Welcome to our weekly installment of Picks of the Week at iSource where we provide our expanded coverage of Apple accessories and applications Here we will promote our favorite iPhone, iPad, iPod, Mac and Apple TV related items, as well as bring you occasional tips and tricks. Hopefully many of our favorite items will also be of interest to you. Please feel free to comment on our selections, and suggest picks of your own. Check out this week’s picks after the break
Star Wars®: Empire At War (v1.0.7)
Picked by: Alex Jordan
Star Wars Empire at War has been available for the Mac for some time now, however it just now made it’s way to the Mac App Store. I don’t have much time for video games these days, but that’s the beauty of a strategy game like Empire at War. I can play as much or as little as I have time for. Start a whole campaign, or just play a quick skirmish. Empire at War is a must for strategy game lovers, and Star Wars fans alike. The only downside, is that internet play doesn’t work on the Mac version. Only LAN fights or the single player campaign, which doesn’t make sense.
($19.99) iTunes Link
(On sale now)
DataDeposit v1.0.3 [Jailbreak]
Picked by: jhrogersii
One of the worst parts of upgrading, restoring, or jailbreaking an iOS device is the uncertainty of your app data. Sure, It’s supposed to be all taken care of when you do a backup, but if you’ve been around the Apple mobile block enough times, you’ve probably run into trouble on occasion. I know I have.
Unfortunately, Apple hasn’t given us any alternate methods to backup our iOS devices as of yet, and won’t allow any apps of this sort in the App Store, either. For those of us who Jailbreak, there are a few apps and methods available to guard against data loss, but they aren’t always as easy to use or as comprehensive as they could be. That all changed recently with the release of DataDeposit.
This app is similar to the popular AppBackup, which has been around for a while, but with an awesome new twist. DataDeposit backs up all of your pertinent app settings and saves directly to your Dropbox account for safekeeping. It also only backs up limited save data for the app, rather than the entire app folder, making it an ideal solution for larger apps like GPSs and Games.
Also, since you file is saved to Dropbox’s cloud storage, DataDeposit makes it easy to share your game and app saves among your jailbroken iDevices with ease. This has been an issue for a while for those of us with iPhones and iPads for a while now, so it’s nice to see someone finally come up with an elegant solution.
DataDeposit isn’t perfect, as I had a couple of crashes trying to back up Navigon MobileNavigator. Also, despite its limited backup scope, there were still a few apps that seemed to bog down. I think they were mostly document and media apps that stored or cached files in a library that DataDeposit was trying to grab. However, despite a couple of issues, DataDeposit does a great job overall. I backed up the majority of my critical iPhone apps, and it only took up 146 MB of my free Dropbox account. That’s hard to beat, especially for a free app. If you jailbreak your iDevice, you should go get this app right now.
Apple, are you paying attention? This is what iOS backup should look like when you new cloud service rolls out. Just sayin. 
(Free) Cydia
Tilt to Live HD (v1.5.1)
Picked by: Thomas
Tilt to Live HD is on sale this weekend. It’s actually always free for trials, but the in-app purchase for the full game is currently just $0.99 and I grabbed a copy to complete the set of iPhone titles that I also wanted to have on the iPad. What I came as a surprise was the fact that Tilt to Live HD isn’t just a blown up version of the iPhone game – it’s actually a larger arena that basically quadruples the number of enemies after you at any one time.
Oh, and those in-game effects…the special effects from weapons in Tilt to Live HD are so gorgeous that, for the first few minutes, I was picking up power-ups just to see what they looked like (with no regard for high scores or achievements).
I actually should have remembered that TTL HD was this good because of Ray Merkler’s excellent review from late last year, but I just plum forgot, and it wasn’t until One Man Left tweeted about this great little sale that I decided to purchase this tablet-sized 1337g pack of action for myself.
($0.99) iTunes Link
Notability (v2.0.8)
Picked by: Joe Tomasone
Sometime last year, I bought a LiveScribe Smart Pen for note taking while at work. The Smart Pen is pretty cool – you take notes, and your writing is recorded, and can be downloaded from the pen and displayed in the LiveScribe application, or saved to PDF, exported to Evernote, etc. What made it uber-cool, however, is the ability of the pen to record audio at the same time, which is synchronized with what you are writing. So when you tap on something you wrote on the note paper, the pen plays back the recording from that point, allowing you to hear what was being said at the time. Cool, right? Handy, too. The downside? Around $200 for the pen, and a nominal extra cost for the special note paper that is required. Oh, plus the fact that my handwriting is so bad that doctors can’t even read it. I type much, much better than I write, so when Notability for the iPad came around, I was eager to try it.
Notability give you essentially the same power as the LiveScribe SmartPen does; allowing you to type notes while recording audio. Once you are done recording, a simple tap on any part of the note plays back the recorded audio. The entire session can be saved, exported as a PDF with audio, and synched to Dropbox. You can also include images in your note, either taken on the fly or imported from your Camera roll. (Tip: This is a great time to snap pics with your iPhone and import them with the Camera Connection Kit).
($0.99) iTunes Link
(80% off for a limited time)
Trunket iPhone 4 Skins
Picked by: Renkman
Trunket is the designer of a unique skin for the iPhone 4. Crafted from rare rescued wood, these skins offer a very different approach to personalizing your iPhone. They are available in (5) natural wood finishes, and include a brushed stainless steel elephant logo that can be removed for an additional $5. Application is easy and painless—check them out today!
($34.00) Trunket
There you have it! Hope you enjoyed this week’s installment of Picks of the week. Please let us know what you think, and share with us some of your favorites.
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