Apps

Apple is continuing their new “if you don’t have an iPhone…” campaign, this time showcasing Apple’s iOS social gaming platform Game Center. The new TV advertisement opens up by noting the vast library of gaming titles available on the iOS App Store then transitions to the main point about Game Center.

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Twitter has released an update to their iOS application with support for the iPad 2’s dual camera system. The update now allows users to capture photos and videos within the application and directly upload them in a tweet via any photo/video uploading service they choose.

– Photo/Video capture support for iPad 2
– Disabled significant location change monitoring that was causing compass to appear constantly when in app
– Bug Fixes from user reported crashes

The rest of the update covers bug fixes relating to location, the built-in compass in certain iOS devices, and app crashes. We think this update will make a big impact as it will now seemingly be the quickest way to share media taken with the iPad 2 with the world. Get it for free on the App Store.

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Skype announced a new release of its Internet telephony software for Macs. Version 5.1 boasts enhanced conference calling capabilities enabling participants in group calls to easily identify active speakers – very handy. iSight Firewire webcam detection problem has been resolved as well, Skype says. Another nice-to-have: It’s finally possible to select recently called numbers stored in the dial pad. Release notes accompanying the download also mention “several minor bug fixes” and “call quality feedback.”

Skype 5 enraged many Mac fans, this author included, with its huge interface. It’s plain ugly, unfriendly and takes up too much valuable screen real estate unnecessarily. Perhaps in a realization of the backlash, Skype today backpedaled with a contest to redesign the application’s chat window, one area heavily criticized for the clutter.

Something about the accompanying statement rubs me the wrong way:

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It is a fact that all mobile phones emit a certain level of radiation. Yes, even the iPhone. That’s why a company named tawkon developed an application to measure the amount of radiation coming through your iPhone. According to the company the application was praised by Apple executives for its graphically appealing design, use of non-private APIs, and overall functionality.

We tried the front door via Apple’s App Store, including great discussions with senior Apple executives at their Cupertino headquarters who praised our app functionality and graphic appeal, and explored various technical solutions with us to overcome API restrictions and get tawkon onto the App Store.

The problem is that it was still rejected. This is not the first time an application was given a blessing from an Apple executive then still rejected (think Google Voice). After their app was rejected, tawkon e-mailed Apple CEO Steve Jobs inquiring about the reason. In return they got a simple “no interest.” For those interested in the application it is now available on Cydia via an iOS jailbreak.

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Image credit: Pennsylvania DUI blog

If you resort to software to figure out those speed traps, know that your senator is possibly lobbying to ban such programs from mobile bazaars forever. A group of senators took a tough stance on the matter, reports ABC News. The senators call such specialized apps “nothing but a public safety hazard”.

Deciding enough is enough, senators Harry Reid, Charles E. Schumer, Frank R. Lautenberg and Tom Udall – all Democrats – in a knee jerk reaction sat down and wrote a letter to Apple, Google and Research In Motion.

They want those checkpoint-dodging programs taken down from Apple’s App Store, Google’s Android Market and RIM’s App World. A mind-boggling excerpt from their letter reads:

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According to several threads on the Apple Discussions forum (here, here and here), the iPad’s front camera locks up in the FaceTime app when attempting to establish a video call. It’s unknown how widespread the issue is, but it seems to be stemming from a software bug likely to be addressed with the next iOS release. According to users posting on the forum, the problem won’t go away until device is restarted.

Other hiccups are also being reported. One poster details the issue:

Facetime was frozen on iPad 2. It had the last video capture as the main screen of Facetime. Could not see receiving video. Resolution: Reset to factoring settings. Apple – possible app glitch.

Another user is having troubles with the back camera, too:

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Voice searching is all the rage on Android devices (and your Chrome desktop with this nifty extension) and at the same time we’re being promised new forms of software interactions stemming from the advancements in the natural language processing science. Our operating systems have basic speech-to-text capabilities, but it doesn’t work that great and we rarely use the feature in everyday computing. With Chrome 11, Google is taking a different approach, leveraging their vast computing power to deliver cloud-drive speech-to-text to HTML5 web apps, explains a blog post:

Fresh from the work that we’ve been doing with the HTML Speech Incubator Group, we’ve added support for the HTML5 speech input API. With this API, developers can give web apps the ability to transcribe your voice to text. When a web page uses this feature, you simply click on an icon and then speak into your computer’s microphone. The recorded audio is sent to speech servers for transcription, after which the text is typed out for you.

