So this is the web that you don’t see; the web in text-only form. Ugly, isn’t it?
Yeah, ugly. But fast. By disregarding everything that isn’t text, browsers like Lynx display web pages at lightning speed. If all you want to do is read stuff, Lynx is useful to have around. And if you don’t want to do that, it’s fun to play with. For five minutes.
But not many people are comfortable enough with the Terminal to install it manually on their Mac. It’s not the kind of app that comes with a drag-and-drop installer.
Well, it wasn’t, until Lynxlet came along. Lynxlet gives you the best of both worlds: the text-only speediness and the drag-and-drop simplicity. Nice.
Lynxlet’s maker calls apps like this “Termlets”, and Lynxlet isn’t the only one available: you can grab a handful of others here.
There aren’t many games on the iPhone platform that can match games on the big 64-bit boxes for production value — but Electronic Arts Mobile’s Madden NFL 10 can, and does, fantastically. Unfortunately, it also has one gaping hole.
Google's Nexus One smartphone. CC-licensed picture by ekai.
It’s been a month since my review of Google’s “SuperPhone”, the Nexus One. Since that time, we’ve surfed, updated facebook, navigated, called, played endless hands of cribbage and even tried to freeze it to death on a trip to Dayton Ohio. Follow me after the jump to find out does the “SuperPhone” stand the test of time, or is it a phonebooth’d Clark Kent.
Forgive me for banging on about Notational Velocity – but it’s such an awesome app that it deserves a place on your Mac. And this week it just got a little awesomer.
The latest version of NV includes native support for syncing with Simplenote, the iPhone app and web notes service.
As I noted the other week in a post about rival (and NV-inspired) notes app Nottingham, the great thing about Simplenote is that you get access to what I call an “ecosystem”. Your notes are safe – there’s copies of them in the cloud and inside your NV database. But because Simplenote encourages third-party apps, you’ll always have plenty of choice about how you access those notes from your computer.
NV has also undergone a few visual tweaks to smarten up its appearance, not least of them smart and funny new icon by Colin Cody. There are some more technical details about the new update on this blog post if you’re interested.
Having all my Notational Velocity notes automatically and wirelessly synced with my phone is just wonderful. If you need a similarly simple synced notes service, I encourage you to download Notational Velocity and sign up for a Simplenote account. You won’t regret it.
I’ll admit, the first alarming thought that shot through my head when I stumbled across this vidclip on YouTube of Cult jefe Leander Kahney, was that he’d created it as fun-yet-terror-inducing way of emphasizing the “dead” part of the word “deadline” to Cult staff.
Turns out it was actually created by app developer Toga Pit — btw, cute marketing there, guys — to promote their new, maniacal-laughter-inducing iTouchMyFriends app, which turns images of your friends into manipulatable puppets. Just the evilness of the name ran shivers of anticipatory pleasure down my spine as I secured a copy to explore. I wasn’t disappointed.
What it is: Skimble is a fitness-tracking iPhone app that stands out from the crowd by keeping track of rock climbing, swimming, and even yoga.
Why it’s cool: Maria Ly created Skimble because she found no good tools for tracking the sports she had become passionate about in recent years. Basically, she’s become a very good rock climber in a very short time, and didn’t have a way to really track that progress and get a clear picture of how far she had come. She also does a lot of yoga, and, unsurprisingly, Nike+ doesn’t work so well for quantifying the impact of your Downward Dogs and Sun Salutations.
Fortunately, Maria’s a talented software engineer, so she was actually able to do something about it. And, as a rock climber (though one not quite so good as Ly), I can say that Skimble is just about perfect for tracking your climbing and bouldering efforts. I put into action at my local climbing emporium Mission Cliffs yesterday, and I was easily able to click a button to select the difficulty of the climb, the fashion in which I finished it, and a note (typically the name of the route). And as a result, I have a record of where I succeeded, where I failed, and where I maybe over-did it (that would be the late 5.12a I threw in).
Way back when the iPhone was the much-speculated upon Apple product of the future, I took the liberty to imagine a time when the iPhone would be a legitimate mobile gaming competitor, tackling Nintendo and Sony head-on. It was a fun bit of predictification back then, but it’s science fact today. The clearest evidence yet that Nintendo’s dominance of portable gaming might be threatened is Rockstar Games’ much-anticipatedGrand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, an epic, multi-hour crime game that is deeper than anything I’ve seen on the iPhone to date.
Moodagent is one of those apps that seems like, at first glance, it’ll cure world hunger, or abruptly manifest all those single socks you’ve lost over the past seven years — a holy-crap,-I-just-gotta-have-this-app, app.
Sometimes I wake up from a dream where I’ve fashioned a majestic rock symphony. I’ll fumble around for my trusty digital recorder, groggily hum a few throaty bars and fall back asleep; then in the morning I find myself listening to something that sounds like a drowning donkey (or more frequently, I find I’ve forgotten to flip the “hold” switch).
Well, hell with that — for $3, I bought VoiceBand by WaveMachineLabs and turned my iPhone into a recording studio. What’s really cool is that all I have to do is vocalize into the mic and the app transforms my voice into a remarkably credible imitation of a musical instrument.
It was a rainy Sunday afternoon when I was suddenly bewitched by the heavenly tones of a siren’s call radiating from the single speaker inside my favorite Starbucks. I was enraptured, overwhelmed with the sudden desire to find out to whom these dulcet tones belonged! Gripped in a fever of curiosity, I quizzed the barista, but — tragedy! She didn’t know! Would I never find the answer?
After I calmed down a bit, I realized, like everything else, there’s an app for that. In fact, there are two — one of which is truly outstanding.
We take pictures to remember our own lives better and tell stories about the people who matter most to us. In older days, we had photo albums. These days, we have gigantic digital libraries on our computers, and a lot of the time it’s pretty disorganized. Sure, the most important photos are grouped into albums and what-not, but little else is. The meaning behind the pictures isn’t obvious.
Apple has taken steps to address this in iPhoto 09, adding in face detection and the ability to take people in pictures for searching by participant and searching by geography via GPS data, but these elements aren’t well-intertwined — and it does a bad job of considering the long view. That’s where MemoryMiner, a very nice piece of shareware from GroupSmarts, steps in.
