David Winograd
Articles by David Winograd
Monoprice iPhone/iPod Battery Backup: Such a deal
In a previous post about offshore iPhone chargers, a few astute TUAW readers mentioned Monoprice.com as a good source for chargers, connectors, and computer, TV and audio cables. In searching their site, I found a real deal. The Monoprice Backup battery pack is the simplest of devices. When your iPhone or iPod is running low on juice, just plug this battery pack into the 30 pin connector. You can then either keep running with a fairly large dongle hanging off the bottom of your device, or wait and the battery pack will charge your device in 3.5 hours according to Monoprice (or about 2.5 hours according to my tests). Yes, there are a lot of battery backups that do this, but how many are sold at US$14.50? You read that right, only US$14.50, and for that you get pack with a capacity of 2200 mAh. For comparison, the capacity of the iPhone battery is 1150 mAh, so this battery should be able to charge your device twice. Due to my ignorance of the vagaries of electricity, mine winds up charging the iPhone about 1.75 times, which isn't bad at all.
BookReader for iPhone: You can't judge a book by its cover
We did a fairly extensive rundown of eBooks for the iPhone/iPod touch in August; you can take a look back if you're new to the eBook universe for Apple's mobile devices. BookReader [iTunes Link] , a US$4.99 app for devices running OS 2.21 or higher, has just joined the crowded eBook market -- but it brings little to the table to recommend itself. The app when first run looks beautiful. You are shown a wonderfully rendered bookshelf which looks very similar to the one found in Classics [iTunes Link], but a bit more nicely rendered, showing the spines of books instead of covers in a scrolling list. Impressive, but now what? I really had no idea since there were no instructions on how to operate the app either in the app, or on the Readdle site. This, as I've often said, is a major downfall of many of the apps in the store. It would be fine if it were an adventure game, but not at all acceptable in something offering utility that you would like to get at quickly. The only documentation in the app is a cursory explanation of one of three methods of getting content into the app -- connecting via Wi-Fi and WebDAV to your computer in a fairly arcane manner. You connect to an external server and provide an app-created numeric password. From there you can add books to the server folder... or so they say, but they don't go as far as saying how. I added books to the server, and they never showed up in the app. I was left stranded on the Wi-fi access page and didn't know where to go from there. Now I know that I'm missing something minuscule, but that's exactly my point; there wasn't enough given to me to allow me to complete the task. The second method of acquiring content is through Readdle Storage. You need to set up an account on the Readdle site which gives you a free 512 megabytes; larger amounts of storage are available for purchase. Once you set up an account, it works fine, but unless you know what to do, you may not find it on your own. You can easily add documents to Readdle Storage and they do show up in the app. Many documents, unfortunately, don't look very attractive. Anything that started as a .pdf document winds up looking like garbage since all the graphics are gone, and the formatting is stripped out. The list of formats that BookReader handles is also lacking. It doesn't understand some very popular formats such as Kindle, MobiPocket and Microsoft Word's .DOC as do other apps such as Stanza [iTunes Link]. DRM is not supported, but that's par for the course in the eReader market.
Proloquo2Go: Assistive communication for the iPhone and iPod touch
Proloquo2Go [iTunes Link] is not your usual iPhone/iPod touch app. It turns the mobile device into a full augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) device. According to the AAC Institute, an estimated 2.5 million Americans are speech disabled to the extent that they experience significant difficulty being understood by other people. Reasons vary, but are often the result of congenital illness or ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig's disease). 75% of people using AAC devices have ALS. One alternative is learning how to use sign language, but that requires both adequate sensory motor ability of the user and a knowledge of sign language expected in the listener. It's a solution that helps some, but not all. When signing is not available or appropriate, using an AAC device may well be. AAC devices use combinations of symbols, words, sounds and technology to allow people without functional vocal abilities to communicate. The cost of such devices range from around US$3,500 to US$8,500 for something about the size of a Speak and Spell. In contrast, the Proloquo2Go app has a price of US$189.99. If someone is in the market for an AAC system, it is one of the biggest bargains in the entire App Store for any iPhone or iPod touch running OS 2.1 or higher. Proloquo2Go took the uncommon route of using existing hardware to run a complex AAC system. It's nearly impossible to describe the use of the system through words, though I'll try, but I'd suggest you check out some detailed videos walking you through the process in some depth.
