The premise is reasonably simple: you’ve got audio on your desktop computer, you want to listen to it somewhere else. For example, you’re running Spotify and want to listen to it as you clean around the house. Unless you’re paying for Spotify Premium, there’s no way to get the music out of Spotify onto your stereo short of plugging the audio of your computer into your stereo.

With Airfoil, you gain a bunch of options. When you run Airfoil, you can send the audio to any Apple TV you’ve got. You can send the audio to any device running the free Airfoil Speakers application — another desktop, a laptop in another room, or even your iPhone.

Pretty awesome.

But, for me, the coolest thing with Airfoil happened the other day. I was watching some TV off of our iMac, and was trying to be polite and keep the sound low.

“Self,” I thought, “why not use Airfoil and broadcast the sound to your iPhone.”

Brilliant. Except, the sound was a couple of seconds behind the video. Which was incredibly annoying.

The smart folks at Rogue Amoeba have it covered, though. Turns out, the Airplay format inserts a 2 second delay. But, if you run the Airfoil Video Player, it will delay the video 2 seconds, so the sound and video are in sync. Including for web videos. So, I laid back and watched some TV off of Hulu, while listening to the sound as it played through my iPhone.

For $25, I continually find uses for Airfoil. It’s easily worth it (and it works for PCs too).

There were some gotchas that were a bit vexing at the time:

• Album Art Syncing
• Smart Playlists With “Limits” Not Working on iOS devices
• Play Counts Not Updating Reliably
• No Genius Playlists on iOS devices

Let’s take these one one by one

Album Art Syncing

If you’re using multiple Macs (or, presumably, a Mac and a PC), this is now about as flawless as it gets. The syncing of songs from one computer to another seems to be nearly perfect. If I update album art on one machine, it now seems to be on the rest within a reasonable amount of time. There was a period of time where that wasn’t true, where random songs would be missing artwork when streaming them, but that’s just not the case now. If a song has artwork on one machine, it does on every other one. So, one check in the positive column!

However, that’s not the case for iOS devices. Now, for a lot of songs, your album artwork will be there. Particularly for songs you play a lot, your iOS device of choice (I’m going to go with iPhone) will download and cache the data. But, if you’re playing a playlist or have your Music app on shuffle, you’re going to find that a whole bunch of songs don’t have album art. The iPhone will go get the album art when you play the song (so the next time it will have album art), but even that seems flaky, as the length of time that the art gets cached seems inconsistent at best.

It does look like (and I should stress that this just seems different to me, it might not be a change) that the Music app will now try to cache artwork ahead of time. In other words, if you’ve got a playlist, it’ll go grab the artwork for the next 5 songs or so, so that they’ll be there. I think it does this, smartly, in an attempt to always be ahead of you, so you’ll never see the ugly no artwork icon.

But it just doesn’t work that well, for a couple of reasons. First, it’s just unreliable. I’ve seen enough times where I’ll just get a few songs into a playlist and all of a sudden I’ll hit a few songs with no artwork, then a batch with artwork, etc. It just seems to hit or miss.

More importantly, the caching seems to render the Music app nearly inoperable. I’m not sure if it’s cases where it doesn’t have a network connection, or if it has a weak one, or something else entirely, but when it starts downloading artwork for a larger playlist, you might not be able to use the UI for 15-30 seconds.

Very un-Apple like.

Given that, nightly, the iPhone uploads a backup of itself, is there any reason that, during the same window, it couldn’t download all of the artwork you need for your music? My library (about 8000 songs, all in the cloud, 90% with artwork) has about 500MB of artwork. Explain why the iPhone couldn’t grab that over wifi when it’s plugged in charging at night.

Baffling.

Not-So-Smart Playlists

The “limit” feature that works so well in iTunes on the desktop simply doesn’t work on iOS devices.

Well … that’s not actually true. Those options used to work, pre-Match. They just don’t work now. You’ll see people online bitching about playlists having too many songs, or inconsistent songs. This is why.

Your playlist that limits to your 25 most recent songs? It’ll probably just have every song you have in it.

Still not fixed. Presumably, this would only be fixed with an iOS update (it must be part of the Music app itself), but you’d think that Apple could set the cloud side of iTunes Match to simply sync over the actual contents of your “50 Best Songs” playlist, as a temporary work around.

No such luck.

