iPhone - page 469

A police officer in Benton County, Washington is using his iPhone on the job as a translator.

Described in the local news story as a “crime-fighting gadget,” Deputy Doug Hollenbeck has been relying on his iPhone for the last eight months to help boost rudimentary Spanish skills while dealing with everything from roll-over accidents to routine traffic stops.

Hollenbeck says he’s admittedly at a disadvantage because he can’t speak fluent Spanish in a significantly Hispanic community.

“I’ve got some basic vocabulary skills but other than that, not so much,” he adds. That has translated to the phone being somewhat of a staple in his line-up of gear.  No mention of exactly which app he’s using.

Are translator apps fast enough to be used on the job? Let me know what you’re using in the comments…

Via kndu

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTOCgkvJ03c
The teen star was trying to play nice with paps waiting for her outside a Pilates studio, taking pics of them with a camera and answering questions.

Then, as the pap was handing her drink back, she let his iPhone drop. That’ll teach ’em.

Well, it’s more of an unfortunate oversight. But the iCount logo — a numbers game for the iPhone, iPod touch —  looks like it’s all about something else thanks to the dropping of the “o”. Oh, my. Chalk up another one for the iTunes store censors.

Via the Inquirer

Registered iPhone developers began playing around with the beta release of iPhone 3.0 late Tuesday, and initial reaction to the enhancements announced earlier in the day are quite favorable, according to a report at AppleInsider.

The beta release includes an updated Software Development Kit (SDK) with over 1,000 new Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) including In-App Purchases; Peer-to-Peer connections (tethering); an app interface for accessories; access to the iPod music library; a new Maps API and Push Notifications.

Apple also announced over 100 new features that will be hotly anticipated by iPhone and iPod touch users when the public software is released this summer, including cut, copy and paste; MMS functionality for 3G iPhones; landscape view for Mail, Text and Notes; stereo Bluetooth; syncing Notes to the Mac and PC; shake to shuffle; parental controls for TV shows, movies and apps from the App Store; and automatic login at Wi-Fi hot spots.

The iPhone OS 3.0 beta also showed off a new Voice Memo app and expanded search capability for all key iPhone apps, as well as Spotlight search across the entire device. Spotlight is said to be very responsive and functions just as you would expect having used the feature previously on a Mac. Copy & paste is also being well received, according to the report.

Any Cult readers who are also iPhone developers are invited to share your impressions in comments and let us know if you have any great screen shots we need to feature.

[AppleInsider]

Spykee is an odd little $300 robot “toy” that’s everything from a webcam to digital music player to VoIP phone and can be controlled via WiFi.

Spykee ships with software that allows it to be controlled from a Windows or Mac PC, but Televolution CEO David Beckemeyer thought it would be cool to control it from his iPhone, too, so he built an iPhone web app that permits just that.

With Beckemeyer’s iSpykee controller, now robot fans can use their iPhone or iPod Touch to send Spykee down the hall to check on the sleeping baby or set it to act as a motion detector and send an alarm or photo in email.

The iSpykee controller is an open source project that, by publishing the source code used to implement the robot’s communication protocol, Beckemeyer hopes will assist other developers in creating interesting apps to control the versatile robot.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxbD6IeLylw

We’ve written before about iPhone and iPod Touch apps designed by parents to keep the wee ones busy and busy parents sane.

Geek dad Darren Murtha created the Shape Builder app to keep his four-year-old amused. If the video demo is any indication — Murtha’s son puts shapes of animals and figures in place accompanied by his own merry made-up sound effects  — it’s a winner.

Designed for kids age three to six, Shape Builder provides 120 puzzles including musical instruments, fruits and vegetables, animals and the alphabet sounded out by a speech therapist.

Available on iTunes for $.99.

Protect your iPhone with a nod to past tech with this leather iPhone, iPod Touch case designed to look like a Sony Walkman.

Available at Etsy for $25.

When Apple unleashed the App Store, I made one of the world’s worst predictions. Over a slice of pizza, I told Dev Patnaik, with whom I was writing a book, that Apple would never permit non-iTunes music programs to show up on the iPhone. Too risky, might take away attention from the iTunes Store. “Even Pandora?” he asked. “Especially Pandora,” I said.
How wrong I was — the brilliant Pandora Radio for iPhone app, sporting iTunes integration, was released the very next day, and it has come to represent the random, serendipitous musical discovery Yin to the predictable, find-what-you’re-looking-for Yang of iTunes. It’s a must-have, and it has, by itself, made the iPhone and iPod touch dramatically better music players than the iPod ever was — in addition to being phenomenal portable computers.
As some measure of apology, I interviewed Pandora Radio founder Tim Westergen over at my other blog to find out what makes the company tick — and why its musical suggestions are so much more accurate than I’d expect any computer to ever be.