Manhasset Long Island Apple store opens
It was freezing this morning as the Manhasset Long Island, NY Apple store opened for business. Employees wearing T-Shirts (they weren't allowed to wear coats), ran up and down the waiting line of hundreds of people both pumping up the crowd and trying to stay warm. The enthusiasm was contagious as orange shirted people shouted out that the store would be open in 15 minutes, 10 minutes, 5 minutes, and then the doors opened to seemingly dozens of Apple workers handing out T-shirts and applauding loudly as each new group of 20 people or so were let in the huge glass doors. The first 1,000 people were handed black T-shirts that said 'Manhasset' on the front and 'Designed by Apple in California' on the back. The store is free standing and much larger than the one at the Walt Whitman Mall, my usual Apple store. The front and back of the store are glass walls and there is plenty of open space. Hopefully this store will take some of the burden off of the other Long Island stores which are usually crowded and have multi-day waits to get an appointment at the Genius Bar. If you're in the area, check it out at 1900 Northern Blvd, Manhasset, NY.
Offshore iPhone/iPod USB power adapters: Caveat Emptor
When I opened my iPhone 3GS, I was surprised to find that the power adapter was nothing but a little 2-prong AC plug (I live in the US) that allowed you to plug in the standard USB to 30-pin connector to charge the phone. I wanted to get a spare; checking online told me that the Apple Store wanted US$29 for the little plug, which just seemed like too much for too little, so I went shopping. On eBay I found a bunch of auctions based in Hong Kong selling what looked like the exact same thing for anywhere from under around $2-4, and they often included the USB cable to boot. I ordered four from a vendor and after a few weeks received them. They looked perfect, right down to the little green dot -- but none of them worked. They might start charging, but after a few minutes the iPhone would beep a few times and I would be informed that "this accessory is not compatible." And so it went for all four pieces. After sending some pictures back and forth and reading a few emails containing a combination of surprise and amazement from the vendor, my money was refunded. Undaunted, or maybe just dumb, I went back to eBay and found another vendor that claimed to be selling, "100% Brand New Original OEM Charger and Original OEM USB Cable for iPhone/iPod" for around US$4. I just checked eBay and found this same vendor raising the price to US$10 in one auction and lowering it to $US.01 in another.
Robotvision: A decent early stab at augmented reality
Ever since I first saw heads-up-displays in science fiction movies like The Terminator, I knew that I had to get my hands on one. How neat it would be to get instant information on anything about anything in my field of vision? Well, just as the iTablet won't be the Knowledge Navigator, the new buzz-phrase of the year, augmented reality, won't give me Terminator eyes. Such is life. I tested out a pretty decent augmented reality app called Robotvision [iTunes Link], and for US $0.99 what you get, if you have an iPhone 3GS running OS 3.1 or better, is quite cool. Will it solve your problems, cure the common cold, or tell you anything that more established apps won't? Not really. But tossing a buck on a neat novelty is not unheard of in the iPhone 3GS world. This one does more than most. First you tell it how widely to search and then, if you're in a highly populated area, you can set up a category ranging from ATMs to Travel Destinations. For the most part, I didn't fool with this since being in the suburbs, I can't be too picky. Run it and the camera shutter opens. Moving the iPhone around, I found Cousin's Pizza, only 8432.1 miles away. Hmmm. The setting was for 5 miles. Wait, I guess it needed to be calibrated by doing the calibration figure eight wave of the phone. It seems that a lot of GPS apps require this. OK, much better. It found a bunch of places but they were all stacked on top of one another. No big deal, since when you touch one, you get a screen like the one in the picture. The closest place is displayed first and the right and left arrows take you back and forth through the stack. While an item is in the front