iPhone apps - page 36

The next time sharp-eyed citizens in Philadelphia see waste, fraud or abuse in their local government, they can report it directly to the city controller with an app.

Called Philly Watchdog, the app offered gratis for the iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad in iTunes has been available since April 12 but officially launched yesterday.

“When it comes to reporting fraud and waste in Philadelphia, I’m proud to say that ‘we now have an app for that,'” said City Controller Alan Butkovitz, at a press conference. “Like any investigative unit of government, we often rely on the public to help us identify waste and fraud in city government. It is critically important for government to be on the same technological page as our citizens.”

The iPhone may now rank third for smart phone market share, but it is still number one for banking applications.

Market researchers TowerGroup found that Android currently has  31.2 percent of the market share; 30.4 percent is owned by RIM; Apple has 24.7 percent. Trailing them by large amounts are Microsoft Window 7 phones with a paltry 8 percent and Palm devices are just at 3.2 percent.

But banks are writing applications for mobile services such as account access and online bill pay for the iPhone because that’s the phone for which most other industry developers are creating applications.

“But support for the Android is surging,” said Andy Schmidt, TowerGroup’s research director for commercial banking and payments, speaking at the company’s annual financial services conference in Boston.

Other banking-related findings: about 60 percent of phone purchases this year will be completed on smartphones and 56 percent of the 200 banks attending the conference offered neither mobile bill pay or mobile gift cards.

Side question: how much banking do you currently do on your mobile phone?

I downloaded my bank’s app, but the only time I actually used it was while on vacation to check credit card charges.

Via MacWorld UK

It’s always sexy time in Philadelphia, apparently.

Public health officials there are the latest in the U.S. to arm horny inhabitants with info on where to find condom dispensers via mobile phones in the hopes of helping bring down STD rates in young people.

iCondom Philly, offered free in iTunes, is launching as part of a health campaign that includes a sex ed site called Take Control Philly. The city is in the top 10 U.S. cities for sexually transmitted diseases with a disproportionate number of adolescents affected.

If you don’t live in Philadelphia, you may still be in luck. iCondom Philly piggybacks off an app called iCondom, which provides the same info for New York City and Washington D.C.

Gratis to download but ad supported, thanks to hordes of helpful randy regular joes (and josephines) who have added condom dispenser info,  it can also help you locate the goods in Brazil, Spain, Australia, Canada, UK, France, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden and Ireland.

“When we designed iCondom, we had in mind that the application could be easily developed to meet the needs of each city’s publicly-run condom programs that exist worldwide. Philadelphia immediately understood how useful the application could be in targeting youth 11 to 19 years old,” said Morgane Danielou, Founder of iCondom.

What’s better than a free app? Yeah, two of them — so today’s Daily Freebie is actually a twofer. Both are from MacPhun, developer of the PhotoStudio app we reviewed yesterday.

The first is a free version of PerfectPhoto, macPhun’s iPhone photo editor. It may lack the fancy filters of the paid version, but it comes with all the darkroom tools you’ll need to edit photos on the iPhone: adjust exposure, contrast, color temp, shadows, crop images and even a posterize and vintage effect. Frankly, you’re going to be using PhotoStudio for the effects anyway.

The second app, Cartoonatic, (that’s a screencap from its App Store page, above) is where the real fireworks are, though — it’ll let you transform a video clip with nine different, wild-looking effects, with live previews while recording, the ability to play around with the clip’s speed, add a soundtrack from your music library and all kinds of other neat stuff. That’s a lot of wow for free.

A  Texas Sheriff credits a new crime tip app for making a major drug bust.

We wrote just last week about whether the Eye on Laredo app was more “neighborhood watch 2.0,” as local law enforcement was pitching it, or digital vigilante.

The app has apparently already hit paydirt. Someone using it reported “suspicious activity” in a Blue Jeep on Mines Road (which looks to be a fairly deserted area) and tipped off police.

Police noticed the same blue Jeep at a convenience store about 12 miles from the sighting. They also spotted some large bundles in the cab, which turned out to be nearly 400 pounds marijuana, valued at $200,000.

Via Pro 8 News

These may not be the worst of times, but they’re not the best either. So the folks who make Geotrio Tours, an iPhone app that allows users to become virtual tour guides, think that awesomeness should be rewarded — they built a feature in their virtual tour app that allows people who go on the user-made tours to tip their guides, all from within the app.

