Apps

Version 2.0 of the Square app has the new virtual shelves feature on iPads

Square, a mobile payment startup founded and led by Twitter’s CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey, has issued a new version of their iOS app with three interesting features. Certainly the most visible change is the new-look interface which looks particularly business on iPad. The main idea here is to be able to showcase products to your prospective customers on an iPad’s gorgeous 9.7-inch display. You can set up your products on virtual shelves any way you like, add your own graphics, write the accompanying description and so forth.

Another nice-to-have and more screenies below the fold.

The iPhone interface is also slightly subdued for a more professional look

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If you’ve ever used Google Apps, you’ve seen what kind of power a collaborative, cross-platform word processor can have.  Today’s Apple iWork.com Web applications fall far short (though they look much prettier) in terms of functionality.  But don’t fret Apple fans!  Patently Apple today shows that Apple is heading Pages toward that same Cloud experience.

While it may or may not be “breakthrough” Apple clearly has plans to put its Pages App/Application into the Cloud.  The sooner (WWDC?), the better.

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Ever since I reviewed MacPhun’s FX Photo Studio for iOS, its insane amount of superior effects, the eye-catching interface taking full advantage of iPad’s canvas and the overall polish have been a revelation. Suffice to say that I walked away wanting that photo editing experience on my Mac. The opportunity is clearly there: Excluding big-name suites and a few established programs from indies, quality yet affordable photo editing programs are few and far between on the Mac. That being said, I set out to review FX Photo Studio on an aging 2.4GHz unibody Mac mini with 2GB RAM running Snow Leopard.

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Would you believe me if I told you a year ago that the Apple police would have reverted its stance on the App Store nudity?  Well they didn’t. Yes, some boobs are now OK, but undesirable Playboy bunnies are not. That didn’t stop Hugh Hefner, the founder and namesake of the Playboy empire, to find a clever solution.

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Infinity Blade is the killer app Apple fans usually run on their iPhone or iPad to showcase the graphical prowess of iOS gadgets to their Android-toting friends. It’s arguably one of the best iOS games around and thus far the only title based on Epic’s Unreal Engine. Developer Chair Entertainment has kept the game alive with two big content updates. Today’s third and most ambitious update has brought us brand new multiplayer and survival modes in a 584MB download. You can fight your friends over the Internet via Game Center’s match-making feature, compare your respective scores, check out your unlocked items and so forth…

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Fans of the Yahoo! Messenger messaging platform can now enjoy video calling on iPad 2. The version 2.1 update, now available free from the App Store, is a universal binary that supports both the iPhone’s smaller screen and iPad’s larger canvas. The 21.7MB download has been optimized for Apple’s slate, iTunes description says, adding iPad-optimized layout plus voice and video calling on the device.

The program also features stronger anti-spam features letting you block one or all add requests from a single view. iPad 2 users don’t have a lot of video calling choices apart from Apple’s FaceTime and a few less fancy programs. Yahoo! Messenger is a very popular cross-platform communications platform, meaning iPad 2 people can now enjoy video calling with their PC and Mac counterparts.

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And it’s only for jailbroken devices with a front-camera. The $7 RecognizeMe by Apocolipse unlocks your phone by matching pre-recorded images of your face against the front camera feed. Simply holding the device in front of your face for a couple of seconds should automagically unlock it. Check out a cool video demonstration below…

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What’s your switching strategy? Most folks believe they’ve got it all figured out until they realize that transferring settings and documents from a rusty PC to a Mac is a mind job. Parallels, the company that brought you great PC virtualization software for the Mac, has just released on the Mac App Store Parallels Transporter, their handy tool aimed at switchers. It’s a no-brainer, especially at price that low. More information below the fold.

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According to paidContent, Apple is planning on exhibiting at the upcoming BookExpo America trade show, a first for the company. Apple will be sending an iBookstore employee Scott Simpson and their show presence is said to be significant based on a large booth in a prime location, next to publishers Random House, Disney Book Group and Macmillan. Apple won’t be selling anything, but their presence is meant to boost their position in the e-reading space and raise visibility of the iBookstore and iPad as an e-reading device.

