David Winograd
Articles by David Winograd
Macworld 2010: Get an education with the DriveSavers Hard Drive Disk-aster Simulator
DriveSavers has been the go-to company for data recovery since 1985, when I used to read about them in Apple ][ magazines. They have saved the bacon (and jobs) of many people over the ensuing years. When all else fails, DriveSavers can be counted on to retrieve your data -- whether it's on a hard drive, memory card, iPod, iPhone, or just about any type of storage media. It seems that their heart is in the right place; although seemingly not great for their business, they created the wonderful free DriveSavers Hard Drive Disk-aster Simulator app for the iPhone or iPod touch. The app teaches, in interactive fashion, how a hard disk works, and all the things that can crash a drive. It shows the inside of a hard disk where you can tap around to read descriptions of all the components. Next, using interactive animation, sound and vibration, you'll learn all the things that can crash a drive. You'll learn what happens during a clicker failure, seized motor, problems with spinning up and down, solid state drive failures (yes, they can fail too), contamination and head crashes. It's both entertaining and educational. There is also a section relating to protection strategies, which covers best practices, backup strategies, securing your data, and how serious a problem must be before you call DriveSavers. Knowledge is power, and I consider this critical information for any computer user. Another section shows you pictures of the clean room where all the data recovery gets done. DriveSavers employs the most advanced certified IS 5 (class 100) clean rooms in the industry and is authorized by all hard drive manufacturers to work on hard drives without voiding a warranty. If you don't have an iPhone or iPod touch, you can still learn everything in the app via a web-based Flash video. %Gallery-85751% We conducted an interview with Chris Bross from DriveSavers from the show floor. Chris talks about the philosophy behind DriveSavers. I found it interesting that there is a suicide prevention professional on staff to take call from clients on the verge of a nervous breakdown -- which is not an uncommon occurrence. Click on the Read More link to see the interview.
Macworld 2010: ScreenGuardz Privacy film keeps prying eyes off your iPhone
NLU Products makes a very large line of screen and computer protection products. I got a chance to speak with Kirk Feller the President and CEO of the company about their newest product ScreenGuardz Privacy (US$19.95), that was released last month at the Consumer Electronics Show. With the iPhone gaining more functionality seemingly every day through third party apps, privacy has become a concern. I really don't think I want someone looking over my shoulder when I'm doing online banking or reading private email. Kirk told me that there is a large demand for products that not only provide screen protection, but also increase privacy protection. ScreenGuardz Privacy is a very sturdy screen protector for the iPhone 3G and 3GS. The film used to cover the screen adheres using static electricity making it easy to put on and take off. But there are a lot of screen protectors out there, some offering privacy protection. This does it a bit differently. Using tiny louvers built into the film, ScreenGuardz Privacy uses four way privacy protection. This means that whether you are using your iPhone in portrait or landscape mode, anyone to your side will see a dark screen. It also helps reduce the amount of light put out by the display which may be distracting in some situations. According to Kirk, other privacy protection products are fine under normal use, but turn the phone to landscape mode and your screen will be visible to any prying eyes. This is the first screen protection product that gives you full privacy protection, I played with it for a few minutes and it worked exactly as advertised. The iPhone felt just as responsive as ever, but unless you were looking directly at the display, the screen appeared dark and this was true any way I held the device. This is a very simple idea, but the implementation is perfect. It's easy to install, and gives you some peace of mind. For anyone concerned with sensitive data, it seems well worth the price. Click the 'Read More' link to see a short video of ScreenGuardz Privacy in action.
