https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YP5goKA4dQ
Blind? Then you’re most likely reading this post on an iOS device, because no other platform has quite the same great level of accessibility options built-in. But that still doesn’t help you when you want to write (unless using Voiceover to find the individual keys is your thing). But I bring good news! Fleksy is a new app which takes predictive text to a ridiculous new level.
As usual, Lonelysandwich (aka. Adam Lisagor)’s video is hilarious and makes you want to buy the product right away (remember the Jambox?). Checkmark is a soon-to-be-released iPhone app which makes setting (and forgetting – for now) location-based reminders easy, and effective.
Sick of forgetting to pick up that [insert household item here] every damn time you visit the grocery store? You need Checkmark.
Much of the discussion about the iPhone and iPad in business focuses on larger enterprise companies and organizations. While the devices are clearly have a lot to offer in the big business arena, the iPhone and iPad are also excellent tools for smaller companies. The versatility of iOS devices, the iPad in particular, lets small business owners perform many crucial tasks like tracking expenses, generating invoices, and planning new projects quickly and easily from a single device.
The App Store is full of apps that can help launch, manage, and grow a business of any size. Many business apps useful to small business are fairly well-known. Square’s mobile payment system (and PayPal’s competing solutions) get a fair amount of coverage in mainstream and tech media stories, for example. There are, however, many great apps for small business users in the App Store that don’t get that kind of publicity.
If you’re a small business owner (or employee), here are ten amazing apps that you may not know about which can help you run your business more easily and efficiently.
An issue with Apple’s App Store and Mac App Store is causing newly-updated Mac and iOS apps to become nonfunctional. Users are reporting that after updating certain apps, they no longer load, but simply crash at the startup screen. It is advised that users avoid updating any of their software until the issue is fixed.
You may occasionally wonder why Apple allows so much crap into the App Store. Despite there being thousands of excellent apps, hundreds of thousands of apps in the App Store’s 600,000+ catalog are worthless pieces or junk and/or knockoffs. Apps often slip into the store that should have never been allowed in the first place, and Apple has to pull the offending app after everyone else takes notice.
Apple employs a small group of people to approve each app that is submitted to the App Store. Mike Lee, a former senior engineer at Apple, has shed some light on what life is like for the people who guard the gateway to the largest and most vibrant app ecosystem in existence.
Finally! Sure, we use that word far too often, but for the iCade Mobile, the physical D-Pad game controller for the iPhone and iPod touch, it seems somewhat appropriate. After what seems like years in development, and months since we saw it at CES, the iCade is finally available to buy at everybody’s favorite nerd-o-rama, ThinkGeek.
If you have any interest in shooting black and white photos with your iPhone, you probably already have Hueless, the excellent colorblind photo app. If not, now is a great time to get it, as the latest 1.1 update brings some neat new features.
Here’s the typical course of a couple of world-changing new technologies:
Printing press. Steve Guttenberg created the moveable type press back in around 1400, shortly after the invention of beatboxing. At first it disrupted the monks' monopoly illuminated manuscripts (books with built-in reading lights), then came the pulp paperback, then comic books, and then people started typing letters to prison inmates.
Postcard. This innocent vacation staple was introduced in the 1800s. It’s a letter without an envelope which can be read by anybody as it travels from sender to recipient, and in this way was the inspiration for the inventors of email. Later, it was used to mail contest answers into Saturday morning TV shows, and in England a smutty variety emerged which is still available today. Then people started sending postcards to prison inmates.
Today, we have the iPhone. I’ll skip the last five years of its history and arrive at today. Now, people can send paper postcards to prison inmates using their iPhones.
After a day of dumb product names (Adixxion, Shoqbox), I’m glad to be able to bring you an app named Mc Loud. You’ll see how clever that name is when I tell you what it does: Mc Loud streams music and movies direct from your Dropbox account.
As a tech writer, I know that pressing Option-Y on my keyboard will give me a ¥ symbol, and that Option-K will add a little degree circle˚ to my article. I even know how to add umlauts (handy for death mëtal band names – just press Option-U and then type a letter) and accents (good for clichés – like an umlaut but using Option-E).
But what about the Apple logo, the copyright symbol, or any of those other essential but seldom used characters? That’s what Characters is for.
Ever wondered if aluminosilicate glass surface of your iPad would make a great dance floor? Now you can find out.
Gameloft promised a June 28th launch for their Amazing Spider-Man mobile game, and sure enough, it’s now available. If you’d like to get your web slinging on, it’ll cost you $6.99 — a price I was fully expecting from Gameloft. The game is available now on Android and iOS and features:
Blogsy, the iPad blogging app, has been updated to version 4. In addition to working with a few new blogging services (Squarespace, Joomla and MetaWeblog), it adds a slew of new features. I have used Bloggsy in the past but found it had too many glitches and weird UI behaviors for me to actually work with it, so I had one question: Could I write this post in it without tearing my hair out?