How does it work?

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As promised, Mozilla, the open-source organization behind the Firefox browser, has just released Firefox 4, the next major iteration of the popular browser. The 27 MB download is available in over 80 languages on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Firefox 4  features an optimized JavaScript engine that makes web apps run noticeably faster, with GPU-accelerated page rendering. The browser comes with a new look user interface. There’s a a dedicated bookmark button right next to the search filed.

The tab bar is placed atop the address bar (you can also revert this setting), resulting in a more polished, cleaner appearance. If you’re like me, you keep dozens of tabs open as you scrub through your favorite websites. This quickly adds up to the confusion as sorting through tabs becomes an increasingly tedious affair. Luckily, more controls are now available to manage your tabs.

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When a critical Flash Player vulnerability was discovered being used in the wild last week, Adobe posted an advisory and promised an update within a week. The exploitable software flaw lets attackers take control of your system after opening an Excel spreadsheet with an embedded malicious Flash file (Office 2010 is said to feature safety countermeasures that prevent harmful code execution).

This undoubtedly nasty bug that affected the whole web and not just the parts of it needed a quick fix. It comes as a surprise that Google has managed to beat Adobe to the update punch by squashing the bug with a Chrome update while Adobe preps to issue the fix this week. How’s that possible?

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If you happen to own a Google TV-branded product, the official remote app released last December on Android devices is now available free on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad running iOS 3 or higher. Sporting a plethora of buttons, the program packs in channel surfing, DVR access, voice search and other features from the Android version minus the ability to push web pages from your iPhone to a Google TV device. Check out Google’s quick video tutorial for more features, embedded below.

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Unlike the App Store mobile bazaar which is the home to 99-cent quick sellers, with about one third free items, inexpensive software takes a back seat on the Mac App Store. According to a Distimo study based on an analysis of major application stores, less than one in eight apps on the Mac App Store are free of charge and games comprise 29 percent of all submissions.

Less than two months since launch the Mac App Store has 2,225 applications versus 8,099 iPad apps two months post-launch. Mac applications on average cost $11.21 – seven times the average selling price of iPhone apps ($1.57) and almost three times higher than on the iPad ($4.19). I have a feeling price drops on the Mac App Store are inevitable and here’s why.

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You can’t always be there at bedtime to read your kids their evening stories.  However, Nursery Rhymes with StoryTime let’s you read them their favorite stories remotely using an iPhone.  While it doesn’t replace being there, it is a nice stopgap and a great idea.  The artwork on these stories is top notch.

I see this as being fantastic for parents that are split up or even parents that travel often.  Perhaps v2 could have a little FaceTime window.

$3.99 at the App Store

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As if today’s pay wall announcement from the New York Times Company wasn’t enough, the news broke that an iPad-exclusive newspaper, The Daily, will begin charging for access next week. Unlike the Times’ entry-level $15 a month subscription for reading online articles on smartphones, the privilege of enjoying The Daily on your iPad costs just 99 cents per week, or forty bucks per year. Rupert Murdoch’s digital-only newspaper is slated to launch in Western Europe by summer, The Guardian reports. The exact release depends on when Apple’s new iOS subscription service becomes available in the country.

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Apple has issued a statement to The Register confirming reports and rumors stating that iOS web apps and embedded web views in iOS applications are throttled and run twice as slow as Safari.

iOS 4.3 includes a new “nitro” web processing engine, which promises to run java script twice as fast as earlier versions of iOS Safari. According to Apple’s iOS feature page:

As you surf the web, your fingers will love the responsiveness of the new Nitro JavaScript engine powering Safari. It runs JavaScript up to twice as fast as in iOS 4.2.²Which means you get more speed behind each page load. And sites with lots of interactive features can appear on your screen even faster.

