Playboy magazine is coming to iPad by the nudity isn’t coming with it. According to founder Hugh Hefner, who broke the news on Twitter, the reason is:

Steve Jobs has a thing about nudity

So yes, you really will be reading it for the articles.

[@hughhefner via 9to5mac]

Playboy magazine coming to iPad absent nudity is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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Chaos Rings fans rejoice! The big hit by Square Enix is now available for iPad. Users have been enjoying the iPhone version for some time now, but the new iPad version supports 1024×768px HD resolutions so you can experience beautiful graphics, detailed backgrounds, intricate character expressions, and intense battle scenes on the iPad’s large screen. The RPG features

• Amazingly smooth 3D graphics
• Gorgeous sound that takes full advantage of the iPad powerful hardware
• A deep story with unique twists for every pair and multiple endings
• Traditional game and battle systems polished to perfection
• Hours upon hours of gameplay, complete with hidden bosses, secret weapons, and more

In celebration of the release of Chaos Rings for iPad, Square Enix is offering all of their games at a discounted price for two weeks. So if there’s a title of theirs that you’ve been meaning to pick up, now’s the time.

If you choose to pick up Chaos Rings for iPad, be sure to tell us what you think!

[$15.99 - iTunes link, Square Enix - iTunes link, touchArcade]

Chaos Rings for iPad now available, all Square Enix games on sale is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

I was excited to see that Let’s Golf 2 just appeared in the App Store! I am not a golfer in real life, but I enjoy a good golf game every once in a while. Let’s jump right in and see what this new version has to offer.

Let’s Golf 2 is not meant as a real golf simulation like a Tiger Woods Golf. Instead, you are greeted with cute, often funny characters in outlandish environments that are beautiful and colorful. This does not mean that the levels are easy, in fact they become quite challenging later in the game (how can that be a par 4, impossible!)

There are several new characters to select. But in the beginning of the game, you one have two to choose from; Vincent and Jane. As you progress through the levels, you unlock a lot of customizations including clothes, hair, golf balls and clubs. A fun addition is the new Skill for each character. I am using Jade for example and her power is “Power of Charm”. This move is useful when putting as no matter how hard you hit the ball when putting, you can use her power to stop it anywhere on the green. The character powers, once used, have to replenish over time and can’t be used again and again without replenishing; use your characters power wisely.

Single Player has a few different modes to choose from; Instant Play where you play across three random holes from a variety of courses. Career where you complete against other virtual players for the trophy. Challenge where you play a series of “challenges” and score the highest points. Free Hole where you can setup the course you would like to play. As you play courses you earn points and medals that go towards unlocking courses and character customizations as well as increasing your character’s abilities.

Multiplayer uses Gameloft Live for online play, but you can also play locally with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Once online you can create or join a room and view the leaderboard. The game is a blast online as you complete in matches against a competitor from around the world.

Gameplay in Let’s Golf 2 is really straight forward. You can tap on the course map on the left of the screen to view where the ball is going and tap left or right on the screen to adjust or use the zoom controls to pan away form the action for a big picture of the course. You have the option of changing your clubs as well, but I have found for the most part the AI does a good enough job that I don’t have to change clubs too often, I can typically control the outcome of my swing by adjusting the strength I am swinging. Swinging your club is accomplished by tapping the golf ball on the right to start swinging and then tapping it again to center the swing for angle and strength. One feature that is missing is some sort of advanced club swinging mechanic. These swinging moves are typically accomplished by swiping your finger in a direction and letting go at the strength you want. Alas, this feature is not available that I have been able to find it.

I really enjoy Let’s Golf 2, but there is one issue that really bugs me. The framerate/accuracy of your club swings is not spot on. Depending on the course I often find that I have to touch the swinging meter ahead of when I plan to swing in order to assure accuracy. This is really frustrating sometimes as golf is a game that focuses on the smaller number of strokes in a game and I often find that through no mistake of my own, I miss a swing or calculate the incorrect swinging strength because of this flaw.

