MyChristmas Will Fill You With Holiday Cheer

Rated: 8/10

"Whether you are already riding a holiday high or still looking for something to get you in the spirit MyChristmas has everything you need to celebrate the season." - Allison Glennon, from App Craver.

"MyChristmas is an all in one holiday app by Talee Talee and it has everything that you need to make your holiday bright. This app is jam packed with whatever you are going to need to take you through Christmas right into the New Year.

When you open MyChristmas and go to the main menu it becomes clear that you are in for a pretty thorough holiday experience. The full list includes: a Christmas Countdown, “A Christmas Carol” eBook, Christmas Carols, Music, Games, Entertainment, New Years, and iChoose Choice".

MyChristmas Review from iPhone App Reviews.net

A review of MyChristmas from Michael over at iPhone App Reviews.net:


I don’t know the people at Talee Talee, but after poking around MyChristmas for a while it’s pretty clear that they took a good look at the mess of Christmas apps hitting iTunes and they came to the conclusion that it’s all just soooooo unnecessary. And they’re right! Seasonal apps are usually very lightweight and have a pretty short shelf life so why not roll them all up into one download?

And thus was born “The Christmas Compendium” that is MyChristmas. This kitchen sink app includes all of the following:

- Two Christmas Countdowns
- “A Christmas Carol” eBook
- 18 Christmas carol lyrics
- 7 instrumental Christmas songs
- 2 pretty good Christmas games (Solitaire and Match)
- Ding-’em-yourself Christmas Bells, pretty cool
- A flickering Christmas candle
- Mistletoe with smooching sounds
- 2 Christmas sounds (Santa and Rudolph)
- New Year’s Eve Countdown
- Auld Lang Syne lyrics
- A fireworks display

Whoa! That’s a lotta holiday crap crammed into one application.

By themselves none of these apps-within-an-app will blow you away, but as a collection it’s pretty impressive. You’ve got your countdown, the eBook, the music, the lyrics… it’s Christmas overload! But it’s way more efficient than installing 10 different apps that you’ll be deleting come January.

The best parts of MyChristmas are probably the music, the Solitaire and Match games, and the Christmas Bells. The mistletoe could also come in handy if you’re “that guy”, the one who’s always ramming your tongue down a girl’s throat when she thinks she’s leaning in for an innocent holiday peck.

An interesting thing that Talee Talee built into MyChristmas is its ability to “talk” to iChoose when you can’t decide what part of the Compendium you want to play with. On any menu screen you just tap on “iChoose Choice” and the app will temporarily switch to iChoose (which you have to have installed already), make a selection for you, and then kick you back to the selected MyChristmas section.

It’s true that a lot of the apps included in MyChristmas can be had for free and some of them, like the Snow Scene, are pretty underwhelming, but you could do a lot worse for a buck. If searching the iTunes App Store for various Christmas apps sounds like a pain in the ass that you just don’t want to deal with, spend $.99 on MyChristmas and be done with it. Even despite a little lameness here and there, MyChristmas comes with plenty of value to make it worth buying.

Top Christmas iPhone app lists

A quick round-up of 3 top lists of iPhone Christmas apps from the interweb:

File Cluster - Top 5 iPhone apps for Christmas

"This last application is actually a compilation of Christmas games, bells, holiday music and a New Year countdown. The developers are also offering MyChristmas free until 14 December, so you better hurry and install it on your iPhone."

OnSoftware - 10 iPhone Christmas apps

"Compendium of classic yuletide games and festive fun"

Sleek iPhone - Top Free Christmas Apps for Your iPhone this Holiday

MyChristmas is available now from Talee Talee.

My Christmas climbs

MyChristmas has been spotted at number 32 of the most popular free entertainment Apps.

Let's see if this helps in anyway when the free-promo ends and it returns as a paid app.

SPOTY

It is the BBC's Sports Personality of the Year award this sunday. SPOTY has a hard time this year. The prime award is offered to the best British sports star in the last 12 months. With this being an Olympic year (in which we did so well) that it is a hard task, and an often biased task, to decide who should win the award.

The main award is a public vote. It will be decided by the public phoning voting system, the BBC may have a slightly tarnished recent history on public phone votes, but all will be good and decided by the voters. That's good democracy.

There are only two winners. I say only, because there are far more candidates that deserve a chance. We have fabulous Cyclers, amazing Rowers, but there are only two winners for the public to decide upon for this award. They are Lewis Hamilton and Rebecca Adlington.

