This is a great idea, and bound to go down very well with your kids.
Balloons is simple: you launch a virtual balloon into the air from your phone. You add a photo and a text message to the label that dangles below the balloon, and send it off.
Anyone with the Balloons app can catch that balloon and add their own message. If you shell out for the paid version, you can track the balloons you’ve launched and see what other people have added to them.
To celebrate and set things off, we’ve created a Cult of Mac balloon for you to catch. It’s purple with green stripes, and has a photo of the Cult home page at the top. If you catch it, let us know what you think about Balloons.
This is a particularly friendly application. I can see school classes all over the world launching balloons to make contacts in other schools. And Shiny development have wisely kept the choice of balloons fairly limited to start with; I wouldn’t be surprised to see custom balloons appearing soon, as an in-app purchase.
Some readers might remember the fuss a few weeks ago, when Snow Leopard came out and people noticed that it did something screwy to the way files behave.
There’s a dirty little secret lurking within the hearts of iPhone and the iPod touch: neither of them is a particularly great music player. A lot of iPhone owners actually keep a separate iPod nano or classic with them to listen to their music libraries. I’m not one of them, but I’m thinking about it.
Don’t get me wrong. Syncing media to modern Apple handheld is the best such experience money can buy, and the actual playback and browsing experiences are in the top tier of media phones and Internet tablets. That doesn’t mean they’re great, though. For the most part, the iPod app found on the iPhone and touch is a fairly literal translation of the original iPod interface ported over to a much higher-end device, plus an overly complex Cover Flow mode — which doesn’t even work well with Playlists. And that’s kind of pathetic, given Apple’s ordinarily high standards.
This is not the usual case where Apple is so far ahead of the competition that it’s not even clear how a media player app should change as it migrates to a modern multitouch platform. The video linked above is the proposed Rachael UI for the media player app in Sony Ericsson’s Android-based phones. It’s not amazing, but it does a few things really, really well. Notably, it provides a lot of rich information on artist pages that brings back some of the feel of listening to a physical album, and it also makes it easy to find your favorites, recently added albums, and tracks, and your most recently played music — all on one screen. That alone, in my opinion, annihilates the best of the current iPhone music experience. And I think we’d all agree it’s a refreshing departure from either a long list of artists listed in alphabetical order as a home screen.
The Zune HD, though its UI is an overly stylized collection of wank, also does some interesting things with tagged favorites that show the untapped possibilities available in next-generation handheld music playback.
I’ve had my iPhone 3GS for about four months now, and I love everything about it — except that it doesn’t do a great job of helping me rediscover diamonds in the rough of my music collection. The iPod app is good enough, but it isn’t great yet. Here’s hoping that the old competitive spirit will push Apple to truly push the edges of what’s possible. Shouldn’t we be able to view iTunes LPs on the iPhone, at the very least?
Philip Dow, the developer behind Journler, has announced that work on the app is at an end. While he will continue to provide support for users, there will be no new releases.
In a brutally honest and open blog post, Philip spells out precisely what brought an end to Journler – its own success.
The first was something I called “Supermarket Spotlight”, and it was described thus:
“Like Spotlight on your Mac, but for supermarkets in meatspace. You tell it that you’re in Tesco in Trowbridge, then start typing in the product you’re after. It tells you: ‘Aisle 12, section 2, top shelf, on the right if you’ve got your back to the cash tills.’ Either that, or it simply does the augmented reality thing and takes you there, beeping louder as you get closer, like a geiger counter.”
Adobe has announced the release of Photoshop for your iPhone or iPod touch – although the software is closely tied to Adobe’s Photoshop.com photo hosting and sharing service.
What it is: HippoRemote is an incredibly powerful remote control application for iPhone that enables you to control any Mac application from across the room. Though optimized for media apps like Plex Media Server or Boxee, it can do just about anything — including launching Spotlight from the keyboard.