UPDATED [May  18, 2011 1:00pm Pacific]: The original story has been updated with a quote from a spokesperson for the event confirming Apple will be privately meeting select books publishers rather than exhibit at the show.

via MacRumors

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Patently Apple today reveals a trademark today by Apple for the word “Noteworthy” which they postulate is a new OCR app that could be released in iOS 5.  One use would be taking an image and turing it into a document like Google’s recent Docs app does.

Update: Apple has a Font named Noteworthy which is likely the reason for registration
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You may have heard that an unknown company called Lodsys was threatening to sue small iOS developers over the use of in-app purchasing, a system-wide iOS mechanism that lets users buy additional content inside apps, using their standard iTunes credentials. This being an Apple-designed feature, a lot of  folks were left scratching their head when Lodsys announced last Friday plans to take developers to court should they refuse to pay royalties.

Following a storm of criticism by many online media outlets and bloggers who said the company was acting like a patent troll, Lodsys put out a blog post. No, they’re not patent trolls and yes, they’re just trying to “get value for the assets that it owns”. Right. In a series of Q&A posts Lodsys detailed this issue. They’re entitled to claim 0.575 percent of US revenue made from in-app purchases, so says Lodsys. On annual sales of one million dollars this amounts to $5,750 a year in license costs. But wait, there’s more of that nonsense.

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Epic Citadel, a free tech demo, was an eye-opener that showcased what the Unreal Engine could pull on A4-enabled gadgets like iPad and iPhone 4. TouchArcade now uncovered Castlerama, another Unreal tech showcase that lets you explore lush environments with amazing detail. Developer Codenrama noted in the YouTube description that graphics could have been even better had they targeted the code for iPad 2 and iPhone 4 only. The reason? Those devices sport 512MB RAM, twice their predecessors:

While developing Castlerama, we had to face the fact that newer devices such as iPhone4s and iPad2s are very different from their predecessors, iPhone3GSs and iPads, in that the former have twice as much memory. In order to have the app run on all devices, we had to compromise quite a bit, pushing the old devices to their limits (risking crash if other applications are left running) while keeping the new devices well behind their capabilities. In the future we believe we will have to develop two versions for each application.

Castlerama can be downloaded for free from the App Store. The universal binary works on all iOS devices and weighs in at 244MB. If you ask me, it’s an exciting example of high-quality games powered by the Unreal Engine coming our way.

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There is no shortage of music-creation software on iPad, ranging from the for-dummies apps like Apple’s awesome GarageBand to the casual yet powerful items like Algoriddim’s djay program to the full-fledged synth studios such as Korg iMS-20, classed as a complete recreation of the Korg MS-20 synth.

Heck, people are even exploring crazy concepts like air-scratching. That said, SynthTronica, a LeisuresonicView production, looks like the ultimate synthesizer app for your iPad. Another nice video introduction and a couple of screenies after the break.

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Instead of using your iPhone and a specialized DJ app like Algoriddim’s djay for iPhone, clever minds have come up with a novel idea based on sensing a performer’s movement to alter the playback of digital audio in real-time. They call it Mopho DJ and it doesn’t require dedicated hardware or time-coded vinyl, explains Nick Brian, a researcher with the Center for Computer Research, Music and Acoustics at Stanford University. How does it work?

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Adobe has updated its Flash Player to version 10.3, squashing a bunch of bugs and introducing a brand new control panel. It’s a welcome addition that lets you better manage the many Flash Player settings, including camera, microphone and Local Shared Objects settings. More importantly, one can now set how Flash tracking cookies are being handled and fine-tune other privacy, security and storage settings.

Also important, Flash Player 10.3 now supports auto-update notification for Mac OS X. The new aplet is a native addition to the system-wide control panel on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux, Adobe said. The team wrote in a blog post that Flash Player 10.3 also includes support for Android 3.1 devices.

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Popular micro-blogging service Twitter has unveiled a revamped HTML5 web app that mimics the look and feel of its native iOS counterpart. The new rich interface works in mobile Safari and other mobile browsers, Twitter said. New features include the ability to quickly scroll through your timeline, move between tabs, compose tweets, access your timeline, @mentions, messages that you can read in conversation view, search, trending topics, lists and more.

