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France asks Apple to lift Bluetooth limits to further its coronavirus tracker
Apple's operating system settings are standing in the way of France's COVID-19 contact-tracing app.
EE's wallet-busting 'Complete' tariffs come with a 50GB data allowance
EE split its pay-monthly plans into two tiers a couple of years ago, offering "double-speed" data and the highest allowances to anyone willing to shell out for its pricey "Extra" tariffs. Naturally, 4G contracts have become increasingly more affordable since, leaving Brewsters everywhere with pockets ablaze. Not to worry, as EE has quietly introduced new "Complete" tariffs crafted for high rollers that get through data as quickly as they get through cash. Like EE's Extra plans, opting for a Complete package affords you unlimited calls and texts, as well as "double-speed" data. But only on a Complete tariff will you find a 50GB monthly data allowance, inclusive international and 084/087 calling minutes, picture messages and the option to upgrade your handset early, one year into the 24-month contract. As you've probably gathered, these plans are just a little on the expensive side.
Make a mess of your contacts with Business Card Reader Free
OCR - Optical Character Recognition is a very difficult thing to do right. Scanning pages of text can now be done fairly successfully, but business cards have always been a mess. Some are loaded with design elements, weird fonts, and non-standard placement of information. Business Card Reader Free is another attempt to do what might seem to be simple: use your iPhone's camera to easily import business card information into your contacts. The app requires iOS 7.0 or later and is compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. This app is optimized for iPhone 5. I tested it on iPhone 6 running iOS 8.02. The application is free, but limited and includes displays adds (and they're rather intrusive). I have a love/hate relationship with business cards. On one hand they can be beautiful and in the past, back when they were expensive to produce, they were a sign of credibility. Now anyone can print off a few hundred cards they designed for a few bucks. On the other hand business cards are annoying little slips of paper that seem to breed and multiply. I use to have binders full of cards, physical Rolodexs, and other file systems. I bought one of the first Palm devices (still called the "Palm Pilot" at that time), to try and organize my growing stack of business cards. Later I worked for a calendar and contact management software company and looked at a lot of scanning solutions. Very few proved to be any improvement or provide any time savings over simply keying them in yourself. Think about it. It might seem like scanning should save you time, but in fact there is really very little information on a business card. It doesn't take that long to just key one in. It's when you have a stack it seems intimidating. I tested out Business Card Reader Free on a variety of cards. I was unsurprised to find that it had difficulty with even the most basic of cards. When I scanned in a clean, simply designed card it still required that I edit the scanned text, an act that takes longer than simply typing it in. On the more exotic cards (and far too many people have ugly, over designed business cards) it couldn't make much sense out of the card at all. The app does have links to the built in Maps app, can send the imported data to Contacts, and can look to Facebook and Twitter for additional information. That's all nice, but if you can't manage the initial scanning, there's no point in the other features. Beyond that, the free version is severely crippled. You can purchase an "unlimited" one month trial for $2.99 per month or $19.99 per year. The paid premium account gives you unlimited scanning, gets rid of the adds, allows you to synchronize to card databases, and exports to Salesforce. You can also buy "recognitions" in lots for 50 for $4.99. You can also disable the adds for 99 cents. Don't waste your time with Business Card Reader Free. Just set aside your stack of cards and when you have a few minutes, type a few directly into your selected contact manager. You'll save yourself a lot of frustration and heartache.
