Thirst
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Daily iPad App: Thirst aggregates the news so you don't have to
Thirst is a newsreader and news-discovery app with a personalized twist. It has a magazine-like tiled layout that reminds me of Flipboard. Each tile is a news category and the default homescreen includes a broad range of categories like sports, politics and tech. You can narrow these categories down based on your interests. The app breaks away from other newsreaders by relying on an intelligent search feature to find news articles instead of an RSS fead. Thirst uses an algorithm to search the web for articles that fit those categories you have put on your homescreen. Being an Apple fan, my Thirst homescreen has Apple, iPad, iPad mini and app categories. The content within those categories comes from a wide variety of news sources, some of which I have never encountered before. Thirst also has a social side and includes a discussion feature that lets you write and respond to comments on those articles that you read. Like most commenting forums, the comments are as good as the people reading and responding. I saw my fair share of useless drivel and a few engaging discussions that I was happy to read. Besides commenting, users can also share articles via Facebook or Twitter. I'm a longtime RSS user and have to admit that I was skeptical about Thirst at first. The app won me over when it used its intelligent search to pull up new and interesting articles that I never would have read if I had only browsed through my favorite RSS feeds. Thirst is available for free from the iOS App Store. It's worth a download just to checkout the news-discovery feature of the app. Use it long enough and you might find that you have become hooked on this search-based way of reading the news.
Futuristic water bottle uses technology, science to let you know you're thirsty
The future is a scary place, yes -- but one thing we don't need to fear is being unaware that we're thirsty. Research and development firm Cambridge Consultants will be showing off its intriguing "i-dration" concept fitness water bottle at CES in a few weeks, combining a series of sensors on the bottle itself that communicate with an app you've got installed on your smartphone. The bottle will measure ambient temperature, how much fluid you've pounded, and how often you've consumed it; the phone, meanwhile, will use its accelerometer to measure how hard you're working out and combine that with heart rate data from a chest strap. After crunching some numbers, the app determines whether you're low on H2O -- and if you are, it'll make a blue light on the bottle pulse. If it seems like a roundabout way to stay hydrated... well, that's because it is, but Cambridge's angle is that this is a demonstrator for cool new ways that sensors can be tightly packed and integrated with smartphones to create "hardware apps." Speaking of, we could use a tall, cool glass of water. Follow the break for the full press release.
