software - page 42

Come with me on a journey: It’s two in the morning, you’ve been working on a report for ages and you’re hitting the hard part. You’d better do something to focus on this paper right now or you’re going to wind up fiddling with iTunes playlists and blindly posting on unsavory websites.

Enter MegaZoomer. With one stroke of command-return your paper just engulfed your entire screen. The WHOLE thing. You finish your paper in record time! The day is saved! Here’s an image of Safari filling my entire screen using MegaZoomer:

MegaZoomer can take any Cocoa-based application and zoom it up to the size of the whole screen. This means you’ve got great screen use for Safari, Aperture, most text editors and lots, lots more.

It even works with Terminal for those… really important coding projects.

The only downside of MegaZoomer is that you have to have SIMBL installed. If you don’t already have SIMBL installed, I’d suggest you look into it not only for MegaZoomer, but for the myriad of other great plugins that require it.

[thanks Larry]

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.

JAJAH, a leading IP telecommunications company, further blurred the lines between iPhone and iPod touch Thursday by announcing a new service aimed at businesses and other telecommunications carriers who want to provide their customers with the ability to make low-cost phone calls and send SMS text messages to any phone in the world from an iPod Touch.

The white label service, which will allow carriers and non-carriers alike to enable VoIP calling with just an iPod Touch and a WiFi connection, could soon see any number of offerings crop up in the AppStore promising Touch users the ability to turn their device into a fully functioning mobile phone.

JAJAH’s platform features a full suite of telecom management services, from termination of the calls and quality control, to billing and processing payments in 200 countries around the world.

“Millions of people around the world already have an iPod Touch in their pocket. With JAJAH’s solution, any company can turn their customers’ iPod Touch into a fully functioning mobile phone,” said Trevor Healy, CEO, JAJAH. “The device is particularly popular amongst students, who live in a world where Wi-Fi access is always available and, like everyone, they are looking to save costs, so this is a perfect solution.”

One wonders whether AT&T and iPhone’s other exclusive global cell carriers can read the writing on the wall.

Check out this cool video from Stimulant, the San Francisco design house and creator of XRay, an app that takes the awesomeness of Microsoft’s Surface and the amazing abilities of the iPhone and creates something rather stunning.

From the Stimulant desciption:

What you see here is a prototype that takes advantage of Surface’s object recognition capabilities to recognize the position of one or more iPhones on the Surface, and allows those phones to “see through” the images and reveal a second layer of information.

The possibilities here are fairly extensive; what’s most interesting is the potential for adding a layer of personalized information on top of a public computing experience.

This could enable users to capture content and take it with them, or to have the system display a personalized information layer (translated text/larger-print type/private messages) for individual users of a multi-user system.

iPhone was the first mobile platform we dug in to, but we’ve also got XRay working on Android-based and Windows Mobile-based phones as well.

Via Ars Technica

Lim Ding Wen, a nine-year-old from Singapore, has written a free art application for iPhone, called Doodle Kids. The app has been downloaded more than 4000 times since its release on Feb. 1.

While many kids his age are content to simply play games on the iPhone or PSP, Ding Wen is all about programming in ActionScript and JavaScript. He also understands five other programming languages and is already hard at work on his next app, a game called “Invader Wars.”

Ding Wen’s efforts stem from his father’s devotion to the Apple IIGS, which he calls “one of the best computers Apple had ever produced.” His dad maintains a website “to bring back the fun and excitement of Apple IIGS programming for all the young children,” with sample codes and a Virtual GS disk available for download.

Kids today. Kind of gives one hope for tomorrow.

Via Engadget

The Reuters news organization brings news of 9-year-old Lim Deng Wen of Singapore, quite possibly the world’s youngest iPhone developer. His signature program is Doodle Kids (app store link), a rather abstract drawing game that he developed for his little sisters. It’s been downloaded 4,000 times so far, and it’s free.

