I’m one of those freaks who much prefers listening to radio than watching TV. Consequently, I like to have radios around me. I have one in my office, one in the kitchen, and one in the bedroom. I really need to get hold of one for the bathroom.
FStream and the BBC Streams web site have jointly come to my aid.
Ecamm’s Call Recorder plug-in for Skype is an easy-to-install, easy-to-use solution for enabling voice and video call recording in Skype, well worth the $15 cost – a highly recommended plug-in for anyone with a Mac who wants to keep records of their Skype voice and video calling history.
I ran into a situation over the weekend where I had scheduled what I knew would be a long interview, something I wanted to be able to refer to later this week when I’m writing up a profile of my subject for a project I’m working on.
The thought of once again trying to cobble something together using a cassette recorder with my iPhone on speaker had finally become too much to bear: how many times in the past had a conversation been too garbled to interpret, or had I forgot to press the record button until several minutes into the conversation? Once I even did an entire interview having forgotten to put batteries in the cassette recorder, and had to face the ignominy of asking my interview subject to let me re-conduct our whole conversation the next day.
Of course, the simplest thing might be for Apple to enable (or at least approve) a comprehensive recording mechanism for iPhone calls, but since that’s not the case at present – and may or may not be grist for another post – I decided to use Skype for our call once I found Call Recorder and installed it.
Ecamm’s Call Recorder has been around for a while, but gets it right with this lightweight (2.3 MB) plug-in that installs in minutes and runs automatically within Skype – with the advantage of being highly configurable and supporting fully manual operation as well. The current version 2.3.4 also handles recording and archiving of video calls, though I’ve not yet personally done one of those.
Both sides of a voice call are recorded to separate tracks in a QuickTime movie, which can be easily converted to MP3 format and then emailed or posted to a website. Call Recorder can handle completely uncompressed recording for highest fidelity, or compress recordings at a 2:1 ratio or using AAC encoding. Video encoding can be done as JPEG, MPEG-4 or H.264.
For any journalist, podcaster, online instructor, even for business people looking to ensure accountability and corporate audit trails, Call Recorder adds easy, indispensable value to Skype on the Mac.
PhotoCanvas, a new image editing app from Big Canvas, Inc. could make Apple’s eventual decision to enable MMS functionality on the iPhone and iPod Touch a moot point.
While many have decried the iPhone’s inability to easily send photos and graphic images in text messaging, a relative few in the US may be aware of Big Canvas’ flagship application, PhotoShare, the free service that allows users to stay connected with their private or public networks through visual social networking.
With a few simple touches users can easily take images captured through daily life and distribute them to all PhotoShare users or to family and friends. After its release in July 2008, PhotoShare quickly became a “must-have” social networking application in Japan, where consumers are already familiar with an always-connected lifestyle, generating over a quarter million comments and photos per month.
Now PhotoCanvas joins a line-up of three other Big Canvas apps that let users personalize photos taken on the go with the iPhone and iPod Touch and, with PhotoShare, enjoy sharing them with others as easily as if they sent them in a text message.
“We are still in the very early stage of a true ‘mobile computing’ era enabled by the iPhone,” Satoshi Nakajima, CEO of Big Canvas told us. “The mobile phone started as a voice communication device, and evolved into a text-based communication device with SMS (texting). This is the beginning of the ‘visual communication’ era, and the large number of photo applications on the AppStore are proof of this.”
Unlike some of the more sophisticated photo editing apps that have shown up, such as Light and Photonasis, PhotoCanvas is a simple, easy to use tool for adding backgrounds, frames, text and drawing to an image, taking the everyday and turning it into something unique for sharing with others, using a few simple taps and strokes on the iPhone’s touch interface.
Creations can be saved to the iPhone’s camera roll and uploaded on the go to a user’s PhotoShare account, where family, friends, and other PhotoShare users can comment and respond to an image, creating an interactive, visual communication experience.
“One of the great things about PhotoShare is people share images in real time – it’s like a visual version of Twitter,” Nakajima told us. “It’s clear to me that the number of users who will edit their photos on mobile phones will eventually exceed the number of PhotoShop users on PC. PhotoCanvas is the beginning of our serious attempt to participate in this innovation.”
PhotoCanvas offers a number of preset backgrounds and photo frames that can be customized with drawing and text rendered in 48 colors and two dozen font faces, all of which are accessed and applied through an easy-to-use, intuitive UI that makes good use of Apple’s mobile platform design.