There’s no need to install anything and it gets updated more frequently, being a cloud-based app. Check it out by pointing your iPhone, iPod touch or Android device at twitter.com. Bear in mind Twitter is gradually releasing the web app so don’t panic if it’s not yet available to you. If you use Twitter’s official Mac client, good stuff happening on that front, too…

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http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=23554190&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=00adef&fullscreen=1&autoplay=0&loop=0

If all the brouhaha about iPhone location tracking fell on deaf ear with you, why not plot your logged location history on a world map, just for the kicks? Sure, you can do that with Pete Warden’s simple and lightweight iPhone Tracker tool for your Mac, but it won’t preserve your location data in the cloud. And while you’re at it, how about making this data actually useful by contributing your personal database of nearby WiFi hotspots and cellular towers (so says Apple) to good causes, from surveys into movement patterns of the human species to epidemiology? That’s exactly what OpenPaths does for you.

With openpaths, you can preserve your iPhone or iPad’s location information as well as visualize where you’ve been. You can even download your data in CSV and JSON format so you can remix it and use it in your own projects. What’s more, openpaths allows you to securely and anonymously donate your data to researchers who could use it to study mobility, transportation, land use, epidemiology, and overall make the world a better place.

It only takes a minute to plot your location data in a variety of ways…

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All checks indicate they have, which would be a first for the puritan California-based gadget maker that likes to keep things under control in the App Store. ZDNet has a story about SugarSugar Dating App somehow making it through Apple’s stringent review process and launching on the iPhone on June 1. The app is a mobile client to SugarSugar.com, which advertises itself as the “leading sugar dating website”.

They also say the app helps one seek “mutually beneficial” arrangements with other users, a telling tongue-in-cheek definition treading the fine line between dating and escorting, if not worse. Maybe Apple censors weren’t paying attention… So, how’s this going to work?

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Angry Birds theme song cover by Pomplamoose (Jack Conte and Nataly Dawn)
(Cross-posted on our sister site 9to5Google.com)

Here at San Francisco’s Moscone West, the Google I/O 2011 keynote has just wrapped up. Being their most important annual pilgrimage for developers, the show is a launchpad for important new products and announcements. For some people, the biggest news is that popular Angry Birds franchise is now available for the most popular platform of all – the web. Joining Google’s senior vice president of Chrome Sundar Pichai on stage was Peter Vesterbacka, the CEO of Espoo, Finland-based multi-million dollar Angry Birds developer Rovio Mobile. Wearing a red Angry Birds sweatshirt, Vesterbacka announced that the Angry Birds web app is now available on the Chrome Web Store. More information and three screenies right after the break.

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Sad news for fans of e-reading. BeamItDown Software announced they are closing down the shop and ceasing development of iFlow Reader, an e-book reader for iOS, due to Apple’s 30 percent cut and new rules that require all content sales to go through the iOS in-app purchasing mechanism. As a result, publishers like iFlow Reader are increasingly finding that Apple’s 30 percent cut is eating into their margins, leaving them with little or no revenue.

BeamItDown Software and the iFlow Reader will cease operations as of May 31, 2011.  We absolutely do not want to do this, but Apple has made it completely impossible for anyone but Apple to make a profit selling contemporary ebooks on any iOS device. We cannot survive selling books at a loss and so we are forced to go out of business. We bet everything on Apple and iOS and then Apple killed us by changing the rules in the middle of the game. This is a very sad day for innovation on iOS in this important application category. We are a small company that thought we could build a better product. We think that we did but we are powerless against Apple’s absolute control of the iOS platform.

“They [Apple] screwed us”, BeamItDown Software’s Philip Huber told Fortune.

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IM+ Pro, one of the best multi-client chat programs for iOS devices, has been updated with a location-based feature that makes it easy to find random chat participants nearby your current location. Developer Shape Services says Neighbors provides users “the opportunity to find new real life connections and friends with common interests”. This is interesting as we haven’t seen a beneficial integration of location, which is the latest fad, with chat services.

The Neighbors feature works pretty straightforward. You locate people on the map to engage in chat sessions with nearby friends. Others discover you based on your location information that can be as accurate as house, street or city – your choice.

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