software - page 34

What it is: Tab Toolkit is a sophisticated guitar practice and education app from Agile Partners, makers of the handy Guitar Toolkit app that came out in 2008. Tab Toolkit lets users read and listen to real-time guitar tablature files, scrolling through songs at the correct tempo, showing both traditional and tablature notation and superimposing fingering notation updated in real-time on a virtual fretboard or piano keyboard.

Why it’s cool: Tab Toolkit is an app for serious guitarists willing to invest $10 in something that will make tab charts come alive on the go. That said, the app is cool because it shows the user exactly where to finger guitar parts as a synthesized version of a song is playing in real time through the iPhone or iPod Touch speakers or headphones. Songs can be stopped and started, scrolled forward and back, and the sound output can be muted to allow users to concentrate on their own playing. The fretboard can even be flipped to accommodate left-handed players.

Tab files can be a bit of a rare beast to come by, with the most useful files optimized for Mac being those created and readable by GuitarPro software, which runs $59.

Online libraries such as GPro Tab offer free sharing of user-generated GuitarPro tabs, which can be a great way to get started in the rich world of online instrument practice and education. Tab Toolkit supports text files and PDF files as well, but the genius behind the app is best appreciated with a GuitarPro tab.

The app supports multitrack parts, so users can learn two different guitar parts to a song, for example, or the bass part, the keyboard part, or even the vocal. Tempos can be speeded up or slowed down, and getting tabs from a user’s computer on to the iPhone are a snap over a wireless network connection – from the web onto the phone they are just as easy using the embedded Safari browser.

This reviewer doesn’t have too many $10 apps on his iPhone, but as a musician, I can say without reservation that Agile Partners have created an incredibly useful, well-thought-out app that performs – so far – flawlessly.

Where to get it: Tab Toolkit went live in the iTunes App Store on Tuesday; it sells for $9.99

Now this looks interesting: Blasted is a Menu Bar app that quietly tracks what you’ve been working on – all the files you’ve created, opened, or modified recently – and makes them available when you need them via an unobtrusive icon.

What it is: Developed by the creators of the excellent photo/slideshow sharing app 12 Seconds, which was among the first iPhone apps to support shared audiovisual messaging, 12mail is the first app to fully support streaming video messaging.

Why it’s cool: 12mail features full integration with Facebook and Twitter, allowing users to instantly populate the app with contact information for their friends on the the two most popular social media platforms in use today. The app breaks contacts into Everyone and Favorites groups, making it easy to find those in heaviest rotation, and has an option allowing public posts to a user’s Twitter page or Facebook wall.

Compiling videos stored on a user’s phone or recording new video is dead easy, and most brilliant of all, the app only uses the first 12 seconds of any video users choose, keeping messages small enough to send and receive painlessly even over a slow Edge connection. The app uses push notification and features the ability to annotate with text titles and geotags.

All video streams from servers at 12seconds.tv, which avoids use of limited storage on a user’s device and allows people without the app to receive and even initiate 12mail video messages of their own.

Where to get it: 12mail is free and went live in the iTunes App Store today.

Of all the announcements at the “It’s Only Rock and Roll” Apple event, I was initially most excited for Genius for the App Store. As an iPhone-lover and friend of more than a few iPhone developers, I was really hoping this could add discoverability to the App Store and help some unsung heroes get attention.

No such luck. It mainly seems to recommend apps that do exactly what apps I already have on my phone do.

I have Tweetie, so it recommends other Twitter clients. I have Mint, so it recommends other money-management software. I have Kayak, so it recommends other plane ticket programs.

Other times, it fares even worse, making flat-out irrelevant recommendations: I have Public Radio Player 2.0, so it offers Lollapalooza, the guidebook for going to a music festival that took place in early August.

Even weirder, Genius only makes recommendations based on a small handful of my apps — maybe six out of the 30+ on my phone. For some reason, it thinks that Shazam and Flickr are more instructive for recommendations than every other app I own. I check it almost every day, and I still haven’t downloaded a single recommendation.

Couple this with the fact that OS 3.1 broke Internet Tethering and has noticeably reduced the speed of scrolling in Mail and iPod, and I regret ever making the upgrade (note to Apple: it’s a bad idea to release software that makes your speedier sequel to the iPhone 3G significantly slower just a few months after launch).

Anyone had a different experience? I’m seriously looking into downgrading back to 3.0.1.

