SayAnything
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Daily iPad App: Say Anything lets you get somebody's attention without saying a thing
Sometimes you need to get a person's attention without saying a word. You can wave your hand wildly at them, but all that vigorous movement may scare them away. A better way to get someone's attention is to pull out your iPad and fire up a banner app like Say Anything from Appy Inc. Say Anything is a simple banner app that lets you type in text and scroll it across your iPad's display just like a ticker tape. It has a swipe-based interface that uses both vertical and horizontal swiping gestures. A horizontal swipe sets your banner in motion and controls the speed, while a vertical swipe lets you scroll among your messages. Speaking of messages, your messages can have unlimited characters and you can save them for later use. You can save an unlimited number of preset messages (99-cent in-app purchase required) and use a favorites list to make it easy to find your most used messages. Unlike the paper banners of yore, you can jazz up your messages on the fly by changing the background color and adjusting the font color and face. There's also a mirror mode that's available as a 99-cent in-app purchase. Your message and its background are fully customizable, but, like mirror mode and unlimited presets, these changes come with a cost. If you want to adjust the size of the text, add more fonts or swap out the background for an image or a texture, you have to activate those features via an in-app purchase. Each feature costs 99-cents, but you can save yourself some cash and buy all five features (fonts, scaling, background, mirror and unlimited preset messages) for a reasonable US$1.99. What sets Say Anything apart from its competition is its ease of use and quality design. It's a fast, responsive app with a clean UI that lets you get your message across to someone in just a few seconds. I've been using it off and on for the past few weeks and am pleased with its performance. The developers are also responsive to problems and committed to producing a quality app. Say Anything is available for free from the iOS App Store, so you can try the basic features of the app without spending any money. If you like the app, then you should spend the $1.99 to unlock all five features and get rid of those pop-ups that appear every time you click on a paid feature that you haven't bought yet. You'll be glad you did.
How iPod docks have reshaped movies
TV shows and movies often reflect the prevailing pop cultural themes of their day and age. One fixture from the eighties and early nineties was the boombox. Like big hair, Members Only jackets, and women wearing shoulder pad-laden tops, boomboxes were seemingly everywhere during that era. You'd be hard pressed not to find a boombox adorned on one's shoulder or booming away on a playground in many urban cities. Much like how Sony passed the Walkman/Discman torch to the iPod, boomboxes have given way to iPod docks. On this eve launch of the potentially revolutionary iPad, which could displace books and magazines, let's take a stroll through memory lane and look at some flicks that may not be as relevant if made in today's technological age. Long before he made Jerry Maguire, Vanilla Sky and Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe wrote and directed Say Anything. After getting dumped by Ms. pretty-, class valedictorian- and has everything going for her- Diane Court, Lloyd Dobbler sets out to prove that he's a "man" in a world "full of guys." In an effort to win back Diane's heart, Lloyd parks his car outside her house, whips out and perches his boombox above his head and plays Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes." Imagine this pivotal scene being played out with, say, an iHome. Definitely not as sexy.