The tours use the iPhone’s GPS to guide tourists along a set route, with photos and audio automatically popping up at predetermined points along the route. If they enjoyed the tour (and if they’re not cheap sods), at the end of the tour, tourists can leave tips for the guide. Virtual guides can make tours of anything they want, for free, at Geotrio’s website, or via their free TourRecorder app. There’s also a paid, pro version for the likes of big institutions.

No one’s going to make a million bucks off the app (if your tour is that good, send me a link), but it might net you some money for time invested in a fun little project.

Forget those china plates, iPad and iPhone apps are the new must-haves for people who want to follow the fairy tale wedding of Kate Middleton and Prince William.

To makes sure there is as much interest as possible on April 29, broadcasters and publishers are crowding the iTunes store with dozens of apps, many of them free, aimed at filling the teacups of royal watchers the world over to brimming.

Among them are the Royal Wedding Insider from BBC America (with an unfortunate ad for The Tudors miniseries in it), The Royal Wedding from Hello! Magazine as well as offerings from NBC , one from People that allows you to print your own commemorative stamp and a virtual tea towel app.

Though they’ll probably never surpass the interest in the Kate Middleton doll with its big head or the fun factor in commemorative condoms, unlike ceramics (which more or less live forever) you can dump these apps guilt-free as your interest wanes post-nuptials.

It’s no secret that the iPad 2 should open the floodgates of the augmented reality experience — and here’s another example of what the iPad 2 can do with AR.

No doubt in anticipation of Yuri’s Night, Vito Technology has just released an AR-equipped version of their venerable star-watching iPad app, Star Walk ($5). Just hold the screen up to the sky and the app will superimpose constellations and all sorts of other info onto a realtime image of the sky being viewed through the iPad 2’s camera. And that’s on top of all the other cool features, like a satellite tracker, night mode and a time-machine function that lets you see what the sky looks like on any given day or time.

Still saving for an iPad 2? That’s ok, the iPhone version has the same features (but not the awesomeness of the iPad’s giant screen), and it’s on sale for a buck till April 12 — which, not coincidentally,  is Yuri’s Night.

Selling itself as the first app to help hunters find their prey, iHunt Journal may also be on target for controversy.

iHunt Journal, approved by Apple for use by anyone over the age four because it contains no objectionable material, calls itself the “ultimate all-in-one hunting app:”

Whether your focus is on planning your next hunt based on weather and solunar periods, keeping a trophy gallery and hunting journal, or statistics and research of your past hunts, this is the application you need.

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We’ve been keen followers of developments at CloudEngines, the outfit behind the Pogoplug network-attached storage device, ever since we reviewed the first one back in late 2009. This month, a little over two years after the Pogoplug debuted, brings a whole raft of new offerings from the company — including one that may bring a big surge to NAS popularity in general.

If you’re lucky enough to posses an iPhone 4 and haven’t already downloaded freebie Ball Pit, do it now and play around with it a little. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Pretty cool, right? For those of you at work or still saving for an iPhone 4, the game is basically a first-person shooter set in the middle of a what looks like a holodeck from the later Star Trek shows, with the objective of shooting down the spheres that happen to be floating around in the big room with you.

A registered sex offender was sentenced to two decades in prison after engaging in sexually explicit chats and exchanging photos with a 12-year-old and a 13-year old girl.

Franklin DeCapua, who was living in Rochester, New York, found the girls in Nebraska by using a popular social networking app called Whoshere on his iPhone.

The girls, who are neighbors, were using it on the iPod Touch. The trio sent each other sexy pics and chatted about meeting for a sexual encounter. DeCapua was arrested before the planned meet-up.

With an estimated 2.5 million users, MapMyFitness is almost certainly one of the top fitness-tracking services on the web and the iPhone;  which means last week’s announcement that their apps now fully integrate with the Wahoo Fisica dongle should make a lot of people happy.

The MMF website and apps, most of which are free, are already chock-full of features like a deep library of user-generated maps, mapping functions (like route elevation profile generation) and their new nutrition-tracking feature; adding the ability to record sensor data should catapult the system to the top of the heap. The integration with the ANT+ Fisica sensor dongle doesn’t quite extend across MapMyFitness’s whole suite of apps, but hits the major ones, like MapMyRun, MapMyRide and MapMyFitness (all three of which are really almost identical).

