Giles Turnbull - page 32

Here’s a hilarious 5 minute talk by Eugene Lin, explaining how his career as an iPhone app developer started, shook unsteadily for a while, bumped into some rocks, lost altitude, gained altitude, and finally rocketed skywards when he had a certain ephiphany.

That epiphany: give people what they want. Which these days often involves scantily clad women. Better still, virtual ones. Better still, virtual ones in 3D. Well, sort of 3D, but you get the idea.

Now are you starting to see why the iSlabTabletSlateCanvasBookPadPod is going to sell so well?

Via Boing Boing.

Tablet? YES!

With its own App Store? MAYBE!

More hype than Avatar? CERTAINLY!

If you’ve spent the last week or so thinking about the new iTabletSlateBookCanvasPod and nothing else, you’ll probably want to grab David Weiss’s Prediction score card for tomorrow’s big announcement. Then you can check off the features as they come tumbling from the Jobsian lips.

Or, you could shell out a couple of bucks for Weiss’s freshly-approved iPhone app of the same name. This gives you the chance to drool slavishly over the whole gamut of upcoming tech events. (It’s true: other companies do sometimes hold events and announce things.)

The app connects you to an online community of predictions, predictors, and metadata thereof. You can add your own predictions to the mix, and feast on the glory of recognition by your peers when you are proved right. Alternatively, count how many blogs reported your predictions as damn-near-fact even though you ended up getting them all spectacularly wrong. Which is another kind of glory too.

Via John Gruber.

John Gruber’s favorite iPhone notepad app, Simplenote, got an updated earlier this week. From now on, it’s free and supported by advertising.

Gaines Kergosien filmed this amusing little interlude at Trevecca Nazarene University the other day.

A student politely asked Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to sign his Mac – and Ballmer genially played along.

Next week, Sergey and Larry will be doing guest slots in a “Get a Mac” ad, with Sergey as Mac and Larry as PC.

(Via The Guardian.)

Behold! The OfficePOD!

The OfficePOD gives you just over 4 square metres of space to swivel your chair and tap on your Mac keyboard. It comes with LED lighting, secure locks, and an electrical connection to your home. All you need to do is move yourself and your Mac inside, and you’re ready to work!

But what else does it have going for it?

The latest iPhone photo app to grab my attention and that of a handful of Flickr users is Phototropedelic.

Users of Mac OS X are spoilt for choice when it comes to notepad apps. We have dozens of text editors and word processors to choose from. There are more browsers than we can shake a collective stick at.

But email clients? Well, there’s not so many of those. And one developer, Brent Simmons of NetNewsWire fame, says he’d like to see at least one more.

The dev channel version of Google Chrome for Mac has been updated with a long-awaited new feature: a bookmark manager.

Cheese, ladies and gentlemen: cheese.

Beloved foodstuff of Wallace and Gromit, primary geological building block of the moon, and cause of a surprising number of international disputes. And frequently, the main ingredient in my lunchtime sandwiches.

Anyway, if you can’t let a day pass without thinking about cheese, without wishing for a nice firm chunk of cheese to chew on, or without wondering what cheese would best accompany the cheesy dish you’re planning to eat when you get home tonight, you might wish to shell out a couple of dollars for the Fromage app for iPhone or iPod touch.

Fromage lists hundreds of cheeses from Europe and the United States. For each cheese, there’s a photo, a description, and some tasting notes.

Version 3 of the app added personalization: you can add star ratings to all the cheeses you’ve tried, and write your own notes into a built-in database of cheese history goodness.

Cheese. Cheese, cheese, cheese. Cheese.

The Copenhagen climate talks last December might have been a political disaster, but here’s another project from the same city that might make a difference for some. And yay – it’s iPhone friendly.

The Copenhagen Wheel is an ingenious hub that you can fit to almost any bike, instantly turning it into a hybrid electric bicycle and data capture device.

Clip your iPhone or A.N.Other smartphone on to the handlebars, and it can talk to the wheel over Bluetooth.

Ever have that feeling that you’ve had a rotten night’s sleep, and the last thing you want to do is get up out of bed?

Yeah, me too.

Sleep Cycle is an iPhone app that says it might be able to help.

Got your iPhone ready? Great.

Go here. See the pretty animation. You just got Flash on your iPhone.

And people said it would never happen.

This video is all over Twitter this morning, and you can see why.

Never mind a rotating Lego iPhone dock – here’s one with added steering wheel, so you can use it to play all your fave tilt-to-steer racing games.

Expect crappy plastic versions of this to appear pretty much everywhere in the coming months, all of them priced 20 bucks and none of them any good. If you really want one, build your own.

Inspired.

Tyler Hall, the developer behind Nottingham is quite clear: he loved Notational Velocity so much, he wanted to make a version of his own.

LAS VEGAS — OK, you got your iPhone 3GS. You record your video. It shakes and wobbles and wibbles all over the place, but no-one minds because that’s what they expect from hand-held video recording.

Not any more, though.

I like electronic notebooks, and I’ve spent a lot of time over the years trying out all the different ones on offer. The latest newcomer is myRichTexts and from what I’ve seen of it so far, I’m quite impressed.

You’ve probably noticed that I tend to get a little overexcited about iPhone photography apps. I got so excited about the Lego Photo app that Pete mentioned the other day, I went and made a Flickr group for it. But this post is about another little gem I’ve found, under the name Hipstamatic.

Just before Christmas, we asked you: What were your favorite desktop apps of 2009?

Based on the responses we got, two apps got fractionally more mentions than most: Google Chrome, and OmmWriter. Neither of which were apps I expected to see topping many end-of-year lists.

Flickr user raneko (who is no stranger to regular Cult readers) has just uploaded a bunch of fantastic photos of Apple mice through the ages.

One of the features I loved from the first moment I saw it in Windows 7 was Snap, the one that lets you instantly resize any document window by dragging it to one side of your screen.

Irradiated Software makes a Mac utility that does a similar job. It’s called Sizeup, and I find it pretty useful. But it’s keyboard-controlled, not mouse-controlled, and you have to remember some new shortcuts to get the most from it. How about a mouse-controlled alternative?

Enter Cinch, a new app from the Sizeup developers.

It’s that time of year again folks.

Last December, we asked you to nominate your favorite new desktop apps of 2008. Popular choices back then included Evernote, Dropbox, 1Password and Things.

But what new stuff has grabbed your attention during 2009?

Let’s assume, just for a moment, that the rumors of an Apple tablet device are true.

And let’s also assume, just for the length of this post, that Apple wants to use this tablet to do the same to publishing that it did to music: turn everything upside down.

Hands up who loves the Muppets and I’ll count, starting with me.

Disney’s just released an “Animal Drummer”, a rhythm game for people who enjoy Animal’s unique (and somewhat insane) drumming style.

So Apple has allowed into the Store a third-party video recording application for plain old 2G and 3G iPhones; but honestly, don’t get your hopes up too high.

iVideoCamera by Laan Labs suffers some serious limitations: it only records three frames a second, it can only record for a minute at most, and resolution is just 160×213. It’s little more than a series of stills stitched together into something vaguely resembling moving pictures.

UK newspaper The Guardian this morning launched its iPhone app.

And wow, it’s pretty damn good.