There’s another smart playlist feature that still doesn’t work with iTunes Match on iOS devices, due to …

Play Counts Not Syncing

This is actually broader than play counts, it is really all meta data. And, like album art, it works perfectly on the desktop. I’ve now got this great system where I can crank through unrated music while I’m working, and when I get home, anything I’ve rated highly is already in my four- and five-star playlists. It’s really, really nice.

But it doesn’t work for iOS devices. At all. Or, almost at all.

Sometimes, the first track in a playlist that you listen to on an iOS device will update it’s play count. Not it’s last played date. Just the play count. And only sometimes. And only the first song. Bizarre.

This obviously contributes to the smart playlist problem. If you’ve got a “Radio” playlist like I do (where it’ll play songs that haven’t been played in a while), these just don’t work. Until I listen to those songs on a desktop, they will haunt me in the Radio playlist, showing up over and over again, even though I’ve heard them 50 times.

No Genius Playlists on iOS Devices

Nope, still don’t work.

So, where do we stand?

Well, if you’re a desktop user with multiple computers, iTunes Match is flawless. It really is. Stuff. Just. Works. It’s very Apple-like, which is something you couldn’t say 8 weeks ago.

Actually, there’s still one problem with the desktop experience …

The iTunes Match error messages suck. Flat out suck. When you hit a song that they can’t handle, you don’t get a good explanation why, and in the worst case, sometimes Match will sit there and churn for as long as you’ll let it. In my case, that was until my iMac crashed (because I hadn’t noticed it had been going for a day or so).

I do believe, though, that this is the exception. That most folks with your average iTunes setup are going to be just fine.

Back to our regularly scheduled summary …

So, as I was saying, if you’re a desktop user (a laptop and an iMac, or a couple of laptops, or a Mac and a PC), iTunes Match is everything it is supposed to be when you bought it.

If you’re an iOS user, there are still some problems, and I don’t expect these problems will be resolved until we get a new build of iOS (5.1?). They’re not necessarily load or cloud issues; they seem to be fundamental application issues that need to be resolved.

And I’m optimistic that these will get resolved. Some of them (the metadata syncing) just seem like bugs, not fundamentally unfixable issues. There’s nothing on the list that jumps out as challenging engineering (other than the scale).

Even with the stuff that works intermittently, or not at all, iTunes Match is still worth it, even just as a backup of your music, a way to play music on your Apple TV without having to keep a computer on, and a way to get higher quality versions of the crappy music you ripped in 1998.

Or maybe you don’t need a higher quality version of “… Baby One More Time”. To each their own. I suppose.

The getting photos off the phone part is sort of helped by Photo Stream, but not really. But that’s also not what this is about.

The podcast bit can be managed really nicely through Instacast. Export your podcast subscriptions from iTunes, import ‘em into Instacast, and it’ll become your podcast player. It’s very handy.

The only thing it doesn’t do particularly well is let you know when to start it up and download new podcasts. (Actually, there’s a cool feature in Instacast HD for the iPad that does just that, but I don’t listen to podcasts on my iPad all that much.)

Screwing around one night, I was trying to come up with a solution, and I remembered that I had Boxcar installed, which gets me push notifications for Twitterrific (since it doesn’t have them natively). I logged into Boxcar, noticed they had a “Push me a notification when there’s a new entry in this feed” option, and thought “Hey, I’ll plug in the podcast feeds and get push notifications whenever there’s a new podcast!”

Amazing, right?

Except, it didn’t work. I don’t think Boxcar supports podcasts as a feed type or something, as it just seemed to ignore any new items that showed up.

But I was not discouraged.

There’s another cool “send me a notice” website/tool out there called ifttt.com. Basically, it’s an awesome little site that lets you plug things together and trigger actions. The premise is “If [this] then [that]” (hence ifttt.com). I’d been using it to send me emails before it’s forecast to rain (can’t forget that umbrella!).

It also lets you send notifications based off of RSS feeds. And it can send those notifications into Boxcar.

That opened up a whole world of possibilities.

First, I plugged in my podcasts. I turned my weather notifications from email to Boxcar push notifications.

While dorking around inside these cool webapps, I noticed that Boxcar also ties into Growl (the Mac desktop notification system). “Awesome,” I thought, “I can have my computer push stuff to my phone when scripts finish and stuff.”