Macworld 2010: Moodagent has synced over one billion songs
In December we reviewed Moodagent [iTunes Link] a wonderful music app that puts you in control of creating Genius like playlists of your iTunes library. On release it didn't recognize about 20% of my library, but now, after analyzing over one billion songs, I find it to be about 95% accurate, and getting better all time. I spoke with Richard French, the CEO of Syntonetic Inc., the parent company of Moodagent, who gave me an update on what's in store for the app and if you like it now, you're going to love it in 3 - 6 months. On the front burner is an iTunes plug-in which has been the most requested feature. I can easily see this completely replacing Genius playlists by putting you in the drivers seat when using iTunes on your computer. I asked about the possibility of importing Moodagent playlists into iTunes and found that it's going to be difficult since the easy way would by necessity stomp all over some Apple proprietary code, but it's not impossible and it's going to happen this year. It will just take a lot of work and time. Another upcoming feature is integration of social networking so you can share your playlists on Facebook, Twitter and all the usual suspects. The limit of a 25 song playlist will eventually be raised, which would be my first request. This will is also on the drawing board and will be gotten to eventually. It was interesting to learn a bit of how Moodagent works. Recent musicology graduates in Copenhagen sample songs during syncing and process them through 50 expert filters adding to the songs that Moodagent recognizes. They constantly work on improving the filters to make Moodagent more accurate. There is no tagging going on behind the scenes. Moodagent is a great app now but after my discussion, I can see it being incredible about half a year from now. I can't wait.
Macworld 2010: HyperMac brings some style to the battery backup market
We're still on the lookout for battery backup options to power recharge your iPhone, iPod touch or just about any USB mobile device. The market just got a bit larger with the introduction of the HyperMac line of batteries at Macworld. Hypermac is also showing its backup batteries for the MacBook Pro here at Macworld, and is offering a 10% show discount. The first thing you notice is that they are very easy on the eyes, which is unusual in a market filled with very utilitarian design. These batteries come in in 9 iPod Nano colors (black/silver/pink/red/orange/yellow/green/blue/purple) and are housed in an attractive aluminum casing. The second thing I noticed is that they are much lighter than they look. %Gallery-85374%
Partner snore? There's an app for that
Ilan Aisic, the CEO of Pointer Software, had a problem. Or rather his wife did. Ilan snores and it was driving his wife crazy, so he developed Snoring U (US$4.99), an unusual iPhone app that monitors snoring while you sleep using the built-in microphone. You wear your iPhone using an arm band or put it on your night table and when it detects at least four snores, measured by a change in the decibel level of the room, the app will vibrate or play a sound clip that you can record to tell you to turn over, stop snoring or whatever you like. It was developed under the guidance of an Israeli specialist in internal pulmonary and sleep medicine. Although no specific claims are made, I can easily see this working since I have exactly the same problem and this seems to automate what goes on three or four times a night. The snoring wakes me up, I ask my partner to turn over or change position and go back to sleep until the snoring wakes me up again. This app does the same thing but, from what I've been told, without the non-snorer waking up. You can control just about everything in the app from number of snores to sensitivity determining when the app should kick in, to how long it should wait before it recognizes another snoring event. It also graphs what happened, so the next morning you can see a chart showing you all the times the app kicked in, what times it happened and the loudness of the snoring. But the neatest part for me is that it provides prima facie evidence against the daily intoning of "...But I don't snore." Ha! Busted.
Macworld 2010: MacSpeech Scribe brings transcription to the Mac
Being a user of MacSpeech Dictate, a program that allows me to speak to my Mac and wind up with nicely formatted text, I was very happy to learn of today's release of Macspeech Scribe (US $149), which turns recorded audio into Rich Text Format files easily readable by TexttEdit or any word processor. Tom Vain from MacSpeech walked me through the program and it's really quite impressive. Using recorded audio from just about any source, including an iPhone, Scribe transforms a wide variety of audio file types into text, but oddly enough it won't work with .mp3 files. This isn't a major problem since you can convert them to .aac files in iTunes, but not inviting .mp3 files to the party seems like a major oversight. After playing a few minutes of audio into Scribe, you train a small portion of the transcription by correcting mistakes in a few paragraphs. This trains the program to recognize the voice. Scribe can handle six unique voice profiles. Once done, Scribe takes in the audio at about twice the speed of speech and delivers your text file in a raw format, but with no punctuation. If you included words like 'comma' and 'period,' they'll be turned into actual punctuation. Using the Nuance engine, it's remarkably good. I've found MacSpeech Dictate to be around 95%, and MacSpeech Scribe should be just as good since it's using the same engine. I can see this being incredibly valuable for students who want to record lectures, and have a printed copy. But there are many other uses. I did my share of ethnographic research which entailed many hours of recorded interviews and transcribing the data. This was both tedious and mind-numbing. MacSpeech Scribe does the grunt work, since fixing punctuation is a snap when compared to transcribing dozens of hours of speech. I would have killed for something like this in grad school.
