Posted By PatrickJ on Monday, December 31, 2007 under General | 1 Comment
31
Dec
When I first thought about bidding farewell to another year, I thought that this one really was not my favorite year. I’ve never really had any health troubles in my whole life, and I had a few this year, which were hard for me and my family - so my knee-jerk reaction was to think along the lines of Good Riddance to 2007.
After just a short think about it though, I know that’s a wrong reaction. I think the outstanding thing about 2007 for me is that it taught me a whole lot. It’s been a while since I probably had my eyes / mind open enough to let myself learn anything major - but sometimes a bit of a kick in the arse will open your mind real quick.
You got a shiny new iPhone this gift-giving season. You absolutely love everything about it except… the cheapo earbuds. (Don’t ya just wish Steve’s MacWorld keynote ended with “…and one last thing- from now on all iPhone’s will ship with earbuds worthy of the iPhone!”?) Luckily, you have a favorite pair of headphones that sound great and are incredibly comfortable. So you figure you’ll just use them… but, oh, wait a second, you can’t because they don’t work with the iPhone’s recessed plug and even if they did, the lack of an in-line mike would mean you couldn’t use them as a hands-free device.
You could buy a new pair of headphones like the Altec Lansing Upgrader Series reviewed by Aczon yesterday or get a pair of Ultimate Buds UB7 for $149.99 but you already own a good pair of headphones. That’s where the Shure MPA-3C Music Phone Adapter for iPhone comes in. Widely available from numerous in-line retailers, (and priced at $39.99 on Amazon.com) the Shure Music Phone Adapter’s plug is designed to fit into the iPhone’s recessed plug and allows you to use any pair of headphones with a standard plug.
CONTEST DEALDINE - TUESDAY JANUARY 1ST, 2:00PM US CST
Just a little reminder - we have a great Remember The Milk Pro Giveaway Contest going on, and finishing soon. Two Free RTM Pro accounts - which normally go for $25 - are there for the winning!
Remember The Milk is a superb and powerful online to-do list ap plication, with a slew of great features - like reminders by email or IM or SMS, Google Calendar integration, tags, lists, sharing of tasks, publishing your lists via an RSS feed, widgets for iGoogle and elsewhere, and more.
The Pro version allows you to use the excellent iPhone optimized version (for more than the two week trial).
So, there you go - a great application and a great chance to win yourself a Pro account for free. To enter for a chance to win, go check out the contest post HERE.
With all the excitement about the upcoming SDK for the iPhone and iPod Touch it is easy to forget the many excellent web apps and iPhone optimized sites that already exist. Last night I discovered one of the best.
While I am a big fan of Amazon.com and make many of my purchases from their site, I hadn’t checked out their iPhone-optimized site until the other day. I wasn’t expecting much from it but when I navigated to it boy was I surprised. The interface, which was, I am told, recently refreshed, works incredibly well. It is quick, easy to use and puts an abundance of information at your fingertips– literally. It is clear that a great deal of thought went into it. Moreover, it is clear that the site is intended for real shopping, rather than creating a presence for Amazon that might encourage future purchases.
To get a real-world sense of using the iPhone to browse and shop on the site I first looked up the Amazon Kindle (I’m still deciding if I want to get it in place of my Sony Reader) on my iMac. I read the product description, glanced at some of the customer reviews and watched a couple of the demonstration videos on the site. I then went through the process of placing an order, stopping just short of hitting the "purchase" button.
I am probably in the minority when it comes to hating those very distinctive white Apple earphones. I’m not necessarily talking about their sound quality per se, but rather the way they stand out like a sore thumb when I’m using them. It wasn’t so bad with the iPod, as I can easily replace the white earphones with whatever I have. Then the iPhone came along, with its recessed headphone jack. All of my existing earphones are now useless with the iPhone, unless of course I spend more money and get some kind of adaptor. Even with the adaptor, I’m still going to miss out on some features that the original iPhone earphones have to offer. So, am I going to sacrifice the ability to use the earphones to make a phone call, or fast forward my music with a pinch on the cord, just so I don’t have to wear those earphones? Well, if you are in the same boat as I was a couple of weeks ago, then worry no more!
Note: This review covers the three (3) Upgrader Series Headphones from Altec Lansing. Namely the UHS301 Earbuds, UHS306 Earphones, UHS307 Earclips-S. Any feature or features that are unique to one particular model have been noted as such. Unless otherwise noted, all of the comments will be in reference to all the Upgrader Series as a whole.
TuneWiki for iPhone is another Big Fun sort of application, and one that should be very popular. The cool apps really are showing up thick and fast lately on Installer.