What the article fails to mention is that Lim’s programs were initially written for an Apple IIGS emulator before porting to iPhone, which might just be the most interesting transition between Apple platforms this millennium. Does anyone have an Apple /// program that runs on the AppleTV?

Via Digg

The much-maligned iPhone camera keeps getting more awesome software written to enhance the things you can do with it.

Last week I wrote about Light, something to give your pics a pro touch, there’s another one I’ve been playing with coming out of embargo shortly and the latest is an app called TimeLapse, which lets you time a photo to be snapped as infrequently as every 24 hours, or as often as every 10 seconds, which is about as fast as the phone can snap and store a image in the camera roll.

Once you’ve collected your pics, you can easily dump them into iMovie or QuickTime Pro and make a simple time lapse movie.

You can also set a delay to allow the photographer to get in the frame for a group photo. And TimeLapse works as a rudimentary surveillance camera, too. While it’s running, a display lists when it started, the time of the last picture taken and the approximate time of when it will stop.

A happy early adopter has a handy tutorial here.

Now you can go make a movie and get famous like that guy Matt. Well, not exactly, but what do you want from a camera phone?

Via TUAW

Woohoo! A bumper issue of WTF iPhone Apps this week, thanks to the ever-increasing avalanche of bobbins and foonity spewing forth from the App Store.

Let’s not dally! Onwards! With the craziness!

First up this week is Angry Scot: “Learn the Scottish way to say No! This application will help you summon your inner Scotsman to give you the courage (and words) to solve your problems in these trying times. Each response is carefully crafted and then spoken by an authentic Scots person in his native tongue.”

Daft, but we can live with it. Can things get worse? You bet they can. We’ve not even started yet.

You may know there are now 2,345 fart-oriented applications on the iTunes AppStore, but were you aware of the growing number of ways the iPhone and iPod Touch can help you keep track of your own or (more likely) your mate’s menstrual cycle?

Yes, Apple’s amazing mobile device can help you keep your relationship together, plan a family, or just avoid unnecessarily broken household objects.

Choices include:

* the free uPMS, an app directly aimed at guys “suffering the monthly Pychotic Mood Shifts from their better halves;”

*PMS Tracker, which, for a buck lets a user quickly track the approximate time each woman in his/her life will have PMS, using a green, orange, red coding system to indicate the likelihood of turbulence on any given day;

* iPeriod is an app aimed at busy women who need a little assist with “doctors appointments, event planning, and knowing when to leave the house prepared,” which could be a handy little $4 tool. It even predicts a user’s next 12 periods, fertile days and ovulation windows;

* another $4 app, MyMate seeks to help the sensitive man “organize information [he] frequently needs but can never remember.” It calculates period and ovulation days for up to six months and also provides means for tracking favorite color, song, perfume, “Don’t Likes,” gift ideas and sizes (with convenient European conversions);

*the high-end Woman Calendar is a $10 tool for family planning that logs biological data including cycle days, basal body temperature, ovulation dates, weight, and other customized personal records. It’s got a module for journaling and allows a user to export data from a date range to a CSV file for backup and use with other desktop applications. Comes with password protection or data security;

* last, but not least is IAmAMan, the $2 “private life planner” that lets a user stay abreast of the cycle probabilities for several women. The record and existence of each person tracked is password protectable, so no one need find out who or how many people a user is tracking, and it has a handy click-to-call feature that dials a woman up just by tapping her name.

That’s just a quick round up of a few apps I found after reading about PMS Buddy a web app that’s reasonably popular on Facebook and reportedly headed to the AppStore.

As these things go, there are likely more coming down the pike.

Via Cnet

Accomplishing what Apple has so far failed to do, Google has now created a todo list that syncs perfectly between your desktop, the web, and your iPhone.

Michael Bolin, one of the engineers who works on the Tasks function in Gmail, announced a new iPhone-optimized Tasks site that you can visit at gmail.com/tasks.