Make your iPhone hands-free for less than the price of a ticket
In most states it's illegal to drive while holding an iPhone to your ear, with the average price of a ticket coming in at at least $100. Personally, I'm lucky since my Lexus 400h, like many cars, allows me to make and take calls through my car stereo. My interaction is limited to receiving calls by pressing a green button, and then pressing with a red hang up button on the steering wheel to end the call. Now Parrot has provided that same functionality to any car for less than the price of a ticket, namely US$99.99. The Parrot Minikit Slim is an ingenious device that clips onto your sun visor. After Bluetooth pairing to your iPhone, installation is complete. It automatically downloads your iPhone contact list and then voice-enables that list. Push the green button and tell it who to call, and it dials the number for you. If there are two numbers associated to your contact, you'll be prompted for either 'home' or 'mobile', similar to the Voice Command function on the iPhone. The Minikit Slim is self-contained including a microphone and speaker. When your call is done, you simply push the red button and disconnect the call. The idea is simple, but the functionality is incredibly useful since you can move the Minikit Slim to any car. Outside of its obvious use as a hands-free kit, I can see it being quite valuable at the intersection of road warriors and rental cars. If your iPhone is synced with a Windows machine, it will download the address book, so it's fully cross-platform. The Minikit Slim won't weigh you down, either -- it weighs only about three ounces.
The amazing shoe box theater powered by an iPhone
I love home theater. I love it so much that I have a real one in my house with a nine foot 2:35:1 screen and enough clean sound to be IMAX's little brother. Now Gary Katz has taken the opposite approach and built an absolutely gorgeous Liliputian theater out of a shoebox, some rubber cement, laser printed graphics and a very sharp knife. Take a look at the hand in the picture above and you'll be able to see the scale. Open the doors and you'll see a quite realistic-looking theater. And what powers the magic? An iPhone of course, which is cleverly slipped into a slot at the back of the shoebox. This little jewel box of a theater is a work of art in itself and the attention to detail is remarkable. I can easily see an audience of green army soldier toys happily watching Toy Story. I think they'd like it much more than Ratatouille. Read on to see the theater in action and then check out the inevitable 'making of' documentary. [via iPhone Savior]
TUAW Giveaway: Win a BearExtender n3
Last month, we highly recommended the BearExtender n3 [US $44.97] as a great way to extend a Wi-Fi network to reach those pesky dead spots. In my testing, I found that it's possible to get around three times as much range as from an Airport device. Now the nice people at Rokland Technologies have given us five units to give to you. If you're having weak signal problems, you want one of these. I bought the unit they sent me to review and have been overjoyed and amazed at it performing exactly as advertised. The details of the giveaway are as follows: Open to legal US residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia who are 18 and older. To enter, leave a comment telling us what what problem you would solve with a BearExtender n3. The comment must be left before February 13, 11:59PM Eastern Standard Time. You may enter only once. Five winners will be selected in a random drawing. Prize: One BearExtender n3 (Value: US$49.97) Click Here for complete Official Rules. Best of luck to everyone Update 2/16/10: The contest is over and the winners have been chosen. Thanks to everyone for the comments. Roland at Bearextender n3 was amazed at the huge response and has offered a 10% discount for TUAW readers through Thursday the 18th at via this link.