Five apps for business card scanning
Persistent critters, those little analog cardboard rectangles. Even with the option to scan QR Codes, email vCards or bump phones to swap contact information, the venerable business card keeps on trucking -- and keeps on making it challenging to leap from analog to digital information. If your career or avocation takes you to meetings, trade shows or conferences, chances are you too have a pile of to-be-dealt-with business cards that could stand a good digital shakedown. Here's our five apps rundown of a few good choices for handling business card scanning on the go. SHAPE's Business Card Reader: Last year, we noted that the US$4.99 Business Card Reader expanded its offerings with an iPad version of the app. BCR delivers capable scanning and OCR (using libraries licensed from high-end scanning developer ABBYY, which has its own app suite as well), with a good verification step to make sure that the recognition is matching the actual card data. BCR can quickly export scanned data to your device address book, match LinkedIn connections, and in the latest version it hooks directly into the CRM tools of Salesforce.com for marketing and sales pros. Evernote Hello: I wasn't all that taken with the first version of Evernote's free meet-and-manage contact app; it was buggy, and it seemed awkward to ask a new acquaintance "Mind if I take your picture so I remember you?" Things have definitely changed for the better with January's version 2 release. In addition to manual entry and Hello-to-Hello audio contact sharing (very cool, I recommend giving it a try), the beautifully designed app now supports business card scanning -- temporarily free for both regular and premium Evernote users, although at some point down the road the regular user scan allowance may be curtailed or changed to IAP. Evernote's expertise with text recognition and knowledge of the iPhone's camera capabilities seems to have paid off, as Hello is now delivering some of the best and quickest scan results I've seen. My favorite feature is the heads-up display that automatically detects the card and gives you instant feedback on getting the best image ("use a shallower angle," "center the card," "hold the phone steady," etc.); as soon as Hello thinks it's got the shot, it captures the scan automatically. If it can't auto-detect, it falls back to manual mode, but most of the time with a light card on a dark background it nails it in one try. Within a few seconds, the data is detected, and if you're signed into LinkedIn via Hello, the card will be matched with that contact immediately. Hello also links a "meeting" note to give context to the encounter, rather than leaving a bare contact without metadata. Some minor quibbles aside (you can't edit the Hello notes in either the desktop or iOS versions of the regular Evernote app, for one), Hello is a winner. Without a firm date or pricing for the end of the free scan trial for non-premium Evernote users, my recommendation is to use it while you can. LinkedIn's CardMunch: With more than 2 million cards processed already, the free scanning app from your friendly neighborhood social network for professional use has simplicity and volume on its side. Assuming you already use LinkedIn's connection ecosystem, CardMunch's scanning speed and off-device processing make it great for dealing with a lot of cards in batch mode, and you can make notes on each scan before it's recognized on the back end. Of course, the trade-off of the cloud processing step is that you can't easily OCR cards on the plane on the way home without forking over for some WiFi. Also, checking for errors is a two-step process since the scan and the data return are a few minutes apart -- but CardMunch tends to make fewer mistakes than other apps, so that's not a big drawback. WorldCard Mobile: When I last checked out the $6.99 WCM app a year ago, it stood up well against competitors like CardMunch and BCR. Since then, the app has added QR Code scanning with support for both vCard and meCard formats, iOS 6 compatibility, support for double-sided cards, batch scanning, duplicate search and direct synchronization with Google contacts. WCM's interface is still in need of some redesign TLC, but for rapid and accurate scanning, it's a good choice. Note that WCM also requires you to tap a small button on the screen to take a card photo, while other apps let you tap the whole screen or auto-detect the card (Evernote Hello). NeatCloud and NeatMobile: If you're in the habit of keeping all your print-to-digital documents in the Neat ecosystem driven by one of the company's desktop scanners, you're already comfortable with the OCR and filing capabilities of the platform. What's new is that Neat is extending your scanned repository into the cloud and onto your iPhone, with the NeatMobile / NeatCloud combination app and service. NeatCloud gives you on-the-road access to your scanned docs, and in turn the NeatMobile app allows you to scan back to that pile of data from wherever you happen to be. This sync isn't a free service, however; monthly plans start at $5.99 for individual users. As such, the mobile app doesn't worry much about handling address book sync or other standalone features; the workflow is that you'll do that processing back on your Mac or PC with the downloaded scans. Neat's app does a solid job of scanning business cards in standalone mode, but for true accuracy with a human touch the optional NeatVerify pass submits your scan for a once-over by a person to make sure everything is in the right place. NeatVerify credits are linked to your NeatCloud account.