pane, you can call them, see them on a map (by cleverly pointing the iPhone to the floor, which invokes Google Maps, but all the stick pins aren't really any clearer than the AR view... maybe less so). You can also hit the Bing button where there might be a review or more information. The problem is that the direction it puts you in is not quite accurate. It might get you to a nearby corner, but not to the butcher shop itself. I don't think we can slight Robotvision on this, since the not quite pin-point accuracy of the iPhone 3GS GPS has already been talked to death. What else can this bad-boy do? You can see who is sending tweets in the area you specified, read the tweets and see how far the tweeter is from you. Not enough? Wait, there's more. You can find people in your area who use Flickr, and view their gallery. This doesn't work too well. I set the default for 50 miles and found no one. Then I set it for 25 miles and found one person with a gallery of 10 pictures. I live 30 miles from NYC, so I can't blame it on the boonies. You still want Ginsu knives? Okay, hit the Wikipedia button and see if anything in your range is listed. If so you'll get a bit of text and the option to go to Wikipedia to read more. I don't know if AR will change the world, or be as successful as either New Coke or the iPod. But I'd suggest tossing a buck at this one. You are guaranteed 20 minutes of awe and then maybe some time to reflect on what you have, once the novelty wears off. Check out this video for a tour and let us know what you think about this or the idea of augmented reality in general.
Friday Favorite: FolderGlance
FolderGlance 2.55, for Snow Leopard only, is a very useful preference pane that adds a number of additions to the Finder. The simplest and most basic thing it does is to add an expanded contextual menu to any folder when the folder is right (or control, or two-finger) clicked. If there are folders embedded inside the folder you have right-clicked, those folders appear at the top of the display window and can also be right-clicked to inspect their contents. This works for any number of embedded folders. The really neat part, at least for me, is to set custom folders. What this lets you do is to determine folders that you would like to get to right away and denote them as special. Then whenever you right-click, whether in an empty area of your desktop or on any folder, the custom folders appear at the top of your list of folders. This does not replace the functions of the usual contextual menu we've all come to know and love; it expands them. Here's why I love this feature. When I'm writing for TUAW, each post requires a graphic and a link at the very least. Graphics need to be properly formatted, so after adjusting the size, I save the result in a folder called TUAW Pix. This folder is buried about 5 layers into my Documents folder. With FolderGlance, every time I right click, the TUAW Pix folder is right there ready to be opened. Saving the graphics goes from about 8 keystrokes to 2. The preference pane does a bunch of other things as well, but none that I find as useful as the feature detailed above. For the record, here is the feature list: Moving, copying and making aliases of the currently selected files in a folder you browse to Control-free popups: Open the contextual menu without holding down the control-key or using a two-button mouse In-menu preview of arbitrary files Opening files with an application different than the default by using an "Open with..." menu you can tailor to suit your own taste Changing the font size used in contextual menus Browsing into package contents Customizable sorting and customizable display of hidden files and folders. The preference pane gets updated fairly frequently, and in that process, you are asked to force-quit and reload the Finder to make the new version take effect. For me, this doesn't seem to work. I need to either restart or log out and back in for the change to take effect. FolderGlance 2.55 costs US$20 for a license. This is expensive and I'm sure that cheaper alternatives are around, but this, in my workflow, has become an extension of the Finder, and something that I feel should be built into the OS. I use it constantly. You should note that if you are running anything under OS 10.6, there are older versions available.