Charge your iPhone, or any two USB devices with ZAGGsparq
In the never ending saga of finding the best battery backup for your iPhone or iPod touch, Zagg has taken a different approach in releasing the ZAGGsparq [US $99.95]. Instead of a dongle or a snap in case, The ZAGGsparq is a big honking block, around the size of an Airport Express that contains the largest lithium polymer backup battery I've seen weighing in at 6000 mAh. For reference, the two Monoprice pieces we covered contain 2200 mAh batteries. The battery in an iPhone is 1150 mAh, so the ZAGGsparq is good for up to four iPhone/iPod touch charges. Running the numbers it seems like it should be about 5 charges, but I never said that I understood electricity. The beauty of the piece is that it can charge two USB devices at the same time. So along with your iPhone, it's also good for your Bluetooth headset, video camera or just about any USB device that needs some juice. Four LED lights tell you how much power remains. You can also plug the ZAGGsparq into a wall, plug in two USB devices, and all three will charge at the same time. This gives you quite a bit of flexibility and helps explain the fairly high price of the unit. Currently ZAGG is sold out, but you can score one on eBay where they seem to be quite plentiful. [via Unplggd] Take a look at the video on the next page (click "Read More") to see it in action:
Have we seen the end of the $9.99 eBook?
At the roll out of the iPad, our old friend Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal chatted up Steve, and when asking about the pricing of buying books from the iBookstore, Walt was told that the price would be the same as Amazon. Amazon currently charges $9.99 for most books, which, according to AppleInsider, means that Amazon is losing $4.50 per book to keep its leadership position in the eBook market and keep Kindles selling. This strategy is similar to the loss-leader marketing popularized by Gillette who sold razors at a loss in the hopes of more than making up for it in the sales of blades. Apple proposes prices that would actually be profitable, wanting to position best sellers between $12.99 and $14.99. AppleInsider notes that Apple's plan is a similar one to the App Store where the publisher takes 70% and Apple takes a 30% cut. Under the Amazon plan, including the $4.50 Amazon subsidy, book publishers are currently being paid $14.50 while under Apple's model, the publisher of a bestseller would only make $10.49 per copy. The idea of Amazon subsidizing books is unsustainable in any competitive market and with more than one big razor in town, or at least one showing up soon, the market will inevitably settle on one method or the other. [via AppleInsider and WSJ]
Watching movies on an iPad: What you see is what you get
Watching a movie on the new iPad will not as pleasurable experience as you might think. The screen being 1024x768 pixels is in a 4:3 ratio which is the exactly the same as an old CRT television set. Many of us are have gone on from there and are luxuriating in the glory of our 16x9 aspect HDTVs. It turns out that 16x9 will give you big honking black bars at the top and bottom of your screen as you can see by the green bar in the image above, and anything above or below it will be displayed as black bars. It gets worse, lots worse. Let's say you're playing a regular, non-widescreen movie which has an aspect ratio of 1.85:1. In that case anything above or below the blue area will be black bars. Now we get to ribbon-vision. Most widescreen films, from Star Wars to the new Star Trek were filmed in 2:35:1. This and all other resolutions mentioned refer to how wide the screen is as compared to how high. So these films are 2:35 times wider than they are high, and result in a mere ribbon on the iPad screen. Without measuring, it seems to me that a full half of the screen in landscape mode will be filled with black bars. One last kick in the pants. Having a resolution of 1024x768 pixels there is no way that you can display the gold standard of today's high-definition of 1080p. There just aren't enough pixels. So iBooks make sense, but movie watching will be somewhat limited. People frequently say that they really can't watch movies on an iPhone or iPod touch, since the resulting display is so small. The iPad will absolutely be better, but still at a trade-off. Thanks to Blake Walters for creating the chart and tipping us off about this. Note: Some users have questioned the graphic, so I'm posting a revised version by Arash Ayrom which is correct. I'm not sure who is correct, but hopefully it will come out in the comments. Either way, I'm still not happy being a purist with the home theater to prove it. I have little interest watching Ghost Busters in pan and scan where Ernie Hudson is hardly even in the film. DW. Here is Arash's graphic:
iPad will ship with 802.11n Wi-Fi, 3G optional
I've been unhappy with the 802.11g Wi-Fi in iPhones and iPod touches, so I was quite happy to see that the iPad will have 802.11 a/b/g/n built in. This will allow everyone running an 802.11n network to no longer cripple your upload and download speed as is the case if you have an an iPhone or iPod touch. The iPad will run at the full speed of an Airport Extreme, Express or Time Capsule. What's also interesting is that the 3G model will run on the the UTMS/HSDPA 800, 1900, and 2100 MHz band with GSM/Edge running on the 850, 900, 1800 and 1900 MHz bands. This means that it will run on just about any provider out there. And the SIM comes completely unlocked, so even if you don't want in on Apples $14.99 for 250mb or $29.99 unlimited pay-as-you-go plan with AT&T, you can find your own 3G provider. Don't forget, though, that you'll be waiting for an extra month, as the 3G models are releasing in 90 days, not the 60 days expected for the Wi-Fi versions. Also included is Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR technology which is right in line with their previous products.