And that is entirely possible. You simply install the Boxcar Growl theme, configure a few easy settings, and boom, your computer can send your Growl notifications to your phone, straight through Boxcar. Mine is configured to only do so when my screen saver is on or I’m inactive. If I’m in a meeting, IMs will get shot to my phone so I can determine if something is urgent. Long backup jobs or scripts will let me know they’ve finished.

Tying all of this into growlnotify (the command line tool to let you send arbitrary stuff into Growl) means you can basically trigger almost anything into a push notification. It’s an amazingly powerful toolset.

I’ve spent the last few weeks getting iTunes Match up and running across all of my machines that support it. This includes a couple of different laptops with iTunes Libraries, an iPhone, iPad, and a couple of Apple TVs. For 80% of the population, I’m guessing the basic iTunes Match service will work splendidly. They’ll turn it on, feel better that they’ve got all this music up in the cloud, and love that they can pull down all their music on their phone without plugging it in over USB.

However, if you’ve got more than 5 or 6 GB of music, or keep your iTunes metadata clean, or are familiar at all with smart playlists, you’re probably going to bump your head a time or two.

If you read through this, you may avoid those unsightly welts on your noggin’. Sadly, I didn’t.

Getting Music into iTunes Match

Again, for most folks, you’ll just turn it on, let iTunes Match chug for a while, and then you’ll be done. That while might be an hour or two, but start it before you go to bed, and when you wake up, you’ll be all cloudly.

The rest of you are likely going to run into a couple of things uploading your music. The first thing you’re giong to do is turn on the “iCloud Status” column in iTunes (right-click on the columns at the top of your iTunes). The second thing to do is make an “iCloud Errors” smart playlist so you can triage any of those songs.

What we’re basically doing is looking for all the songs that are in our library that didn’t get matched or uploaded (or weren’t already purchased from iTunes). This playlist is going to basically show you two types of errors:

1. Errors
2. Ineligible

The first thing you’re going to do is select all, right-click, and choose “Add to iCloud”. iCloud, often, just messes up the first time through and it’ll upload or match a bunch of tracks the second time. Once you’ve done that, you need to deal with these tracks individually.

Let’s deal with the Ineligible tracks first.

Ineligble Tracks

These, by and large, will be tracks that fall below iTunes Match’s standards. Usually they’ll be tracks you ripped a long time ago and are below 128kb (bit rate) or will have been ripped at a variable rate and didn’t require much (often vocal or quiet tracks end up at a low bit rate). Fixing these is simple: right-click on them, choose “Convert to MP3” (or AAC, whatever your iTunes is set to), and let it go. Your iTunes will make a copy of your track (metadata included), at a bitrate high enough for iTunes Match to be happy.

Occasionally, you’ll find iTunes Match needs a bit more coaxing, which involves turning your track into an AIFF track and then back to mp3. Macworld covers that process in detail, so I won’t repeat it here. I only had to do that twice out of ~9k songs.

Error Tracks

If you find a bunch of tracks marked as “Error”, in my experience, just retrying the “Add to iCloud” option fixed them. For a handful of other tracks, the issue was that the mp3 is corrupt and iTunes Match couldn’t read the song to match it. Your best bet is to re-rip that music, because surely you ripped that music off your own CDs and didn’t steal it from Napster or someone else’s collection, right?

One more hiccup …

I ran into a case where Purchased music that was definitely on my machine stopped working. I have no idea why or how, but it did. It was the most recent album I’d bought via iTunes. All of a sudden—my guess is that I ended up with a contention between the songs downloaded to my computer and to my iPad—iTunes lost the metadata and couldn’t play the music.

The solution was one of the major features of iTunes Match. I deleted the songs, and then re-downloaded them. Problem solved.

iTunes Metadata & Libraries

iTunes Match does a reasonably good job of managing metadata. It doesn’t replace any of it, so if you’re hoping that you’ll take all of your crappily tagged music and have iTunes replace it with much better data, you’re going to be disappointed.

However, if you’ve done a reasonably good job of keeping your iTunes library tagged, iTunes Match allows you to merge all of your iTunes libraries into one big library in the cloud. Doing that is insanely easy.

1. Turn on iTunes Match on your first library
2. Let it do its thing
3. Turn on iTunes Match on your second librar
4. Let it do its thing
5. Rinse and repeat for each library

There are some gotchas that pop up when managing your now merged libraries in the cloud.