Don’t let my previous statement sway you from getting this game. Granted, the timing of some swings can be frustrating but the online play coupled with many characters and unlockables makes for a fantastic golf game.

[$4.99- iTunes Link]

Pros

• Colorful graphics
• Diverse courses
• Unlockable characters
• Unlockable character customizations
• Online and local wireless play
• Many different types of golf games to play

Cons

• Framerate can be slow at times
• Easy to miscalculate swing due to input latency

Let’s Golf 2 for iPad- app review is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

And the iOS4 app updates just keep on coming. We’re finding more and more by the day. Whether it’s adding support for the iPhone 4’s awesome retina display or taking advantage of new APIs within iOS4, we’re still watching for them. Here’s the ones we found this time around, and as always, if you see any we missed, be sure to let us know in the comments!

Readdle

Readdle is an incredibly easy to use app that allows you to not only view all kinds of files right on your iPhone, but also allows you to manage and save attachments. It’s one of the better apps we’ve found to handle documents, not to mention reasonably priced. Not only did Readdle’s newest update add multitasking support, it also adds support for USB file transfer through iTunes. Better yet, you can now save attachments via the Mail app.

[iTunes Link]

WeeMee Avatar Creator

WeeMee is an incredibly cool app that allows you to create your own avatars on the fly.  (I bet all of you could have guessed who the above avatar was without a name attached!) It’s a great time killer and an awesome way to express yourself on Twitter or whatever social medium you choose. This update fixed a couple bugs found in their initial iOS4 update. It also adds tons of in-app purchases to choose from. If you decide to check it out, let us know!

[iTunes Link]

Wolfram Alpha

If you need a hardcore math application that can handle any formula or calculation you throw at it, Wolfram Alpha is definitely for you. Leanna reviewed this app a while back and had good things to say about it. I don’t know nearly as much about math as she does, so coming from her, you know it’s decent. I use this app for easy to semi-complicated formulas and it’s always performed incredibly well. This update adds support for the iPhone 4’s retina display as well as optimized images. It also adds multitasking support for fast app switching.

[iTunes Link]

Trism

Trism is a long time favorite on the iPhone platform. It was released not long after the app store initially launched and it’s still a favorite of mine. It takes a newer approach on puzzle games like Tetris. This version of Trism adds HD puzzle pieces to support the iPhone 4’s retina display.  So if you’re in the mood for a game that never gets old and never ends, Trism is definitely a great time killer at a great price.

[iTunes Link]

Reel Director

Reel Director was here before iMovie for iPhone 4, and unlike Apple’s offering it supports not only older iPhone models but iPod touch and iPad as well. That’s right, it’s a universal binary and the latest update includes:

• Import music from iPod music library (iOS 4 only)
• Support iPhone 4 retina display
• Upload to YouTube within app
• Improved HD video quality on iPhone 4
• Improved photo render quality

[iTunes link]

iOS4 Apps Updated: Readdle, WeeMee Avatar Creator, Wolfram Alpha, Trism, Reel Director is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

We Farm for iPad is a real-time farming game by ngmoco. If you’re familiar with We Rule, We Farm is very similar except that your are building a farm instead of kingdom.

As with most ngmoco games, you must have a plus+ account to play. If you don’t have one already, signing up is simple. When you first start playing We Farm, the game takes you through a little tutorial which is pretty helpful.

The goal of We Farm is to raise money and build your farm. You raise money by growing crops, raising animals, and receiving and placing orders with friends. Almost everything you do yields experience points. As you level, more items are available for purchase; higher level buildings will output more money. You will also be able to upgrade your farm as you level which gives you more space and gives you a nicer looking farmhouse. You can also turn on notifications to alert you when certain tasks are complete. However, they do not work for me. I’ve asked around and apparently I’m the only with this problem.

There are two currencies used in We Farm. The first is gold and is what you make doing various farm tasks and buying items. The other is Gro. This is used to instantly complete tasks like growing crops, building buildings, fulfilling an order, raising animals, and increasing your animals’ happiness. You earn Gro every time you level and is also available as an in-app purchase.