Escape the contact sync spiral with addapt for iPhone
Sometimes I miss a paper Rolodex. While I'm not really old enough to have used one, the idea of a reliable, semi-permanent repository of contact information -- update it by stapling in a new business card, or with good old correction fluid -- seems comforting. Plus it makes that cool whappity-whap sound when you spin it. Modern contact management, while faster and much lighter (my 1K+ contact list would be a pretty bulky Rolodex), doesn't provide the same sense of control. When your contacts could disappear in a puff of iCloud, it would be comforting to know that your friends' up-to-date info is only a few taps away. Contact syncing from LinkedIn, Plaxo and now Facebook helps somewhat, but all those services come with their own baggage and inessential features. Former LinkedIn exec Mrinal Desai looks at the current state of contact management and thinks that we might as well still be using the spinny card holders. "We used to pen down contact info before and then when and if informed, erase it and write a new one all over again -- today we do the same. Everything has changed yet nothing has changed for the address book," he says. That's why he and co-founder Jorge Ferreira are introducing addapt for iPhone, a free app that aims to modernize the contact update cycle. The addapt approach is straightforward. You select your contact info; you share it to fellow contacts in your address book. If they reciprocate, you'll stay in sync automatically with nothing to import, export, re-enter or correct. Grace notes include a best-guess iMessage accessibility field (for contacts who have a phone record flagged as iPhone) and a clear local time indicator so you don't call people at odd hours of the night. There are other clever services for parsing and importing contact information from inbound email (WriteThat.name for Gmail accounts is one example) or apps that will merge and de-munge the inevitable duplicate contacts from cross-service sync or Facebook integration (Wim deNood's Cleanup Suite on iOS, Spanning Tools on the Mac), but few that deliver dead-simple updating. If you're tired of emailing out a blast whenever your phone number changes, check out addapt's app. You can learn more about the addapt service at the company's website. As they ramp up the service, access will be invitation-only for a while; be sure to mention that you read about it here on TUAW and maybe you'll get bumped to the front of the line.
Daily iPhone App: WorldCard Mobile scans your business card collection
The paper business card may go away someday if innovative apps like Bump and Evernote Hello take over, but for now we're still dealing with these little chunks of cardboard. Of course, in almost all cases it's not the physical object we care about, but rather the data printed on the card. (Some exceptions are inevitable.) Getting those inky bits converted to actual bits is easy enough with your iPhone and the right app. My default tool for business card scanning has been CardMunch, which has a number of advantages: fast, ties in easily to parent company LinkedIn, accurate (using actual humans to do the card transcription) and free. Unfortunately, CardMunch's cloud dependency means that sometimes it can get backed up, and when you're sitting on an airplane with a stack of post-conference business cards to go through, it's quite likely useless. That's where the Penpower family of contact management apps comes into play. The flagship iPhone app is the US$6.99 WorldCard Mobile, and it picks up nicely where CardMunch leaves off. You can scan your cards neatly without any network connection, and all the OCR processing is handled locally on the phone. Additional features include the ability to copy an email signature and parse it into a contact record, which is a lot more useful than I thought it would be. How good is the OCR function? Well, you can test it yourself with the app's lite version (allowing three scans the first week, and one scan per week after that). In my evaluation, I'd give it a B+ compared to the intelligent transcription of CardMunch -- keeping in mind that CardMunch also makes mistakes on some cards. Given that it's working in disconnected mode, the slight loss in accuracy seems to be a reasonable tradeoff. What's a little harder to take is WorldCard Mobile's UI, which has the same weird aesthetic and hinky buttons as a lot of other utilitarian apps on the App Store. It compares unfavorably to CardMunch's clean look, and it's most reminiscent of the early versions of Readdle's apps (which have come a long way since v1, in fairness). The lite version will let you know pretty quickly whether the look will make you nuts or not. Penpower also has a WorldCard Contacts app, which lets you keep the card images alongside your contact records but omits the OCR tool; it's $2.99. There is an iPad version, too, which costs $14.99 and doesn't quite work as advertised with the iPad 2's onboard camera, per reviewers -- it's apparently not quite high-res enough for accurate recognition. If you're a frequent business card recipient and you'd like to be mobile-enabled, check out WorldCard Mobile; start with the lite version, and if it's useful you can fork over the $7 for the full build.