BuzzVoice reads aloud to you almost anywhere
BuzzVoice can most simply be described as a talking reader for over 1400 blogs, but saying that doesn't begin to do it justice. It's not just an iPhone/iPod touch app, although BuzzVoice provides one [iTunes Link]. It's a platform that can be enjoyed on a variety of devices including any iPod or mp3 player, your computer, Blackberry (upcoming) or with added functionality on the iPhone/iPod touch running OS 2.0 to use the basics, or OS 3.0 or better, to use in-app email. BuzzVoice is the butterfly that emerged from chrysalis of the now defunct PimpMyNews app, a talking reader with far less functionality. What it grew into is a full system that starts on your computer at the BuzzVoice site. There you can sign up for a free account and explore the 1400 different blogs that BuzzVoice can read to you. The site allows you to listen to individual stories and to email a story that, when received, contains an audio file of the story, as well as the ability to visually read the story either on the site or by being transferred to the originating blog. The BuzzVoice site lets you create a list of MyFeeds in where you build a list of the blogs you are interested in hearing by either searching, browsing or picking a ready made playlist based on specific interests. This is handy and becomes quite important when we get to the iPhone app. The site also lets you put together a Buzzcast, which is a grouping of blogs that you like, and have that grouping transform into a 10 minute (for the free version) or 30 minute (for the pro version) personal podcast that, after a click, will be added to iTunes and update daily, so it can be heard throughout the iPod line. A feed is also displayed for use with a non-iTunes powered device. How does it sound? I was expecting to be disappointed since I have had enough of the 'take-me-to-your-leader' type vocal stylings of many talking apps, but I'm very happy to report that the voice implementation is nearly perfect. It sounds quite natural with great attention paid to punctuation. You can choose a male voice or female voice or have BuzzVoice mix it up, using the pro version. For free you get one voice. The sound was good enough to allow me to stop paying attention to the player and start giving my full attention to the story being read. This is not a small thing if you're going to listen to more than a story or two. The iPhone app (selling now for $US1.99) ties in nicely to the site and provides additional goodies. On the bottom of the screen are four buttons. MyPlaylist displays all the blogs that you put into MyFeeds on the site. Tap one and you'll see the current story list, tap a story and it will be read to you. If you tap the blue arrow to the right of each story a second screen lets you share a story via Facebook to Reddit (plus 4 others) or email. You can tap Listen to hear the story, or tap Source to read the story in BuzzVoice, which doesn't present in landscape mode, or Safari, which does. Tapping My Buzzcast will play the Buzzcast that you created on the site without having to go to iTunes. The third button, BuzzRadio, is interesting. Tapping it brings up a listing of topics ranging from Apple Radio to Politics Radio to Sports Radio. There are currently eight stations to choose from. When you pick one, a grouping of top stories from various subject-specific blogs gets built, which BuzzVoice then reads; perfect for any time your hands should be somewhere else (driving, running or whatever). You don't get this on the site. I'd like to see a non-variable, or user designated playing time for the stations. As it is now, I've found that playing time can vary from 4 minutes to 30 minutes. I can see that being a problem when driving and expecting a longer read. Once that is fixed, I'd like to be able to stack stations so if I know that I'll be in the car for 90 minutes and I know that each station plays for 30 minutes, I would be able to stack 3 topic-oriented stations which would then be sequentially read to me, filling up my 90 minute drive. The fourth button is 'Info' which doesn't really provide any. Instead, it opens up an email where you can report mispronunciations, suggest blogs or ask for help. It would be nice to see a little tutorial on this page. In the iPhone app, when you receive mail sent from BuzzVoice, either from the site or from another iPhone, you get a link bringing you to a BuzzVoice-formatted Safari page with a big Listen to this story button on top and the full story with graphics displayed below. This is a very nice feature.
Found Footage: Sesame Street does the iPod dance
Big Bird, Grover Elmo, Cookie Monster, Snuffy (my bad) and the Sesame Street gang have been cool since I left my crib for the big-boy bed. Here they give some love to their favorite music player. Not too shabby for a bunch of 40-year-old dudes (except Elmo, who is young enough to be hip to the iPod). Snuffy isn't in this one as they couldn't find earbuds to fit. My mistake, I guess they could. Honestly, I surprised that Apple hasn't used this. Sunny days to all. Thanks to Chris Hollomon for the tip!
