Need a last-minute stocking stuffer, or wondering how to keep that New Year’s resolution? Digifit is giving away its $80 ANT+ Digifit Connect — just download their free Digifit app, then pop for the $15 in-app upgrade (which allows the app to connect with the dongle).
The idea is pretty much the same as with the Wahoo Fisica dongle (also $80): Attach the Digifit Connect to an iPhone (or iPad or iPod) and it’ll communicate with any ANT+ heart-rate monitor, footpod, bicycle cadence or speed sensor; then workout data can be tracked and analyzed through the Digifit app, or download the data to one of several websites, like New Leaf Fitness.
Fishing for dollars? A screen shot of Smurf Village.
Smurfs’ Village, the iPhone/iPad game a lot of parents point the finger at for accidental in-app purchases, has now added a few warnings.
The first sentence of the game description now reads:
“Smurf Village is free to play, but charges real money for additional in-app content. You may lock out the ability to purchase in-app content by adjusting your device’s settings.”
If you can’t get anyone to watch your ho-hum videos, a new iPhone app can pixelate or bleep that turkey carving moment to make it look like something out of “Sh*t My Dad Says.”
It’s the latest from Darren Murtha and partner Chris Lott, who created the Shape Builder app to keep his four-year-old amused. Murtha tells us he was inspired to make this $1.99 app by a Sesame Street video that was unnecessarily censored.
“Even before the iPhone had video editing capabilities, I wanted to develop the app. After Apple released API to help code video editing, then it became a reality.”
The basic idea: even if your video recordings are strictly PG-13, you can still have some good fun (preferably at someone else’s expense) with the app.
With the CultofMac so chock full of bike geeks, it’s no wonder we pretty excited to see the arrival a few months back of one of the first gadgets that fall into the app-enhanced category — a gadget/app mashup that manufacturer New Potato Tech cleverly calls an “appcessory.” In this case, the $99 LiveRider combo of an iPhone bicycle mount and sensor/receiver package with its own dedicated app turns the iPhone into a flexible, jumbo-screened bike computer.
It’s not the only sensor/app combo on the market; Enki Sports offers a more complete and expensive solution, and newcomer Wahoo Fitness recently arrived with a flexible, modular approach (with sensors that look remarkably similar to Enki’s). But we figured New Potato’s kit would provide a simple, relatively inexpensive setup for intermediate-ish cyclists wanting their data fix. We were mistaken.
But Microsoft is apparently even more ambitious: they’ve just updated Bing with some new abilities — including location-based reminders, a Google Maps Street View-like feature and more — to the point where it seems as if Microsoft is trying to turn Bing into some kind of uber-app. The whole thing’s also been given a facelift, and the results pages are less cluttered (even though the front page still needs work). It’s worth a download, even if, at the very least, just to gawk at its application of technology. Here’s a list of all the new stuff:
Bargain-hunting just got more interesting — Metaio has added yet another augmented-reality channel to their AR iPhone app, Junaio. This time they’ve partnered with eBay and created a channel that lets users scan their surroundings for deals in eBay Classifieds, itself a newish, local version of eBay.
It works just like any other Junaio channel; looking around through the iPhone with the eBay channel switched on will, in this case, display local eBay Classifieds listings — apartment buildings will show unit listings superimposed, shops might show discounted stuff available, etc. The channel is also searchable by keyword.
Angry Birds characters, crochet version... Via couturecrochetbykt on Etsy.
Angry Birds Lite is the top downloaded free game on iTunes in 2010.
The pigs-vs-infuriated-fowls diversion beat out Tap Tap Revenge 3, PacMan Lite and Rockband in iTunes Rewind, which highlights the most popular games, music, apps and TV programs in the iTunes Store for 2010.
Angry Birds was also the second most popular free iPhone download overall, trailing Facebook but coming in ahead of Skype and The Weather Channel.
And it’s not just an addictive freebie, either: Rovio’s Angry Birds, the $0.99 version, is also one of the top grossing apps overall.
Its feathered fury is more popular than Call of Duty: Zombies, Tom Tom, Plants vs. Zombies, Tetris and Doodle Jump.
On the wings of this success, Rovio has just announced that they intend to launching Bad Piggy Bank, a new in-game payment system which will allow Angry Birds players to make in-app purchases without going through Apple.