I’ve been playing with it this morning and so far, it looks and works great in Mobile Safari. And hey, get this: I can add a todo to the list while I’m out and about, and it *magically* appears in Gmail when I return to my computer! How about that?

It’s worth pausing for a moment here, and reminding ourselves that Apple STILL has not supplied iPhone users with todos or text notes that sync with their Macs. I’ve come to the conclusion that Steve Jobs, Tim Cook and the rest of them simply don’t have anything to do, and therefore don’t understand why anyone else should need a sync-able todo app.

Therefore, I propose that henceforth this should be known as Give Apple Management Things To Do Day, or GAMTTD. If Tim Cook’s any good with a hand drill at the top of a ladder, my gutters could do with replacing. Any time this week would be good, Tim.

When the technology historians look back on the development of the iPhone, they will surely remember this as a golden age. Not only have the last few months seen the arrival of dozens of flatulence generators and “flashlights,” but today, we have an application devoted solely to the exploits of MC Hammer.

Just in time. HammerTime, if you will. The new app (iTunes link) has lots of incredibly useful features, including streaming versions of Hammer music videos, his Twitter feed, upcoming events and his official blog. It’s like becoming best friends with Hammer — except he doesn’t put all his friends on the payroll anymore (bankruptcy will teach you some hard lessons). All that, and it was developed by the creators of iFart. Visionary.

When you look on its gorgeous UI and well-thought-out logo, can you possibly deny that this was the very reason the iPhone was created? Of course not. Welcome home, Hammer.

Via Gizmodo

Those who simply cannot wait for Google to release the official version of Chrome for Mac have the option now of checking out CodeWeavers’ free Chromium download, a proof of concept project to get Windows executables to be run as-if-natively on Intel-based Unix operating systems such as Linux and Mac OS X.

Sound like fun?

Those interested in previewing the Chromish experience on the Mac should understand, first, that it only works on Intel CPU architecture – no PowerPC – and has no auto-updater, so if you’re a security skeptic, forewarned is forearmed.

Chromium is built from the open source Chrome code base, however and CodeWeavers helpfully provide a tarball for the source code for those who like to get under a browser’s hood, but, there are still some fairly significant reasons to think hard about whether Google’s browser is for you, even if the official Mac version was on offer.

As presently built, Chrome’s “porn mode” – a feature that allows one to browse the Internet without passing identifying information to visited web pages – is not supported on sites such as Facebook, nor is Chrome capable of being used to collaborate via Google’s own Google Docs application, as an article Sunday at TechCrunch points out.

So, if you’re just insatiably curious about what they’re up to down in Mountain View and you want to give Windows developers a leg up on marketing their wares to the Mac community, go get you some Chromium.

The Contra Code is the most famous video game cheat code ever – Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left Right, B, A. eBattalion, developers of the puzzle game FLIP, have built it in to their iPhone and iPod touch app, allowing savvy players to unlock all the levels in FLIP’s “Puzzle” and “Speed” modes.

Full disclosure: I got off the video game train shortly after it pulled out of the Pong station. I think I was trying to get someone with ID to buy me a beer in the PacMan station, and I turned around and all of a sudden, the train was gone and I just never got back on. I know. That makes me both old and non-conversant with something like 80% of the people on the planet.

But I came across this at Macenstein and I think it seems like something that could maybe be built into more than just one of the AppStore’s thousands of games.

So tell us, Cult of Mac gamers, is FLIP the only iPhone/iPod Touch game that can be unlocked using the legendary Contra Code?

Surely there are other hidden gems and “easter eggs” out there, for Apple-oriented developers are nothing if not whimsical and versed in the historical arcana of game and software lore.

Let us know what you’ve found in comments and we’ll feature the best bits in another post.

This post has been edited to correct the author’s error transcribing details of the Contra Code in the original. Thanks to commenters who pointed it out.

The iPhone and iPod Touch take another step toward recognition as legitimate atristic tools with the introduction of an app called Lignt, from Digital Film Tools. The app allows users to introduce realistic lighting and shadows to any photograph using digital versions of the gobo library created by Gamproducts.

Normally used in front of lights during photography, gobos, or patterns, are widely used by lighting designers in theatre, film, photography and television to create atmosphere, project scenery, and generally enhance the visual impact of their lighting.

With Light, these same exact patterns can be applied digitally to an entire image or inside a selected area. Gobos from the Gamproducts collection included with Light are arranged into categories designated Breakups, Foliage, Lights, Sky and Windows, and are controlled with sliders affecting light position, rotation, and size. They even built-in accelerometer functionality so that a shake can produce a random effect or reset effects to the photo’s original state.

One probably needs to have an advanced sense of lighting design or a least a little training to make truly effective use of Light’s capabilities, but for $2, anyone can take a whack at turning blah and boring into striking or alluring just by experimenting with different effects.

Light is a great example of the many applications being developed to drive the evolution of Apple’s mobile device platform. As iPhone’s drawing and photography options become more varied and its output is more accepted, look for a new wave of visual and multimedia creative talent to come from its millions of users.

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.

If we ever do become a paperless society, Houdah Software’s ACTPrinter apps for Mac, iPhone and iPod Touch are likely to be among the solutions credited with helping to get there.

With a Mac running OS X Tiger or Leopard and an Airport/WiFi card installed, ACTPrinter Mac (a free DOWNLOAD) works in concert with ACTPrinter 1.1 ($1.99 for iPhone or iPod Touch) allowing you to “print” from any application which uses the standard “Print” dialog. On the Mac you simply “Print to iPhone” and documents (emails, web pages, letters, and more) are sent wirelessly to your iPhone. With this app, documents have finally become mobile.

Aside from being a handy way to store important papers on your mobile device, one of ACTPrinter’s most effective uses stems from the fact that bar codes embedded in documents can now be scanned directly from the touch screen.

The US Transportation Security Administration is currently testing a pilot program at 13 US airports, with the intention of standardizing the electronic boarding pass nationwide in about a year.

Follow after the jump for a list of the participating airports and airlines, and for a full list of features included in the latest ACTPrinter 1.1 update.

The DC Public Library’s first-in-the-nation iPhone App giving users access to card catalog and reservation systems almost cries out for an “if they can do it in Washington” joke.

On the other hand, we’re not talking about the Library of Congress.

Still, it’s pretty cool DC residents have access to (indeed, anyone in the world can have it) vital library information, with an iPhone app providing 24 hour a day, on the go access to the Library’s card catalog and reservation systems. One might think any forward-looking City in the nation would want to have one of these in the AppStore in no time.

There’s at least a few jobs in that gig all over the world, right?

Can’t afford an iPhone? Me neither. That’s why I was so excited to see this photo of a Nokia phone dressed up as a Mac on Flickr. My old phone could use some panache.

A quick search through the comments shows that this is a theme from Dan Schwartz, and it’s compatible on quite a few different phones. It’s hard to find on his website, tucked into the About pages, but you can get the theme for your Nokia phone here.

Source: Dan Schwartz

The theme imitates the Mac without interfering with the phone’s functions. Dan used the application icons from Mac OS X’s system and one of the gorgeous Apple default backgrounds to give you the full experience. The theme even goes so far as to closely imitate the fonts used in the Mac system. All in all, these themes are an excellent escape for those of us who want to keep a little Apple with us all the time.

Turns out, while the iPhone and iPod Touch are just about the awesomest fart-generating devices ever, the considerable power of Apple’s mobile devices can also be marshaled to more productive uses, such as processing credit card sales.

ProcessAway, a Tustin, CA-based company has submitted to Apple software that will allow busiiness owners to process credit card transactions over any available network connection. The app is designed for use in places such as conventions, street fairs, antique shows, and by business owners performing mobile detailing, on-site consultation or construction, but certainly the list of scenarios is virtually endless where on-the-spot transaction processing could be useful.

ProcessAway software utilizes the Authorize.net gateway (one of the very first Internet payment gateways) with one of the largest customer bases in the card processing industry. “The Authorize.net API fueled development of ProcessAway,” according to spokesman Randy Palermo, allowing “millions of iPhone (and iTouch) users to turn their device into a credit card terminal.”

Authorize.net merchant accounts used with ProcessAway include an option to download transactions into Quickbooks and also a comprehensive Virtual Terminal. This will give business owners the benefit of processing transactions out of the office with ProcessAway as well as in the office through the web-based Virtual Terminal, all with a single account. Even though the Virtual Terminal is available, ProcessAway was designed as a stand-alone comprehensive processing solution that can be used effectively in any environment.

ProcessAway software will be sold through the iTunes AppStore for $19.99. A fully functional free version, called ProcessLite, will also be available, identical to ProcessAway except the charge amount is limited.

The apps were submitted to Apple on January 26 and the developer offers a notification sign-up page should you want to hop on this one as soon as it’s available.

Here are two iPhone home screens. On the left, my iPhone home screen from a few months ago. Everything normal.

On the right, my iPhone home screen from yesterday. And something weird has happened.

An additional line has been added to the status bar at the top, pushing all the app icons closer together. It displays only the characters “O2” – the name of my British network provider. Which is already displayed, of course, in the main part of the status bar. What, as they say, the frak?

Very cool new iPhone app just out called Air Photo that allows printing directly from an iPhone to a printer connected to a computer. Basically, you download a Mac or Windows software program called Air Photo Server, then head to the iTunes store to pick up the Air Photo client, which is $2. Then you can just use WiFi to connect your computer and your iPhone, and away you can go.

For owners of HP InkJets, this technology already exists in a free app called HP iPrint Photo, but this is the chance for people with other kinds of printers to get in on the action. I think the scenario of use for this technology that I like best is treating the iPhone kind of like a Polaroid camera at a party. Walk around taking pictures, then have them start printing from across the room. Just get more of a keepsake feel to the whole process. More organic.

Lifehacker via Gizmodo

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 a page from The Magazine, an ezine-in-an-app that’s now available on the App Store for a dollar.

By itself, it’s not much to write home about in my opinion. The presentation is amateurish and the content not terribly interesting. And there simply isn’t very much of it. Not my kind of magazine at all, frankly.

But what’s more interesting is the concept of a mag-as-an-app.

Is there anything an iPhone app cannot be programmed to do?

CubeCheater is an amazing app for iPhone and iPod Touch that, given the current state of your Rubik’s Cube, will tell you how to solve the puzzle in just a few moves.

You can either input the cube’s state using the color palette and tapping in the colors, or you can just take a picture of each face of the cube and CubeCheater will use advanced computer-vision techniques to recognize the cube for you. (The camera feature is obviously not available on iPod Touch)

The app uses the famed Kociemba algorithm to find a solution quickly. It finds optimal or near-optimal cube solutions in only a few seconds. Even a really mixed-up cube will only take about 20 turns to solve, compared to hundreds of turns for a typical human algorithm.

By getting all Beatles Revolution #9 on it, you can also use CubeCheater to put your cube into pretty-looking patterns. Start with a solved cube, input the pattern you want, and solve it. Play the solution backwards to put your cube into that configuration.

The app’s most recent update adds support for different styles of cubes, such as the Blue-opposite-White cubes sold in Japan. You can also specify your own custom cube configuration if you have a non-standard cube.

Have you ever dreamed up a new feature for an application, like using network drives for Time Machine backups, or changing the sounds Mail makes when you send messages? Sometimes these features actually are in the application, they’re just difficult to find and change. Most of them require you to know how to use the Terminal or find files deep in your Library or System folder.

Secrets from the awesome people at Blacktree lets you change those settings through a preference pane in System Preferences. Suddenly all those features your Mac’s been hiding from you are just a checkbox away. Be careful though, changing the settings marked as “dangerous” might not be a great idea.