Pinball wizard Steve Kordek passes away at age 100
Known for crafting the pinball machine into what we know it as today, Steve Kordek revolutionized the industry with his two-flipper concept way back in 1948. Sadly, his daughter Catherine Petrash confirmed Kordek's death to the NY Times last week. He was 100 years old.Kordek designed his final arcade machine in 2003, based on the National Lampoon's Family Vacation films, after having spent a life crafting machines for Genco, Bally, and Williams. He started his auspicious career in 1948 with a two-flipper redesign of the pinball machine, an improvement over the previous year's six-flipper design (pioneered by Chicago's D. Gottlieb & Company). From there, Kordek went on to craft tables at Bally and Williams, such as Contact, Pokerino, and Grand-Prix."Pinball!" author Roger Sharpe described Kordek's impact on the world of pinball as, "comparable to D. W. Griffith moving from silent films through talkies and color and CinemaScope and 3-D with computer-generated graphics."Kordek is survived by his daughter Catherine; by another daughter, Donna Kordek-Logazino; two sons, Frank and Richard; a sister, Florence Wozny; two brothers, Joseph and Frank; six grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren, according to the NYT report.[Pinball image via Shutterstock]
iPhone address book issue prompts response from Apple, apps' access to contact data will require user permission
A week ago today, developer Arun Thampi detailed on his blog how the Path app for iOS accessed users' contact information and uploaded that data to Path's servers -- all without any explicit permission granted on the user's part. That sparked quite the firestorm, including investigations into which other apps behaved in a similar manner (quite a few, it turns out), and some responses from a number of other app makers -- Twitter, for one, has acknowledged that it does store users' contact data, but that it now plans to adjust its app to more clearly inform users of that behavior. Now, Apple itself has also responded, with spokesman Tom Neumayr telling AllThingsD that "apps that collect or transmit a user's contact data without their prior permission are in violation of our guidelines," but that it is "working to make this even better for our customers, and as we have done with location services, any app wishing to access contact data will require explicit user approval in a future software release." Still no word on when we can expect that software update, though. Incidentally, this news comes on the same day that Congressmen Henry Waxman and G.K. Butterfield sent a letter to Apple over the issue, asking that it respond to a number of privacy-related questions no later than February 29th. That letter can be found in full after the break.
The Puzzlejuice emails document the nitty gritty of iOS development
Puzzlejuice is a really great puzzle game (really, a big mishmash of different puzzle games) that's available on the App Store right now. It was put together by developers Greg Wohlwend and Asher Vollmer, and Wohlwend has just published a post on his personal blog that's pretty spectacular: He calls it "The Puzzlejuice emails," and it's basically all of the email communication between the two developers as they work out the look and feel of this crazy game. It's really long (he really did include everything, from first contact all the way up to release), but it's also a fascinating read, especially if you've been involved in iOS development, or game development of any kind. You can see the two devs hashing out everything as they go, from the look of the graphics to the meaning of the game's name, all the way up to the icon and setting up the website and price for release. Wohlwend originally was just interested in the game as it was being made, but eventually the release turned into a partnership for the two, and there's all sorts of little trivia bits in there about things that did and didn't work during development. The emails are presented as-is, too: The devs had some concern about another word game that came out during development, Spelltower, but eventually decided the games were different enough that it was worth carrying on. I would agree. If you have any interest in seeing behind the scenes on just what small scale iOS development is like, give this one a read. It won't teach you to make code or art, but it will teach you how these games are put together piece by piece.
Scientists testing HUD contact lenses on rabbits, hope to bring augmented reality to your eyeballs
Scientists at Washington University are a step closer to bringing us all some sweet information displaying contact lenses. The team has been successfully testing prototype lenses on rabbits -- though there are some major caveats here. First, due to limits of circuitry, they can only display a single light-emitting diode at a time. Also, the scientists have yet to figure out a workable energy source -- at present, they need to be within centimeters of a wireless battery. The researchers have big plans, however, including the display of holographic images -- and, no doubt, information about which targets to destroy.
