Giles Turnbull - page 13

YouTube wasn’t supposed to be a music player, but that’s what a lot of people use it for. There are millions of songs on YouTube – the only problem is finding them.

That’s why you might enjoy a Mac app called Musictube, which takes the hard work out of finding and playing the songs you want. If you want a video jukebox on your Mac, this is it.

You know about Activity Monitor for your Mac, right? How would you like to have an Activity Monitor for your iPhone too? Something like Activity Monitor Touch might do the trick.

Not many opera companies have ventured on to the App Store, but London’s Royal Opera House has and the result is something unexpected: not a listings app, not a tickets app, not anything you’d normally associate with opera. It’s a game. And it’s great.

New on the Mac App Store is Tincta, a text editor for coders and writers. It’s small, lightweight, fast – and free.

I’ll confess right from the start that I’m not much of a gamer. I tend to just play lightweight puzzles and dip-in-and-out games that don’t demand too much attention. But Aquaria is something special – an incredibly detailed action/RPG that’s compelling enough to pull even a non-gamer like me right in, and keep me playing for hours.

This is the Incase Origami Workstation ($30), a case for your Apple Wireless keyboard.

Yes, you read that right: this is not an iPad case. It’s a keyboard case. But it’s awesome. Here’s why.

The new Doctor Who Encyclopedia for iOS claims to offer everything a Who fan might need to know about the three most recent incarnations of TV’s best-known time traveller. But this is one app that could do with a zap from a sonic screwdriver: although it’s stuffed full of facts, the presentation could be improved.

Streetmate is a nice little photo app I stumbled over on the App Store a few weeks ago. It’s a camera app all about shooting, not editing.

For the last few weeks I’ve been using DuckDuckGo as my search engine, not just on my Mac but also on my iPhone.

The iPhone app in particular was a delightful eye-opener.

If you need to do some serious writing on your iPad, you should give Writing Kit a try.

When Apple announced iCloud, it also announced the end of MobileMe web hosting.

If you’re among the small community of iWeb/MobileMe users who’ve been wondering what to do when MobileMe finally gets switched off next June, I suggest you take a look at Sandvox as one possible replacement.

So you get a shiny new iPhone 4S, and you want to make Siri do something cool. Cooler than Shit That Siri Says, anyway.

What do you do? You get Siri to pour you a beer, of course. And you call it Beeri. Hic.

(Photo by Chrissy Polcino, used with thanks under Creative Commons license.)

So here’s former Oasis megastar Noel Gallagher, quoted in The Mirror this weekend:

I just want a basic 1994 Nokia mobile. I can keep it in my back pocket and just do the basics with it – phone and text. What would I need a camera on it for? iPhones are for Cockneys and ****s. And they are far too big.

It’s not clear to us exactly which insult The Mirror decided to blank out with asterisks, but feel free to use your imagination on that.

UK newspaper The Independent launched an iPad app this morning, but it still needs a little work.

The free app is a far cry from the offering by The Guardian, which we raved about recently, but The Indie (as it is affectionately known by UK hacks) has had to struggle by on a tiny budget for decades. It’s not going to have the same sort of cash to spend on digital news projects.

Sadly, that shows in this morning’s newly-launched app. It’s functional, but very basic. There’s no access to an archive of issues; you get today’s paper, swiftly downloaded to your device when you open the app (so offline reading is possible).

But as a newspaper reading experience, it’s disappointing. You can’t swipe your way between articles. The primary navigation tool is an icon of a bullet list in the top left corner – tap this and you’ll see links to section front pages, and from those you can reach individual stories. The upshot is a lot of tapping to move around, which soon feels like hard work.

Stranger still, today’s launch issue shows signs of being released before it’s ready. On story pages, the newspaper’s masthead graphic doesn’t quite fit into the space allocated for it, so the line immediately below cuts through the graphic. Worse still, there are broken images all over the place, even on the front page. Teething problems, no doubt, but a shame they weren’t spotted before the app was made public.

If you’re a regular reader of The Indie and like reading news on your iPad, you’ll probably jump to get this app. But as it stands right now, there’s little on offer here to tempt people away from other news apps.

[xrr rating=40%]

My original plan when downloading this app was to use it as the basis for a little light humor.

“Sorry readers, can’t write another word, my phone is telling me to go and kiss someone.” That sort of thing.

But after downloading it, I made a terrible mistake: I actually tried using it. It turns out When Should You Kiss is the worst thing I’ve seen on iOS for a long, long time.

This is the Lytro, a bizarre and radical new concept in digital photography that lets you snap an image now, and worry about focusing it later.

Pre-orders just opened today, and you can grab one for as little as $399 (I’ll take two!). But before you click the order button, make sure you have a Mac – because Lytro doesn’t work with Windows computers yet.

Want to see just how good the iPhone 4S is as a video camera? Yeah, so did this guy. So he made a side-by-side comparison – and the results show the 4S is a pretty impressive piece of video recording kit.

Color Uncovered is a neat little educational app for kids and grown-ups, all about the weird and mysterious science of color.

The BBC’s technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones wanted to find out which smartphone was the best listener, so he conducted a quick test of his own.

He spoke the same text into a Siri-equipped iPhone 4S and a Samsung Galaxy Tab, and compared the transcribed results.

The Guardian‘s new iPad app is a triumph. It’s an excellent daily newspaper in tablet form, designed to make the most of the tablet format without over-indulging in it.

I confess: when I first looked at Apple’s new Newsstand app when iOS5 was released last week, I felt nonplussed. There didn’t seem to be any content in the store that I’d want to subscribe to. I became one of the many people who tried to find ways to hide the Newsstand icon altogether.

If you like your bleepy music with a healthy dose of retro, you might like to know that right now on the iOS Store you can grab a copy of the latest virtual synthesizer from electronic music pioneers Moog – for just 99 cents.

Apple’s release of iOS5 caused “the highest ever traffic” over the UK broadband network, BT has confirmed.

We reported yesterday that demand for iOS5 caused “unprecendented” broadband traffic for some UK internet service providers – but today, BT (which manages the entire national broadband network as well as running its own ISP business, BT Retail) sent the following statement to Cult of Mac:

Over the last two nights, BT has experienced the highest ever traffic levels over the UK broadband network.

(Image by Cain and Todd Benson, used under Creative Commons license. Thanks Cain and Todd!)

Users of photo sharing site Flickr have started posting their own tributes to Steve Jobs. This digital portrait by Cain and Todd Benson is just one example – there are hundreds more.

Demand for yesterday’s iOS 5 release combined with all the associated updates for OS X and other apps caused “unprecedented levels” of traffic over one UK broadband network.

Writing on their own network status alerts site, engineers at UK ISP AAISP reported that “something was up” at 8.48pm UK time last night.

We’ve seen the first rash of iPhone 4 reviews coming in, and they all agree on one thing: Siri is very impressive.

It works because it does several things all at once. It understands what you’re saying, irrespective of your accent, and without a lot of initial training. And it understands what you mean, because it has the built-in smarts to know that if you say “Tell my wife I’m running late,” you mean “Send a text message to this particular contact with text that says I’m running late.”

But this is just the start for Siri (which Apple’s acknowledged by calling it a beta). The iPhone 4S is the first Apple device that supports it – it certainly won’t be the last. Where might Siri go next?