, gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair – hallmarks of the just-one-more-go greats.

World’s top tech firm brought to book by minor monologuist over working conditions in factories that make its gadgets

These days Mike Daisey is run off his feet. “I don’t even have time to listen to my voicemail now. That’s a phenomenon I have not experienced before,” he told the Observer with an amazed laugh. Perhaps he shouldn’t be so surprised. In the past fortnight, Daisey has gone from being a gifted but obscure solo act in the US theatre to the public face of a backlash against one of the iconic corporations of the 21st century.

Daisey’s latest work, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, has triggered off a spasm of soul-searching about the sometimes appalling labour conditions in China under which many of America’s most cherished products are made. Specifically, the shiny, sleek iPhones, iPods and iPads produced by Apple.

The Agony and the Ecstasy was devised after exhaustive research talking to exploited and abused workers in China, for almost 18 months. Daisey played to small but appreciative crowds across the US, winning critical praise but stirring little trouble, not even with the target of his ire: Apple itself.

But everything changed in January when a discussion and partial performance of Daisey’s monologue appeared on the National Public Radio show This American Life. It rapidly became the most downloaded episode of the show’s history and an online petition calling for Apple to reform its practices began. Within 48 hours it attracted 140,000 names. Then the New York Times ran an exhaustive investigation of Apple’s supplier network in China that revealed industrial accidents, brutal working conditions and child labour. Daisey had briefed the newspaper’s reporters and they had watched his show last year. Suddenly, Apple’s Chinese supplier network was huge news.

That has turned him into an unlikely nemesis, sending tremors of fear through one of the largest and most powerful companies in the world. It is an amazing shift. After all, for 15 years the New York-based Daisey has crafted his art as a gifted monologuist, winning praise but little mass appeal on a variety of topics from his first job at Amazon to his views on Oprah Winfrey, or recounting a trip to the South Pacific.

But now, arriving apologetically late and harried in a trendy Brooklyn restaurant near his home in New York, Daisey is a man in intense demand. He has appearances lined up on CNN and other TV shows. On his blog he has been updating the story regularly and fending off criticism from Apple’s defenders, including comedian Stephen Fry and Forbes columnist Tim Worstall.

Daisey is delighted but exhausted, having been up until 5am composing a response to a public attack from Worstall. “I am tired but I am encouraged to see traction. The only way you can fight for a thing like this is when you know the truth is on your side,” he told the Observer.

Daisey’s sudden catapult on to the world stage as the public face of criticism against Apple is an astonishing development, especially for such a rarely practised art as the theatrical monologue. It has also likely made his Steve Jobs piece one of the most remarkable performances of recent years, not least because of its leap from the stage to real world activism. “It’s the first time maybe in a generation that the American theatre has affected change.”

The play’s premise is simple enough. It blends Daisey’s own backstory as a nerdy geek who loved – and continues to love – Apple products, with the story of how Jobs ran the company with a mix of tyranny and genius before he died last year. But then it heads into dark territory as Daisey recounts how he became obsessed with photographs that emerged from inside the giant Foxconn factory in which many Apple products are made.

His fascination with how his beloved gadgets were built ends up with a subversive trip to southern China and interviews with ordinary workers who describe the physically and mentally crippling conditions in which many toil. On the trip Daisey was stunned that he, as a playwright, was the one digging up the truth. “I wanted journalists to tell the story. I am a monologuist and it’s not the same thing. But I had to act as a journalist,” he said.

Daisey is scathing about many of the journalists who cover Apple. He claimed they were often cowed by the firm, given strictly controlled access to the latest product launches but subject to intimidation over writing about anything that might hurt Apple’s public image. He recites the story of one tech journalist who agreed to appear on a panel with him, only to be contacted by Apple and warned off doing so. “Apple has built an incredible institution of secrecy and people understand that when Apple threaten them they mean it. Everyone knows that,” Daisey said.

As a performer, though, Daisey is immune. Yet he confesses he still has a complex emotional relationship with the company. He still uses an iPhone and does not tell people to boycott the company, just spread the word about Chinese labour practices in the hope that they change. When people email him to ask what phone they should buy – and they do in large numbers – he tells them to make an “ethical” choice they are comfortable with. He himself no longer upgrades his devices and is considering buying secondhand in the future.

Apple for its part says many of the stories emerging from China are not true and that it already is acting to monitor its suppliers’ behaviour and bring in greater transparency. Other defenders of the firm point out that many other electrical goods firms are equally as culpable as Apple, if not more so.

For Daisey, perhaps because he loved Apple’s caring and cool public image so much, that is not good enough. “It is like watching a friend lose his way. It is hard to imagine the Apple of a generation ago making this ham-fisted error.” He believes the firm could have acted years earlier to improve its supplier network in China and would have reaped a PR bonanza, rather than the current global whirlwind of bad publicity.

“Now all they have to do is clean up the mess, but if they had got ahead of it they could have looked fantastic,” he said.

Daisey himself is not stopping his charge. His monologue is still on stage and will remain so for at least the rest of the year. He may take it to bigger venues for one-off shows, aiming at 2,000-3,000-seat venues so the ticket prices can be driven down. He is also seeking to turn the monologue into a film. As a final way of spreading the word, he is soon to release a transcript of it and allow anyone in the world to adapt his show or put it on in as their own live performance. “People can tell this story to other people. This is exactly how the environmental movement really took hold. People realised these values mattered and they began to tell the story from person to person and that’s what caused change,” he said.

Though Daisey has other ideas for future monologues he knows the success of the Jobs show and the issue of Chinese labour practices that it illustrates is going to dominate his life for the foreseeable future. As he got up to leave the restaurant he left behind a half-eaten sandwich. He was headed to a car that would whisk him to a TV studio for another interview. “It’s like that feeling you get when you climb a mountain and you get to the top and it turns out you are in the Alps, and there’s a whole series of mountains ahead of you. Then you sharpen your stick and keep walking,” he said.

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This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. Five Filters recommends: Donate to Wikileaks.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. Five Filters recommends: Donate to Wikileaks.