The iPod touch may in fact be the “Funnest iPod Ever”, as recent ads claim. Games like Spore Origins and Cro-Mag Rally that embrace the device’s unique (and frustrating) controls are certainly amusing time-wasters.

It’s not necessarily true, however, that being the most amusing iPod also makes it the “best portable device for gaming”, as Steve Jobs has claimed. One thing it lacks, when compared to dedicated platforms like the DS and the PSP, is game variety. Developer ZodTTD hopes to help broaden the scope of iPhone/iPod touch gaming by bringing popular FPS Quake to the platform.

To date most iPhone/iPod touch games have been puzzle and casual titles, with some notable (and successful) exceptions like RPG port Vay. The platform has yet to see many offerings that appeal to core gamers. Reviews for more ambitious games like Kroll and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed reveal that while players are impressed with the hardware capabilities of the iPhone and iPod touch, titles to date have not been living up to their full potential in terms of gameplay quality and longevity. If it is accepted by Apple (it was submitted by the developer last week), a working version of Quake on the iPhone would go a long way towards proving to core gamers that the device is a true contender to established rivals like Sony and Nintendo.

According to the developer, Quake will be a free download for all iPhone and iPod touch users. Controls are screen-based, as accelerometer control was found to be unwieldy and unsuited to Quake gameplay. The game is played in landscape mode and features full audio support. ZodTTD also makes the ambitious claim that future releases will include network play, downloadable mods and additional content. The reason for Quake’s original success was due largely to its multiplayer mode and customizability. It’ll be interesting to see if these same features will make it a hit on the iPhone/iPod touch as well.

View the original post by ZodTTD and actual gameplay footage here.

I’m not a morning person. The moment my iPhone’s terrible “alarm” rings, I curse the day. There’s only one reason why I make it to the office, or anywhere besides my bed. Music.

It fuels my life. And those of my friends. We exchange music every day – our drop boxes are working overtime. The Hypemachine, a secret new music service, and some specific friends on Twitter supply us with inspiration for new songs and albums. There’s only one downside.., my iTunes collection is a mess.

In comes TuneUp

Actually, my iTunes collection was a mess. Ever since I’ve discovered TuneUp, I can browse my collection Cover Flow style without being agitated by the lack of covers.

TuneUp is a management tool that let’s you clean dirty tracks (like the ones that have the artists’s name in the song title), find missing cover art, receive upcoming concert alerts, and enjoy music videos.

The PC version is available in French, Spanish, Italian, German, and English, so most of your European folks can use the service in your native language. People from Holland, Scandinavia, and Eastern European countries must remain patient for a while.

Still in beta, we have 50 invites

TuneUp for Mac is still in private beta, meaning it made my Mac crash once and it loads very slowly. But still, my collection looks way better now. So grab yourself one of those Next Web invites to try it our yourself. Send an email to thenextweb@tuneupmedia.com, the first 50 will be invited to the TuneUp Mac Beta.

The normal program is free for 500 songs/50 album art cleans, and $19.95 for unlimited (Gold version).

This is turning out to be quite a good week for OpenID, an increasingly popular mechanism for creating and managing a single identity across the Internet. On Monday, Microsoft announced that it would give every Windows Live user an OpenID account, and today, Google announced a very similar plan.

Google will allow web services to join a limited test of an API based on the OpenID 2.0 protocol that will give Google Account users the option to sign in to websites with their Google credentials and without having to sign up for a new account at those sites.

Sponsor

Among the launch partners for this new API are Zoho, Plaxo, and Buxfer.

Don’t Mention OpenID

One of the key results of Yahoo’s OpenID usability study was that users did not understand OpenID and what its logo stands for. Instead, Yahoo promoted the idea of giving users a sign-in button that simply said “Sign In with a Yahoo! ID” (though Chris Messina argues that this could be detrimental to OpenID in the long run).Google and its partners are taking a similar route and are basically bypassing any mention of OpenID itself in favor of a simple message saying “Sign in with a Google Account.”

More to Come

Google also announced that it is looking to combine the OAuth and OpenID protocol so that a service can not only request a user’s identity through OpenID, but also “request access to information available via OAuth-enabled APIs such as Google Data APIs as well as standard data formats such as Portable Contacts and OpenSocial REST APIs.”

Tipping Point?

Thanks to this announcement, a wide range of some of the web’s largest service providers now supports OpenID: Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, MySpace, and AOL.

As John McCrea notes, the result of these announcements from Google and Microsoft this week should be “a massive adoption wave for OpenID all over the web.”

Discuss

As someone who spends a great deal of time developing web based products, one of the first steps we take is to launch Skitch to draft out some ideas for how things could work and the general concept as a whole. Once all that is done, we’re ready to move ahead. We need to get some specifics working and make sure that the user flows of particular areas are well thought out and as we want them. Normally we’d go straight to Omni Graffle for this phase, but that may be about to change…

Product Planner is new site brought to you by the guys at Kissmetrics, a simple & elegant tool which allows designers & UI specialists to quickly create a user flow. Each flow is organised by type  such as well as the kind of web product it’s designed for, such as social networking, photo sharing, etc. Product Planner gives you the option to privatise your ‘flows’ however you are encouraged to share with other visitors/users of the site to allow other users to learn and benefit.

