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Our friends at Joystiq have procured the first gameplay footage of Epic’s followup to the popular Infinity Blade series, called Infinity Blade: Dungeons, and you can get a look at it below. As you can see, it’s set in the same world as the first two games, but features a completely different take on gameplay, using gestures to fight baddies from a top-down view rather than a fixed camera.

There are also some interesting crafting mechanics, like rubbing out imperfections on a blade you’re making, or tapping dents in metal to clear them off. Infinity Blade: Dungeons was announced at the iPad 3 Apple event, and is supposed to be out later on this year.

Infinity Blade: Dungeons gameplay revealed originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 18 May 2012 08:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Inkling is an e-book publishing platform that’s currently running an app on the App Store, and while Apple has been making an official push for more textbooks in iBooks, Inkling is strengthening its own holdings. The company has made a deal with Follett to bring hundreds of Inkling titles into college bookstores, where students can buy the ebook content right there in person.

The company is selling whole textbooks, or it’s also offering a program called “Pick 3,” which allows students to grab three chapters of a book at a time, keeping costs down if teachers or students don’t need the whole book. Overall, this may not be cheaper, however — don’t forget that students who buy real books can often have a chance to resell them, or can buy them used, and with ebooks, there’s obviously no resale value.

The Follett deal should be ready by the time students head back to school in the fall.

Inkling to sell iPad textbooks in over 900 college bookstores originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 15 May 2012 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you’re like me, you’ve got a hard drive filling up with images. I do a lot of landscape photography, and while I normally shoot in RAW format, they get output as jpegs for the web, email, and the printing service I use. Over the years I’ve seen a lot of applications that will shrink jpegs, and the jpeg itself is already much smaller than anything that started out in raw, native Photoshop or TIF format.

I was offered a new OS X app called JPEGmini to test, and it is impressive. You can drag a folder of photos or even a complete hard drive onto JPEGmini and it goes to work, showing each image it opens and keeping track of how much is saved. It supports images from 2 MB to 17 MB in size, and I have some larger files so the app warned me those would not be shrunk.

I was a bit skeptical of this shrinking process, so I opened up some of my detailed landscape images and looked at them in Photoshop. I couldn’t see any significant difference in the before and after images. I should note that I duplicated a folder of images for this test and worked on the copy, because once you shrink the photos, there is no going back. I saw more than 50% reduction in file size, and there would have been more if I didn’t have so many files in that folder larger than 17 MB. This is very nice for sending files via email because I can reduce the file size while keeping the quality.

Best of all is that your photos stay in jpg format. No program is going to have trouble opening them.

If you want some details on the process, the developers go into more depth about how the application works. Besides the file size caveat, the program only works on jpegs.

JPEGmini is US $19.99 through the Mac App Store. It’s a little pricey, but it does what it claims. It mightnot be for the pro photographer, but I think most amateur and semi-pros will be thrilled at the drive space you get back. If you’d like to see how the program works without any investment, the developers have a free service on their website where you can upload some files and let their server shrink them and return them to you.

Check the gallery for some comparison shots, but remember that these examples are further reduced in quality when we publish them.

JPEGmini puts your images on a diet originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 14 May 2012 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Jetpack Joyride has followed in the steps of Halfbrick Studios’ Fruit Ninja and is now playable in a free version over on Facebook. The new game is very similar to the iOS version. In fact, it’s strikingly similar, given that there aren’t any really new social elements, and even the gadgets (just arrived on iOS) are implemented and ready to buy in the store. In fact, while Fruit Ninja was a nice solid port with some original features, Jetpack Joyride seems a little more of an afterthought unfortunately.

Still, it’s fun, and it’s completely free. I like it, and even though it’s not quite as fitting as the Fruit Ninja port, it’s still Jetpack Joyride. So if you can’t pull out your iPhone to play at work, maybe you can do it on Facebook.

Jetpack Joyride arrives on Facebook for free originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 11 May 2012 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Today, I got to try out Juggernaut: Revenge of Sovering (Free) from Mail.ru. A freemium-style RPG game, it offers a polished feel and good production values, especially in the audio track. In the short time I have had with the app, game play mostly consists of bashing enemies and using spells and armor to defend.

I have yet to find much subtlety for strategy and it’s clear from the start that the game’s raison d’etre is to sell in-game coins and crystals. That said, it’s not bad for older kids so long as they keep out of your iTunes account and are okay with highly sexualized game imagery. Adults will probably get bored fairly quickly with the fights.

However, gameplay isn’t really why I liked this app as much as I did. I was mesmerized by the deeply accented narrator who could barely speak English. His strong Eastern European tones have won my heart. One of the devs, Alex Patsay tells TUAW that in one of the voice-over versions there were “lifeless desserts” instead of “deserts.”

The app itself is fine, I suppose, but the narrations are a delight unto themselves. “When shadows crapped upon the land” and “Land whipping of their noble sons.”

If you decide to download, be aware that the app is nearly a half a gigabyte in size.

Juggernaut: Revenge of Sovering first look originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 10 May 2012 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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