Available now in the AppStore for $1.99, PhotoCanvas is a great complement to the free PhotoShare service for anyone wanting to add some flair to their visual communication on the go.
A confession: as a teenager, I got involved with amateur acting and ended up doing a great deal of improvisation. Every Sunday evening a gang of us would get together in a tiny theatre just yards from the beach, where we would play improvisation games until we fell over.
Sometimes it’s hard to remember those games, to conjure up just the right one for just the right moment.
Enter stage right: iProv, the improvisation database for iPhone. It contains over 250 improv games. They’ve been sorted using tags, you can search through the list, and create your own list of faves by just tapping a star. Feeling lucky? Open a random game idea by just shaking the iPhone.
iProv is free on the App Store, although you can make donations at the web site if you want to support ongoing development.
Not long ago, I reviewed Altec Lansing’s expressionist CLASSIC PC speakers and found them great value for the money. After listening to them for a while beyond the publication of that review, I still loved the sound quality from those $80 speakers but found myself wishing for a little more oomph on the bottom end.
Well, I should have known Altec had already thought of that. Ingeniously engineered into the small-footprint housing of their Expressionist BASS computer speakers, powerful 4″ (100mm) long-throw subwoofers deliver all the lows that are typically missing from the little speakers you find sitting on desks all over the world.
Of course, you could spend lots of money on high-fidelity audio components for a computer set-up, which in many cases would include a separate subwoofer that sits at your feet or hides somewhere nearby, effectively dispersing the low frequency signals you need to get a truly rich audio experience on the computer. Altec Lansing has managed to put that all together for you in a pair of attractive desktop cones that are super easy to hook up and sound great without breaking the bank.
Twin 1 ½” drivers deliver mid and high frequencies so vocals and details come through with the clarity you expect from the company’s long history as a quality speaker manufacturer, and the sub-drivers in each speaker really do provide that punch-in-the-head color you want from your online gameplay, movie watching and YouTube browsing. They also have an auxiliary input for conveniently connecting portable CD, DVD, and MP3 players.
To get the most out of these speakers I had to play around with the EQ in my iTunes app to correct for their increased bass response, but once I got everything balanced the way I wanted it, I found I could actually listen to all sounds from my computer at a lower overall volume than previously and now, two weeks into using them, I find I actually mute the computer volume quite a bit less than I used to, and I work with music on in the background more as well.
For $130, Altec Lansing Expressionist Bass computer speakers could help you come to love computer audio.
When the new iLife 09 package was announced, I was pretty keen to get my hands on a copy. Some of the features in iPhoto – face recognition, photos on maps – looked too good to be true.
Turns out they *were* too good to be true.
Now that iPhoto 09 has “upgraded” my photo library, I’m cursing myself for installing it. Allow me to explain why.
I *do* like the new features. The face recognition is a little haphazard, but it works most of the time. Seeing photos mapped is also very cool and a great idea for browsing through a large collection.
But you pay a price for these new features. iPhoto 09 includes plenty of new eye candy and interface snazz which is having a detrimental effect on my photo browsing. Photos now animate into view when selected for editing or viewed full-screen. Each photo can be flipped upside down to add metadata, an idea copied from Dashboard widget behavior.
The net result of all this animated swishery is my MacBook’s fans going bananas, and the machine slowing down noticeably when I’m browsing or editing. Frustrating doesn’t cover it: this is maddening, when I stop to consider how smooth and easy and processor-friendly everything was with iPhoto 08.
Another frustration (a minor one, I’ll concede) is that the built-in Flickr upload offers very little in the way of options. Every upload creates a new Flickr set, even if you’re uploading just one image.
What seems to be missing, in my view, is some flexibility in the preferences. If I could simply switch off the eye candy, and tweak the Flickr upload defaults, I’d be a much happier bunny.
In the meantime though, I’m a bit of a grumpy one, and wishing I was still using iLife 08.
I think I need a beer. Yes.
Proof once again that it’s the *software* that makes the iPhone camera, QuadCamera is my latest favorite thing from the App Store.
It turns your iPhone into something like a Lomo Action Sampler, only one with much, much more flexibility than the its traditional film-loading counterpart.
This is Trunk, and it’s possibly the most interesting and enticing iPhone app I’ve seen for weeks.
You’ve got to love Japanese developer Yuki Yasoshima, whose free stopwatch app hit the iTunes AppStore this week. The version of the app on sale in the US store is “English,” but nowhere in the AppStore description is a word of it actually in English, just the same Japanese character information found on Yasoshima’s website, which is also in, yes, Japanese.