Back in the mid-1990s, there was one thing incredibly obvious to anyone using a Mac: Apple wasn’t ever going to develop a modern successor to the classic Mac Operating System. Despite screenshots of the planned Copland system, the ship date kept getting pushed out, and the pages of MacWeek, MacUser, and MacWorld all started devoting more time to other possible replacements for the core Mac experience. Some mentioned NeXT (the true eventual source of Mac OS X), others ludicrously suggested Windows NT on PowerPC might suffice (seriously), but the consensus was that Jean-Louis Gassee’s BeOS would be the winner.

The upstart operating system had a lot going for it: Native PowerPC support, remarkable multiprocessor optimization (this thing screamed on dual PPC 603s), and, of course, the requisite modern multi-tasking support. Though it ended up losing out to Steve Jobs, a fact almost no one mourns, a lot of us longtime Mac-heads still have a soft spot for the Be-fueled Macs that never were. The software is now mainly found on embedded devices (Palm tried to make it the next Palm OS long before the creation of the Pre) and has no real future.

But you can relive the glory days of the BeOS today, now, on any Intel Mac, provided you have VMWare, Parallels, or VirtualBox (caveat: I’ve only gotten this working on VMWare — the others should work, though). Meet the Haiku Project, an open-source effort to recreate the magic of Be for the modern era. That’s pretty much the pitch — and it mostly delivers. It’s fairly impressive for what it is, though it’s more novelty than anything else for the time-being.

Any true Be-lievers out there? Head to Haiku to get your install disks. If you’re on VMWare, just get the VM file here and go to.

Social browser Flock might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it comes with some social web smarts built-in, and some of these can be put to use in cool ways.

What is it? It’s one of my all-time favourite Menu Bar apps, and was recently updated to work with Snow Leopard. I’m delighted to have just re-installed it after a spell of trying to live without it.

The app is called I Love Stars, and I prefer it over ever other iTunes helper I’ve tried. And I’ve tried quite a few.

What is it? It’s Notational Velocity, one of the best and yet most overlooked note apps for OS X. You should download it immediately.

Why it’s cool Because if you want to store text notes, many hundreds or thousands of them, and then be able to search through them at lighting speed, there is no faster or simpler way of doing it.

What it is: Yahoo has released a native app for iPhone that seamlessly integrates Apple’s mobile device with Yahoo’s popular photo and video sharing platform, Flickr.

Why it’s cool: With the iPhone having recently become the most popular camera among users of the Flickr service, it should be no surprise Yahoo has produced a nifty native app that makes uploading photos and videos from the iPhone to Flickr dead easy.

The first time users launch the app they are prompted to verify a Flickr account through a Safari browser, after which uploading pics and videos to Flickr servers on-the-fly become easy and intuitive. Uploads can be geotagged, tagged with keywords, and placed into sets – and a user’s entire Flickr stream can be viewed in series or by set and tag.

Maybe you don’t want to upload pics but just want to chill with some eye candy from your own stream, the streams of your Flickr contacts, or from other Flickr users worldwide. Just open the app and it will serve up a handful of images from random users as well as from your contacts and display them in a lovely little “Ken Burns”-style slide show. You can also search your contacts, view recent activity, comment and mark images as favorites.

All in all, the app brings very tight integration between the iPhone and the web service and should make the iPhone even more popular as a Flickr upload device in the coming months.

Where to get it: Flickr for iPhone is a free application, available now on the iTunes App Store.

Here’s a short screencast showing the basic function of iTunes 9’s new app management tool for iPhone and iPod touch.

It’s interesting to compare and contrast this with this app manager concept that we featured here on the Cult back in February.

Most iPhone owners I know have never bothered to sort their apps into any sort of meaningful screen-by-screen arrangement, simply because doing so was too much hassle. This tool will change that, I think, and encourage people to create screenfuls of apps sorted by category.

Have you tried re-arranging your apps yet? What do you make of it?

Noted cogitator Jason Kottke has an interesting thought on the experience of getting fully up to speed with brand-new Apple hardware and software. Basically, things have gotten so good that, barring minor speed improvements, you can’t tell any difference between new and old. He terms it “The Apple Upgrade Problem”:

“Which is where the potential difficulty for Apple comes in. From a superficial perspective, my old MBP and new MBP felt exactly the same…same OS, same desktop wallpaper, same Dock, all my same files in their same folders, etc. Same deal with the iPhone except moreso…the iPhone is almost entirely software and that was nearly identical. And re: Snow Leopard, I haven’t noticed any changes at all aside from the aforementioned absent plug-ins.”