HourFace: The picture of Dorian Gray in an app
HourFace [US $.99 iTunes Link] is a very neat little novelty app. I'm told that it's the top selling app in Japan. HourFace uses your camera or your photo library to take or choose a head shot. It then uploads the picture to its server which turns it into a very realistic moving 3D image with the face naturally moving and eyes that blink. If you touch part of the screen, the face will move in that direction. The effect is startling. The neat part is that app makes your 3D face younger or older depending how you hold your device, using the accelerometer. Tilt the screen up and the face gets younger. Tilt it down and the face gets older. Keeping the bar in the middle shows you the default age of the the face. You can also move the blue bar yourself with a finger. HourFace works on any iPhone or iPod touch running OS 3.0 or better The app is quite picky when it comes to taking pictures or using them from your photo library. If there are more than one person in the picture only one person will age. If the face not exactly what the app expects, you'll get a message telling you that it can't find a face, even if the whole picture is a face. You are informed that the ideal photo faces directly ahead, has its mouth closed, be not too bright or dark, show a visible forehead and not be wearing glasses. I found that more than half of the pictures I took or were in my photo library worked well, while the rest didn't. You are also given the option of emailing the image. I don't know how much utility I'll be getting from the app, but I like it very much for what it is, which is is an eerily realistic graphic manipulation. Take a look at the video below, and give it shot. It's worth a buck for the entertainment value and the result is amazingly real. TUAW is commonly provided with not-for-resale licenses or promo codes to permit product evaluations and reviews. For more details, see our policy page. Note: As of testing the app about 20 minutes before the post is scheduled to go live, I found that pictures will upload, but it gets stuck on 'processing', eventually timing out. My uneducated guess is that their servers are temporarily down.
Review: Monoprice's iPhone leather-cased battery backup is another great deal
We like Monoprice around here. They are a wonderful source for cables and iPhone battery backups as well as lots of other accessories and add-ons. We covered their 2200 mAh battery dongle a few months back and nearly everyone who bought one was quite happy including our own Auntie TUAW. The price was great at US$14.50 when reviewed and currently up just about 75 cents to a still absurdly cheap US$15.23. One problem people had with it was that if left in your pocket, the dongle could get loose and stop charging the iPhone. Pushing it back into place corrected that, but it was an inelegant solution. Getting ready for my trip to the Macworld Expo I wanted something that would stay in place dependably no matter where I put it, so I went back to Monoprice.com, and found a leather case cover with a 2200 mAh battery built in that the iPhone snaps into. The price is ridiculously low at US $20.75, just US $5.52 more than the dongle. This has been on sale for at least as long as the dongle, I hadn't heard anything about it, but decided to give it a try.