Now, that’s confidence in your product!
Fortunately, Big StopWatch is dead intuitive. Not to mention elegant, graphically boss and accurate to the 100th of a second.
If any of our Japanese-savvy readers want to take a shot at Yasoshima’s app description, it’s appended after the jump. Please let us know what we’re missing in comments.
I’ve spent a week or so playing around with the beta release of Picasa for Mac, and here are some thoughts.
– It’s FAST. It does a superb job of pulling in your iPhoto collection in no time at all. Scrolling through it all is much faster than similar scrolling in iPhoto itself.
– It’s considerate. It makes a point of co-existing with iPhoto, and asks nicely for your permission before making a copy of an image that’s being edited. As a consequence, it means people can try Picasa out without worrying about damage to their iPhoto database.
– It finds your photos without fuss. Start it up, and it pokes around in all the usual places (and any other places you instruct it to poke in), looking for new pictures. These then get neatly added to the archive.
– It does things my mum will love. The collages, the integration with Picasa Web Albums – these are features I have little interest in myself, but my mum (who has never got on well with iPhoto) will love them.
– I like the the color searches (as shown in the photo above). Ask it to find “red” stuff and it will. Great for collages, photo books, or artistic projects.
Naturally, as with any beta, there are going to be some teething problems. One bug I’ve noticed is that right-clicking on an image and selecting “Move to (named) album” doesn’t work. And Picasa does seem to take a loooooong time to look through the images already on the camera, and decide if they are duplicates or not. But it does get there in the end.
Beta status or not, Picasa offers a decent alternative for photo management for people who don’t want to spend the kind of money required for Aperture or Lightroom.
OK so the name isn’t quite as snappy as Quicksilver, but the intent is very similar. And at least one of the developers is exactly the same.
Google’s new Quick Search Box for Mac was coded in part by Alcor, aka Nicholas Jitkoff, aka the guy who created Quicksilver and made keyboard-centric launchers the big hit they are today (on pretty much every platform, not just OS X).
This beta release is a good start. It doesn’t spend ages cataloguing your hard disk (at least, not in an intrusive, tie-your-Mac-up-for-minutes sort of way). And the architecture is designed for expansion; more features can be plugged in via, um, plugins.
Note that this is NOT the same as the Google Desktop Search app that you might have played with a while back. Desktop Search used the same Command+Command shortcut but made much greater demands on your system (at least, that’s how I remember it – it lasted about a day on my machine before I removed it, dissatisfied to put it mildly). I’m not very clear right now whether or not Quick Search Box is a replacement for Desktop Search, although I suspect that is the case, or will be in the medium to long term.
The only thing that the older Desktop Search product has got going for it is that it will run on Tiger, whereas the newer app is Leopard-only.
There’s a way to go yet. This new beast crashes, twice in the time it’s taken me to write these words. But hey, if Alcor’s in charge I have high hopes. High hopes indeed.
There are several “serenity” apps on the AppStore, though none may have the cache of Buddha Machine, an iPhone/iPod Touch version of the cultural icon brainchild of Beijing-based musicians Christiaan Virant and Zhang Jian.
Calling themselves FM3, the two pioneers of electronic music in China have brought the idea of their simple, palm-sized box to iPhone and iPod Touch with a $4 app that offers 9 different ambient loops and a zen-like 3D depiction of the real-life Buddha Machine in 7 different colors activated in sequence by simple swipes of the touchscreen or randomly by shaking the device.
Virant was kind enough to offer me a promo code to check out the app and as with many things related to Buddha nature, its simplicity is both disarming and fascinating. The nine ambient loops, ranging in length from five to forty seconds, amazingly synced with the natural rhythm of my breathing, perfectly complementing a meditative mood or providing welcome refuge from modern urban distractions.
FM3 released the first corporeal Buddha Machines, each of which is said to contain a little Buddha, in 2005. Recently released 2.0 versions sell for around $20 and feature 9 new loops and a pitch control. Virant says he is working on an app version for the Buddha 2.0 with new sounds as well as pitch-shifting and a few other functions. It should be released in a month or two.
There are a bunch of guitar-oriented apps on the AppStore but the one demo’d in the video above, from developers at Frontier Design Group seems to have a lot of promise.
Called, simply, Guitar, unlike many of the instructional apps or glorified tuners out there, this app focuses on playablity. Chords and scales are easily assigned to its fretboard buttons, making it possible to strum chords, play melodies, or both. With over 1500 built-in chords, and a built-in chord editor to create custom chords, Guitar relies on a variety of realistically sampled sounds to provide surprising depth and nuance to what a user can play.