Jason’s on to something interesting here. If you are a frequent Apple upgrader, you get far less of a thrill than if you wait a long time between devices. Consider the negligible differences between last year’s MacBook Pros and this year’s (unless you love battery life, FireWire, and SD cards, there’s not much to discuss). Or between the first video-capable iPod nanos and the current models (styling and form factor tell the whole story). And that’s without mentioning that it’s literally impossible to tell a 16-gig iPhone 3G apart from a 3GS.

So what does this mean?

For most people, very little. Unless you’re buying replacement hardware on an annual or at most biannual basis, you won’t have these kinds of difficulties. I, for one, had an iPod from 2004 that lasted me until I bought a green nano last year — huge leap forward. My PowerBook G4 stuck it out for five-and-a-half years before my beloved unibody MacBook arrived. And I won’t even go into just how much better the iPhone 3GS is than the BlackBerry Pearl it replaced.

For some people, Apple’s current predictability is a major boon. For corporate purchasers for example, the ability to requisition multiple models of a computer and not make it clear in the design who has the nicest or newest machine is a big deal for IT. That way I don’t get jealous when my 2008 unibody MacBook starts to age unfavorably against what I can only presume will be a 2010 unibody MacBook Pro. That’s true on iPhones, too, where executives who adopted a 3G last year don’t look hopelessly out of date around their 3GS-packing peers.

Honestly, the more I think about it, the very few people who are negatively affected by stuff like this are Apple’s most diehard fans — creative professionals who rely on new Mac hardware and software to help them do great work. The same people, it should be noted, who carried Apple through its darkest days. I’m less concerned on the hardware front (Apple always sticks with a design for a few years to avoid costs and focus on bigger leaps forward), but in software, it is a niggling question. And if the Mac isn’t providing creative pros with interesting novelty and inspiration, Apple isn’t executing on the fullness of its mission — where’s the creativity?

Now, it’s clear that Snow Leopard was a deliberate pause in the OS X development cycle to make sure that everything just worked a whole lot better. Other than a few front-stage changes, it was meant to invisibly make your existing Mac more stable and speedy. The question remains just how Apple will evolve OS X next. There are a lot fewer gaps than there used to be — and so much interesting work to be done in mobile and other touch interfaces.

What do you think — is there interesting work to be done on OS X as we know it? Or does Snow Leopard signal an end to innovation in conventional desktop operating systems?

On Monday, reader Abram Siegel’s iDisk showed 2TB of available storage. Yeah, that’s right — terabytes. The default iDisk storage is 20 gigabytes.

Siegel’s iDisk said 2TB when  logged on this morning and is still saying 2TB this evening. “Still showing,” he says. “Very strange.”

Even stranger, a few other people on MacRumors forums have also experienced the mystery 2TB upgrade.

Is it a common glitch, or is Apple upgrading accounts? Anyone else’s iDisk showing 2TB?

Snow Leopard’s revitalised Services menu is probably my favorite improvement among the many included in the upgrade.

At long last, the user has been given total control over Services. We can choose whether or not they are used, we can assign keyboard shortcuts that suit us, and we can create entirely new Services using Automator.

The crucial difference between Services in Leopard and Services in Snow Leopard is context.

OK, this one’s a bit niche, but some of you might find it useful. For the benefit who’d rather read than watch a video, here’s an explanation.

Many of you will already be familiar with OS X’s built-in zoom feature (which you can reach via the Mouse or Trackpad prefs in Snow Leopard). Hold down Control (by default; you can change it to Option or Command if you wish), then two-finger scroll up or down on your trackpad, or use a mouse wheel if you have one. Your display will zoom smoothly in and out.

And many of you will also have heard about the new QuickTime screencast recording feature in Snow Leopard, which offers does a fine job but lacks the bells and whistles found in full-scale screencasting apps like ScreenFlow.

Combine the two, and you have a neat way of calling out or highlighting details while using QuickTime to record a screencast.

Update 2: Thanks to Cult of Mac reader Gus, who noted that certain websites were screwing up his Photoshop. I started playing around with Safari and noticed that sites with embedded Flash were causing the cursor issue. I then recalled Adobe UK PR bod Emma Wilkinson’s tweet from earlier today:

Info: Snow Leopard ships w/earlier version Flash Player, recommend all update to latest, more secure which supports SL https://bit.ly/yP2VA

Sure enough, after installing the Flash update, the problem seems to be gone.

I’ve been a quite vocal critic of Adobe of late, but I’m damn impressed with the company today—it looks like someone is listening, and that’s always a good thing.