Q: There’s another side of this story that I’ve heard about, which is that to maintain the connection to the musicians you help promote, you actually hire a lot of musicians to work at Pandora. A: Yeah, the foundation of Pandora is this thing called the Music Genome Project, which is an enormous musical taxonomy. The thing about it is, it’s all hand-built. We have a team of about 35 working musicians, and they listen to songs all day and analyze what’s going on with them. For 9 years now, that’s become a pretty substantial number of artists.

Q: How many songs have been classified now?
A: A little over 600,000.

Pandora Radio’s made out of people! It’s people!!!

Read the full interview!

Playfish, one of the largest and fastest growing social games developers, announced Saturday the availability of its popular title, “Who Has the Biggest Brain?” for iPhone and iPod Touch. Who Has The Biggest Brain? features Facebook Connect and enables friends to play together anytime, anywhere.

Playfish is behind 5 of the 10 most currently popular social games played on Facebook, according to the company’s marketing material, and claims more than 60 million registered players currently play its games on the Internet’s fastest growing social networking platform. The company says more than 15 million people have played Who Has The Biggest Brain? on Facebook since launching in late 2007.

“We believe iPhone and iPod touch represent the next generation of entertainment platforms,” says Kristian Segerstrale, CEO of Playfish.

With 12 mini games, 27 brain types and a variety of unlockable achievements, Who Has the Biggest Brain? enables players to compete with their real-life friends and experience the more social and connected game play that Segerstrale describes as part of the company’s mission.

By creating games for people to play together using social networks and platforms such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Yahoo!, iPhone and iPod touch, Playfish aims to transform video game play from an isolated, solitary obsession to one in which people enjoy greater social and connected experiences.

Who Has the Biggest Brain? is available now for $4.99 in the iTunes AppStore.

Apple may launch as soon as next week a “Premium” AppStore focused on games and other “sophisticated” apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch, according to a report at Wired.

The premium section would largely be focused on apps priced at $20 and more, giving game makers a channel to offer more in-depth (and pricier) titles without getting lost in the clutter of free and $1 apps. The Wired report also speculates that creating a “velvet rope” within the AppStore ecosystem could make Apple’s mobile platform more attractive to enterprise software companies such as SAP, that would otherwise prefer to focus on the more business-user targeted BlackBerry phones.

Should the rumors of a new AppStore section for “serious” software prove true, look for the announcement to come at Apple’s media event scheduled to launch a new SDK and iPhone 3.0 software on March 17.

Here’s an iPhone app you might find coming in handy someday. Best of all, Have2P is a free iPhone app that finds restrooms in your area thanks to your device’s nifty GPS locator.

Useful features include info on whether the restroom is for customers only, if it has a changing table and even reviews on how clean it is. Users can edit restroom info, submit restroom reviews and add restrooms to the database.

The latest update to Have2P even claims to have an “urgency detector” that senses when you and the phone are shaking and automatically starts a new search for nearby relief.

[GeekSugar]

The app designed to provide alerts on kidnapped kids in the US is now available, gratis, on iTunes.

As we reported last month, Jonathan Zdziarski, creator of the first iPhone forensics toolkit,  developed the AMBER alert. These alerts are issued when missing child cases are granted Amber status –œ  kidnappings of children under age 17 who police believe to be in danger of  bodily harm or death.
The iPhone Amber app provides a real-time feed of recent alerts including victim photos, suspect photos and descriptions, vehicle photos and descriptions and a reporting mechanism allowing users to report sightings.

The Amber Alert program was created in 1996 after the kidnapping and killing of nine-year-old Amber Hagerman.

The application was approved just two days after Zdziarski emailed Steve Jobs pleading for him to help expedite the app’s approval after waiting over a month, though Apple has not said if his letter had any effect on the approval.

Via ars technica

Ego is an aptly-named iPhone app that lets you check web statistics that matter to you, on the go. Because you’re, as the tag-line says, important.

Through hooks into Feedburner, Mint and Twitter, the current version supports statistics on the number of visits to any number of your websites (including daily, hourly and monthly numbers), feed subscription totals and changes, and how many people are following you on Twitter.

Support for Google Analytics is planned in a coming update.

Just $1.99 keeps you up-to-date on your web relevance any time, any where.

Evil Panda says: See me inside Tweetie. I like Tweetie. Apple, stop being stupid, or Evil Panda will get you.

UPDATE: All’s now well in the land of Tweetie. Apple relented and, in double-quick time, posted Tweetie 1.3 to the App Store today. However, this episode highlights that if you’re going to censor things, you really have to censor the ‘right’ ones, and also have some consistently enforced guidelines to work towards. And so Evil Panda is sated for now, but he’s still watching, Apple.

I recently moaned about the App Store on my blog, Revert to Saved, when the South Park app rejection debacle highlighted Apple’s inconsistency regarding application approval. (Short version: South Park app gets rejected for “potentially offensive” content, despite entire South Park episiodes being for sale on iTunes and therefore watchable on an iPhone.)