The most recently updated version of this $4 app, compatible with iPhone and iPod Touch, lets users record performances or create backing tracks that can be played along with. Recordings can also be backed up over the web to the Frontier Song Server, where they can be shared between multiple devices.
Guitar may not be as huge a hit as Ocarina, but it serves notice that Apple’s mobile gadgets are limited only by their users’ own imaginations.
Did you know your iPhone and iPod Touch may contain the inscrutable wisdom of the Spheres? Two free applications on the iTunes AppStore promise to take the guesswork out of hard decision making, with the same whimsy and clarity offered by the once wildly popular Magic Eight Ball you might remember from your youth.
The Magic iBall app borrows its name and a similar look from the classic Eight Ball, and offers a choice of “themes” – from the standard black ball to a gold “bling” ball to a smiley face ball. It also offers a choice of answer “themes” – classic fortune teller, zen, weird and more – that are somewhat confusingly accessed and enabled from your device’s Settings menu and not from within the app itself.
Not as groovy looking as Magic iBall at first blush, in the end I think I prefer the look and feel of My Answers, which features a multi-sided triangle die floating in dark liquid, similar to the old Eight Ball decision-making assistant.
Both apps work on the same principle: turn the touchscreen face down, ask your question, and turn the device over – your answer appears, like magic. Another attractive feature to My Answers is its 20 fully customizable answers. You can stick with the default yes, no, maybe-type answers delivered in “fortune teller lingo (Signs Point to Yes), or make up your own personal directives.
These apps could come in handy this week at Macworld. Will there be an iPhone Nano? Will there be a new Mac mini? Is Steve Jobs really OK? The Magic Eight Ball knows all…
I’m a shy and retiring Englishman, so tooting my own horn doesn’t come naturally, but my brash American wife insist I post this: USA Today named Inside Steve’s Brain, my book about Steve Jobs, one of the best business titles published in 2008.
Says USA Today:
“Offers insightful nuggets on Steve Jobs, who helped create personal computers and digital music while moonlighting as a modern-day Walt Disney at animation studio Pixar.”
Link: Year’s best: These books meant business in 2008
Links: Inside Steve’s Brain on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and 800CEORead.
There are many fine and useful offerings coming out of the Freeverse development shop and I recommend a visit to the website, but I want to talk right now about a couple of their iPhone/iPod Touch games – Flick Fishing, which you can see in the video above, and Flick Bowling.
When I got into this gig, I didn’t intend on becoming an iPhone game addict, but I’m beginning to understand why some people chase the mobile handset dragon.
Ancient wisdom in fishing circles holds that the worst day fishing beats the best day working. Well, Flick Fishing is an app that will give you a mighty realistic taste of a day on the water during that smoke, or coffee, or lunch break on a day when you’re stuck at work.
Choose from 6 locations, 9 types of bait and tackle, a dozen tournaments and dozens of unique species of fish, for a far more satisfying virtual fishing experience than you’d think 99¢ might buy. You can even use Network and Hotseat play to compete against your friends and show off your trophy catches by email with the “Brag” feature.
If you’d rather kill some time with a virtual indoor experience, you could do a lot worse then Flick Bowling. There are a couple of other bowling games on the AppStore, but Freeverse’s 99¢ program knocks ’em down in the first frame.
Excellent 3D animation and realistic bowling alley sounds, along with great music – and customizable bowling balls in the latest version – make Flick Bowling an oddly relaxing way to feel good about doing nothing in particular. You can choose from varying levels of difficulty and bowl solo, against your friends or against a built-in opponent. Between frames you can switch over to iBeer and come back to pick up where you left off.
Promo App Codes, a web forum, tradingpost and clearinghouse for iPhone app developers and the people who love them, launched this week and seems to already be generating considerable interest on both sides of the aisle.
For developers, the site is an oppportunity to promote their work and share Apple’s recently authorized promotional codes, a device for getting early-release and review copies of AppStore approved apps quickly into the hands of up to 50 app testers/reviewers. For reviewers/bloggers/app-nuts, the site provides an easy way to learn about new apps and to establish relationships directly with developers while giving them the valuable feedback to optimize and improve their applications.
Amanuel Tewolde, a developer and founder of Promo App Codes, told Cult of Mac, “When I first heard that Apple will give me 50 promo codes for my apps in the store, I didn’t know who to give them out to.” The site was conceived as he began to consider that “user testing is expensive, and these codes provide a cheap alternative, not to mention help with some positive buzz.”