Remember when someone in the Apple camp let their censoring powers go to their head back in May, and they began censoring the word “jailbreak” across music, movies, apps, and podcasts? It didn’t take the Cupertino company too long to backtrack, and it removed the censor almost entirely just hours later.
I say almost before for podcasts, the word was still considered an expletive — until this morning, when Apple removed the censor completely. Finally.
However dramatic the stories about her extra-curricular activities and personality are, Martha Stewart remains the undisputed queen of crafts.
But the last time I did anything crafty was back in high school when I ditched three periods and headed for the beach — so I wasn’t horribly enthusiastic when Martha Stewart CraftStudio popped up on our radar. Color me shocked though, because it’s pretty darn awesome — especially for kids, and people who actually know what they’re doing.
It seems that my whining prayers for native iPad photo apps have started to answered by the developing gods. And how! MiniatureCam is not only an iPad-specific tilt-shift app, it is fantastically designed, too.
Ever wondered why Facebook’s iOS app is so slow? We’ve explained it all before, but what it comes down to is that the app is an Objective C wrapper around a UIWebView component loading Facebook’s raw HTML data.
Why’s that so slow? Well, UIWebview isn’t very fast, and it has terrible caching, which requires the Facebook app to redownload your entire wall every time it needs to do an update, instead of the chunks it needs.
According to The New York Times, though, that could soon change, and Facebook could ditch the UIWebview bottleneck once and for all.
Instagram was just updated with its first big tweak since it was bought by the Evil Empire, and much of the buzz is about the new Explore section, which replaces the useless Popular tab (which mostly featured I Shot Myself-style self-portraits of pretty girls, and cats).
But Facebook designer Keegan Jones Tweeted out an awesome little tip: long-pressing on the camera icon launches you right into your camera roll.
You know those apps which turn you photos into pencil drawings or watercolors or oil paintings? Let’s face it — almost every single one of them is junk (iPhoto’s paint effect is a rare exception). Which is why Popsicolor is going to blow your socks off.
Want to quickly check the weather on your iPhone? Want to have your eyes soothed by wonderful, minimal design at the same time as you’re informed of the temperature outside? Then you need WTHR, an iPhone app which could have been designed by Dieter Rams himself.
You probably love Instagram filters, and all the other image-tweaking filters in the myriad apps available for your iPhone. But no matter how many you try, they are all just presets.
What if you could make your own presets instead? That’s the promise of Booster!, an iPhone 4/s (or iPad 3 if you don’t mind pixel-doubling) photo app with infinitely changeable live filter effects.
SkimClip is a very clever, and very handy little Mac app. What it does it this: With one keystroke, you can make a screen grab of any part of your Mac’s desktop and SkimClip saves it and performs OCR.
Thus, any image containing text is instantly cataloged for searching. Sure, you could also roll your own PDF workflow to do the same thing, but as SkimClip also organizes the results into an iTunes-like interface with search, subcategories and quick-look, and only costs $5 on the Mac App Store, then why bother?
Plus, this is yet another way to convert DRM-encumbered e-books into plain old go-anywhere text.
SkimClip v1.0 is available now in the Mac App Store.
Source: Dom Loves Kim Software
It’s our inalienable right as citizens of the modern world to take a vacation or a holiday, right? Well, instead of packing your whole family off to an all-inclusive Club Med vacation or Disney cruise, how about taking on one of the most time-honored summer vacation traditions, the road-trip. Long drives through scenic countryside with loving families and family pets are some of the best memories we all have, right? Right?
Well, at least we have iOS devices with us these days to both combat boredom and make sure we arrive where we want to. Here’s a veritable cornucopia of apps and ideas for road-tripping this summer, iOS-style.
Many IT departments are under intense pressure to develop and implement a range of mobility initiatives. Those initiatives often span a range of IT disciplines. There’s the effort to develop internal apps, provide access to new and legacy systems from mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad, the need to manage and support users devices as part of BYOD programs, and the need to develop customer-facing solutions like mobile-oriented sites and native apps.
With so many pressures hitting IT organizations at the same, compromises are being made because of tight deadlines and budgets. According to security expert Jeff Williams, that push to get solutions out as quickly as possible may result in solutions that have major security flaws in them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXPWgEcIUI8
Years ago, I worked out a way to remote control my home’s lamps from my iPhone: just record the sound of somebody clapping, and play it back when you want to switch a light on or off.
Now, though, there’s a much higher-tech way to do the same thing. It’s an iPhone-controlled lightbulb from Insteon.