How would you like to plug your iOS device into a laser-gun, and use it to view leaderboards, vitals and weapon information the next time you head out to do battle in a mighty game of laser quest?

This August, Hasbro is planning on launching its 2012-edition of “Lazer Tag,” and the focus in this new iteration is on iOS device-compatibility. The new set of laser-weapons, which you’ll be able to purchase individually for $40 or in pairs for $70, will ship with a slot reserved for an iPhone or iPod touch. Plugging an iPhone into this slot, and launching a yet-to-be-released Hasbro Lazer Tag app, will allow players to engage with the game in a whole new way. Here’s what Hasbro says in its press release:

Each LAZER TAG blaster equipped with a device has a virtual firing range of over 250 feet and contains a ‘Heads Up Display’, or HUD, which allows players to keep track of their gear and remaining power, while also providing a view of the augmented reality targets and enemies in the area. A virtual leaderboard keeps track of each player’s profile and, with every successful mission, players will gain in-game access to upgradeable attacks, missions and gear. With LAZER TAG blasters, the stakes are high, the game is real. Don’t just play it, live it.

Sounds great, right? The only downside is that we’re going to have to wait until August before we can hit the battlefield with our iOS device-powered laser-weapons. As mentioned, once the new weapons are available you’ll be able to purchase a single gun for $40, and a pair of guns for $70.

Let us know your thoughts on the above in the comments.

[via Engadget]

The Treasures of Montezuma 3 HD ($4.99) by Alawar Entertainment, Inc is the third installment of the trilogy based on the mythological hidden treasures deep in the ruins of the Tomb of Montezuma. Test your match three skills on this iPad-only high definition adventure.

Alawar Entertainment made waves with the original Treasures of Montezuma and followed up with a sophomore app that was even better. The third in the trilogy is just as amazing as the second and offers a new adventure with rich graphics and stunning audio quality.

This is more than just a simple match three game. Taking a page from Bejeweled, it offers various ways to add bonuses that help increase your score. The bonuses offer such things as adding three seconds to the clock, activating the “Score Frenzy” mode or blasting tokens with lightning strikes. There is a totem for each color of token on the board. The totems perform different actions which help increase the point score. For example, the green totem will throw magical ivy around all gem tokens, destroying them and adding to your gem count.

The point of the game is not just to destroy matching tokens, but to collect gems that will add to the overall score. Each level has a certain point goal. When all goals have been achieved in a level, players receive a star that can be used to buy or upgrade bonuses. There are 160 levels that can be played in either casual or expert mode. There are five chambers with 40 chests to unlock and 22 trophies to win.

Alawar Entertainment continues to improve on an already impressive match three game. Is it possible to say that this game is better than Bejeweled? I think so. Bejeweled is a fantastic game with plenty of features to keep one playing for hours, but The Treasures of Montezuma 3 HD has impressive graphics and animations that create a more engaging experience.

This is a top quality full featured match three game for the iPad. It is on the higher end of the price range, but worth every penny for fans of games in this genre. It is everything one would want in a casual game, beautiful graphics, superb audio quality, and plenty of trophies and achievements. Pick it up in the App Store for $4.99.

• The Treasures of Montezuma
• The Treasures of Montezuma 2
• The Treasures of Montezuma 3 HD Free
• The Treasures of Montezuma HD
• The Treasures of Montezuma 2
• The Treasures of Montezuma HD Lite
• The Treasures of Montezuma 3 HD

I first reviewed Mr. Reader last year, and I thought it was a very good competitor to Silvio Rizzi’s Reeder for iPad, which seems to be the RSS app king around these parts.

In my initial review, I loved the app because it had a better way to manage your feeds than Reeder, and also has various color themes that make the reading experience even better. The best thing was that you can even add a new task or note to OmniFocus, Things, or Evernote from an article item. Now, the app has just gotten a rather large and beefy update, and includes a lot of new stuff.

The biggest new feature is the ability to download more themes. You can install new themes from their website, and they have a guide on editing your own themes. Other awesome new features include Posterous for sharing, new fonts for the article viewer (specifically ‘Helvetica Nueue’ and ‘Optima’), improved Twitter support (insert the feed name beside the link), better settings, and defined mail settings.