Tutorials as you like them with N.E.D. and its family
Nonlinear Educating Inc., has been selling tutorials on a wide variety of subjects for years. Their catalog of 146 video tutorials cover just about everything from all the programs in the Adobe CS4 Suite, to iLife 09 and iWork 09, or virtually anything you could want to learn about Mac software. To get a tutorial from Nonlinear in the past, you would buy it, download it, and play it on your computer. Things have changed with the introduction of new ways to buy and watch tutorials. Nonlinear now gives you three ways to learn on any Mac or iPhone/iPod touch running OS 3.0, using three N.E.D. (Nonlinear Education Device) products. Now along with buying individual tutorials, you can subscribe to their streaming library, giving you access to tutorials on demand either from the web using The N.E.D web player, or N.E.D.i [Free iTunes Link], an iPhone/iPod touch app. The idea of total flexibility is wonderful, but the complexity of all the subscription and purchase options are a bit daunting. The tutorials are excellent. The few I had a chance to go through were totally professional, complete and entertaining. The trainers are some of the best in the field, including Jim Dalrymple and Maria Langer. The tutorials are broken down into many 1-4 minute movies that progressively teach you the software. I'm not going to review the tutorials here, since I feel that they are just about perfect. The only problem I had with the catalog is that some courses are really quite old. The Mac OS X 101: Mastering Your Mac course was released in April of 2006 and deals with OSX 10.4.5. While it's true that a good deal of the information is still valid, there have been a lot of changes in the last two years and a new course for each major OS software release would increase the value of the instruction. The description of this US$29.50 course did not tell which OS version was addressed and I had to dig into the videos to find out.
The BearExtender n3 gives you more Wi-Fi range at a low cost
It's not often that I've come across a product that works perfectly, does exactly what it says it will, costs a lot less than its closest competitor and provides a real and salient difference in my computing experience. The US$44.97 BearExtender n3 does just that. Roland Saekow, a recent graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, realized that the 'Airbears' campus network wasn't complete enough to allow students to connect from all parts of the large campus, so he developed an external Wi-Fi receiver that can boost the range of a standard Airport-equipped laptop by up to 200%. He partnered with Jason Opdyke of Rokland Technologies and brought his extender to market this past December. I was interested in taking a look, since my home network (comprised of a Time Capsule and several Airport Express units) still leaves a section of my house where I can't get a decent Wi-Fi signal, no matter what I try. I've been told that the only way to solve this is to run RJ-45 cable all around the outside of my house, and get a second router. Doing this would be ugly, inconvenient and expensive, so when I heard about the BearExtender n3, I had to find out if this would do the trick and vanquish my Wi-Fi-challenged rooms problem. Within ten minutes of opening the box I found that it did solve my issues, and in further testing I became even more impressed.
Walt Disney World on 5 apps a week
We did a write-up of apps used at Disneyland and Walt Disney World back in November, but I just spent a week at Walt Disney World where my daughter got married, and wanted to add some personal perspective on my experience with five iPhone/iPod touch apps for seven days. There are a lot of apps out for Walt Disney World, but from reviews both here and anywhere else I could find, I decided upon, and bought, five of them. The quality of these apps ranged from beautiful but arcane, to incredibly useful. The most eye-catching of all the apps has to be The Walt Disney World Maps Boxed Set US$3.99 [iTunes Link]. This set contains maps of all four parks: Magic Kingdom, Animal Kingdom, Hollywood Studios and Epcot, along with Downtown Disney, Blizzard Beach, Typhoon Lagoon and the Orlando International Airport tossed in for good measure. Maps of each of the parks can be bought individually for US$.99. When running the app, you are presented with the main screen which goes black for a few seconds and then re-appears. Odd. Tapping on any of the parks gives you a detailed "cartoony-looking" map that can be pinched and stretched to an extent. You can't pinch any map enough to see the entire park on one screen. This means that you really have to know basically what you're looking for before the app can be of much help, and since the map has no text of what the buildings represent, it's hit or miss. At least it was until I found the spyglass button which brings up a screen that searches attractions either by A to Z, by location, or by category. Choosing one brings up a screen with the name, a one line description, and some additional information.