Rovio’s goal is to divorce the game’s in-app purchase system from a reliance upon a credit card. Bad Piggy Bank, then, will launch in Finland (where Rovio is based) on Elisa, the country’s biggest telecom provider, and any in-app purchases will be added to their monthly bill, or even purchase other games, with other countries and telecoms to follow.
It will be interesting to see if this gets Rovio into trouble with kids making in-app purchases. Apple’s policy has been to allow kids’ games to have them, but generally refunds the money to parents if they complain about kids unwittingly buying stuff in apps.
OBiON, a free mobile communications app for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch now available for download from the iTunes App store, is an exciting — if still evolving — tool that offers more power and flexibility than any similar app available today.
The app is the mobile centerpiece in a new communication paradigm being charted by Obihai Technology, a Cupertino, CA start-up founded by the developers of the first Analog Telephone Adapter, which made “Internet calling” possible without the use of a computer and spawned the growth of Vonage and dozens of other Internet Telephony Service Providers.
Now, in conjunction with the OBiTALK web portal and the company’s Obi110 Voice Services Bridge, OBiON users can leverage the ability to make and receive calls from local or remote landlines, as well as to and from multiple VoIP services on Apple mobile devices.
In-App Purchases are no joke. With the Freemium model becoming a mainstay for many popular apps, iOS users may get confused and can easily rack up a $100 tab in minutes. To prevent this from happening to you we’re going to show you how to disable all in-app purchases.
Evolution is a wonderful thing (relax, creationists — we’re only talking the electronic kind here), and iPhone app Twitcal‘s transformation today into SnapCal brings big changes along with the name switch — not the least of which is that the cool little app is now free (down from $3) through iAd support.
For those who aren’t familiar with the app, SnapCal lets users broadcast event details through Twitter, which can then be easily imported into the app’s calendar by other SnapCal users. Events can also be auto-updated by following another user’s calendar. And now, the app can also import events from Evernote and sync with Google Calendar.
SnapCal can also be freed of its iAd shackles for a buck through an in-app purchase.
We’re pretty big on Dropbox here at the Cult, and it’s handiness as a transfer/storage utility for Macs and iDevices alike hasn’t really been challenged. That is, till now.
Spot Documents works with the same basic idea: Its free OS X or iOS apps can be used to upload a user’s e-junk to Spot Document’s cloud — in this case, hosted on Amazon’s S3 servers — where it’ll be stored and made available for download/viewing. The difference is that where Dropbox is pretty slim on options, Spot Documents seems to be substantially more powerful: Spotlight-like search, full previews even on iDevices, and the ability to play around with access options for multiple users. And more.
A high school basketball coach used an iPhone app called PhoneAid to perform CPR on a 17-year-old who collapsed on the court.
Eric Cooper Sr. downloaded the $1.99 app just the night before, as kind of a refresher course. When Xavier Jones keeled over in the middle of the court, Cooper and the assistant coach rushed to his side.
Jones’ heart had stopped beating. Cooper used the iPhone app, which gives real-time instructions on how to administer cardiopulmonary resuscitation, to jump start his heart.
This one’s got us raising an eyebrow: an app that figures out not only the distance to an object, but its speed — for a buck.
From the app’s press release:
Employing the device’s three-axis gyro and basic trigonometry establishes distance. Speed and laps are measured using the motion sensing of the video camera, timing the interval between the object entering and leaving the frame. The app is compatible with iPhone 3Gs, iPhone 4, and iPod touch 4.
We’re assuming that though SpeedClock is compatible with the 3Gs, it must deliver somewhat less-accurate results on it as there’s no gyro. We’re also assuming the app isn’t all that accurate for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the app requires the user to guesstimate the distance from the iPhone to the object. But who knows, maybe one day the tech’ll get there; somehow the idea of state troopers aiming iPhones instead of radar guns seems somewhat more cuddly.
Steve Jobs publicly vowed to make the iTunes app market porn free, telling customers if they want smut they should get an Android. Whether you want sexy stuff on your smartphone or not, there’s undeniably an appetite for adult material.
That’s why developers keep submitting salacious apps to the iTunes store – playing peek-a-boo with the public as they are approved and then shut down. Big names like Playboy and Hooters iTunes offerings are, kind of a tease – lots of skin, but no nudity and “games,” like a squeaky-clean screen washing app. Android is another story.