Potential reviewers and developers alike register for a free account on the clean, simply designed site, with developers having the opportunity to post app information and screenshots in blog-fashion. Registered users have the opportunity to post comments on each “post” about an application.
Users/reviewers/bloggers create profiles and add apps to a “wish list,” entries which show up to developers as interest in their apps, and developers then contact users with free promotional codes. The site maintains a rating system for each app and hosts a forum where all interested parties can communicate with one another. At this writing the site has registered 685 accounts in the two days it’s been open for business.
“We still have lots to learn and do but things look very exciting and the timing seems right,” says Tewolde. “It is christmas season, could there be a better time to start a site where people get free apps?”
Oh look, Delicious (or del.icio.us for us old-skool users) has gone all mobile-friendly with a new site at m.delicious.com.
It works well on an iPhone, complete with a shiny icon if you decide to add it as a home screen bookmark. It’s great if you want to access your bookmarks on the move; what’s missing (and is equally important in my opinion) is a view of your network’s bookmarks.
I agree with Fraser Speirs – my Delicious network is a fabulous source of links, news, ideas and stuff of interest, and it’s compiled automagically for me every day by 58 people I know, like, and admire. I couldn’t live without it.
At a talk in San Francisco tonight, I encountered a very cool (relatively) new OS X app called MemoryMiner. Basically, it takes all of your photos, your address book, and Google Maps to create interesting, shareable stories with friends and family. The most important piece of the app is its ability to quickly tag a portion of an image, much as Facebook and Flickr do, then associate those pieces of data back to your wider social network — over the course of time. It’s explicitly designed to allow you to tag a person at different points in their lifetime, so you can track and associate your family’s history over the course of centuries, if you have the documents to support it.
It’s currently in version 1.85 (available for a 15-day trial or $45), and creator John Fox tells me version 2.0 is well on its way, as is a social tool to track your personal geographic history compared to others. Having played around with the app for a few hours now, I will say that the program is really great at tagging and adding in new people to my MemoryMiner people file. In a few minutes, I had clips of pictures and names with all the people I wanted to. Unfortunately, for those whose birth dates I didn’t know (most of them), I had no ability to track their photos over their lifetimes. But it largely works as advertised.
Unfortunately, it has some pretty basic, pretty show-stopping limitations for the time-being. I couldn’t get it to import my iPhoto 08 Library, so that’s a huge portion of my memories that aren’t included right now. Even more troublingly, the program lacks the basic functionality to rotate photos so they’re in the correct orientation. Or, if it’s there, I just couldn’t locate it, which would almost be worse
Still, it’s a program with considerable potential. I could even imagine the company setting up a service to scan, upload, and tag archival photos so they can be associated and studied by users at home. I can just see the genealogy lovers getting way into this. Maybe in version 2.0.
Bring me the head of Nick Pavis! The CEO of San Francisco-based entertainment software company MunkyFun is ultimately responsible for the two hours I failed to notice ticking by this afternoon while engrossed in his visually stunning, sneakily addicting iPhone game, Ivory Tiles.
With its oddly calming Oriental soundtrack and the realistic sounding slide and click of ivory tiles on a wooden gameboard, Ivory Tiles draws you into the challenge of solving its spatial and geometric puzzles like nothing I have ever experienced. Making excellent use of iPhone’s accelerometer and impeccable 3D graphics engine, the game took me through levels of frustration, elation and ultimately relaxation that I hardly imagined possible from playing a game on a mobile device.
Must. Keep. From. Number. One. Son.
$1.99 from the AppStore; worth ten times that amount. Requires iPhone 2.1 software update.
They may not look as studiously Apple as the Earbud speakers in the next post, but I’ll wager the $20 difference in price these Altec Lansing expressionist CLASSIC speakers kick some serious audio jams on those stylin’ earbuds.
To begin with, Altec Lansing is one of the venerable names in audiophile engineering. The Milford, PA-based company has been producing superior quality speakers since 1938 and this offering in the PC audio category lives up to its 70 year reputation for good sound. Unique cylindrical cabinets house specially designed 3″ drivers powered by 15 watts of total continuous power to deliver a full spectrum of clear, warm sound found in other PC audio products costing twice as much.