Auto refresh any web page
Last night when the Apple store went down, I got tired of hitting refresh in Safari every few minutes while waiting for it to come back up, and went searching for something that would do the job for free. Now, this is not for coders who will laugh hysterically at my incompetence, but for those of you that are either lazy or don't program at all. I fit both categories. Back in 2005 someone going by the moniker of Biovizier posted the solution on Macosxhints.com. It's a little html snippet that will refresh any web page as frequently as you'd like, and its easily customizable for any page at all. Here it is: <html> <head> <**** **********="refresh" content="60"> </head> <body> <FRAMESET> <FRAME src="http://www.tuaw.com"> </FRAMESET> </body> </html> Copy this into TextEdit and save it with an .html extension. Then just double click it. You can change the refresh time from 60 to the amount of seconds you want to wait before the page refreshes, and you can change the URL to anything you want. I was using: http://apple.com/store and having it refresh every 20 seconds which must make me a certifiable fanatic. Since I saw this I've found a ton of uses for it, like refreshing eBay auctions in the last few minutes, or just leaving it set for TUAW to see new stories coming up when I'm doing something else. At present I have four or five of these snippets in a folder on my desktop for different purposes. Give it a try and see if you don't find a handful of uses for it. Okay, you coders can stop laughing now. Note: TJ Luoma just let me know that this tip won't work with Twitter which intentionally blocks this sort of thing. Thanks to macosxhints.com and Biovizier wherever you are.
TUAW Poll: Do you use in-app purchasing?
One of my favorite apps is Night Stand [iTunes Link]. This app contains a variety of different themes (clock displays) and has an alarm, pretty basic but I use it every day. Last night when I ran it, I found that there was a new clock theme named Glow for in-app purchase. It looked interesting but there was no way to find out the cost without hitting the 'buy' button which I did. Luckily, before it was purchased, a confirmation screen came up with the price of US0.99. This was a bit surprising since US0.99 was the full price of the app which already came with six themes. This got me thinking about whether in-app purchasing will work or not, or if there is any rhyme or reason to pricing? I wouldn't buy one-sixth of the value of an app for full price and I wonder who would? Last week we ran a story on how in-app buying is not working out so well for Pangea. I wonder if it's working out for anyone?My feeling is that iPhone apps are looked upon differently than full Macintosh applications. They are cheaper and tend to do one thing only. Night Stand is a clock, it doesn't purport to be more than be a clock. So what should a new clock theme be worth?I've started viewing apps as casual purchases and at the price I don't expect more than one thing, which if done well, is worth the buck. So I'm not seeing the value of highly priced in-app sales. I can see the reason for some expensive apps charging for major functionality increases, such as Navigon when they added a $US20 live traffic option to their $US90 Mobile Navigation app, but that seems to be the exception and not the rule.I would guess that extra gaming levels would be an expected revenue source, but I just don't see the majority of people spending enough time with a game app to run out of levels and buy more.Take the poll below and then comment on your feelings on in-app purchasing. Will this turn out to be something big, or is it just another solution looking for a problem? %Poll-34880%
iWork '09 Update 3 is ready and waiting
Fresh off Software Update, it's iWork 09 Update 3 which addresses a ton of issues in Keynote, Numbers, and Pages as well as the iWork.com beta. It's recommended for all iWork 09 users. General fixes include: General compatibility issues Updating help Adding a link to online resources in the help menu Improving image handling when reducing size with Instant Alpha applied Improving file size management when inserting movies. The full list of improvements to Keynote, Pages and Numbers, and the iWork.com beta can be found in Apple Support article HT3681 Thanks to all who sent this in.