• If you enabled iTunes Match on iOS devices (iPhone, iPad, Apple TV), Album Art doesn’t show up on a song until you play it. I’m sure some engineer at Apple thought that was a great idea, and it is a good way to ensure you’re not keeping a bunch of extra art on your device. But it sucks in real life, especially if you’re someone who tries to keep your album art up-to-date on your music. Hopefully, Apple comes up with a better solution.

• Smart playlists that rely on other playlists simply don’t sync. You can probably rebuild those playlists using nested playlist logic (option-click on that little plus icon), to create a playlist like this:

My “Radio” playlist

• Smart playlists that rely on the “Limit” feature simply don’t work on iOS devices. They ignore the limit. This is, by far, one of the most infuriating things about iTunes Match. I have a ton of playlists that rely on that feature. Your “Top 50 songs” playlist that is limited to the top 50 most played tracks, or your “Best Rated Songs” limited by tracks you’ve most recently added are both not going to work. Or, more accurately, they simply ignore the limit, which probably destroys the value of that playlist.
  • I’m guessing that this is because the iOS device doesn’t have the iTunes Library or the necessary database to make those limits work. This seems reasonably easy to fix (store that data in some sort of binary file and sync it out periodically).

• No Genius playlists on iOS devices. You can still create them on your Mac/PC, and then click the “Save Playlist” button. This playlist will then sync out to your devices. I’m assuming, once again, that this is because the Genius database is no longer getting synced to your phone. Apple should fix this. Genius is awesome.

• Playing songs on another device seems to only update the play count for the first song. This is just a weird bug.

Is it worth it?

In the end, is it worth it to move to iTunes Match? So far, for me, I think so. I no longer have to manage multiple iTunes libraries the way I was before, which probably saves me an hour or so a week. When I’m at work on my Macbook, I can listen to music that isn’t locally on my machine. If I ever run out of space, I’ll just blow up a bunch of my music, but still be able to listen to it as long as I have an internet connection.

The fact that I no longer need to have my media server turned on just to serve up music to the Apple TV is going to save me more in electricity than iTunes Match costs per year.

One day, when I get bored, I can go through and replace all of my old bad rips with pristine iTunes copies. That’s kind of nifty too, and probably worth the $25 by itself.

The broken smart playlists and Genius on iOS devices is a bummer, and in some cases, so un-Apple-like that I wonder how the hell it got out the door. Then I remember that probably 5% of iTunes users have ever created a smart playlist or used Genius and it makes a bit more sense.

In 6 months, if we’re still complaining about poorly matched songs, broken playlists, and all that fun stuff, I certainly won’t be happy. But, we’re still talking about $25/year, which to me feels worth it just for having a backup of all my music off-site, and the reduced electricity use in my house from not having to keep a media server turned on.

Your mileage may vary, of course.

Then I go to move her Google Calendar to iCloud like I did with my own GCal. I export her ics file, import it into iCal, and merge it into her normal calendar.

Everything looks normal.

Until iCloud starts sending out acceptance emails to people for meetings from her work calendar (that had been synched with Google Calendar back in 2008 and 2009).

Yep, tens, maybe hundreds of acceptances to meetings that were years old. I’m sure there’s a setting that I missed somewhere, but that just doesn’t seem like the right thing, Apple, now does it?

Over time, working with Google Calendar across all those devices became a bit tougher. It’s not really Google’s fault–I just wanted to do some stuff that wasn’t as easy to do. Syncing across multiple devices with all of them being able to read/write/update entries became a crapshoot as to whether or not an update would work. Weirdness with iCal (on the Mac) where all of a sudden it couldn’t authenticate to Google’s servers. I’m not sure where the fault lies (probably both on Google and Apple: Google tends to do some stuff non-standard; Apple seems to sometimes not handle non-standard stuff very well), but it would go flaky every now and then.

That being said, it still worked very, very nicely. Mostly. iOS 4 made it even easier when they added native Google Calendar syncing.

But, in iOS 5, Apple released iCloud, and with it, the chance to simplify a bit. I could drop some of the workarounds to go native Apple. So, as risky as that sounds (remember MobileMe … or hell, remember the trouble just downloading and activating iOS 5?), I decided to bite the bullet and move my calendar out of GCal to iCloud. Just one less thing that could go wrong…for better or for worse.

Google makes it very easy to get your data out. Within a minute, I had downloaded my .ics file with all of my historical events. Over to iCal, import, and boom.

It would fail every time.