Update: Kudos to Adobe. Shortly after this post went up, a ‘Senior Software Product Quality Specialist – Photoshop’ was in touch, and we’re now involved in a discussion to try and figure out what’s going on. Also, Nack is keeping people up to date regarding some of the reported CS3 and CS4 problems.

With any new operating system comes a certain amount of pain, but the transition to Snow Leopard has been relatively easy for me. I’ve had one incredibly nasty hard crash that locked up the Mac, painted vertical stripes down the screen and looped about a quarter-second of audio at maximum volume (it was like the iMac decided to do its own really small horror film), but nothing bad before or since.

A minor exception is Photoshop CS4, which on the face of it works well, but is becoming increasingly quirky. Two bugs I’ve so far discovered that have hampered my workflow quite significantly are: 1) Photoshop deciding to ignore drags from Finder to its Dock icon—half the time, it opens just one of multiple documents; 2) insanely useful Photoshop custom cursors vanishing when the mouse button is held down.

For the latter of those things, I made a quick video (with an exasperated tone of voice). If anyone knows what the hell causes this and how to fix the bug, please post in the comments. (Note the hardware in this case is a 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac.)

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

The British security firm Intego has published a security memo that provides a clear and detailed view of Apple’s new XProtect anti-virus system in Snow Leopard.

There are several interesting tidbits: Apple’s new XProtect system cannot recognize all the variants of the Trojans it is supposed to protect against, for example.

Also, the XProtect system does not spot Trojans hidden inside .mpkg files downloaded from the internet, a major weakness, according to Intego. (Apple’s installer recognizes two types of files — .pkg files for simple packages, and .mpkg files that contain multiple packages to be installed.)

The memo is patently self-serving — Intego sells several anti-virus and privacy packages for the Mac — but nonetheless provides a clear and detailed view of what Apple’s new XProtect system does — and doesn’t do.

The full memo after the jump.

Way way back in the mists of ancient history, I owned a Palm device, and I loved the little fella.

One of my favourite apps for the Palm was AvantGo (now defunct) – a huge database of free newspaper and magazine content that the device would download every time you synced the Palm with your desktop computer.

I used to spend long train journeys catching up with news from the BBC, Wired, and a bunch of other publications. Most of it was full text, there were no ads (not that I can remember, anyway – this was a long time ago now), it was fast and quick and easy. Superb.

This week I noticed Time magazine’s new app, and started poking around elsewhere in the news section of the App Store. In particular, I wanted to see what the UK media were up to.

In what’s turning out to be a busy few weeks for the team at Bare Bones, their information manager app Yojimbo has just been bumped up to 2.0. The new version is a 20 dollar upgrade for owners of older versions, is Snow Leopard compatible, and has this spectacular new icon.

UPDATE: The Yankee Group also says the numbers are way high, and AdMob defends its estimates, kinda, sorta. See below.

Estimates that the iPhone App Store is worth $2.4 billion a year are utterly ridiculous, iPhone developers say.

Mobile advertising firm AdMob on Thursday got a ton of press for estimating that the iPhone App Store earns billions. The number was extrapolated from a survey of about 1,000 users — and is massively overstated, iPhone developers say.

“Do the math and that’s a ridiculous claim,” wrote developer Layton Duncan of Polar Bear Farm, an iPhone developer based in New Zealand.

Duncan did the math: $2.4 billion divided by the 65,000 apps in the App Store is $37,000 per app, per year. And while some developers earn that, many do not. Long Tail anyone?

David Barnard of App Cubby, a developer based in Austin, Texas, says AdMob’s number is at least 5x too big. The iPhone App Store is worth $250 and $500 million per year, estimates Barnard, who keeps a close, professional eye on App Store sales.

Renowned blogger, FriendFeeder, and all-around social web socialite Robert Scoble has pointed out something really interesting about the latest updated to the new revision of the Yelp iPhone app (iTunes link): it has a secret augmented reality mode dubbed “Monocle.” It is, of course, for iPhone 3GS only.

To activate, simply shake your iPhone a bunch (I’ve heard three times, but it took me like 10) until a blue box lets you know Monocle has been activated. Then just tap the Monocle button, which sticks around for good, and the app uses your camera, GPS location, and compass to put up signs and reviews for nearby restaurants and bars.

I just tried it out in my living room (that’s the view from my window circa 9 p.m.), and it’s seriously amazing. That list is pretty much exactly the full complement of cheap eats south from my window.