MMS finally comes to the iPhone
MMS (multimedia messaging service) has come to the iPhone 3G and the iPhone 3GS. You'll need to update your carrier settings by plugging in your iPhone to allow iTunes to see it, then go to "Check for Update." The update adds a 37k file (at least on the Mac), named: 'ATT_US.ipcc' file to your /Users/[Username]/Library/iTunes/iPhone Carrier Support/ folder if on a Mac. In Windows XP the file is downloaded to: C:\Documents and Settings\[Username]\Application Data\Apple Computer\iTunes\iPhone Carrier Support In Vista the file can be found in: C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\iTunes\iPhone Carrier Support\ The install just takes a second and you then need to restart your iPhone. When you do, your Messages app will gain a small camera icon to the left of the input box. Tapping it will bring up a screen allowing you to take a picture or video or to use an existing one from your iPhoto library. Sending is pretty slow. This could be due to everyone trying it at the same time. One picture took about 20 seconds on Wi-Fi and a 5 second video took about 30 seconds to transmit. The quality of the received picture or video is just as good as you hoped it would be. You can read more about iPhone carrier settings updates on this Apple support article. Thanks to everyone for sending this in! Here are some quick screen shots of what it looks like: %Gallery-74012%
SayAgain - an audio bookmarking app
A few weeks ago we covered the Bookmark app, a subsystem for playing and bookmarking audio books. I was quite impressed with it, but some comments dinged it for not playing in the background when the app is closed. It also only handled audiobooks and some felt it would be more useful if it covered any audio file in your iTunes library. SayAgain [iTunes Link] is another bookmarking app which solves both of those problems, but not nearly as well or as elegantly. It is compatible with the iPhone and iPod touch and requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later. It sells for US$1.99.One of my pet-peeves is that many apps give you no instruction on how they work, and SayAgain is one of those. When you run it you are presented with a lined screen titled 'Annotated Media'. To the left is a + button and to the right is an edit button. Now what? Clicking on the developer link in iTunes brings you no help, only a description of what the app does. Nowhere in the app is an info button to bring some direction. But, one might say, it's intuitive. You don't need help. I say, nonsense. Everyone comes from a different level of experience and assuming intuitiveness is a bad assumption. Bookmark, on the other hand, gives full instructions and a tutorial right inside the app.SayAgain is a generalist audio bookmarking app, allowing you to add bookmarks to any audio file in iTunes. This is quite useful since you might want to bookmark a story in podcast or even a great drum solo as well as a place in an audiobook. There are two ways to use it. Either play something in iTunes and then run the app which will display your audio file as Now playing, along with the name of the song or file. Or you can run it without playing anything and hit the + button which brings up iTunes. Leaving the app doesn't stop the audio, a major advantage. To add a book mark you click the star (which in other apps means favorites), and you'll get a window with a keyboard and buttons to 'Set start marker' and 'Set end marker'. On top of the screen are buttons marked back and play. Read on to see how well it worked.
Friday Favorite: SpamSieve 2.76
My Friday favorite is SpamSieve. We have mentioned it a few times previously, but since it has recently been updated to version 2.76 I wanted to sing its praises again. It's the best way I've found to deal with spam. Using Bayesian filtering, SpamSieve installs as a plug-in to your mail client and lets you mark messages as spam. As you do, it builds a a corpus file of rules telling determining what is spam and what isn't. The more messages you mark, or train, the more accurate SpamSieve gets. I've been using it since November of 2003 and after years of training, it's so accurate that it rarely fails to catch an errant spam encrusted message. When it does, using either a keystroke sequence or a pulldown menu from your Mail client you can train it as spam. At the start, it's quite labor intensive since you have to mark a few hundred messages for it to really start working, but it pays dividends. After a while, you'll have a personalized set of inclusion/exclusion rules that gets better over time. To give you an idea, yesterday I received 307 emails. Out of those SpamSieve correctly marked and moved over 30 messages and missed only 2 that needed training. This is a shot of my corpus screen showing how many messages have been filtered and how many words were read resulting in messages being regarded as spam or good. Yes, over 15,000 messages is a big number, but by being cumulative, SpamSieve gets more and more accurate over time. SpamSieve allows you to import or export the corpus file so if you get a new computer, or decide to use a different email client, you lose nothing.