With Product Planner the userflow process should become an awful lot slicker & smoother. The tools provided make putting together a solid user flow easy and fast. You’re then able to share it with the community and get the feedback you’ll need to make sure the finished product is as it should be and inevitably you end up with a happy community of your own. Once the site has expanded and more people have heard about it, you’ll be able to find the best user flows from across the site ensuring that your new site or product flows to perfection :)

Here’s an example of a user flow from the site:

Social networking platform Ning announced support for the OpenSocial standard today. Thanks to this, developers can now easily create applications for the Ning platform. At this time, Ning already features 30 applications that users can embed into their profile pages, including support for file sharing with Box.net and poll creation from Polldaddy. One of the highlights of Ning’s implementation of OpenSocial is that the widgets automatically adapt themselves to the branding and design of the individual networks.

Sponsor

Ning is a social networking platform that allows its users to create their own, custom social networks. Some of its high-profile customers include celebrities like 50 Cent and Ellen DeGeneres.

For now, users can only add OpenSocial applications to their profiles, but not to their networks. This will change, however, once future versions of OpenSocial are developed, as Caroline McCarthy reports.

By adding support for OpenSocial, Ning is joining a growing number of social networks that support this standard, including MySpace, hi5, Orkut, and Bebo. For developers, supporting OpenSocial makes good sense, as they can reach a far larger audience with an OpenSocial application than if they just programmed for a given network’s own APIs. The only hold-out with regards to supporting OpenSocial is Facebook, though Facebook is also considering the option of opening up its development platform to other social networks in the future.

Ning itself is growing nicely and just celebrated the creation of its 500,000th network. By supporting OpenSocial, Ning now gains the ability to offer its customers an even larger array of options, though it would have been nice if Ning already supported OpenSocial apps on network pages and not just on profiles.

Discuss

Organizing a competition on your blog is always mentioned as a good way to get your visitors love you more. When Problogger’s Darren Rowse writes a post about creating an active community, competitions won’t go unmentioned. But to organize one is a pain. You’ll have to make up all the procedures and logistics yourself. Not the kind of thing a busy blogger is waiting for. That didn’t go unnoticed by Crystalroot’s Savraj, Kalid, and Lee, who founded the service ContestMachine.

This Y Combinator backed start-up let’s you create a competition widget which you can easily place on your site. There’s your competition! You can specify the prize (of course), what users have to do (answer a question, poll, or just enter their name), customize the design, the deadline, and collect some user data for email news letters. Oh and do you want a random winner or pick the lucky one yourself? The service is free to try out when you organize two contests a month, and then charges $9 a month for ten contests or $90 a year for fifty contests.

It’s funny to see how a widget can make such a complicated thing as a competition really easy. I seriously expect this service to stir up the number of competitions on blogs. The little thing just arouses a feeling of “I have to organize a competition right now!”.

If you’re not a web publisher, you might wonder by this point what’s in it for you? Well, as I said before, you might see more competitions on your blog. But that’s just a wild guess. What’s more concrete, is ContestMachine’s live page. You can check all the running competitions in their network. So if you’re bored for a minute, start winning some prizes!

By the way, we’ll organize another competition this week with Adobe. Stay tuned to see the ContestMachine widget popping up.

iHologram – iPhone application from David OReilly on Vimeo.

I’ve showed this video to a couple of friends in Berlin (where I’m staying for a few days), and they all freaked out. Maybe because I left the “illusion” part out of it, I don’t know. But one thing is for sure, it’s a really cool effect. David OReilly is responsible for this hologram. He used “the Cat” from his award-winning but unfinished cartoon PSS and gave it a 3D effect with Anamorphosis, the same technique used in Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors (the one with the skull).

I wonder when the holograms become reality, Starwars style. On the iPhone it would probably look a bit like this:

[Via iSmashPhone]

Tonight, Microsoft has publicly launched Photosynth, its long awaited Live Labs product that allows you to stitch your photos together to create a detailed 3D environment.  While most of the computation is done on your desktop, the images are uploaded to Microsoft's servers and Microsoft is giving all Photosynth users a total of 20GB of storage for their collections. The rendering and browsing is done with the help of Seadragon, another Live Labs product.

Windows Only

When Microsoft first publicly showed a demo of Photosynth in 2006, it almost looked too good to be true. Now, getting started with it couldn’t be easier – as long as you have a Windows machine – there is no Mac version available yet. You first have to install both a browser plug-in and a desktop application (all done through just one installer). The installation was as standard as Windows installations get and finished in less than a minute. We tested the plugin in both Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 7 without any problems.

One interesting aspect of the uploader is that you can choose a license for your creation. You can either choose a Creative Commons license, put the pictures in public domain, or mark it as ‘All Rights Reserved.’