The only affected users would be users of third-party web browsers that utilize the web engine that Apple provides to developers in Xcode. Full-screen web applications that launch from the iOS homescreen are, of course, affected as well.

We presume that Apple has left out asynchronous mode of execution and other HTML5 goodies, too.

Apple spokesperson Trudy Miller confirms:

The embedded web viewer does not take advantage of Safari’s web performance optimizations.

Apple does not provide a reason as to why this is the case but here is our speculation from the other day:

Of course, Apple has a vested interest in native apps due to a 30 percent cut they take from sales. I’ve argued nearly two years ago that the web is the ultimate app store and it’s true that many native apps are easily replicated with HTML/CSS, especially the stuff like news readers, social networking clients and more. Also important, web apps run on any device with a standards-complaint browser whereas their native counterparts lock you into a specific mobile platform.

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The New York Times made the announcement today that marks the end of free news on their website. From now on, you will be able to access up to twenty online articles per month free of charge. Reading the news on your smartphone will set you back fifteen bucks a month and five more bucks if you’re accessing their content from a tablet. They also offer a combined $35 per month plan that buys you full access to the New York Times website via the web, as well as smartphone and tablet apps.

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An engineer with Mozilla hinted that the final Firefox 4 build will be ready for public consumption the following Tuesday, March 22. It’s set to ship on multiple platforms, including Windows XP. Following up on a recent Release Candidate build, Damon Sicore, Mozilla’s senior director of engineering, mentioned the March 22 release date in a Mozilla Development discussion on Google Groups.

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Mac database application Bento has been updated with several noteworthy features and made its Mac App Store debut. Additionally, companion iPhone and iPad apps, each costing five bucks, have been enhanced with support for Bento 4 for Mac and the ability to record voice memos and sync iCal tasks. Mac folks who own a previous Bento version can upgrade for just $29 with a $20 instant rebate upgrade and newcomers are free to download Bento 4 from the Mac App Store for fifty bucks. Here’s a quick rundown of the new stuff.

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The maker of the widely popular game Doodle Jump, Lima Sky, has announced that the app has surpassed the 10 million download mark since its April 2009 App Store debut. The folks behind this success story are in the middle of producing an iPad-specific version of game with “brand new content.”

After such incredible first two years, it is safe to say Doodle Jump has exceeded even our wildest imaginations,” says Igor Pusenjak, founder of Lima Sky.  “We are looking forward to bringing even more amazing content to millions of Doodle Jump fans around the world.

Perhaps the most exciting news from Lima Sky’s announcement is that Doodle Jump is coming to the Microsoft Xbox Kinect. Lima Sky is yet to announce the logistics of that or a launch time frame, but it does sound exciting. Full press release (via Joystiq) is after the break.

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AirPlay is a great new feature of iOS 4 that lets you wirelessly stream photos, video and music from an iOS device to your television via Apple TV. Like any new tech, AirPlay has its share of teething problems as it doesn’t work two-way between any iOS device, as originally planned. Apple fixed some of the concerns with iOS 4.3 and AirPlay can now stream video from the Photos app, web sites and Air Play-enabled apps that are now listed in a brand new section on the App Store.

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According to Anthony Morganti Apple has been so inspired and excited by the latest stream of iPad-optimized magazine applications that they are now working on a magazine-app template for use by developers in Xcode.

Apple’s goal is for any company, essentially, who wants their magazine in digital form for the iPad can have it done. The template will supposedly also allow developers to easily implement back issues and the new in-app-subscription service.

I’m told; “Imagine a guy drawing and writing a comic book. He can’t sell it to Marvel or DC so he hooks up with a programmer and within days, he’s getting his comic book published and sold on iTunes.”

The report claims Apple will implement the new template by the end of the year. This is around the time we can expect iOS 5.1 or 5.2.

Just in time for the iPad 2 launch today, first triple-A iPad games have received timely updates designed to take advantage of the gizmo’s advertised nine times graphics performance increase. Enhanced versions of both medieval sword fighting Infinity Blade by Chair and Electronic Arts’ Dead Space for iPad just went live on the App Store, proudly advertising prettier and more complex graphics made possible by the A5 chip inside iPad 2.

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