The Online Magazine Focused on App Design, Branding & Marketing

Designed by Rocksauce Studios, iGoToo is an upcoming iPad app that has one simple goal: to forever change the way you travel! In addition to using it to find local recommendations and make your way around your location, iGoToo lets you design custom tours, letting you plot out your daily adventures and follow them like clockwork. Your tours can then shared with all iGoToo users, letting other travelers share in your experience.

There’s a lot going on in iGoToo and rather than blather about it up here, how about we watch the awesome commercial we shot for the app?
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Our new travel app, iGoToo, hasn’t launched just yet, but I still thought I’d provide a little “behind the scenes” on some of the process that goes on with our creative team, especially in regards to marketing. The clients were very interested in creating a commercial with us. Now, that may sound beyond the capability of most app companies, but our CEO, Q Manning, also happens to be an experienced feature film maker, and several members of our staff have a background in film production as well (and if you’re wondering how filmmaking translates to the world of app design — it’s all about production coordination and clarity of “storytelling” — things we use in our app-making every day).

We pitched three storylines for a one-minute commercial, and you can see the pitches and the finished product after the jump.

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The Game: Jetpack Joyride

The Device: iPad

The Price: Free for for iOS

The Basics: You steal a jetpack and go on a joyride. You’ll ride it for a while and then are killed, horribly.

That’s it.

The Review: Since I’ve been playing games on a borrowed iPad, I’ve been making my way through what’s considered the best of the bunch, and Jetpack Joyride might be the most addictive one yet. I simply can’t stop playing this game.

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The Game: Grand Theft Auto 3: Ten Year Anniversary Edition

The Device: iPad

The Price: $4.99 for iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad and Android.

The Basics: This is it, the one that started it all. There are very few games that can be legitimately called trendsetters, but Grand Theft Auto 3 is certainly one of them. A massive open sandbox world the likes of which had never been seen before, with all the guns, car chases and adult themes one could hope for. It’s sold well over 15 million copies, became this generation’s Doom to both overly concerned parents and senators looking for votes, and defined a genre that developers are still trying to emulate it to this day.

Despite all the controversy over the adult themes and the multitudes of easily murdered hookers (hey, they took your money!), people fell in love with Grand Theft Auto due to its irreverent sense of humor, fun missions and over-the-top characters, and now, ten years later, the full experience is available to be downloaded straight to your phone.

The only question is- should it be?

The Review: Sometimes memories are best left alone.

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There’s a chance this footage is fake. I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if it was. There are enough convenient cuts to make its fabrication a reality and this is the internet: we have to cynical because we’ve been tricked too many times. The online age has transformed all of us into skeptics. With that out of the way…

This video is amazing. It’s also a commercial, which may very well make it one of the greatest commercials of all time. No joke. To be specific, it’s a commercial for G-Form’s Extreme Edge iPad case, which is wrapped around a iPad 2 as it is lifted 100,000 feet into the air — riiight on the edge of space — by a weather balloon. The balloon is popped and the iPad falls to the ground in footage that is sure to unnerve anyone with even a slight fear of plummeting to death from the stratosphere. The footage itself and scope of the endeavor is so impressive that the fact that the Extreme Edge case keeps the iPad completely intact feels like an afterthought…although I know what iPad case I’ll be picking up when the time comes.

The only thing that comes off better than the case in this video is the GoPro camera, which not only captures all of the footage beautifully, but survives the fall as well! Watch the video after the jump.

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As incredible as mobile gaming on smartphones and tablets has become in the past couple of years (and it’s been great enough to effectively kneecapped the extremely impressive Nintendo 3DS), there will always be that one major obstacle that separates it from other gaming platforms: the entire game has to function on a touchscreen. For some games, this isn’t a big deal — and for many others designed with this in mind, it’s ideal — but many games attempt to transplant genres pioneered on consoles to tablets and phones with often dire results. Controlling a platforming game or a shooting game with touchscreen controls can be serious pain in the butt. Of course, some phones have attempted the whole “slide out to reveal a controller” thing, but that never took off. It’s also a definite hindrance for companies who want to port their older games (like Grand Theft Auto III on iPad, for instance) to a mobile platform. The iPad could be the ultimate place to play your favorite classic games, from Super Mario Bros. to the Legend of Zelda to the original Resident Evil games, but that touchscreen…

All of that rambling is my way of setting up my excitement for something like the 60beat Controller. With an estimated price of $50, this controller plugs into your iPad or iPhone’s headphone jack and draws power from there, with no batteries required. The controller itself looks like a standard third party controller, falling somewhere between the style of an Xbox and a PlayStation design. The big question is whether or not game developers would be interested in designing their games to be compatible with a controller like this. The other big question is how this controller will function when you try to play games while on the bus or waiting at the DMV, which is where most mobile gaming occurs.

Check out the video after the jump. What do you think?

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Remember how the Kindle Fire was going to be the tablet of the 2011 holiday season? Well, Barnes and Noble has stepped up to the plate and introduced their RoboCop to Amazon’s ED-209. The Nook Tablet was unveiled today (it goes on sale next week) and it looks like it was specifically designed to directly compete with (and crush) Amazon’s new baby. Considering how well the Nook Color has done, Amazon is definitely going to have a fight on their hands, even with a brand as consistently strong as the Kindle.

The Nook Tablet resembles the Nook Color, but it’s thinner and lighter. The innards sport 1GB of RAM, 16GB of hard drive space and a dual-core 1GHz processor. Then there’s the micro SD slot that can support a 32GB card. On top of all of the hard drive space, the tablet will have full access to the Nook Cloud and will support Android apps. Oh, and unlike the Kindle Fire, the Nook Tablet will feature full 1080p video, including Hulu Plus and Netflix. Amazon may have a cool reader on their hands, but Barnes and Noble are presenting a device that looks more like an Android equipped iPad than anything else.

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Consider this: there will soon be a generation of children who will not know a time before the iPhone and the iPad. What we see as one of the most amazing innovations of our generation, they’ll see as an everyday fact of life that is in no way groundbreaking or exciting. In a video that does an exceptional job of displaying the death of print media, a toddler effortlessly explores an iPad while another attempts to swipe and pinch zoom on a paper magazine…and seems baffled when it doesn’t work. Will magazines even exist by the time this kid grows up? How soon will she resent anyone who reads books the old fashioned way? How old you feel right now?

Watch the video after the jump.

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It’s hard to believe that the iPad has gone this long without an official Facebook app. After all, isn’t Facebook the very first thing new smartphone users go to download the moment their new toy is out of the box? Still, the development of a Facebook app for the iPad has been one filled with delays and mystery. It’s taken so long that most users have taken advantage of numerous third party offerings.

Well, iPad users, get ready to uninstall those other options, because the official Facebook app is just about here. Although we here at Tapsauce haven’t had the opportunity to test it ourselves, we definitely like what we’re hearing, especially in regards to how this version of the groundbreaking social network will be integrating other apps into the basic Facebook experience. You can check out images of how that tablet-ized Facebook will look if you follow this link.

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