Say It & Mail It: iPhone voice memos on steroids
Innovation is a wonderful thing. Developers are taking built in features of the iPhone and improving upon them. As Bookmarks is a subsystem for iPhone/iPod touch Audiobook listening, Say It & Mail it [iTunes Link] is a subsystem for Voice Memos that outclasses the Apple-designed feature by a mile. Apple's Voice Memo app lets you record a memo and optionally create an email to send it. That's pretty neat, but how about recording a voice memo and sending it as a pre-addressed email along with the option of attaching a picture (either shot from the camera, or photo library) and tossing in your location for good measure? Say it & Mail it does all this in the easiest and most intuitive way imaginable for $1.99. Start by tapping on 'Say it' and record a voice memo. Tap 'Play it' and listen. From this point you can Mail it, or tap on a camera icon to take or use an existing picture. Then click on the little 'Interstate 10 sign' icon and the built in GPS will find you, display a road map or satellite view of your location, and add the clickable Google Maps link to the email. You don't need to use it all, but you can't send email unless there is a voice memo created first. The other two options are, well, optional. Read on for more details & a video preview.
The Bookmark App: Audiobooks finally done right
The Bookmark app [iTunes Link] has solved a number of problems I've always suffered while listening to audiobooks on an iPhone. It isn't pefect yet, but what is currently in the app store is the best implementation of digital audiobook listening I've found. It's earned a place on my home page and that alone is quite a recommendation. I'll get to a play-by-play in a bit, but first a bit of context is in order. I have always been a fan of audiobooks. Long before the inception of the iPod, I was a constant Books on Tape customer. I'd choose a book and in a few days, receive a sizable box filled with anywhere from two to over forty cassette tapes. It was worth it to me to go through all the hassle of keeping the tapes in order and carrying a stack of them with me to play on a portable cassette player when I wasn't listening in my car. When the iPod came out, I found Audible.com and life became much easier. I always carried at least a dozen books with me on my iPod Classic. The books usually downloaded in one or two big files making a book easy to manage. A few years later, Audible.com started embedding chapter markers in their books so jumping to a particular chapter was a snap, but I always had a problem with the iPod losing my place in a book. It could have been due to syncing, or being knocked around, but it was constant and always annoying. When I bought my iPhone, I found the way the iPod module handled audiobooks had changed. Instead of downloading a few big files, what wound up in the library was a separate file for each chapter. So, for example, Fool by Christopher Moore, which my iPod Classic saw as one file with twenty-six chapters, appeared to be twenty-six files on the iPhone. That would have been fine, except for the fact that the iPhone was no better than my iPod Classic in losing my place seemingly at random. Worse, I never knew which file I was on when my place got lost. Read on to see how Bookmark has solved this dilemma for me.
Desert showdown: the Vegas Mate app vs. Frommer's paper guide
A number of weeks ago we went on a vacation to Las Vegas, and I was curious to see if an app can replace a traditional tour book. I picked the most respected tour book I knew, Frommer's Las Vegas 2009 by Mary Herczog; and an iPhone/iPod touch app called Vegas Mate [iTunes Link] which trucks on years of experience and data from an established Las Vegas review site. The Vegas Mate app sells for $4.99 and is almost wonderful. It provides a wealth of immediate information. From the Concierge button you can get current Las Vegas news. It's always interesting to read what's going on behind the glitz. There's a listing of all the events and shows, along with where and when they are playing. The Nearby button uses the GPS function to give you a listing of the hotels, restaurants and activities with the closest ones displayed first. Tapping the Hotels button gives you a list of hotels on or off the Strip or a full listing. Tapping on a hotel brings up a screen with information including basic cost, the nearest Monorail station and a fairly useless map with stick pins representing what's around, but no walking directions. Squeeze the screen and you'll get a lot of real estate on the map, but the unmarked stick pins didn't seem remotely useful. What was useful was a history of each hotel, a live phone number, and a listing of all the restaurants in the hotel. Tap on one and it'll tell you if the place is open, a few paragraphs about each, a phone number and sometimes even a menu (which can take quite awhile to load using 3G). The most valuable part to me was user ratings of just about everything. Since Ratevegas.com has been around for years, users post reviews and those show up in the app. This was useful since we found that the Criss Angel show was rated poorly by most all reviewers. We had advance tickets and the consensus was right on the money. We also found that the new house show at the Mirage, Terry Fator, who won the TV show 'America's Got Talent,' was terrific; although we had never heard of him, we bit, and it was one of the best shows we saw all week. This is very very good stuff. Tapping on the Restaurant button delivers an alphabetical listing with a useful red or green symbol telling you whether the place is open or closed in real time. You can filter restaurants by cost from $ to $$$$$ which is just a rough indication, since there is no legend accompanying the dollar signs. Other information includes listings of shows and nightlife. Update: An earlier version of this post noted that the app states that "most of the MGM/Mirage board are about to be indicted for insider trading." Further research pointed out that the information contained in the statement is three years out of date, so we have removed the offending statement. Our apologies to the MGM Mirage hotel and casino for this error.