Desktop App

The desktop application does most of the heavy lifting for creating the ’synths’ and seemed to make good use of all available cores. You only have to pick your photos, give your collection and name and click ‘Synth.’ After it has finished, it will create a score telling you how ’synthy’ your photo collection was. Obviously, your photos need to have common areas for Photosynth to be able to stitch them together. While Photosynth does a great job making these connections, it can’t work magic and our first attempts with relatively unconnected images were futile.

The more pictures you have, the longer the process of creating your synths takes, of course, and depending on your connection, the upload to Microsoft’s servers can also take quite a while. In the end, though, your patience will be greatly rewarded.

Online Viewer

The online viewer is quite intuitive and allows you to zoom in and out, move around the picture and also go through the pictures in a 3D slide show mode. One nice feature is that you can also go full screen, which is really the best way to showcase your photos.

You can also embed a copy of your synth on any website and email a link to your friends.

The animation in Photosynth is astonishingly smooth and our screenshots really can’t do it justice. If you haven’t seen it yet, you should watch Microsoft’s demo of Photosynth at TED2007, which will give you a good impression of what the final product looks like.

Different Way of Shooting

It really takes a different approach to shooting pictures to make the most out of Photosynth. If you often stitch together photos, you are probably already used to this, but Photosynth also gives you more freedom, as you can zoom in and out, or walk around an object and still have Photosynth recognize the common areas.

In our tests, Photosynth performed flawlessly, but we would recommend that you have a set of at least 10 to 20 photos to create an interesting ’synth’ and the more photos you have, the more interesting it will be.

Caveats

A couple of caveats:

• All synths are public – there are no privacy controls!
• Photosynth only runs on Vista and XP so far.

Verdict

Even though we only had a short time to test Photosynth, it has already changed the way we think about taking pictures. Suddenly, you can do so much more with your photos. But besides the cool factor, we can also see a lot of other interesting applications for Photosynth. A realtor, for example, could use it to create a more immersive virtual tour of a house.

If you already have Photosynth installed already, you can see a 3D view of Venice below – otherwise, clicking on the image will take you directly to the installer.

I just stumbled across CrowdSound, a slick widget that enables anyone to gather ’social feedback’ from users and customers. There’s inherent value to creating and maintaining a direct dialogue between you and your customers, so I decided to take a look and see if it’s really a good tool to implement in order to improve customer relationships and product development.

CrowdSound is a social widget that allows anyone to become part of a discussion on your site, without the need to leave it, thus allowing a direct conversation between other users and yourself. In fact, the widget allows you to interact without even signing up for an account, so the threshold is pretty low. You can run CrowdSound widgets on your own website or on a CS-hosted one (example).

This is a test widget I set up in a few seconds:

Furthermore, the widget can be customized to fit your site’s look and feel, all to provide a seamless, integrated experience for sharing suggestions and voting on other users’ submissions. CrowdSound allows for suggestions to be marked as ‘private’, allowing a customer to submit a suggestion that can only be seen by your company, and also allowing you to take offline sensitive suggestions that may otherwise be visible to your competitors.

You can also pre-define categories, such as bugs, feature requests, account-specific issues, etc. The company even offers a full-featured iPhone interface for managing CrowdSound conversations on the go.

Some of the features mentioned above are not available in the free version (a pro version sets you back $10 a month), but the basic functionality offered in the free version seems to be sufficient for a test-drive. A non-embeddable (grrr) screencast can be watched here.

CrowdSound is the work of Washington-based Intridea, who makes other cool stuff like SocialSpring, MediaPlug and Scalr.

On a sidenote: the backend of the platform seems to extremely ‘inspired’ by the lay-out of WordPress, as you can tell from the screenshot below.

Rss is still getting more important for many bloggers, as co-blogger Boris update our blog for RSS last May:

“Well, if it turns out that most of your readers don’t actually visit the site but just read your posts in their RSS reader than it might be time to start optimizing for that.”

Since the updates, subscribers on thenextweb have been increasing tremendously! (subscribe here if you haven’t done allready) Here at TheNextWeb office we have been trying out different programs to read the feeds of other sites, and today I found one on Techcrunch with a new time saving approach:

Open source program Apprise allows users to not only read, but also share news directly from your RSS reader. The project is developed by Christina Cantrell, an Adobe Employee and editor on WatchReport.

The reader is based on Adobe Air, users can simply add and aggregate feeds. Its not world changing, but I believe this is the first RSS reader that can share your articles this easy.

Key Features

1. AIM Integration. Just click on a story, and choose which of your buddies to send it to.
2. Twitter Integration. Post URLs to Twitter right from Apprise.
3. Drag and drop. Easily drag and drop (or copy and paste) articles to share them via email.
4. Realtime search across all feeds.

Sharing your RSS finds

How often do you copy and paste URLs from your news reader or browser into your IM or Twitter client in order to share stories with friends? Apprise created a simple way to share articles from your RSS feed. Simply add your twitter and AIM credentials in the preferences, and the icons will light up. Tap the button will send the article to it respective destination
.

Open Source

The free Apprise reader is opensource, so integration with other services can be expected if the project picks up! We are hoping for integration in more social websites like Wordpress, Tumblr and Stumbleupon.

Try it out on Apprisereader and add our feed: Thenextweb