The App Store Expense Monitor: Be scared. Be very scared.
I know that we're between Christmas and New Years, but it seemed more like Halloween when I checked out The App Store Expense Monitor from WetFish Software. It scared the Yuletide right out of me, taking me from Ho Ho Ho to OMG No!!! This free Mac application looks into your iTunes library, finds the apps you bought under all iTunes accounts on your computer, searches for the current prices of the app, and then gives you the bad news in some detail. It's scary how all those innocent little $.99 US charges add up, but it might not be as bad as it seems. Regardless of what you paid for an app, the Monitor finds the current price and uses it to total up your cost. If you have a bunch of apps that you got when they were free and they were later were changed to a paying basis, your total won't be accurate. That should be okay for most people. But if you want to make your accounting perfect, and you remember what you really paid for an app, you can edit the prices; quite a nice feature. It's also possible to also export the information to a .CSV file for viewing in a spreadsheet, which would be a very nice feature if it actually worked. The program tells you that you can sort the information ranked by developer, name, category or price, but in actuality, your resulting spreadsheet file is two columns wide with most of the information jammed into column A. Not very useful... Update: The output CSV file appears to use semicolons as delimiters, as pointed out below, rather than the commas that are customary in the US. Adjusting your import settings to match will improve your results. In setting up the App Store Expense Monitor, I found another stitch dropped in the attention to detail department. The program expects to find your apps in the ~/Music/iTunes/Mobile Applications folder, which is not where they live in the current version of iTunes. You'll need to change the path to point to the ~/Music/iTunes Music/Mobile Applications folder. That's not the biggest deal, but an oversight like this should have been caught and corrected, even in a free program. Update: Sorry for any confusion over the paths noted above. It looks like it's my machine that is idiosyncratic, as our commenters and my fellow bloggers report that the first path is indeed correct on their machines. Regardless of the minor glitches, the App Store Expense Monitor is still quite useful in giving you an idea of what you spent on all your apps, while affording you a reality check on the implications of tapping that Buy Now button. [via lifehacker]
Earn It Stars: a motivating little app
I came across a very simple little app that I felt would be useful -- at first thought, just for small children, but after thinking about it for awhile, realized that it could be helpful for just about everybody who tends to procrastinate (guilty!), or wants to reinforce or change a behavior. The app is Earn It Stars [iTunes Link] which sells for $.99 US and runs on iPhones and iPod touches with OS 3.0 or better. This app is all about motivation and is really very simple; in this case, that's a good thing. Let's say you want to get your kid to clean her room and no amount of hectoring is getting the job done. Earn It Stars works on a reward basis, which some may call bribery, but I'll just call it positive reinforcement. Negotiate what the pay-off will be and how many times the room will be cleaned before the the prize is awarded. Let's say 20 cleanings before the kid gets to go to the movies to see something that will probably make the parent gag and retch. I'm looking at you, New Moon. The app lets you designate what the task will be and how many times it needs to be done before it pays off. Then each time the room gets checked and you can see that the color of the carpet isn't laundry, someone gets to tap on Star Earned which plays a nice sound and increments the counter. When the counter hits 20, a badge is displayed that says: Earn It Stars. You did it! That's Great!! Enjoy (your) New Moon, or whatever the reward might be. That's about it. It's really nothing more than a fancy looking counter, but sometimes simplicity is a good thing. Having grown children, I know that I could have used this years ago and that it would have worked. It would have eliminated the circuitous discussions based upon: Yes I did. No you didn't, Yes I did. No you didn't etc. Once you get into one of those, getting out is never easy, or fun, and if you don't think that kids like getting stars, ask any first grade teacher. Given the app's meager aspirations, I think it's fine, and the only thing I would add is a big audio flourish when the goal is reached. Earn It Stars can be used for anything and can be used by anyone. Right now, I have it set that if I write 10 posts I get to eat. Simple. TUAW is commonly provided with not-for-resale licenses or promo codes to permit product evaluations and reviews. For more details, see our policy page.