Speakers should never require an engineering degree to get going and these small-footprint machines, with their own simple style that says “listen up,” are about as plug and play as any audio component you will find. Power and speaker volume controls are at your fingertips on the rear of the Right speaker, and if you’ve got a friend over with an iPod or other portable audio device, you can easily listen to their iTunes library by plugging into the Altec’s 3.5mm Aux-in jack. All the cords and connecting hardware are made from high-quality, heavy gauge material that inspires confidence in a well-made, long-lasting product.
I mentioned they sound great, right? For $79.95, these speakers will upgrade your standard thin, tinny PC audio system and bring new life to your music, gameplay and movie watching experience.
Available now from the Altec Lansing website and select Apple Retail outlets, these and the full line of Altec Lansing PC audio components will also be featured at Macworld 2009.
iPhone beatbox app Beatmaker has been updated to version 1.3, which brings with it some nice new features.
This release is about detail: there’s more detailed edit options in the step sequencer. You can do more with your patterns, they can be more complicated and mixed in more interesting ways.
Editing the whole song is easier thanks to a zoom control and an access bar that lets you jump from one part of the song to another.
Best of all, it’s now a proper sampler. Beatmaker will let you record sounds using the iPhone’s built-in mic, assign them to pads, and use them in songs without any extra fussing about.
Wait, though, there’s more! Have you wanted a pocket Stylophone ever since the 1970s ended? Me too!
Weeeeelllllll…
Got a big fat PDF? Rather have it split into lots of little jpgs, one for each page in the PDF?
That happens to me a lot.
Jim DeVona’s Save PDFs pages as images Automator app is what you and I need.
It does all the chopping-up-and-separating, then it neatly saves the images in a numbered sequence so you know which one’s which.
You should check out his software page too, it’s got all sorts of goodies for your Mac, especially for Yojimbo users.
Everybody say: “Yojimbo!” There, that feels better doesn’t it?
Some people are frantically asking “WHY GOOGLE, WHY?” but to me it makes perfect sense. Gmail now has a simple task manager and I love it. It works nicely within my copy of Mailplane, as do the keyboard shortcuts. You can enable it from inside the Labs settings tab (which is where you can mess with keyboard shortcuts too).
It made me smile when I looked at the hints. Gmail knew I was using a Mac and showed me the appropriate Command keystrokes to make stuff happen. Move items up and down the list with Command+Up or Command+Down, indent them with Tab, unindent with Shift+Tab. All makes sense.
But my favorite feature is that any email can be turned into a task. These tasks appear with a little “Related email” link so you can instantly see their context.
Bravo Gmail team, a job well done.
I wrote last week about the impending release of Job Compass, an iPhone app that utilizes the phone’s location-aware capability and Google Maps to deliver location-specific results to users’ job search queries. The app had its debut on the iTunes AppStore over the weekend and I’ve spent the past few days playing around with it.
I am happy to report Job Compass is a useful, intuitive and well-designed application that takes out of the equation some of the more tedious aspects of searching for new employment. In the current economic climate, where the unemployment rate in the US has risen in each of the past six months and now stands at a level higher than its most recent peak in 2003, Job Compass is a handy app indeed.
On launch the program asks permission to use your location as a base from which to perform a job search. After a few moments, a Google map pinned to your location appears and you’re invited to search for a job. Users can put in anything they want (now’s the time to think – what’s your dream job?) and choose to search for listings within a 5, 10, 25, 50 or 100 mile radius of their current location.
A recent search for writer/editor positions within 10 miles of my house returned five open positions, all of which I could then call up and read about, either in short digest or full description form. Users can choose to send themselves an email with a link to the job description, or open it in Safari and apply for the job right from the iPhone. Though, given the limitations of the iPhone’s virtual keyboard and the raft of text entries usually required in an online job application, sending an email link is almost always going to be your best option. (Note to Ed.: I’m not looking, that was just an example!)
Titus Blair, spokesman for Securicy Ventures, the app’s developer, told Cult of Mac, “we have partnered with most of the large jobs boards with the goal of being the #1 source for location based jobs searches,” and noted that Jobs Compass’s patent pending search protocol currently scans a database of over 2+ million listings, with more added daily.
Blair acknowledges “on Edge it can run pretty slow,” but says “we are working directly with Google on dramatically speeding this up for release 2.0.” Other enhancements in the works for coming updates include displaying maps and search results in landscape mode, the ability to input zip codes to search in other locations, as well as support for listings in the UK and Canada, and possibly other countries down the road.
Job Compass sells for $3.99 on the iTunes AppStore, which, if you’ve just lost your job or are interested in finding a new one, could prove to be a worthy investment.