While there is no adult material in its official app store, almost exactly a year ago a company called www.mikandi.com launched a porn app market for the Android platform, billing it as the world’s first mobile adult shop. (See our post about what Android users get a looky-loo at when they use it).
Google adopted a hands-off policy towards this parallel porn shop – and following its pattern of keeping mum about it, a Google spokesperson declined to comment for this post. It’s also worth noting that Android’s open approach allows users to use and install third party apps without jailbreaking phones.
Cult of Mac talked in exclusive with MiKandi (it’s pronounced “my candy”) CEO Jen McEwan about what’s hot in the store and where the market is headed.
Game "Pocket Hottie" offered on Android mobile market MiKandi.
To prove seeing is believing, we downloaded MiKandi, the adult app market for Android about to celebrate a year in business, and took a little tour of the apps offered there.
Mikandi (pronounced “my candy”) was a quick download on the Nexus One phone we used. To install, users must agree to allow the app to have access to the phone store and location (info they need to combat the Android’s ongoing fragmentation problem) then a lengthy end-user agreement that begins with the caveat that users must be over age 18.
In a few seconds – the waiting message reminds us it’s “loading goodies” — and the store opens. (If you’re concerned about prying eyes, you can also register for a secure account online or through the app store itself).
If you’re looking for something to make those long holiday drives a little more interesting, the DriveGain iPhone App promises to cut your gas bill by about 15% through teaching you to drive more efficiently.
The app gives penny-pinching commuters and cost-conscious city drivers visual and audio feedback on what changes they can make to their driving style to help them save fuel. Developed in the UK and first launched for cars with manual transmissions only, the latest version works on automatics too.
DriveGain costs $6.99 on iTunes. The company also offers a scaled-down gratis version called CarEconomy.
Cult of Mac talked with DriveGain CEO Simon East on the challenges of testing it with his own ride — and why the app is not like having a nagging backseat driver.
Ever since we posted about Let’s Create Pottery HD last month, we’ve been wondering when the app — that lets users have a go at creating virtual pottery on the iPad — would be out (or even be practical) on the smaller screen of the iPhone/iPt.
Last week, developer Infinite Dreams released the iPhone version, then added further enticement to get our hands dirty by releasing a free, try-before-you-buy version of the app a few days later (Which is a good thing, because the paid version looks like it might be a little prone to crashing, judging by the comments).
Still, the lite version checks out pretty well, and the full version, with its expanded creative options, is on sale right now for just a buck.
When future iPhones gain near field communications technology, the way we use our mobile phones is going to undergo a dramatic evolution. Imagine being able to pay for a cup of coffee by waving it in front of a cash register, or even taking your entire Mac’s file directory with you on the road and automatically transferring it over to a new machine just by bumping it against the display.
That’s all plenty cool, but another way NFC will make the iPhone a cooler device is by building-in a lot of the functionality of apps like Bump, which allows you to share your contact information with another person who has the Bump app installed simply by brushing iPhones together.
I hope NFC also enables another cool function that Bump has just integrated into their app — : music sharing — only with more sophistication. The most recent update to Bump allows you to specify songs from your iTunes collection that you want to share with a friend. It doesn’t do this by squirting the MP3 to your “bumpee” however: instead, Bump stays on the right side of the music labels by plucking the song information from your MP3’s tags and redirecting them to a YouTube clip of the same song. From there, your bumpee is free to enjoy the song and if he likes it, buy it directly from ITunes.
It’s a very clever implementation, but imagine if Apple baked this into iTunes properly via NFC, complete with MP3 squirting. Microsoft’s Zune has had something like that for awhile, but I’d just kill to see it on an iPod.
NBC’s Jimmy Fallon is the first American late night TV host out of the gate with a dedicated app for Apple’s mobile device users, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon (iTunes link), available free as of Wednesday in the App Store.
Fallon, arguably the most tech-savvy of all the late night talk show hosts in the US, regularly spotlights tech and social media in his show’s skits and jokes and in the past showcased “fantasy” apps such as “Axl Rose Relaxation” and “Moldova Y/N” that actually made it into the production release.
The mobile app — compatible with iPhone, iPad and iPod touch — will also showcase video clips and photos from the TV show along with behind-the-scenes blog posts from the Late Night site.