Here’s how TuneWiki itself is described:
Free, Self service lyrics-to-music playback synchronizing utility and related services. It opens your own music file, goes to the Internet to try to find lyrics via a simple search. When you listen to the music it shows the lyrics in step with the music.
And that’s it. Fire it up and choose a song to play, and it streams the lyrics for you as the song plays. Very nice. It found most songs’ lyrics for me straight away, though not all - to be fair, the only one it didn’t find was a live version of Clapton’s Crossroads, which is probably not a real typical track.
There’s a cool video demo of TuneWiki on the iPhone HERE.
Very cool looking new app. Camera Pro adds some advanced features to the iPhone Camera. There’s a free version, and then paid-for Pro and Premium versions that add more features as you move up in cost.
Here’s the list of Camera Pro features:
The Free version includes:
Digital Zoom
Black & White
Image Size
Auto-orientation
Premium features (5 times free tryout):
Self-Timer
Burst Mode
Burst Speed
Silent Shutter
Added soon (only free for registered users):
Flickr integration (week 2, 2008)
Manual Exposure (February, 2008)
More features t.b.a. (February, 2008)
That upcming Flickr integration sounds nice as well.
Just started playing with this. So far looks good. Let us know what you think when you give it a try. It’s available in Installer now …
This one is not new, it’s been around a few weeks - but I just had a look for the first time and thought it’s worth a mention for two reasons:
It’s another example of a major company putting a lot of effort and marketing dollars into an iPhone / iPod Touch site
It looks superb - great photos and video of the upcoming Jaguar XF
"Great brands should stick together and Jaguar knows so. Hence, they’ve decided to hop into the iPhone wave and prepare the special and industry’s first “multimedia magazine” for the iPhone owners."
Jaguar is calling the site the "industry’s first broadband multimedia magazine specifically for Apple iPhone and iPod Touch users". There are lots of very high quality photos, and each has a one-tap link to video footage of the XF as well.
OK, this may have no practical application whatsoever as yet - but this new app is just big, big fun. This had my daughter and I cracking up for ages this evening.
Real Artist lets you use your finger to twist and radically distort an image on the screen. The effects are instant and crazy looking. Like a little Photoshop magic in the tips of your fingers.
By default it uses the most recent image in your Camera Roll - if you don’t have any images there, it provides a photo of Mr. Jobs himself to work with. It’s only at Version 0.1 and there are no bells and whistles as yet. It would be great to see a future version where you could select which image to work with, and save your creations. Then it really could have some more practical uses as well.
The photo above was not done in Real Artist, as I just cannot get a screencap to work with it - but it shows the sort of things you can easily do with the app.
iPhoneSender is a very clever, time-saving idea for working with addresses and Google Maps on the iPhone.
Here’s how it works:
You install it as a Firefox extension, or add it as a Safari bookmarks toolbar item.
Once installed, when you visit any page with a street address on it, you can right-click (in Firefox) and choose to ‘Send Map Link To iPhone’ - a dialog pops up where you enter your destination email, then sends you a properly formatted Google map link.
In Safari, you highlight an address on any web page, and click the bookmark in your bar. Once again, iPhoneSender prompts you for your email address, and sends the Google map link.
When you click the link in the iPhoneSender mail, it will open in Google Maps.
Very simple and quick to use. And a big help, especially given the iPhone’s lack of copy & paste ability.
iPhoneSender works on PC and Mac, and is a free service, which is good because …
Only problem for me so far, is that it doesn’t work this weekend. Everything goes according to plan right up through the Success! message shown in the screencap above, but mails never arrive so far. I’ve been trying it out for over 24 hours now. I’ve sent to a GMail account, an Exchange account, and one other (all of which are receiving mail just fine all weekend) - but no go on any of them. Hopefully this is just a glitch over a holiday weekend, or maybe a problem at my side, but that seems doubtful at this point.
Anyway, iPhoneSender is a good idea - and I’m very keen to see the whole process in action.
Let us know if you have given this a try, and what you think …
You’ll find all iPhoneSender’s info and install instructions for Firefox and Safari, at:
UPDATE: Tried this again on Sunday. Good news it worked and when it works it is very cool indeed. Works just as advertised with the map links. Good stuff. Not so good news - never saw any of the mails that were supposed to have been sent previously.
After working with hundreds of other mobile devices, developing for the iPhone is a breath of fresh air. The hardware is stable and full-featured, while the software development tools are intuitive and represent a level of polish rarely seen in the mobile arena. — Jonathan Backer, The Walt Disney Company
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ilk Pro Giveaway Contest going on, and finishing soon. Two Free RTM Pro accounts - which normally go for $25 - are there for the winning!
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