Today, however, things took a turn for the crazy. Tweetie, an iPhone Twitter client—in fact, the very best and top-selling iPhone Twitter client—just got its latest update rejected. The reason is so staggeringly bonkers that I’m hoping it’s an early April Fool jape. Apple rejected it, according to the developer, because there was an offensive word in the Twitter trends list, which Tweetie provides access to. No, really.

This is so astonishingly stupid that I am still reeling that Apple could be so dumb. Are apps now supposed to police the entire internet? Does Safari filter out rude words? Is Apple suddenly going to wrench Tweetie and every other Twitter client from the App Store? For that matter, maybe Apple should remove the likes of WriteRoom, because, hey, I can write the word “fuck” in it, and I might offend myself.

Sort out your App Store approval process, Apple, because you’re looking stupider by the second. And while competition is currently non-existent, it certainly won’t be that way for long.

iTriage is an app for the iPhone and iPod touch that helps US users find local healthcare information on the road.

Developed by two emergency room doctors, it offers a national directory of emergency departments, urgent care facilities, retail clinics and pharmacies. Drilling down, the info also includes descriptions of capabilities and areas of specialization, web site links, opening hours and contact information. Quality reports on hospitals and physicians can be downloaded, too.

The docs saw a lot of patients making uninformed snap decisions, so they formed partnerships with leading health care information, service and technology companies to offer additional services,  including companies that can provide iTriage users with everything from quality and safety ratings and patient recommendations to 24-7 phone consultations with board certified physicians and assistance in negotiating medical bills.

Reviewers — including an ER doc and closet programmer — suggest  filtering to wade through all the info but otherwise like the app.

Available for $.99 on iTunes.

Zumobi announced Monday the arrival of the first-ever official American Idol application for Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch. “American Idol Season 8 Exclusive” (link opens iTunes) follows this season’s American Idol Top 13 finalists in their quest to be named the next American Idol and brings fans exclusive multimedia content and news updates for $2.

The app gives dyed-in-the-wool AI nuts contestant bios, pictures, news and exclusive video from behind-the-scenes of the on-air show. In total, 78 original videos of the remaining contestants will be released weekly between now and the Finale, giving fans the opportunity to get know their favorite contestants better.

A “My Rankings” feature allows users to test their talent-picking power by predicting, customizing, and tracking the order of who stays and who gets voted off each week. As users track their favorite contestants’ progress, they are also one click away from the American Idol iTunes page where they can download music from recent performances.

Of course.

A pre-release version of the original iPhone has surfaced for sale on eBay, though if it’s real, it may not be there for long.

According to the Bloomington, IL seller, up for auction is “a quite rare and collectable example of iPhone prototype,” that even runs on a beta version of the iPhone OS.

The device features a matte plastic screen and has serial number YM649xxxxxx, which the seller claims corresponds to a factory in China, manufactured week 49 of the year 2006. It supposedly works, running iPhone OS 03.06.01_G — the iPhone launched running OS 1.0, version 03.11.02_G.

The seller claims the phone can make calls, browse the mobile versions of websites, and can receive SMS, but lacks any way to manually type an SMS on the phone.

Also for sale is a non-working prototype with a glass screen, a slightly higher serial number, and is described as being in “fair” cosmetic condition, with various scratches.

The bid on the two phones is currently $735, though it remains to be seen whether the auction will close on March 11 as scheduled. Apple demanded eBay take down a recent auction for a pre-release iPod, citing intellectual property concerns. eBay quickly complied, though the iPod owner apparently sold his device privately anyway.

[iLounge]

Phonesuit’s MiLi Power Pack will free you — in style — from the tyranny of needing to recharge your iPhone every night, or after say, every five hours of serious use.

The casual iPhone user probably doesn’t need a MiLi Power Pack, which, at $80 is a not-insignificant investment in extra power, especially if one tends to be in the habit of recharging the device overnight on a daily basis.

However, power users, who have adopted the iPhone as their primary telephone, or who spend a lot of time using it to surf the web, pull up Google maps, send lots of email, are into serious gaming, use it as a constant music player, or take and edit lots of photographs — those users will love having a MiLi Power Pack on hand.

Read on to find out why.

A feature called “Now Playing,”  launched in  fall 2007,  allowed latte-sippers to wander into a Starbucks, log onto the iTunes Store with a laptop, iPod Touch or iPhone and instantly see what song was playing in-store, plus browse and buy music on iTunes.

Unwired View found a patent Apple filed for a similar feature.
The basic idea: place a local cache of iTunes media store server at a retail location and follow the music played from that cache. The associated info is beamed to iPhones and Macbooks via local Wi-Fi network.

Apple envisions lots of in-store tie-ins and cross selling thanks to the feature.