We received these cryptic press releases from two fairly well-known developers today, and we just thought we’d share them with you — especially since one of them was marked confidential and requested we not reveal anything till Monday; as if! We’re revealing it NOW! (Yes, we’re horribly easy to manipulate).

Toy giant Hasbro Inc. is bringing 3D to your iPhone and iPod.

For about $35, their new goggles called My3D promise to bring a new experience to your Apple devices. Available in black or white, they launch in exclusive at Target stores on April 3; the U.S. retailer has an exclusive for the goggles until June.

The design is a little more streamlined than the version we showed you back in November, but it still looks a little like a View-Master, which first brought the 3D experience to kids in 1939 and slunk off into the sunset due to declining sales in 2009.

Instead of those little plastic discs of the View-Master familiar to kids the world over, with My3D you’ll be able to download special apps from the iTunes store.

There are currently eight free apps available on iTunes, ranging from Tunnel Pilot and Shatterstorm to 360° Shark.

Hasbro promises there will be a mix of gratis and paid content available — likely to include trailers and movie snippets following the 3D film trend.

Concerned citizens in Kentucky can report “suspicious activity” to their state branch of Homeland Security through an iPhone app.

Called Eyes and Ears of Kentucky, the app is offered gratis on iTunes. The handiwork of developers NICUSA, it has been in the store since March 7. So far, it has not received enough reviews to reach an average rating. Through the app, you can report a suspicious incident or activity along with details about the alleged subjects and their vehicles.

Daily coupon upstarts like Groupon and Living Social have become so massively popular that it’s gotta be increasingly difficult for older and more fogey-ish coupon flingers like Valpak to keep up.

So what Valpak has done is team up with the Junaio augmented reality app to provide an AR channel for Valpak deals in the area. Which is cool, because since Junaio is location based, rather than flip through Valpak’s iPhone app (yeah, they have an iPhone app now too) any potential coupon would just pop up on the screen when standing right outside the store.

Unfortunately, Valpak still seems to have retained its stodgy image; a pity, because the deals are actually pretty good. The Junaio channel’s a start though.

The folks at Digifit seem to have been working feverishly on evolving their iPhone-linked fitness-monitoring system since the last time we covered them, a few months ago.

In fact, the system seems to be evolving very closely along the lines of Wahoo’s Fisica system — so closely that their new $50 Digifit Connect 2 dongle (that’s it pictured below) looks the spitting image of Wahoo’s version. No surprise then that the $15 Digifit app is now also compatible with the Wahoo dongle. In addition, there’s a new $120, water-resistant, iPhone 3/4-compatible Digifit Connect Case for mounting on bicycle handlebars.

Y’know how you’ll be chugging along on a game and get to a point where, for hours, the gameplay is just sod-awful boring? And you want to get up and watch TV, but don’t want to leave the game for fear something actually exciting — like crashing into a mountain — might happen? Well, there’s an app for that. In some instances, anyway.

In this case, clever app FSXFollow saves countless faux pilots from the numbing monotony of piloting their faux Cessnas over the Midwest, by shunting all the data to their iDevice, so the pilot can walk off and get a latte or watch TV. Definitely limited appeal to this app (and frankly, if the simulation or pilot is too hardcore to employ a simple time-lapse feature, I’m not sure getting up to watch TV or do laundry in the middle of a flight is any better; but then I’m not down with all the current FAA rules), but the concept is cool — using a handheld as an integral part of a much larger experience on the desktop.

FSXFollow works with apps like the superb X-Plane and Microsoft’s Flight Simulator X and costs $6. There’re more examples of this kind of mobile/desktop symbiosis, of course; anyone got a favorite?

iPhone users are downloading, and VCs are throwing money at, a new iPhone app called Color.

Don’t get it? You’re not alone.

What the Naysayers are Naysaying

The general reception to Color has been overwhelmingly negative — even worse than the initial reception to the Apple iPad.

Gizmodo quipped that Color’s main purpose is to “amuse yourself by creeping out strangers.”

All Things Digital said Color reminds them of a mock news story created by The Onion, in which investigators establish the cause of a fire by examining the “43,000 pictures taken by students at a party.”

Fortune called Color a “whimsical” “Trojan horse.”

Computerworld called it a “social network for voyeurs.”

Daring Fireball says Color is a “breathlessly overhyped piece of crap.”

