aim

Editors' take: The AIM app for the iPad, as you can imagine, lets you chat with friends on AOL Instant Messenger. In portrait mode, the friends list is hidden.

It also has a livestream feature that will stream in all your social-media updates. So you will be able to catch up with your friends on Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, and more via the AIM livestream.

Heavy Gunner 3D is a satisfying if repetitive sci-fi-themed arcade shooter with short, fast-paced levels and an RPG-style system for buying and upgrading weaponry.

Heavy Gunner 3D's most striking feature is its 3D-ness: from your fixed first-person perspective, you look down the barrels of your two guns (one on the left, one on the right, controlled with touch-screen thumb-joysticks), but you can tilt left or right to rotate your view 360 degrees, and you can tilt forward and back to look up and down. This makes for physically involving gameplay, as you rack up kills and chains on large … Read more

commentary Although Nintendo has said little about its plans for the Nintendo 3DS, its upcoming 3D-capable portable gaming device, company exec Reggie Fils-Aime recently said in an interview with BusinessWeek that the 3DS isn't just another version of the DS. Instead, the device will replace Nintendo's DS line.

"We have ideas of what we want to bring to the consumer that we can't do with the current DS model," Fils-Aime, who is president of Nintendo of America, told BusinessWeek in the interview. "The Nintendo 3DS for us is our next handheld platform." He … Read more

Air Assault is a relatively unremarkable arcade game in which you fight "invading Russian/Afghanistan forces" in Afghanistan with "Anti-Air and Mortal" (presumably "mortar") guns.

Every game begins with a slowly scrolling text introduction set to "Flight of the Valkyries," which you can thankfully skip. It outlines a muddled, quasi-historical backdrop with dubious references to "September 11" and Operation Enduring Freedom (which isn't helped by later appearances of apparent suicide bombers and oil-production fields, something that Afghanistan is not particularly known for). The game's wide-screen interface has you … Read more

As a longtime fan of Meebo, the browser-based, cross-platform instant-messaging service that requires no software and costs no money, I've been waiting forever for an iPhone companion.

The wait is over. Meebo for iPhone is here, and it's perfect. I can't envision myself wanting or using any other IM app.

Meebo supports all the major networks--AIM, Facebook, Google Talk, ICQ, Windows Live, Yahoo--and dozens more you've probably never heard of. (Batanga? Decayenne? Outspark? Guess I'm not as social as I thought I was.)

If you're already a Meebo user, just sign in; the app … Read more

Correction 1:05 p.m. PST: Boy, did I get it wrong.

Writing off available information this morning--the AIM beta download site and a few news reports--I assumed the Facebook-AOL interoperability was the result of a corporate partnership. Instead, it's because Facebook actually did open up its technology, embracing rather than neglecting the approach I called for. In this case at least, the bad instant messaging network habits from the past were not carried over.

I have to say I'm impressed with Facebook's move, and not because it makes the crow I'm eating any tastier. What … Read more

Have you noticed how many times bullets miss their mark in the movies?

If you need to shoot a bank robber, Sean Bean, John Malkovich, or even an ugly looking two-dimensional chap on a distant target, it seems as if it's very much a hit-or-miss affair.

This, believes professor Timothy Kraft of the University of Alabama, Birmingham, is because no one has re-thought the basic principles of a pistol sight for a hundred years.

Kraft, who happens to rather enjoy shooting and is good at it, dedicated some of his finest mental armory to solving the problem. As he describes it on the university's site, … Read more

Yahoo's Victor Tsaran knows how much time Web designers spend agonizing over color and font-width choices when laying out an application. So when he started Yahoo's accessibility push two years ago, he had a tough time arousing sympathy for engineers grousing about how much extra time was needed to create accessibility features.

Fortunately for Tsaran, Yahoo's accessibility manager, he's running into that problem less and less. Web designers are starting to take accessibility as seriously as button placement or heading layout when they develop their products, improving the Web experience not only for people like Tsaran--who … Read more

AOL's instant messenger, AIM, becomes on Tuesday the AIM Lifestream and gets support for modern social services Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Flickr, and Delicious.

A multiple-platform suite of products being announced at the TechCrunch50 event will support the service.

In addition to instant messaging, AIM Lifestream will display updates from the social feeds mentioned above and, likewise, enable people to post back to the services. The suite of products, including mobile clients, Mac and Windows desktop apps, and a Web client, will launch on September 22. The current Lifestream Web site shows the development of the project so far. The … Read more