Found Footage: Snow Leopard hidden features, great video by a 16 year-old
Matt Fisher is a 16 year old high school junior and Apple enthusiast who has been putting up tutorial videos on all things Macintosh since December of 2008. I just saw one that is so good I wanted to bring it to your attention. Matt has created a video on hidden features in Snow Leopard and although we have covered some of these before, this you have to see. In four minutes and twenty-nine seconds Matt covers more content than most people can cover in an hour, and he does it with grace and total clarity. Matt found hidden features in: Coverflow Spotlight Resizing of icons Preview viewing modes Hiding windows in dock icons More organized keyboard shortcuts Location based setting of time and date Showing the date in the menubar Stacks Text and symbol substitution The re-emergence of the trash 'put back' feature. Take a look and I think you'll not only be impressed, but pick up a few things you didn't know. Thanks go out to Mustafa Histoni for sending in this tip.
Cartoon Creator: a great introduction to animation in an app
Remember flip books? Get a stack of paper and draw something on the first page. On the next page, draw just about the same thing moved slightly, repeat until you run out of paper. Staple the pile together, flip through the pages and if you did it right, your drawings move like an animated cartoon. That, in a few words, is the basis of movement in all animation and motion pictures. When you go to the movies, the projector displays 24 frames per second giving the illusion of movement.Flip books used to come in Cracker Jack boxes, be sold in stores, and steal hundreds of hours of kids lives who were taken with the idea and who made lots and lots of them. I was one of those kids.Well, there's an app for that. Cartoon Creator [iTunes link] is a fun app that makes flip books on your iPhone or iPod touch running OS 3.0 or later. Choose a pen and a color and go to work. Draw something on page, click the empty face button and an overlay drops over your first page allowing you to see what you did but also letting you draw a slightly moved version. Wash, rinse and repeat until you have a full animation that will play back at any speed you determine. The app has some very nice options, like three different pens, each with a thinner or thicker line, lots of colors to choose from, and a bunch of cartoonish sounds that you can attribute to any page. If you are creating an animation of a brick being thrown through a window, why not assign a glass breaking sound to the page where the brick hits the glass? In addition, and this is something near and dear to my heart, it does anaglyph 3D, (red and cyan) with the appropriate glasses. This works remarkably well. The app gives you the ability to draw on three planes. Along with regular drawing that appears on the plane of the screen, you can draw behind the screen and in front of the screen as well. After digging out my anaglyph glasses, I found this to be some of the best anaglyph 3D I remember seeing. The image is sharp, clear and very dimensional.This is a really nice app, and a great introduction to animation and 3D. It would be perfect for kids. My flip book period took most of my ninth year. It would also be great if you can actually draw. I have absolutely no talent in this area.When you run the app, you are presented with a an uninviting lined screen titled 'Cartoons.' Big detriment there, but the web site provides full instructions on how to use the app. This is a problem I've seen with many apps. Load it and then what? At the very least having a link to the site would be a help.Another problem with the app is that you can't delete anything but a particular page. If you are a screw-up like me and want to delete an entire animation, you can't. Any time you start an animation, an entry named Untitled appears and you can't get rid of it. That may not seem like much of an oversight to someone who can draw, but it's me reviewing this app and a delete option would get more use than anything else. These two slights are minor and I'm sure can, and hopefully will, be fixed in a an update. As it stands now, it's a fun app, does great 3D, can waste countless hours and might even teach kids about animation. At $.99US it's worth the money and at the same time you'll get to feel good about yourself when you think of all the trees you're saving.