My biggest complaint of We Farm is animal raising. To make your animal happy, you have to periodically “pet” it. Each pet increases the animal’s happiness by 5%. The happier your animal is, the better chance he has of winning a prize at the fair. Once you win a prize, your pen/coop/pasture becomes available for your friends to place orders at. This means you make a lot more money from it. The problem is that if you have an animal that takes 2 hours to raise, you must come back every 6 minutes during that 2 hour period to get the happiness to 100%. This is an unrealistic expectation in my eyes. Of course, you can get around this by using Gro, but We Farm doesn’t provide enough Gro to use it on all animals before needing to spend real money. However, the happier your animal is, the less Gro it takes to bring him to 100% happiness, so my strategy is to pet my animals as much as I can, then use grow at the end to bring it to 100%.

Another small complaint I have is that there isn’t a way to quickly return to your own farm when visiting someone else’s farm. I’d like to a small icon to tap in the corner of all farms that quickly takes to your farm.

All in all, I enjoy playing We Farm. However, you must like time management games to have fun with this one. I have been impressed with the performance of the app; it runs smoothly, I’ve never received a memory error (a common problem with We Rule), nor has it ever crashed. So if you’re a fan of these types of games, check out We Farm – it’s free!

Screenshots after the break!

[Free - iTunes link]

Pros

• Good performance
• Fun
• Easy to tailor around how much you want to play

Cons

• Can’t quickly return to your farm when visiting someone else’s farm.
• Animal petting requirement for a ribbon is unreasonable
• Push notifications not working (for me)

We Farm for iPad – app review is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

Pottery HD is a unique virtual clay pottery app that can really only be done on the iPad. It shows what an enterprising developer can do with a large multitouch interface. This game is fun and relaxing.

When the game first launches, I was caught a little off guard as I had no idea what to do. You have a “Create” button and that is it. So, I started to create, experimenting with the controls. You can make the clay taller and shorter, wider and thinner. That’s about it. So, I made a pot and fired it up in the kiln. When it was done, it gave me an option to sell it. I thought to myself, “Who is going to buy it?”. As it turns out, no one regretfully as it is all virtual. Once I sold my pottery I earned some virtual money. At the main menu a new feature appeared, “Shop”. Now I had access to paints and brushes. I had a new feature appear as well, “Inbox”. So it appears that as you play the game you are given different objectives; unique pieces of pottery to make. You can reference the photo given to you and once you make it, you can send it off to the virtual requestor. You can play Pottery HD independent of the virtual quests and just have fun adding lots of different pottery creations to your collection. If you like, you can even share these creations with friends via email.

I have had a lot of fun with this game, however, I left it me wanting so much more. For example, I would like a way to regulate the spinning of the pottery wheel; it stays at a constant speed. Also, you can’t add or remove clay either. It would be great to add globs of clay to truly make your pottery any size you want, but instead, you are limited by the vertical size of the screen. The biggest enhancement I would like to see is the ability to share online. The marketplace is limited to a virtual settings, you can’t see other users creations. This is such a wasted opportunity in my opinion.

Overall I really enjoyed Pottery HD, but it’s glaring lack of features and options lend me to recommending only for the most casual of users.

[$4.99- iTunes Link]

Pros

• Pottery looks beautiful
• Sensation of actually making pottery
• the Inbox adds hours of creative fun if you are stumped on what to make

Cons

• Not completely fleshed out with features (missing ability to control clay wheel rotation)
• No Internet- based way to trade with others

Pottery HD for iPad- app review is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

Take all your social media streams like Facebook and Twitter, flow them into a daring, dynamic iPad magazine and you have Flipboard. Billed as “everything you care about in one place” it will no doubt delight those who live for what our friends and those we follow are recommending, and annoy those who think the social web is a noisy, confusing crap-shoot. (Those deliberately without a social graph, of course, need not apply).

For me the key will be wether it gets stuck on meme-heavy, oft-repeated (or re-tweeted) content or whether it helps me better discover those little gems discovered by my more adept friends.

But why am I still typing, there’s an @lonelysandwhich video after the break!