The complete change log is rather extensive, and includes plenty of new features, improvements, and fixes. You can check it out for yourself:

[NEW FEATURES]

• Additional themes can be installed from the website: http://www.curioustimes.de/mrreader/themes/

• Theme Editor added. You can find more informations about it on the website: http://www.curioustimes.de/mrreader/themes/themeeditor.html

• You can send your created themes to other Mr. Reader users by mail. The recipient can install it directly from the Mail app.

• Added Posterous as new service

• Added SENDtoREADER as a new service for your Kindle

• ‘Read It Later’ Mobilizer added as a additional article viewer

• Adjust the content width of the article viewer

• Display the article content justified

• Added ‘Helvetica Neue’ and ‘Optima’ as new fonts to the article viewer

• Twitter: beside the article title and link you can insert the feed name (source)

• Settings: Now you can re-order your used services

• Mail Settings: Define mail recipients, when you frequently send links and articles to the same persons

[IMPROVEMENTS]

• Tap and hold a link in the article viewer to open the service menu

• Merged the two service groups for composition and configuration into one called ‘Service’

• Displaying all or at least more images of subscribed eBay searches in the articles table

• Some improvements and fixes of the pull up functionality to ‘mark all items as read’ in the articles table

• Revised the Tumblr dialog and made it possible to refresh the Tumblr blogs

• Resolving ‘http://feedproxy.google.com/’ urls when using the supported services (Mail, Twitter, Diigo, Tumblr, …)

• When only one service (Safari, Mail, Posterous, …) is enabled, it gets executed immediately without showing the popover

• Deletion of web cookies on App exit is no longer the default (Settings->Miscellaneous)

• Send2Mac settings revised

[FIXES]

• ‘Mark All As Read’ did not work as expected, when the ‘Articles Table’ option ‘Hide Read Items Immediately’ was enabled and while displaying ‘All Items’ in the articles table

• Solved some rarely occurred encoding problems in the web view

• Fixed some crashes and memory leaks

• Restored the sound quality (used in v1.6 a sound compression with a lower quality)

• The table display mode (All Items / Only Unread Items) could be changed where it should not be possible

• Facebook logins after each App start, when deletion of web cookies was enabled

If you like Mr. Reader, please rate it in the App Store every time an update comes out. That helps me a lot, thank you very much!

What do you think of this extensive update for Mr. Reader? Let us know what you think of this fine iPad RSS app in the comments!

• Mr. Reader
• Reeder for iPad

A few weeks ago, Apple revealed their plans for reinventing textbooks, which included a major update to iBooks for iOS, and a Mac app, iBooks Author. While our hands-on look at iBooks Author showed how easy it is to create content for iBooks, some may find its six templates to be a little lacking.

Hot on the heels of iBooks Author’s release, publisher Jumsoft released Book Palette ($2.99), which adds 10 new templates to iBooks Author, and that number is expected to grow with future updates.

Here is a description of Book Palette from Jumsoft:

With the new, revolutionary iBooks Author app, anyone can create and publish great Multi-Touch books for iPad, including you. Jumsoft swiftly offers you an enhanced experience in book creation with 10 beautiful templates for iBooks Author.

Each template included in the Book Palette app features an assortment of stylish and modern page layouts. You can use them as a starting point and go from there by typing or pasting your own text, adding or removing text boxes, and dropping images or other media.

Although the standard designs included in Book Palette are very polished, you are not expected to settle for default. Most objects in the templates can be easily reshaped, moved, or removed, and colors can be changed. Use a variety of pre-designed text styles or opt for fonts of your choice to format your text for the best effect.

The current templates included in the first version of Book Palette include: biology, cooking, decision making, dental hygiene, environmental design, interior design, IT strategy, managing change, and team building. Of course, these templates are customizable to your liking.

You can download Book Palette for $2.99 in the Mac App Store. Be sure to let us know in the comments how you like it.

• iBooks
• Book Palette

Path is one of the more popular social apps out there (popular enough that Apple allows it to use the white iPhone in marketing materials, anyway). Of course, with great popularity comes great attention, and with great attention comes even greater scrutiny.

To wit, Path fan and iOS developer Arun Thampi’s recent discovery that his

entire address book (including full names, emails and phone numbers) was being sent as a plist to Path.

Hmm. A network built to help you “capture life’s moments to enjoy them with close friends and family” catching heat for collecting the digital addresses of close friends and family? Seems reasonable.