I don’t know how useful Monocle is (using the standard map mode is probably faster and definitely less battery draining), but it is a great way to feel like you live in the future.

Nicely done, Yelp.

One of the more, um, INTERESTING, design choices in Snow Leopard is the option to show icons in the new Cocoa-based Finder at an insane 512×512 pixels. Here’s how big that is: on a unibody 13.3″ MacBook Pro, you can display exactly two of them without either overlapping or running off the screen. The 30″ Cinema HD Display can only display 15 of them, and it’s significantly higher resolution than a 1080p television. The original Mac, at 512X342 pixels, could only display the width in full.

They’re enormous, and only possibly practical if you want to read documents without opening them, in which case Quick Look is a way better option anyway. Regardless, the new high-definition icons are fascinating viewed at full size. I’ve put in just the Folder icon, which is now big enough to have discernable flecks of dark blue in the grain. Amazing. Totally obsessive. And totally Apple.

The Register has more. Check them out.

After a long wait, the new Facebook 3.0 App for the iPhone is finally live on the App Store. It offers several new features, including the ability to upload video from the iPhone 3GS, like posts and photos, and RSVP to upcoming events.

If the App Store still says version 2.5, ignore it — version 3.0 will download says developer Joe Hewitt.

Download Facebook 3.0 here.

New features include:

– See your upcoming Events and RSVP
– See Pages and post updates and photos to Pages you administer
– Write Notes and read your friends’ Notes
– Upload videos from an iPhone 3GS
– Complete photo management (create albums, delete albums, delete photos, delete photo tags)
– Change your Profile Picture
– Like posts and photos
– See the same News Feed as the Facebook website
– Visit links in a built-in web browser
– Quickly call or text your friends

Spotify’s app for the iPhone has been approved by Apple and should be available to premium customers shortly. But alas, not in the U.S. — at least, not yet.

“The current status as of right now is it’s been approved and we hope to add the app to the more than 65,000 apps on the app store very soon,” an Apple spokesperson told PaidContent. “We’ve been in constant communication working with the developer and have already notified Spotify that the app will be in the app store very soon.”

This is fantastic news for music lovers, and a big surprise from Apple. If there’s a real threat to iTunes, it’s Spotify.

Spotify’s streaming music service has taken the world by storm with a library that rivals iTunes — about 6 million tracks — and an interface to match. It’s dead easy to search, build playlists, and find new artists. It’s basically iTunes in the cloud — but free.

The $20-a-month premium service dispenses with the occasional ads, which aren’t intrusive. A premium account will be required to use the iPhone app.

So magnificent is the service, it already has 2 million subscribers in Europe and is adding 50,000 new users every day. It is set to come to the U.S. some time later this year, or maybe next, pending licensing agreements with the record labels.

The only downside is that it’s tied to the computer. But Spotify’s iPhone app promises to change that. The app can cache full playlists to be played offline — thousand of songs can be stored on the iPhone and played at any time. You can store up to 3,333 songs — that’s 10 days constant listening — and the songs will sync over WiFi, no USB cable needed, according to Wired.com. Bye, bye iTunes. This is the future of music. Why would you buy songs any longer?

There was speculation that the app wouldn’t be approved by Apple because it is such a threat to the iTunes business model. Some feared Apple would argue that the Spotify App replicates core functions of the iPhone: IE. playing music. This was the reasoning Apple used for not approving the Google Voice app, which is still under review because it replicates the iPhone’s telephony functions — or so Apple argued to the FCC.

So big surprise that Apple’s giving the go-ahead. Of course, the app might be crippled in key ways. But perhaps the company is softening its stance in the face of ongoing controversy about the App Store? Or perhaps Apple is afraid it might become the target of an antitrust case, a la Microsoft?

Fingers crossed Spotify comes Stateside sooner than later. Here’s a cool video of the Spotify app in action. Watch the offline song caching feature at about 28 seconds in. .

With Uncle Walt’s confirmation, the cat’s officially out of the bag: That $30 Snow Leopard disc Apple’s making available starting Friday? It works with more than just full Leopard installs — it can upgrade any Intel Mac, including those running Tiger. In other words, unless you want to pick up iLife and iWork in the process, the only reason to buy the $169 Mac Box is if you want to live by the spirit of Apple’s marketing.

What do you think, Tiger users? Will you abide by formal ethics or just buy the cheapest upgrade path ever? And will your Leopard-buying friends hate you for it?

All Things D via Gizmodo