The app is currently rated by users with only two stars out of five in the iTunes App Store. Compare that with, say, the 99-cent “Mr. Ninja” game app, which is getting five stars.

The two main strains of criticism center around uselessness and privacy. People aren’t understanding how to use Color, nor why they might want to. Also: The app doesn’t give you any way to know who’s seeing your pictures, and enables creepy weirdos to potentially observe others unwisely sharing private or inappropriate moments. Also: Many users I’ve talked to don’t realize that when you connect to others at a specific event, Color then gives you access not only to their photos and videos taken at the same event, but all taken by them previously elsewhere as well.

All this criticism and mockery is interesting, but largely misguided. I’ll tell you why below, but first lets understand what Color actually is.

Calling the online petition signed by over 150,000 people a “calculated smear campaign,” by gay activists to remove the Exodus International app, the president of the Christian organization responded to Apple’s decision to pull it from the iTunes store.

Here’s an excerpt of what Exodus President Alan Chambers has to say about Apple’s decision:

Here is my point.  It is becoming apparently clear that there is no room in this culture for diversity of thought or opinion. It goes beyond Apple having the right to discriminate. It is the fact that simply offering someone support as THEY CHOOSE to live their life through the filter of their faith rather than their sexuality is now considered not only offensive, but also dangerous.  People with biblical convictions are now being labeled bigoted and homophobic for simply upholding someone’s right to self-determine how they want to live their lives.  It’s astounding.

Do you think this decision is going to come back and bite Apple in the you-know-what?

Via Exodus International

As promised, here’s the statement from Apple over the removal of the Exodus International “gay cure” app.

Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr said Wednesday:

“We removed the Exodus International app from the App Store because it violates our developer guidelines by being offensive to large groups of people.” (Emphasis ours).

It’s short and sweet — but opens up a big can of worms for other groups or companies who may have apps approved that later are targeted as offensive to “large groups of people.” In the case of removing the Manhattan Declaration, a “large group” was about 6,700 online signatures, for Exodus it reached 150,000.

Apple has never re-instated an offensive app after pulling it — but I suspect there will be some backlash on this one.

It looks like Apple has responded to the outcry over an app from Christian group Exodus International aimed at “homosexual strugglers” by removing it from iTunes.

Some 145,000 people signed an online petition demanding it be removed. (That’s the entire population of Pasadena, California, Rochester, England or Beihei, China).

The real issue: Apple has no coherent policy about what kind of content gets approved and remains in iTunes.

Apple has not yet released a statement about why it yanked the app, which had been available since February 15 and marked 4+ for containing no objectionable content.

Our obsessive checking for it just showed that poof! The Exodus International app was no more.

There’s nothing about it in Apple’s online press room, though it is likely a spokesperson will issue some kind of statement when reporters start ringing tomorrow — since they took the app out after close of business today here in California. (We’ve also put in another request for comment.)

As of this writing, Exodus’ site still has a prominent front page splash for the app and gay rights group Truth Wins Out hasn’t updated the poll with the news, either.

UPDATE: At change.org they are still urging folks to sign the petition — until Apple releases a statement about why it was pulled.

Does that means Apple has pulled the app, like more than 140,000 customers have asked? It’s hard to tell; Apple hasn’t issued an official statement yet. Until they do, it’s important that we keep up the pressure, so that Apple hears loud and clear that “ex-gay” therapy deserve no place in the App Store.

More to come.

The hubbub over the app from Christian group Exodus International keeps growing. The petition against the app for “homosexual strugglers” has reached nearly 130,000 signatures.

Apple has still not responded and, at this writing, the free app is still in the iTunes store. The battle is also being waged in the reviews for the app – currently there are 371 five-star reviews and 836 one-star reviews.

Exodus International spoke to the Christian Post about how they hope Apple the reviews won’t shake the initial 4+ rating for their content – meaning it contains no objectionable material — and how the app has been misunderstood.

There are plenty of questionable apps available on iTunes – from the plethora of fart clones to belly jam – but here are some that Apple approved then removed because they were offensive.

What Apple approves, keeps or pulls in iTunes was on my mind over the weekend as I watched the number of signers to the online petition to remove a “gay-cure” app from Christian group Exodus International boom.

When we first wrote about the app, there were 6,700 signatures – about as many that got the much milder Manhattan Declaration pulled – there are now nearly 90,000.