Why it’s cool: Because it finally puts every possible thing you could do on a Mac at your fingertips. It uses Mac OS X’s built-in Screen Sharing features to provide a very responsive multi-touch trackpad that moves around with you. It also offers a keyboard including F-keys and command keys that can be viewed in Portrait or in Landscape. It’s absolutely seamless. It also includes 23 application-specific suites of buttons, so you have video controls for iTunes or Plex movies, but audio controls when you’re just listening to a song. Other apps, most notably Rowmote Pro, offer identical functionality, but this one just feels more accurate — possibly because it uses VNC Screen Sharing instead of a third-party program. I’m actually writing this on my iPhone into my Mac right now, and there’s virtually no lag. Additionally, it’s worked without a hitch. Simply fuss free, and perfect for your living room Mac mini.
Where to get it: HippoRemote sells for $5 in the App Store.
Ken’s trick depends on a little bit of Applescript to make it work. But not everyone knows Applescript, which is where another app called Hazel comes in handy.
With over 75 gazillion apps in the iTunes App Store now having generated more than Umpteen billion downloads, it might seem a tad preposterous to try and pick the 10 with the most beautiful GUIs.
But we’ve never let being a tad preposterous stop us before and we’re not saying these are the 10 most beautiful apps in the App Store — we’re just saying these 10 are beautiful. In almost every case, too, they have other redeeming features that make them worth checking out if you don’t have them already.
And don’t forget to let us know in comments if you’ve found something useful and beautiful that we may have missed here.
Classics is the, uh, classic reader app that lets you experience some of the greatest works of literature ever produced — in a digital format that’s so natural and so obvious, it just feels right. Meticulous care has been given to the typography and illustration of works such as Alice in Wonderland, The Art of War, Paradise Lost and many more, with sensual touches like realistic 3D page flips, a satin bookmark to remember where you left off reading and a beautiful woodgrain bookcase to store your collection.
For years, people used to bash Macs by noting the absence of what was viewed to be an absolute essential application. Though there’s still a hold-out or two (we’re still waiting for AutoCAD for Mac, despite hints to the contrary), things are much better these days.
No application, perhaps, embodies this change more than Intuit’s QuickBooks. The company abandoned support for business accounting software package on the Mac in 1997, then pushed out a superficial and generally disappointing port for OS X in 2003. But things started to look up three years ago with QuickBooks 2007 for Mac, the first Mac-like QuickBooks release in almost a decade.
Intuit’s newfound commitment to the platform continues with this morning’s announcement of QuickBooks 2010 for Mac (out in late October for $200), which uses signature OS X UI elements to create a more intuitive accounting experience.I had the chance to observe the software in action yesterday, and there’s a lot to be impressed by. Read on to learn more.
When the installer contains two spelling mistakes, it’s a sign you’re installing quality software.
From Adobe UI Gripes, a site that describes itself as: “Me moaning about shoddy UI inconsistencies and mistakes in Adobe products and how they get shittier with every release.”
It’s a well-known fact around these parts that Tweetie is the best of all Twitter clients (and it’s exclusive to iPhone and Mac, as all great things are). Today, we got to see just how much better it can get, as developer Loren Brichter and somebetatesters shared their thoughts on the much-anticipated Tweetie 2.0, which should be released for both Mac and iPhone within the next week.
First, the bad news. Though the Mac version will be a free upgrade, Tweetie 2 for iPhone will be $2.99, given that it’s a complete rewrite (and functionally a different app). But it looks to be well worth your hard-earned $3 bill. Here’s a taste of the functionality:
Full persistence (you can do something else and come back to the app, and it’s like you never left; who needs multitasking)
Landscape support
Support for Project ReTweet API and future geolocation APIs
View threaded conversations
Sync with Address Book for full communication integration
Video support
Drafts manager
New compose screen, including @user picker, recent hashtags, multiple attachments manager and more
Short URL previews
Same code base as Tweetie for Mac
Yeah, you saw that last bullet right. From a functional standpoint, Tweetie for both platforms will be a single application, which means (most) of this goodness is coming your way. I can’t wait to get my hands on it. Take a bow, Mr. Brichter.