After a bit of digging (using Console.app), I could see this error:

iCal: Component boundaries mismatch (VALARM VEVENT)

That lead me to think that maybe Google’s ics file had some sections that didn’t match right (I’m pretty smart, eh?). Thanks to Google’s search engine, I was able to figure out why Google’s Calendar wouldn’t give me my data.

I uploaded my ics to this iCalendar validator. I helpfully told me places where the file didn’t parse properly. Using my favorite text editor (hosted on Google’s code repository–is there anything these guys don’t do?), I fixed the problems.

Voila. Everything imported nicely. Moments later, I had my calendar on iCloud.com, on my phone, and on my iPad. Working exactly the same as it was before, but now I get to more easily take advantage of some of Mac OS’ and iOS’ niceties (data detectors, applications creating calendar events), and I can to take one “sync” out of my chain.[1]

(from http://jmak.tumblr.com/)

Over the past 10 years or so, like many folks, I’ve become (or re-become) an Apple fan. The first computer I ever used was probably an Apple IIe or IIgs, at a friends or at school. Loads of Oregon Trail, other text-based games, and a bunch of Carmen San Diego.

Then, as I got older (and here we’re talking ten or twelve), I moved into the PC world. I liked building machines, replacing parts, screwing around with trying to move memory around with the autoexec.bat and config.sys so I could run the latest game. And that’s a huge reason I ended up with computers being my vocation. Apple got me in the game, the late 80s/early 90s PC world made me a tech geek.

But then something changed. Well, a couple.

I graduated college.

I got a job.

I no longer had time (nor the desire) to upgrade to the latest drivers, or deal with the incompatibility between my new graphics card and my sound card. I didn’t want to deal with poorly developed software that caused my machine to blow up just because I wanted to use a scanner or play a game.

It started slow. I got a second-gen iPod in, I think, 2002. It cost $500 for 10GB. I had to buy a FireWire card for my PC to even use it.

But Steve Jobs had gotten his foot in the door. The iPod did one thing, and it did it well: it played music. The interface required no instructions, no learning curve, no explanation. It. Just. Worked. (It also lasted me 3 or 4 years. And I’m pretty that if I turned it on right now, it would work.)

One iPod lead to another iPod (a Shuffle, then a 5th Gen iPod). Then, I got sick of dealing with a crappy PC at work and bought myself a MacBook Pro. My re-entry (after 20 years or so) into real Mac computing.

I’m not going to tell you that Macs are better because of superior hardware or software. I’m not going to tell you that everything about a Mac is better than a PC. I won’t tell you that Steve Jobs was some sort of deity of software design.

What Steve Jobs got, and what he eventually made me realize, is that my time and my experience are worthwhile. It’s worth paying a little bit extra to get a computer that just sort of does what it is supposed to. That has an interface that makes sense. That doesn’t make me worry about configuration or setup. That does the little things right. Whether it’s a computer, or a music player, or a video player for the TV, what’s valuable isn’t the technology, it’s the technology’s ability to get out of the way and make my life better, easier, faster.

As a kid (and even now, a little bit), futzing around with a computer is an enjoyable pastime. Your time, as a kid, just isn’t quite as valuable. When you have a job, and maybe a hobby or two, or a family, your time is your most valuable asset. Your time allows you to do what you dream–build a company, a family, play a sport, start a charity, whatever it is. Steve Jobs sold time.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.[1]

It is the one machine to rule them all.

I try to do a lot of smart stuff to keep my machine and data safe, since pretty much everything I care about is on it. I have a Time Machine backup that I keep up-to-date religiously. I sync a collection of documents to Dropbox as an off-site backup. The music and photos get sync’d to another machine on my home network.

Nothing groundbreaking, but I try to do what I can to keep this machine happy and healthy.

Over the past few months, as often happens, software upgrades and new applications put a little extra stress on the hard drive and CPU, so things started to get just a bit slower. Things might stutter a bit as I scroll down a web page, or flip between applications. Just enough to annoy me while I worked and make me look longingly at Katie’s MacBook Air with its nice solid-state drive and near instance application loading and boot up.

So, I tried to do the best thing I could do, short of buying a new machine and having to go through all of the work to make that new machine the machine. I SSD-ified it[1].

Well, first, actually, I found out that I could upgrade the RAM to 8GB. $45 later, I had my shiny 8GB RAM kit, took the 10 minutes to install it, and in the couple of weeks since I installed it, my machine has gone into swap a grand total of 500 times (or so). In the couple of weeks before that, it’d gone into swap millions of times. Score one for memory.