Apple's Find My Friends app now available
In advance of iOS 5, Apple has released Find My Friends, a location sharing app similar to Glympse. As the name implies, Find My Friends will let you locate your friends on a map. It'll also let you share your location so your friends can find you. For those concerned about privacy, the location sharing feature can be turned on permanently or only temporarily which is great for when you want your friends to meet you while you're eating dinner at a local restaurant, but not when you go home. It's also conveniently integrated with the built-in contact and map applications so you can find your friends and generate a route to meet up with them. You can install Find My Friends by visiting iCloud.com on an iPhone running iOS 5. You can also download it from the App Store. [Via Macstories]
VZ Contact Transfer will move contacts from Verizon's cloud to your iPhone
If you're upgrading from a Verizon dumbphone all the way up to the iPhone, it's possible you were using the carrier's Backup Assistant to keep your contacts safe and secure up in the cloud -- but the fact is, you're definitely not going to be using it anymore (trust us on that one). So, what to do? Well, Big Red is helpfully providing a VZ Contact Transfer app -- already available in the App Store -- that'll move contacts down from Backup Assistant and into your iPhone's storage. Once they're there, you can do whatever you want: set up ActiveSync to get them into Google, for example, or just let them transfer up to your Mac or PC. One less reason to stay on that Coupe, right?
Gmail can now restore deleted contacts, still can't mend broken friendships
So what if Google knows and remembers all our data, at least it's turning that stuff into something useful. The latest enhancement to its Gmail client is a neat Contacts restoration option, which can rewind you back to a maximum of 30 days ago, offering a chance to recover rashly deleted email addresses or to remedy an ill-advised sync with any of your other contact-keeping services. As is par for the course with Gmail, it's a neat and seemingly minor improvement that'll probably keep users from leaving it for greener pastures over the long term as they grow accustomed to its security. Just how Google likes it.
Join up with the Massively.com community!
Hey there Massively.com readers! Have you ever wished to meet up with your fellow readers and go on adventures through strange lands? Have you ever wished to have a place where you can talk about MMO news and games with the other commenters on the site? Have you ever wished to yell at me in person rather than through the comment box? Then boy do we have a deal for you! Today we're launching a brand new page on our website, the Massively.com Community! The community page will be hosting all of our contact information, from Twitter to our Facebook Discussion board, as well as information on how to access our brand new chat room, the upcoming events we're hosting on your favorite games, and information on how to get involved with your game's community. Plus, we'll be hosting contests, live chats with some of your favorite developers, and more events down the road! So please, drop by our community page (or just click the link on the right hand side of the page, under game columns), follow our Facebook or Twitter accounts, or dust off your IRC program and log into irc.quakenet.org and jump into #massively (or use QuakeNet's webchat.) We look forward to meeting you guys!
iGroups patent suggests Apple is looking at social networking
A new Apple patent is going around that offers up something called "iGroups" functionality -- it seems to be a kind of location-based social networking, including an ad-hoc currency functionality between a crowd of Apple devices. It's pretty interesting, though it sounds more like an idea Apple is playing with than an actual service they're going to debut. They specifically mention rock concerts and tradeshows (including WWDC), with the plan that someone would start up a "group," and then individual group members in the same location (determined by GPS) would be able to hook into that group and/or exchange contact info or "tokens" with other members of the same group. Not quite a Foursquare or Facebook competitor (this definitely seems like a much more local service), but a new kind of ad-hoc network based on the idea that everyone in the area who is using an Apple device can connect up in new ways. The "token" idea is interesting, too -- it adds a gaming element to the situation that seems very un-Apple. That, more than anything else, is what makes me think this is Apple just covering their bases rather than securing an idea that they plan to put into action. Still, a lot of Apple's services (MobileMe, iWork, and so on) tend to be more traditional rather than innovative -- they innovate on hardware and often play catch-up on software -- they do it well, of course, but their specialty is polish, not necessarily. Diving into a newer arena like social networking would be an interesting move for Apple.
The Daily Grind: Locked out
You don't really know the value of account security until it fails you. Or, more accurately, you don't think at all about entering your password until that day when you type it in... and it doesn't work. You double-check it, and it still doesn't work. You don't know if you somehow forgot it, or if you've gotten hacked, or what the issue is... but suddenly playing the game becomes impossible. And suddenly, something as trivial as going in and doing your obnoxious dailies seems like it's an urgent matter. In the best-case scenario, you just forgot the correct password and it can be fixed fairly easily. In the worst-case scenario, you look and find that the recovery e-mail is an address you haven't used in years that no longer functions, and all of your contact information is completely wrong. Because who needs all of that, right? Except that you do now, and you're left kicking yourself for not thinking it through at the time. Have you ever found yourself on the wrong end of getting locked out of an account? What happened? Were you angry, upset, or just ambivalent? Tell us your story, because for better or worse, we've all had to wrestle with security at some point.