From the patent application:
“One advantage of the invention is that patrons of establishments can dynamically receive store-based information while at the establishments. Store-based information facilitates user experience and can also facilitate locating associated media content from an online media store.

In store-based information can be displayed on a patron’s portable electronic device while the patron in the store… The online media store can coordinate with central management to make store-based information centrally stored and accessible…”

Via Unwired View

Digital media company Mosaic Legends and San Francisco rock photographer Jay Blakesburgh have created a limited edition interactive app and eBook titled, simply, Grateful Dead, avialable now for $6 on the iTunes AppStore, that appears to be a template for more titles to come.

But who better to start a long, strange trip with than Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead?

Focused around a stunning Photomosaic of the Dead’s iconic guitarist, comprised of nearly 450 individual photographic “tiles” that users can double-tap and pinch their way into, down to full-res views of single photographs, the app also includes photographer’s notes on each photo, additional history of the band, built-in capability to comment on and share photographs with other app users, and a link to the Mosaic Legends store, where users can preview and purchase photographic Glicées and limited edition large prints.

If this AppStore offering takes off among the Dead’s famously loyal and devoted community, look for the idea to be reprised as a marketing vehicle in many additional incarnations.

Via MP3 Insider

You just might find out about layoffs at your company on the way to work, if a new iPhone app dedicated to cutbacks and hires does its job.

The layoff and hiring news app receives real-time data feeds from website layoffdaily.com.
Info includes today’s layoffs news (at this writing, those cuts include from “Chicken Soup For the Soul” to Lamborghini and Utah State University), plus previous two day’s layoffs and, to balance things out a little, a section dedicated to news about which companies are hiring (American Welders Society, call centers and Six Flags New England.

It’ll set you back $1.99, but may prove vital.

Via Mac World

It’s no secret President Obama and much of his team are big Mac fans, or that some of their more publicized frustrations with the transition to power in DC have come with confronting the challenges posed by outdated Windows technology and requirements to meet legal guidelines for security and archiving of official communications.

Perhaps readers will recall, as well, Obama’s stated desire to continue using his Blackberry in office and the various and sundry security concerns that have arisen around that issue.

News Wednesday is that Waltham, Mass.-based Onset Technologies may be working on technology that could allow the President to use an iPhone, should that desire strike the Commander in Chief.

Many high profile government groups, including the US House of Representatives, the Senate and NASA, use Onset’s METAmessage ACT to secure correspondence on mobile devices, as do many private businesses. The technology can scan, block and archive all wireless communication on a device that uses it and keeps companies compliant with regulations like SEC, NASD, Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, FINRA and the latest Privacy Act.

While Blackberry maker Research in Motion is Onset’s most high-profile partner to date, the company’s solutions are available on all the major US carriers and it is looking to expand its reach.

Onset expects to release new versions of METAmessage ACT for Windows Mobile and Symbian soon and yes, even hopes to make a version for the Apple iPhone.

Via VentureBeat

We’ve written previously about the odd dichotomy emerging from the general disdain with which the iPhone’s camera is regarded — fixed focal length, only 2 megapixels, blah, blah, blah — and the ever-increasing number of applications appearing to give iPhone photographers unprecedented control and creativity over their images.

Tonight we call your attention to a wonderfully whimsical app called ColorSplash, for two reasons.

First, it’s an amazingly powerful tool that, for $2, gives anyone the ability to transform their snapshots into arresting images in a way that Madison Avenue has long paid professional photographers and creative directors big bucks to do.

Using your finger on the iPhone’s touch interface you can highlight just enough color on a black and white image to make it pop, turning something ordinary and mundane into something extraordinary and memorable.

It’s cool, it’s easy, intuitive and it works. And it’s $2.

Which calls for the second point, which is that, when this kind of thing can be done so well and so easily and so cheaply on Apple’s mobile UI, just imagine the creative possibilities to come when touch interface technology becomes the norm for high-end mega CPU computing platforms.

What I was able to accomplish here tonight, literally in a few minutes dragging my fingers across a little 3″ screen, would have been far more complicated — if not more time consuming — to accomplish using masks and layers and industry standard digital retouching tools in common use today.

The current economic situation may appear to be dire in many respects, but the future of creative expression, as evidenced by the explosion of tools and ideas inspired by the iPhone, seems bright indeed.

Pocketmac and the ASPCA announced Monday a one-of-a-kind fundraising promotion in which $1 of every sale of Pocketmac’s $3 iPhone game ShiveringKittens will go to the ASPCA through the end of April 2009.

ShiveringKittens is a quirky puzzle game in which users must successfully arrange falling blocks of ice in order to free – you guessed it – shivering kittens – from their cold-hearted captors.

Comes complete with a strangely hypnotic soundtrack, appropriately mewly sound effects and 10 levels of increasingly difficult play.