The final step was the actual SSD-ification. I found a reasonably good deal on 256GB SSD (at MicroCenter, and grabbed a USB enclosure for the disk I’d be removing at the same time for $8). When I got home from my excusion, I loaded up Carbon Copy Cloner, and cloned my existing data onto the SSD. About 2.5 hours later, I had this nice SSD with all of my data on it.

Again, another 15 minute surgery to the laptop, and I had removed the old drive, placed in the new SSD, and closed things back up.

This machine now flies. iTunes starts in seconds. Excel opens up in seconds rather than minutes. It boots up and loads up my settings in less than a minute.

It’s a giant MacBook Air.

And, at the same time, I’ve now gained a nice backup drive (remember that USB enclosure). Every week or so, I can clone off my entire drive and have a 3rd backup of my data.

All in, the upgrades cost me about $450, which is less than half the cost of buying a brand-new low end MacBook Air, and about a quarter of what a new MacBook Pro will cost. I’m guessing I’ve added at least another year or two to the life of this machine.

It’s probably one of the easiest and most productive upgrades you can perform on your aging laptop.

Hands-On: With Wii U’s Touchscreen Controller, Nintendo Could Radically Change Games | GameLife | Wired.com: “As Link duked it out with a giant hairy spider on the TV screen, we could see all sorts of secondary info on the controller screen: the dungeon map, Link’s health bar, the items he was carrying. These icons no longer cluttered up the TV screen and got in the way of the high-definition visuals. The cool part was this: With one tap of an icon on the touchscreen, the images flipped. Suddenly, seamlessly, the game was running on the touchscreen and the map, etc., was on the television.”

Aahhh. So awesome.

Notification Center: “You get all kinds of notifications on your iOS device: new email, texts, friend requests, and more. With Notification Center, you can keep track of them all in one convenient location. Just swipe down from the top of any screen to enter Notification Center. Choose which notifications you want to see. Even see a stock ticker and the current weather. New notifications appear briefly at the top of your screen, without interrupting what you’re doing. And the Lock screen displays notifications so you can act on them with just a swipe. Notification Center is the best way to stay on top of your life’s breaking news.”

Ahhhhh. Awesomesauce.

iTunes Match:”Here’s how it works: iTunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store. Any music with a match is automatically added to your iCloud library for you to listen to anytime, on any device. Since there are more than 18 million songs in the iTunes Store, most of your music is probably already in iCloud. All you have to upload is what iTunes can’t match. Which is much faster than starting from scratch. And all the music iTunes matches plays back at 256-Kbps iTunes Plus quality — even if your original copy was of lower quality.”

Knockout.

Apple and Nintendo should just marry each other. They would have kids as cute as baby pandas, but who hit baseballs like Albert Pujols, and dominate basketball like LeBron James.

But, 99 cents for NBA Jam?

It didn’t really matter how bad it might have been, because that’s a price I couldn’t possibly pass up.

And, oh, how it is awesome.

To be fair, let’s start with the bad.

• As with almost any iOS action game, the controls are an on-screen joystick and buttons. It doesn’t matter how well they’re implemented, it’s still a shitty control scheme and probably the weakest part of iOS as a gaming platform.
• If you’re not wearing headphones, your hand is going to cover the speakers and you won’t hear the sound.

That’s pretty much it.

What’s awesome? Everything. The rosters are pretty up-to-date and full of awesome unlockable and hidden players (Bird and McHale, Spud Webb and ‘Nique, Stockton and Malone). The gameplay is simple enough that the touchscreen controls, as cumbersome as they might be, work well enough. The graphics are fun and solid. The sound is good, and has brought back the announcer (or at least a sound-alike) from old-school NBA Jam.

Basically, it’s the same old NBA Jam with prettier graphics, modern players, and it’s on a device that fits in your pocket.

Oh yeah, and it’s 99 cents.

If you enjoyed NBA Jam at all when it was in the arcades or on the home systems in the 90s, you’ll like it now. There’s a difficulty that works for everyone, you can pause a game at any point and pick it back up again. There’s a campaign mode that let’s you work through all the teams, unlocking players and special attributes as you go.

NBA Jam for the iPhone will be your favorite time killer for at least a couple of weeks.

Go buy it. Now.