[iTunes - Free]

Flipboard turns your social streams into an iPad magazine is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

Apple has just set iBooks 1.1.1 loose in the App Store. A point release, it does sneak in some nice functionality none-the-less:

• Double-tap an image within a book to view it in greater detail.
• Experience books that include audio and video.
• Enjoy substantial performance improvements when reading PDFs.
• Look-up definitions to English words inside books without a specified language.
• Addresses an issue that may have caused some book downloads to not complete.
• Includes many stability and performance improvements.

If you’re trying it out, let us know how it works for you.

[iTunes, thanks @daveizzle!]

iBooks 1.1.1 hits App Store is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

Blogshelf for the iPad is an RSS reader that displays your feeds as magazines on a shelf. Imagine iBooks filled with blogs – that’s Blogshelf.

• Magazine layout, just swipe your finger to navigate
• White/Black theme
• Contrast setting for night reading
• Font adjustment
• Offline reading with images
• Download full content articles for selected news sources that usually only give you the short article summary on other readers
• Organize blogs and feeds visually
• Swipe menu bar designed for left and right handed users
• Translate text from foreign languages to your own, based on your iPad’s regional setting
• Search feed powered by Google
• Hundreds of handpicked blog and feed organized by topics (TiPb is included in Apple topic!)
• User Favorites (request your favorite feeds by email)
• Subscribe to to 90 blogs and feeds

The good folks over at gdiplus have generously provided us with some promo codes to give you! Just let us know why Blogshelf would be a great addition to your iPad app collection and we’ll randomly choose 3 winners. After you’ve done that, be sure to check out our review of Blogshelf!

Give-away starts now and ends Sunday, July 18 at midnight PST. (Promo codes require US iTunes Store account — Apple’s rule, not ours — and they expire so if you get one, use it quickly!)

[$4.99 - iTunes link]

Blogshelf for iPad: give-away is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

My latest productivity app this week? Penultimate for iPad. There are several competing “free hand” note taking apps on our favorite tablet device. After our recent TiPb at Work Post, I thought I would see if Penultimate tries to separate itself from other note apps on the iPad. Is being simple with just enough  of a “feature” to get the job done enough?

Penultimate starts you off with a single notebook. That notebook serves as a tutorial to show you how to use Penultimate. The example notebook is excellent as it “teaches” you everything you need to know about the app. The basic setup is this; you can have virtually unlimited notes in your notebook. You tap the bottom right corner to go to the next page and the bottom left corner to go to the previous page. You have a pen, eraser and a clear page button at the bottom as well. On the main screen you can create your own notebook, email or delete notebooks as need, you can even rename them by tapping the name located below the notebook.

Writing in Penultimate is a pure joy. As you draw or write with your fingers, the developers have given the virtual ink a very distinct look, almost like calligraphy. The ink is thick in some areas and thinner in others. If you want to adjust the thickness or color of your ink, simply tap and hold the pen icon at the bottom of the page to make your changes.

You can create new notebooks with the tap of a button located in the top left hand corner. The top right hand corner gives you additional settings. The style of paper be changed from graph to lined for example, you can reposition the tools (pen, eraser, etc.) to the top of the page and even email the entire notebook or just the page you are on via email. Penultimate converts the notebooks to PDFs for emailing.

I like Penultimate for what it does; it is a simple no-frills note taking tool. I find there to be a couple of irritations however. In landscape view, you are given a cropped view of the page and you can flick the right side of the screen to scroll towards the top and bottom. I feel there has to be a better way to implement this, or, give me completely different functionality in landscape. The other issue is that there is no way to zoom to give yourself more space; the notebook is it’s real size and there is no zooming. I would have liked to have seen a pinch-zoom function that increased the size of your note area. Ah, perhaps in a future release. Regardless, Penultimate is a beautiful fun and easy note taking tool that most of use can find a  use for in our busy lives.

[$2.99- iTunes Link]

Pros

• Simple
• Beautiful design
• Ink looks great
• Animation is smooth

Cons

• Landscape view is awkward to use
• No pinch to zoom functionality

Penultimate for iPad- app review is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog