Author archive: Lonnie Lazar
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…
Posted by Lonnie Lazar in Reviews, Software, iPhone, iPod Touch | No Comments »
Just in time for the NFL playoffs, you can relive the glory days of your youth (applies predominately to American males of a certain age; your mileage may vary) with a free PaperFootball game for iPhone and iPod Touch.
Just like you did on school cafeteria tables back in the day, use touchscreen swipe gestures to try and get a triangular “paper football” to hang over the edge of the table and even “kick” for extra points. Play against your device or against a friend.
PaperFootball has pretty cool, colorful graphics and is certainly nothing more than a time waster, but in this reviewer’s humble opinion, it’s better than having your mobile device make farting sounds. And I mentioned it’s free, right?
Posted by Lonnie Lazar in Quickies, Software, iPhone | 3 Comments »
Plenty of chatter yesterday in the Apple blogosphere about the patent application for special iPhone gloves Apple filed back in June 2007, the day before the original iPhone made its commerical debut.
In the meantime, a few companies have already produced products intended to ease the need for iPhone users in the northern latitudes to actually go inside to use their Jesus Phones during the winter. Click on images in the gallery below to see the Apple patent illustration and few solutions on the market today. And let us know in comments how you manage to fulfill your iPhone jones in places where chilly winds blow.
Apple's iPhone Glove Patent Drawing
Tavo Gloves @ tavoproducts.com
Freehand Gloves @ swissmiss.typepad.com
Dots iPhone Gloves @ dotsgloves.com
Posted by Lonnie Lazar in Apple, Clothing, News | 6 Comments »
Add a new layer of creativity to the things you can do with your iPhone and your photos - with iSteam, a cool new app from UK developer consortium, Great Apps. iSteam uses features of the iPhone and iPod Touch including the accelerometer, multitouch, microphone and speakers to turn the touch screen into something resembling your bathrooom mirror after a hot shower, or a window on a winter day.
Blow on the microphone to “fog up” the surface of the phone (iPod Touch users need an external mic) and use your fingers to write messages and draw, just like you would on a steamy window. Realistic water droplets form on the image and leave trail marks that can be manipulated by tilting the device; shake it up to clear the screen and start over. iSteam even has finger squeaking sounds included.
Images can be saved to the Camera Roll using the screen capture method (hold the Home key & press the lock button) or emailed to iPhone and iPod Touch owning contacts directly from iSteam.
Posted by Lonnie Lazar in News | 4 Comments »
A Worker Cleans Apple logo on Beijing Storefront
Image © Cancan Chu/Getty Images
If you’ve ever wondered what it might be like to work at Apple, out in the wild are more than a couple of tell-all accounts penned by former employees, and as the company prepares for its final Macworld appearance next week in San Francisco, the UK Guardian has one, published Friday, by Chuq von Rospach, a former Apple employee who has taken his experience there and turned it into a little cottage industry of freelance writing.
Von Rospach’s piece for the Guardian waxes a bit nostalgic for the days when Steve Jobs delivered the Macworld keynote, but he says nevertheless “still tune in with great anticipation” to this year’s speech by Phil Schiller, especially because word on the street says Apple will bow out of Macworld with a hiss and not a bang.
The piece is rather on the long side, and true to form for the genre, is more about the author than about the experience of working at Apple, but von Rospach does provide a glimpse of behind-the-scenes observations that are rarely seen in Apple’s context and, for those interested in one person’s perspective, provides a worthwhile read.
Posted by Lonnie Lazar in News | No Comments »
“Easter eggs” is a term that’s come to describe little screens, menus and functionalities software coders hide in their work. Sometimes these things are uncovered by intrepid users, who take as a point of pride the mission to peek behind as many curtains as they can find in an application; sometimes there’s either enough lack of interest in finding the Easter eggs or they are so well-hidden developers end up revealing them on their own.
Those wacky kids in Mountain View, CA who write the Google blog posted Friday about a “Bells and Whistles” Easter egg menu for the company’s voice-enabled iPhone app. The screen is revealed by repeated attempts to swipe upward on the iPhone’s touch screen from the Settings menu. At first glance, there appears to be nothing below the tab labelled “About” but continue swiping upward on the screen (five swipes in my case), and a “Bells and Whistles” tab will appear.
From the B&W tab you can change the app’s theme color, its default sound effect and more. OK. Now that’s out of the way, let’s see what else we can accomplish today…
Via Venture Beat
Posted by Lonnie Lazar in News | 1 Comment »
Image © 2008 John Ellenich
7″ Screen, 1.6GHz Atom, 1GB of RAM, 32 GB of flash storage, Wifi, bluetooth, modified iPhone OS (Snow Leopard)
Flickr user tacojohn has a vision of the much-rumored Mac Tablet Apple has been said to be working on since at least September 2007.
Ahead of Macworld next week in San Francisco, the Apple rumor mill has been busy ginning up interest to counter the let-down of Steve Jobs’ decision to skip Apple’s final appearance at the popular trade show, and Tuesday a TechCrunch report cited a trio of three independent sources close to Apple who say to “expect a large screen iPod touch device to be released in the Fall of ‘09, with a 7 or 9 inch screen.”
“Prototypes have been seen and handled by one of our sources,” according to the report, and “Apple is talking to OEMs in Asia now about mass production,” the publication said. It added there were some early concerns among Apple managers over the potential market for such a device, but implied those fears have been quelled by the blistering success of the App Store:
“The difference now is the iTunes app store, which has thousands of games and other applications that are perfect for a touch screen device with an accelerometer.”
Looks cool to us.
Via AppleInsider
Posted by Lonnie Lazar in Apple, Hardware, Rumors | 10 Comments »
Digg founder Kevin Rose announced his concern for Steve Jobs’ health Tuesday, but there’s always a subtext to such public displays of empathy. We’re not sure what it is in Rose’s case, but a few guesses are he:
a) puts way too much stock in what he reads on Gizmodo
b) is more worried about getting publicity for his own Internet venture
c) is a typically clueless amateur money manager
d) lives to see his name on the Internet
e) all of the above
On top of which, he’s either a very careless typist or an embarrassingly poor speller.
Posted by Lonnie Lazar in Opinions, Steve Jobs | 14 Comments »
Gigabye Solutions updated its line of crazy 99¢ singing animal apps for iPhone Tuesday, adding the camel to a lineup that already included your singing monkey, orangutan, cat, puppy and snowman.
Singing Characters use low-level sound API’s to provide very low latency responses to nearby sounds. Advanced sound leveling technology adjusts for different speech volumes automatically.
Sit them on your desk at work and they’ll talk at the same time as other people in the office. They are a sure-fire tension cutter at that next awkward sales meeting.
Captivate 3 year-olds endlessly with the talking cat that copies everything they say.
Limitations in the iPhone SDK prevent Singing Characters from singing along to the music you have playing on your iPhone in iTunes, but they will sing along with music playing from an external device.
Posted by Lonnie Lazar in Humor, Quickies, Software, iPhone | 1 Comment »
From Smule, creators of the internationally captivating Ocarina app for the iPhone, comes Zephyr, a 99¢ app that is part snow globe, part artboard, part multi-media messaging device, part chain letter and altogether fun.
Classified as a Social Networking application in the App Store, Zephyr invites users to use the touchscreen to draw pictures and messages rendered in snowflakes, while the app simultaneously translates touch and movement into distinctive wind sounds to complement the written message. You can erase a composition entirely by shaking the phone or erase parts with a two finger swipe gesture. When you’re happy with your creation you can send it off anonymously into the ether, where it will be received by another Zephyr user.
The chain continues when the recipient of your message expresses “love” for it by tapping a heart icon that appears on the screen with a received message. The more a message is loved, the more it will be passed forward.
You can also receive a message, see the stops it made on its way to you and decide whether or not it will continue on its journey around the world.
No word yet on whether Smule developers plan to update the app with different iconography for the changing seasons.
Posted by Lonnie Lazar in News | 1 Comment »
Don’t forget to download your free New Years Blowout Horn and 2009 Countdown app Wednesday (if you haven’t already got this little NYE party favor).
Blow into your iPhone’s mic, Ocarina-style, and hear the party horn. See the horn unravel on the touchscreen. Play Auld Lang Syne by pressing the i button. Comes complete with a countdown timer.
What will they think of next?
Posted by Lonnie Lazar in Humor, Quickies, Software, iPhone | 8 Comments »
News broke over the weekend that iFart Mobile, the current #1 paid application on Apple’s iTunes AppStore, netted its creators $40,000 in two days at Christmas, according to a blog post by Joel Comm, the application’s lead developer.
The two-day holiday haul was in addition to $25,000+ in profits the app generated in the two weeks prior to Christmas.
Comm’s is by no means a unique success story. Steve Demeter, developer of the game Trism, made $250,000 in the first two months the AppStore was open; Eliza Block, the developer of “2 Across” app, was reportedly earning $2,000 per day on her application back in September.
Granted these are but three names out of the more than 10,000 apps now available for the iPhone and iPod Touch. It’s not difficult to do the math, though, and when an application designed around people’s fascination with flatulence - one of dozens dedicated to the same theme - can net its creator $40,000 in two days, it would seem irresponsible of a director attempting a remake of The Graduate not to write this exchange into the script:
Mr. McGuire: I want to say two words to you. Just two words.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: iPhone Apps.
Posted by Lonnie Lazar in News, Opinions, iPhone, iPod Touch | 5 Comments »
I have to admit I have been keeping abreast of technology news with one eye, sort of, during this Holiday Season. I have a family, and my one child is going to grow up fast, so I’m told. Thus, I’ve been spending more time with him since he’s off from school for the winter break.
I was a little surprised, then, to see all the hoopla frothing around HP’s introduction Monday of a new Home Media Server for automatically backing up and accessing digital music, videos, photos and documents from multiple computers on a home network. “That sounds kind of familiar,” I thought.
But there it was, all over Gizmodo and Engadget and TUAW and I said to myself, “Has the Apple community been somehow missing this appliance and its amazements?”
To be fair, some of the reportage was done in the context of wondering if Apple itself might be coming out with a similar appliance, and whether or how it might be integrated with the company’s MobileMe web services product. And, wouldn’t you know it, there’s this trade show coming up next week in San Francisco, which would be a perfect time and place to introduce just such a device. The suspense is now killing me.
But this HP baby that got all the ink? Well, it’s compatible with Mac and Windows, organizes files across all PCs on a connected network, streams media across a home network and the Internet, has a server for iTunes that centralizes iTunes music libraries on the server for playback to any networked Mac or PC running iTunes, and costs $600 with a 750GB hard disk or $750 for one with a 1.5TB disk.
Sort of like a souped up version of the Lacie Home Media Server I reviewed six months ago for Mac|Life Magazine, priced at about $150 with a 500GB disk.
Also to be fair, HP’s server plays nice with Time Capsule and Leopard, and lets you easily publish pictures and video to social networks such as MySpace and YouTube - which is not to say Lacie has not updated its software to do the same in the past six months - but on the whole, HP’s latest venture outside its core printer making business struck me as something of the very slow-news-day variety.
Posted by Lonnie Lazar in First impressions, Hardware, Opinions | 2 Comments »
More Apple oriented websites felt obligated to post the news on Monday that casemaker Vaja has added an iPhone Nano category to its offerings of cases for Apple phone products. Coming on the heels of last week’s news that XSNS had done the same, the pre-Macworld rumor mill seems to indicate a strong likelihood that Apple will introduce a mini-me version of its popular mobile phone next week in San Francisco.
Is this what we’ve come to? Roughly 10 million people have bought iPhones this year. AT&T is selling refurbished iPhones for $99 and now you can buy them new at Walmart, too. Who, exactly is dying for an iPhone Nano?
I have to go on record as saying I’ll be disappointed to see Apple cave in to the mobile handset market’s mystifying tradition of churning out 1001 minutely varied executions on a theme, for the sake of what? Surely not functionality.
Prior to the iPhone you had relatively similar smartphones made by a few companies (Palm, RIM, Nokia) and hundreds of other devices that were just, phones, made by dozens and dozens of manufacturers. Even within the smartphone realm, my eyes glazed over at the number of “different ” Blackberries, for example.
The iPhone came along and changed everything. And in perfect Apple fashion there were basically two choices, a perfectly fine device and another one for those whose device must, under any circumstance be perceived as “bigger.” Hey, fine. There’s nothing wrong with a Corvette…
But now, a Nano? Something smaller? Less functional than its big brother? Less touchscreen real estate? A virtual keyboard for really tiny fingers?
Knock yourself out, Apple. I would think there are greater heights to scale.
Posted by Lonnie Lazar in Apple, News, Opinions, iPhone | 11 Comments »
iPhone app developers iPaguri have a new offering on the AppStore today, called Walking Tour Fierenze, a one and a half hour audio guide for, you guessed it, a walking tour through the center of Florence, Italy.
The version currently available is in Italian only, with versions in English, French, Spanish and German coming. The developers promise anecdotes, curiosities, stories and legends about the famed center of Renaissance art and culture that “others can’t show you,” a claim we’ll have to get our Italy-based colleague Nicole Martinelli to suss out and possibly opine on regarding the true value of this $10 app.
In concept, however, iPaguri could be sitting on a gold mine. I envision Walking Tour versions for every major tourist destination and gallery in the world…
Requires iPhone 2.2 Software Update.
Posted by Lonnie Lazar in First impressions, News, Software, iPhone, iPod Touch | No Comments »
If you just can’t live without emoticon functionality on your iPhone, you may have cell phone users in Japan to thank. Perhaps with a nod to the centrality of “emoji” on all mobile devices in Japan, Apple has apparently enabled their use with iPhone 2.2 firmware, according to one report, but only through the Japanese virtual keyboard.
You must be willing to enter the brave world of jailbreaking your phone using cydia.app, but once there, you’ll be able to enable “emoji” right from the phone’s settings for International keyboard functionality: settings -> general -> international -> keyboards -> japanese -> emoji
Requires iPhone 2.2 firmware.
Via Pradt
Posted by Lonnie Lazar in News | 6 Comments »
Apple may be adding useful swipe gesturing functionality to the virtual keyboard on the company’s mobile devices, according to a report at MacRumors.
Blogger Arnold Kim describes two potentially effective additions to Apple’s touch interface contained in a patent application filed yesterday with the US Patent and Trademark Office.
Aside from the single finger swipes depicted in the diagrams below, multi-touch gestures (two and three fingers) could invoke other special functions. If a single finger left-swipe might delete a letter, a two finger left-swipe could delete a whole word, and a three finger left-swipe could delete a line. Similarly, a single finger right-swipe could add a space, while a two finger right-swipe could add a period. Up swipes and down swipes could also invoke different functions based on the number of fingers used.
As with Apple’s evolving multi-touch notebook trackpads, these optional functions could provide iPhone and iPod Touch users with useful and welcome shortcuts.
Posted by Lonnie Lazar in Apple, Rumors, Software, iPhone, iPod Touch | 2 Comments »
It’s not clear whether or not the Shogakukan Illustrated Sushi Guide would have helped Jeremy Piven with his mercury poisoning problem last week, but the company’s iPhone app is slated to hit the Japanese iTunes store any day now.
The $5 guide will contain pictures and descriptions of 82 different kinds of sushi, ideal for frequent travelers to Japan, and will sport an English appendix, according to a report at Crunch Gear.
Posted by Lonnie Lazar in Quickies, Software, iPhone, iPod Touch | 1 Comment »
New York Times technology columnist David Pogue and publisher O’Reilly combine to bring those of you who just unwrapped your brand-new iPhone yesterday iPhone: The Missing Manual, a $5 application available at Apple’s iTunes AppStore.
According to the publisher, the app “shows you everything you need to know to get the most out of your iPhone. Full of humor, tips, tricks, and surprises, this book teaches you how to extend iPhone’s usefulness by exploiting its links to the Web as well as its connection to Macs or PCs; how to save money using Internet- based messages instead of phone calls; and how to fill the iPhone with TV shows and DVDs for free.”
The funny thing is if you can purchase and download the app to iTunes and sync your phone so the app gets on there, you probably don’t need the manual in the first place.
Via iSmashPhone
Posted by Lonnie Lazar in Humor, Software, iPhone, iTunes | 1 Comment »
Did you know the AppStore has a free app for iPhone and iPod Touch that will let you print borderless 4 x 6 photos (10 x 15 cm in Europe) directly from your device, without the need to upload them first to a computer or image processing program?
iPrint Photo, from HP uses Apple’s Bonjour technology to locate most WiFi enabled HP network printers wherever you are, letting you immortalize that once-in-lifetime capture on the spot. Printers with separate photo trays automatically select that option, and otherwise default to the main paper tray. The app is compatible with most industry standard WiFi environoments, including Apple Airport, Linksys, D Link and Netgear.
Via Slippery Brick
Posted by Lonnie Lazar in News, Quickies, Software, iPhone, iPod Touch | 1 Comment »