Apple gets one-upped on homescreen contact patent
Quite a few people have been asking me what app it was that I used in that post the other day about the rumored new iPhone. Unfortunately, it wasn't an app (although the jailbreak apps LockInfo and Intelliscreen offer similar features) -- it was one concept among many that have been suggested for a potential new homescreen on the iPhone's next OS revision. There have been a lot of great ideas bouncing around for the kinds of information Apple could put on a completely revamped iPhone homescreen: an easier-to-read clock, a list of received push notifications, easy access to contacts and/or email, and more. It seems as though Apple is experimenting with some of those things as well: the company recently filed a patent for including a contact, with picture, on the iPhone's home screen as an icon. Rather than navigate through the system to find your aunt that you call all the time, you could save auntie's picture on the home screen, and then hit one icon to call her up. Unfortunately for Apple, as Engadget points out, the Android OS actually lets you do this already, so the chances of their getting this patent approved are low. But it does tell us that Apple is at least thinking about how they could make the homescreen a little more useful. They may still be tied to the icon scheme, but at least they're looking at adding a little more functionality.
Apple tries for 'adding a contact to a home screen' patent, but Android beat them to the punch
Despite the incredible realism of the drawing above to the left, we're probably not looking at iPhone OS 4.0 right here. Instead we've got Apple doing what Apple does: applying for a patent for some pretty vague functionality that may or may not end up in a device someday. No harm in that game, but it looks like Google's already done the "put a contact on the home screen with their picture" thing before Apple got a chance, as demonstrated on the right. There are other little tidbits to Apple's approach, however. Apple is naturally showing that little numeric badge we know so well, to show what sort of new activity the contact has (hopefully that pulls calls, SMS and email into one pretty little package, like we've seen on other modern operating systems), but Apple also mentions that "an icon associated with an entity can be temporarily displayed on the mobile device based on the proximity of the mobile device to the entity." So, Stalking 2.0. We like it, and hope to see it in some future iPhone software, but between the crazy broad claims in the rest of the patent and Android's prior art, we'd say Apple's chances of getting this 2008 submission approved are pretty slim.
Contact creator's next game: 'Sakura Note'
Marvelous Entertainment revealed Contact director Akira Ueda's next project, Sakura Note, with a teaser web site. According to 1UP's summary of a Famitsu preview of the game, the game involves two mysterious sakura trees in two towns. One is blooming late in the year, and the other is dying. This is somehow connected to a new arrival in your neighborhood, and subsequent attacks against her by ghosts. In order to solve these two mysteries, you explore the nostalgic scenery of two neighboring towns, "talking to people and unlocking new story episodes as you go along." The game is being created by an all-star team. As on Level-5's Fantasy Life, Nobuo Uematsu and Hideo Minaba are contributing music and character design, respectively. Kingdom Hearts' Kazushige Nojima is writing the story, and Half-Minute Hero producer Kenichiro Takagi is producing. Sakura Note will be out in Japan November 5.
Around Azeroth: Contact
No - no words. No words to describe it. Poetry! They should've sent a poet. (But instead they sent Silant <Exploding Kitty Brigade> - US Dalvengyr).So beautiful.So beautiful...Do you have any unusual, beautiful or interesting World of Warcraft images that are just collecting dust in your screenshots folder? We'd love to see them on Around Azeroth! Sharing your screenshot is as simple as e-mailing aroundazeroth@wow.com with a copy of your shot and a brief explanation of the scene. You could be featured here next! Remember to include your player name, server and/or guild if you want it mentioned. Please include the word "Azeroth" in your post so it does not get swept into the spam bin. We strongly prefer full screen shots without the UI showing -- use alt-Z to remove it. Please, no more battleground scoreboards, gold seller ads with dead gnomes any race at all, or pictures of the Ninja Turtles in Dalaran.%Gallery-1816%