My sports are Football and Motor Racing. Lewis is exceptional. Perhaps he should show a little more humility at times, but he is destined to be one of the best drivers of all time. Certainly the best British driver. I grew up watching F1 with Mansell and later Damon Hill. I watched (teary eyed) when Damon won his title in '96. I do not mind admitting that I shed tears, it meant so much to me and the man who was never the best, but worked his socks off to get his job done. Lewis is different to Damon, he has the natural talent and ability, he came into F1 at a young age and in one of the best cars. I admire Lewis, I respect Lewis but I cannot vote for Lewis this year.

The F1 decider this year was a fascinating race. McLaren were far too cautious. Lewis was out of it, although I know they say they knew that Glock would falter at the line - I cannot believe you would let it go that close!

Lewis deserves his title. He would have deserved last years' title even more, but, and I stop my personal preferences now, Becky Adlington has one chance every 4 years for stardom. We did not have a lot of belief in our athletes going into the games this year, and we certainly did not expect such a performance from a British woman in the pool. We knew we would do well in the cycling, we knew we would do well in the rowing, the pool? No. That was such an amazing performance, in one race she was thought not to even enter.

Becky Adlington, we the nation, announce you BBC Sports Personality of the Year. Well done girl! Amazing to watch and my sporting moment of the year (even though I did have to get up early to watch it live).

VOTE FOR BECKY ON SUNDAY.

That is all. :-)

Football silly season(s) and stupid transfer exclusives and what not

I love my football, but I also despise some of the rubbish that goes with it. Non-stop press "EXCLUSIVES" and the occasional outburst of utter drivel, probably as this article is.

David Bentley is a quality player. He is also a prat and the opinion he gives is that he thinks more of himself than he should do. The ability to kick a ball about for a salary of somewhere between £40,000 and £140,000 a week (yes, a week!) is a nice job if you have the talent to play in the Premier League. Although, the unfortunate side effect of so much money being earned by people who do not know how to handle it, is that they become somewhat lacking in their attachment to the real world, who wouldn't be?

Bentley was considered the replacement for Beckham. The phone-in shows were full of it. "Beckham is finished", "He's too old", "He can't run", "What has Beckham ever done for England?". OK, the last one is really stupid, as anyone with a brain will realise - but I tell you, I have not only heard phone-in shows spouting such trash, but have also heard first-hand from people with that belief. What? Well, quite.

Anyway, back to Bentley.... no doubt that he moulded himself on Beckham. He can play a beautiful ball, with some (not too dissimilar) style. But, he also refused to play for the England under 21's. He took a pay rise for joining Spurs and when Ramos was in charge, didn't look like he could be assed to play for them.

So, from the BBC, comes today's "gossip" column, with this little beauty being reported by the Daily Star...

New Real Madrid boss Juande Ramos will return to his former club Tottenham to try to sign wingers David Bentley and Aaron Lennon in January. (Daily Star)

Sorry. Am I really thick or something? Bentley couldn't be bothered to play for Ramos at Spurs. Why would he now want to sign him at Madrid? He doesn't, does he. End of silly season for this rumour. Things have picked up for Spurs under Harry Redknapp, and in no small way that is simply down to the players doing a bit more of what they are paid for.

It's also fair to mention that before Bentley was the "Replacement for Beckham", the previous candidate was Aaron Lennon, and before that (everyone forgotten already?) was Shaun Wright-Phillips. All good players, I prefer Shaun myself because I think he works for his place, but really, Becks is still going. Did anyone tell you he's joining Milan next month? Sure, it's for money, and to keep an option for his England place, and Milan are doing it for the same reasons probably. I will say though, nobody and I repeat nobody has ever played in an England shirt who could 'bend it like Beckham', and I think everybody knows that now and will miss him like hell when he is finally is gone.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing

As Chris mentions below, all of our iPhone and iPod touch apps are free this week.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and with our newly discovered 20-20 vision into the future, we realise that we should probably have made MyChristmas free as an introduction, rather than doing so now.

We put a lot of effort into ensuring that our apps are not only functionally sound, but also well presented and enjoyable to use. We are professionals and are primarily in this business, as you are in whatever your business is, to make money. This is part of our job. We have bills to pay and mouths to feed just as you do.

