Review: Black Box – Pranks with Twitter (Remote Control Tricks & Jokes)

review-iphone-black-box-pranks-with-twitter-remote-control-tricks-jokes[rating: 3/5]

A Black Box of Tricks

Black Box is a UNIQUE PRANKSTER APP that allows you TRICK, JOKE and EMBARRASS your friends (or yourself!) with FUN, CRAZY and SCARY sound effects.

Other prank apps require you to launch sounds with an iPhone in your hands, but Black Box can also be REMOTE CONTROLLED via TWITTER, something the target of your prank won’t expect!

“LOOK MA, NO IPHONE IN MY HANDS!”

Black Box uses TWITTER, the popular micro-blogging service, as a REMOTE CONTROL! With SIMPLE COMMANDS SENT AS A TWITTER UPDATE you can PLAY ANY SOUND from your Black Box (included are farts, audience noise and even CRAZY KITTENS!), UPLOAD YOUR OWN SOUNDS (WAV, MP3) or delete them, set up ALARMS, and MORE!

We all like a laugh and there’s no better way to get one than by the watching someone squirm with embarrassment or jump in fear and while pulling down someone’s pants or placing a spider on someone the introduction of Black Box lets you do both of these items and more from a simple $0.99 app.

In simple terms Black Box is a joke machine that you can control remotely via your Twitter account. Now to be honest, leaving my iPod Touch hidden near someone while I send it a tweet from the other side of the room makes me feel a little cold with fear, but none the less for the sake of seeing how this works I did exactly that.

Before playing the prank there are some initial things that you’ll need to configure. Firstly you’ll need to enter your Twitter account details; this account will be the one that Black Box monitors for instructions. Then you’ll need to decide on which sound you want your iPhone/iPod Touch to be activated when you instruct it too.

There are 20 inbuilt sounds to start with inc. multiple fart sounds, cats, boo’s and applause, however if none of these are appropriate you can load your own sounds. Unfortunately it’s not just a of browse to a specific sound file, to load a new sound you’ll need to send the URL and name of the sound to your Twitter account, and a direct message will not do, it will need to a public tweet which may prompt some questions from your followers as to what you are doing!

The other thing you’ll need to learn before setting your trap is the secret ‘gesture’. When ‘activating’ your phone for the prank Black Box will turn the screen black and to the untrained eye it will look like it’s switched off so in case someone finds it they can’t use it. In realty though the back light stays on and if anyone knows anything about the iPhone/iPod touch they’ll know that a simple click of the Home key will give them access to the phone, though if you need to re-open Black Box you’ll need to perform the secret gesture on the phones screen.

With all that said it took me no longer than five minutes to set everything up. Next I activated Black Box and placed my iPod touch in a suitable spot.

Black Box monitors your Twitter account every 10 minutes so it could take up to that amount of time between you sending the tweet and your phone making the sound. You can make it scan your Twitter account as frequently as every 5 seconds but with that you’ll use up your 100 Twitter account scans per hour extremely quickly.

The tweet that you send to yourself will need to contain the name of the sound in Black Box, so you could just Tweet the word “boo”, “fart”, ”applause” or you could build the trigger word into a sentence, in fact I used “I wonder who deserves a round of applause” with applause being the trigger word.

After sending the Tweet I didn’t have to wait any longer than 3 minutes before my phone spontaneously let out a round of applause causing my victim to jump with surprise before searching for where the sound came from.

In essence the app does exactly what it is supposed to do. However while using Twitter as a remote control is pretty ingenious having your twitter account spread with instructions didn’t really work for me.

iphone-app-reviews-promo-codes-official-app-store-badge_touch_4Price $0.99

The Good

  • Simple to setup
  • Simple to use
  • Customizable Sounds

The Not So Good

  • Twitter integration can look like spam
  • “Locked” appearance can easily be bypassed

Reviewed by : Craigwillis

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