TechCrunch, who picked up the story, reached out to Path co-founder and CEO Dave Moran for comment, but he hasn’t yet answered any specific followups to his not-too-revealing initial announcement. TechCrunch explains:

According to a comment left by… Dave Morin, uploading the user’s address book is meant simply to connect users with each other. …

“This is currently the industry best practice and the App Store guidelines do not specifically discuss contact information. However, as mentioned, we believe users need further transparency on how this works, so we’ve been proactively addressing this.”

As you can probably tell, it’s hard for me to care about this kind of thing anymore. It happens way too often with even the biggest name(s) in tech. Yes, privacy is important, but what do we really expect a company so deeply socially integrated as Path to do? Especially when the practice isn’t even a secret! Should the company be more upfront about it? Sure. Would it stop a few users from taking the plunge? Of course. Is Path ever going to maliciously misappropriate your data and lose its entire business over a hill of beans? No way. (The company’s already submitted an update to Apple that eliminates the issue, by the way.)

Nevertheless, I understand people’s skittishness. I just don’t feel the outrage. Maybe that’s because I never use such services. Ergo, you guys and gals — the Path users and Google plussers and Facebook elite of the internet at large — are a heck of a lot better equipped to get up in arms about this kind of thing.

So, tell me, why should I care?

Better yet, why should you?

EA has just announced that Mass Effect will be coming to iOS in the form of: Mass Effect Infiltrator.

This game will be a companion app to get players ready for the next major installation in the series, Mass Effect 3. The goal is to increase your “Galactic Readiness,” which will help get you the best ending possible in the franchise’s final game (and that’s always the gamer’s dream, right?).

Infiltrator will be a third-person shooter with gorgeous graphics, as well as authentic weapons and powers from the Mass Effect series.

The gist of the plot in Infiltrator will have players rescuing prisoners from a hostile Cerberus base, and they will receive rewards for collecting evidence of the crimes that Cerberus has committed along the journey.

According to ShackNews, these rewards have a direct correlation with the Galactic Readiness that was mentioned earlier. As you successfully gather intelligence and complete rescues, you will increase your Readiness rating directly through the new Galaxy at War system in Mass Effect 3. Pretty cool, right?

There has been no set release date, as EA just said it is coming “soon.” However, the sooner, the better! The game will also feature ways to unlock exclusive weapons in the main game.

I love the idea of the tight integration with the upcoming final game of the franchise, and wish that more major game developers would do something like this. Are you a Mass Effect fan? What do you think of this? Let us know what you think in the comments!

(via ShackNews)

Though one of Apple’s best aspects that they’ve poured their full love into is the signature iOS device screen. Other than the svelte qualities of the iPhone, with its sleek aesthetic, the capacitive touchscreen is one major forte that iOS can boast over many other competitive phones. Regardless, some people just miss external, physical buttons, and they love Apple at the same time – so for those unique people, clever designers have manufactured the Sliding Bluetooth Keyboard and Stand Case for the iPhone 4 and 4S.

Kickstarter has been the funding partner with many high budget, successful accessories, among the plethora of other things that are funded daily on the community website, and it today boasts another product that is both relevant to this site and looks like it’s got some serious potential. The SoundBender amplifies your music without power, batteries or anything of the sort, however, only for the iPad 2.

Other than covering daily affairs in the iOS world, we here at iPhone Alley also like to please both our developers and readers. So, in order to do so, we now giveaway a large amount of promo codes each week. Today is our 6th week in doing so, and we’ve got a total of 30 promo codes to distribute among our followers. Apps include Current Weather, Mos Speedrun, Blot, Momento and more!

Just like during the other major holidays, at least in the U.S., iOS app developers have been pumping out Valentine’s Day content updates. On a somewhat unexpected move, Atari has decided to jump in on the seasonal update fun. Added to their retro arcade game, Breakout: Boost, earlier today was the Valentines level pack.

The Valentines pack includes 50 romantically-themed levels. The blocks are configured to form pixelated images of heart-shaped candies with messages, a man proposing, a “Be Mine” sign, and so on. Breakout wouldn’t be complete without a power-up, right? Cupid’s Arrow works like a few other power-ups, destroying bricks with less strikes.

In addition, Atari has added the Game Center achievement “Playing With The Queen Of Hearts,” complete all 50 Valentines levels, and a Game Center leaderboard to accompany the new groups of levels.

Breakout: Boost is a universal app compatible with iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch running iOS 4.1, and available in the App Store as a free download. Level expansion packs are available via in-app purchase for $0.99 each.

• Breakout®: Boost