Our policy on providing free apps remains steadfast. Although everybody wants everything for free all the time, in practice that is not an option. We provide high quality products with good levels of support for a modest price where applicable. We do not believe that to be unreasonable.

iChoose is and always will be free because we believe it is best suited as a free app. It does what it says on the tin and it does it very well. An awful lot of people enjoy using it and we are very happy to have provided it for the iPhone and iPod touch community. This policy is not something that can be applied to everything we release, unfortunately that is the way of the world. We will continue developing both paid and free apps and hope that you enjoy using them. If you support us and help make us rich then we will give you back lots of free apps, that's a promise.

Enjoy this offer while it lasts.

Free!

The festivity must be getting to us because for a very limited time (until the 14th) ALL our Apps are FREE! Yes, we've made them free!

This is for 2 reasons (and we're not shy saying why).

1) The Apps are buried in the App Store, so unless they are popular they are not found. Allowing them to be free for a while will hopefully allow people to use our Apps and see they are great. Hopefully in the future more of our stuff will be found, seen and purchased.

2) We love Christmas and we like being generous.

Merry Christmas from Talee Talee!

Oops...

One of two things has happened. Either we have annoyed Apple to such an extent that they have removed us from the App Store, or (much more likely!) my own personal stupidity has resulted in our apps not appearing on the App Store at the moment, or indeed for most of the day.

We have rectified things (hopefully) from our end and they should start filtering through again soon. As far as we know the App Store links from the Talee Talee website work fine again now, although you may have trouble seeing us in iTunes.

Hope to be back soon!

Sorry, I won't do it again :-)

Spread The Cheer With Your iPhone

Over on iPhone Nuts (www.iPhoneNuts.com) is the nicely titled: Best Christmas Application For Your iPhone

We agree.


"Well as I sit here typing this wishing I had a caramel apple spice drink, I’ve got the perfect iPhone Christmas app to let you know about. This app really has it all under one roof. The app is called MyChristmas, and for everything this app will do for you this Christmas it still comes in at a cheap $1.99. "

"My favorite part in the entertainment section was the Bells. There are seven sleigh bells you can tap and play your own Christmas song."

- Ryan Ray, iPhoneNuts.com


You can continue reading more of Ryan Ray's post on the iPhone Nuts website.

Christmas is nearly here, so get into the spirit right now with MyChristmas.

More information about MyChristmas (including additional screenshots and videos) is available from the Talee Talee MyChristmas website:

www.taleetalee.com/MyChristmas/

iChoose still going strong - it must be update time then!

It's quite amazing really, when you think about it. Despite the fact that iChoose has been knocking about since July now, it is still going pretty strong and is currently the 52nd most popular entertainment app on the USA iTunes store.

We're still getting reports of quite a lot of downloads, and that's brilliant.

We believe in updates, so you'll be pleased to know that yet another iChoose update will be winging it's way to you shortly. What's new we hear you ask? Well, we'll tell you...

1. We've updated the UI a bit

2. A lot of people wanted 'shake' to make a decision, rather than just touch the screen. It's in now.

3. iChoose is now integrated with some of our other apps. MyChristmas and iChoose play together nicely, so that you can use MyChristmas to ask iChoose what music to play, what game to play, what entertainment to use and what carol to sing along to, etc. We think you'll like it very much. And, vice versa, from within iChoose you can ask it to choose an aspect of MyChristmas for you to see. (Obviously you will need to have both MyChristmas and iChoose installed on your iPhone or iPod touch for this functionality)

4. The same functionality integrated with uSnap! Can't decide which type of game to play? Let iChoose decide for you.

5. Following on from a wonderful comment from a bloke that downloaded iChoose, we've added in Turn Left or Turn Right decision making. This guy deliberately drives round getting lost so that he can learn the area and the streets! What a concept. Now you too can get lost with iChoose. It's sort of like a reverse sat-nav.

OK, so that's on its way in a few days when it gets through the App Store process - updates to iChoose (v2.1), MyChristmas (v1.1) and uSnap! (v1.1)

And, we have one more idea for another iChoose update before the end of this year. We're going to put in some GTD stuff - the iChoose way.

Christmas Bells for your iPhone

Talee Talee bring you Christmas Bells, for your iPhone or iPod touch.

Christmas Bells is a free introduction into the joys of MyChristmas, available now on the iPhone App Store.

Christmas Bells has been released and should appear in iTunes later this week. Ho, ho, ho! Merry Christmas! :o)