Hip to be Square, Foursquare that is: US Voters with iPhones can share their experiences with friends
During the final stretch of the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, a number of different media organizations set up different kinds of maps to track real-time activities at the polls. Wired.com, for example, set up a voting machine problem map where voters could use a ZeeMap we had set up to tell us what went wrong in their experience.
Fast-forward to 2010. Foursquare, the mobile social geolocation service, has teamed up with Google, Pew, a couple of get-out-the-vote groups and a couple of Washington DC-based technology and design firms to update that idea.
The coalition recently launched its “I Voted” project, which enables iPhone Foursquare users to broadcast the fact that they voted to their friends, and to report what it was like, and whether there were problems like long lines or voter intimidation.
The idea is to harness the attributes of peer pressure and political campaigns’ competitive spirit to spur more people to actually vote. Another side benefit of this project is that it could potentially uncover trending problems at polling places.
On election day itself, all the data emanating from this activity on Foursquare will stream to an online map to give people a big-picture portrait.
The project so far is an experiment. It started off as an idea being batted around between some young political technology consultants on Twitter this June.
Mindy Finn, a co-founder of EngageDC, one of the participants that set up this project, sees the application’s use this election day as a dry run for the 2012 presidential election. Political campaigns could possibly use it to ignite socially-inspired viral voting campaigns.
“We’re certainly not at critical mass right now,” Finn said. “But the potential for this type of social voting, and the use of geolocation services to encourage civic engagement, the potential is just huge.”
Halloween, with its legions of black-clad kids running around and darting out into the street, introduces its own variety of driving perils. So in addition to warning other users of speed traps and red-light cameras, Trapster users can now mark two new location types on its map this Halloween: haunted houses and trick-or-treat zones.
The free app works through crowdsourcing, which means any registered user can add markers which then become viewable to other Trapster users; and if users find a marker that’s inaccurate (say, if some user tagged their in-laws place as a haunted house), it can be removed with enough votes against it. Now if only the had a marker for houses with the best candy…
On Monday, we mentioned the launch of Peel, a new app that uses an algorithm similar to the one used by Netflix to try and figure out what its user should watch. Here’s the second half: A peek under the hood, excerpts from a chat with Peel’s (née Zelfy) VP of marketing, and a look at an accompanying piece of hardware that’s (maybe) coming next.
New York City is full of characters — that’s one of the biggest attractions of living there.
Freelance radio producer and artist/animator Eric Molinsky spends his commuting time on the city’s subway system capturing the visual aspects of those characters using Autodesk’s SketchBook Mobile application, as the New York Times notes in a blog post profiling Molinsky on Friday.
From the beaky-nosed, middle-aged woman in a blue hat to other characters whose faces are artfully-shaded, each of these portraits manages to capture the spirit or mood of a person, a bit like a Richard Avedon portrait. In my mind, the pictures look as if they should be in an edition of the New Yorker magazine illustrating some story, or in the Times‘ “Metropolitan Diary” section illustrating some anecdote.
There’s something utterly romantic and wonderful about bringing the timeless art of sketching to a device like the iPhone — in my experience, it’s actually cool functionality like this that seems to have converted a lot of my older technophobe friends into iPhone and iPAD devotees.
As you’ll see from the comments on the Times blog post, it turns out that Molinsky’s hobby isn’t that unusual: a lot of other people have been using apps like Brushes to do sketches too.
Above: A subway rider on the 3 train August 9, 2010, sketch by Eric Molinsky.
Apple is making a big deal about the jazzed-up photo book capabilities in iLife ’11, and for good reason — being able to cradle a vibrant, printed image still trumps the digital alternative. But iPhoto isn’t the only way to transform pixels into ink.
Simply Postcards lets users grab any photo off their iPhone and snail-mail it to an address in the U.S. or elsewhere. Postcards ship the day after ordering them, and prices range from $1-$2 for a stateside address to double that for international cards.
The app is free, and so is the first postcard; the Cult is going to use its free credits to brighten the Microsoft HQ mailbox with images of our new MacBook Airs!
Couch potatoes take note: Peel, a free app that’s a sort of mix between Netflix’s movie suggestions and TV Guide, made its debut last week.
And it’s got a star-studded development team backing it up. Core members of the original iTunes team helped create Peel’s interface, and a team that beat Netfilx’s movie-suggestion algorithm in a competition worked on Peels innards.
