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- Weekly App Store Picks: May 2, 2009
Who’s that knockin’ at your door? Why it’s none other than the freshest pickings from the App Store, joined by a smattering of Apple news.
Before we get stuck in to this week’s iPhone picks and recommendations from the App Store, let’s shift our focus for a moment and have a quick recap on what went down this week.
There’s so much to get through here, so let’s kick off by rewinding back to Monday where Apple launched a new iPhone OS 3.0 beta, sliding in a selection of new features including settings for push notification and audio scrubbing in the iPod app. Plus, David Appleyard took a look at iStat for iPhone. The $1.99 app is a useful tool for remotely monitoring your system performance and resources.
The very next day, Amazon swallowed up iPhone developer Lexcycle. A significant purchase indeed because Lexcycle is the brains behind Stanza, a wonderful — and absolutely free — eBook reader for the iPhone. Also on Tuesday, our own Clayton Lai continued his Jailbreak series, looking at how to jazz up the sedate iPhone lock screen.
Rumors abound as Verizon CEO Lowell McAdams has apparently, “talked to people at Apple.” Speculation has turned to the possibility of two new Apple products: an “iPhone Lite,” and apparently a “media pad.” The latter of which would essentially be an oversized iPod Touch.
The latest addition to TheAppleBlog’s journalistic lineup, Gavin Bowman, launched the App Store Roundtable article series. His first post brings several developers together to look at the growth of the App Store and the initial gold rush. And finally, Apple stealthily launched Live Chat support for MobileMe. (It’s still not going to convince me to move over from DropBox, though.)
And in other news, UK-based artist Jon Burgerman has teamed up with UsTwo, the app developers behind Steppin and MouthOff. The team are currently cooking up an iPhone music toy, titled Inkstrumentals, featuring a crowd of Burgerman’s odd and awesome characters.
Moving on to the picks, this week I’ve been looking at Pixel Contact, Wolfenstein 3D Lite, MusicNeon and Lilt Line.
Pixel Contact (99 cents)
Since purchasing my iPhone, I’ve been disturbingly fastidious when it comes to keeping my Address Book tidy. It’s particularly important to me that I have an image for every single one of my contacts. The problem is that when swapping contact details, it can be somewhat awkward to ask someone I’ve just met if I can take their photo. Can give the wrong impression, you see? This app allays an awkwardness by providing an array of pixellated people that you can assign to your Address Book contacts. It’s super cute and incredibly useful, too.
Wolfenstein 3D Classic Lite (FREE)
The original PC-based Wolfenstein was, I’m proud to say, my first FPS. The seemingly massive environments, the strange new control scheme, stealing weapons from dead enemies — it was a fresh and exciting challenge, something I’d never experienced before and, crucial for me as a young lad, it felt like games had started to grow up. Doom would, of course, take all of this even further for me, but until then, Wolfenstein reigned supreme. The iPhone version hit the App Store a couple of months back for only $1.99; those looking to try before they buy, download this free version and try out three levels.
MusicNeon (FREE)
Burgerman’s forthcoming Inkstruments toy for iPhone got me on the hunt for music games in the App Store. After searching for something fun but also free, I tracked down MusicNeon. Coming from the collective mind of Shanghi Gokei, an app development outfit from Japan, MusicNeon is a nonsensical sound toy meets Bejewelled-esque puzzle game. As the clock counts down, it’s your job to link the glowing neon tubes up from left to right, ensuring you trigger the seemingly useless bonuses along the way. The gorgeous glowing visual style, paired with the jaunty music selection (including a few Christmas classic, for no apparent reason) make this a tongue-in-cheek but nevertheless fun game.
Lilt Line ($2.99)
However, fans of music games looking for some serious action should perhaps skip the weird Japanese oddity that is MusicNeon and skip straight to Lilt Line. The game combines a deliciously messy Dubstep soundtrack — courtesy of London-based crew 16bit — with retro high-speed shoot-em-up action (except without the shooting). As a white line glides through empty neon caverns, you play by tilting the iPhone left and right and tapping the screen to the shuffling groove. Developer Different Touch describes the game as, “hack’n’slash dubstep vehicle synthesis simulation action.” Whatever it’s meant to be, it’s one of the most original games to hit the App Store so far and is highly recommended.That’s all the picks we’ve got time for this week. Meet me right here, same time, same place, next week for more of the week’s news alongside fresh picks from the App Store.
In the meantime, what apps have you been using this week?
Переслать - Sequel Pro 0.95 Released
Back in Feburary I took a look at the open-source database tool Sequel Pro and compared it against the commercial tool, Querious. Querious had the winning edge at the time, despite being for MySQL 5 only and costing money. It was only Sequel Pro’s support for MySQL 3 and 4 that provided any feature advantage. However, Sequel Pro 0.95 was released yesterday, and this release continues the steady pace at which Sequel Pro is catching up to the features and polished nature of Querious.
The version of Sequel Pro I previously looked at was 0.93, and in the two versions since then the whole feel of the application has lifted from a ‘rough open-source app’ to that of a ‘polished professional tool.’ They have added and enhanced functionality that was previously lacking, and tweaked the UI here and there to give a smoother user experience — which makes the important difference between an app that is functional, and an app that is enjoyable to use.
The general look and feel of the application is polished in the details and has more of the Mac sleekness that we have come to expect from great OS X software. The buttons on the main interface have all been tweaked, both in terms of style and the icons used to depict the action. The preferences dialog has also been redesigned and offers many new customizations and time saving options. There are lots of other little UI tweaks that help the application look like it belongs in OS X.
There is also finally a much improved query editor, with line numbers, full syntax highlighting and expanded code completion (press escape to bring this up). You can also right-click on keywords (such as WHERE or INSERT) and look up the MySQL documentation for that keyword in your browser with just one click. Editing query favorites is also easier with an improved favorites editor.
The output console log can now be hot-filtered with a live search term, making finding what you want easier than ever, too.
Just as importantly, there are many more tweaks and changes behind the scenes that results in a better user experience, including performance improvements and lots of bug fixes. With the speedy rate of development going on, the Sequel Pro team have their sights set on a 1.0 release with improved printing, user privileges management functionality and an enhanced Import/Export interface. This is exciting to watch — when open-source software gets solid momentum behind it, awesome things can happen. You can download Sequel Pro 0.95 from here, while the full release notes documenting all changes can be found here.
Переслать - Is Keeping Older Mac Notebooks in Service False Economy?
Many enterprise IT departments are exercising false economy by extending the service life of notebook computers from the traditionally recommended 3-5 years in an effort to keep a lid on replacement cost, according to a new research report (PDF) released by Northborough, Mass.-based market research firm J.Gold Associates.
The report estimates that squeezing out an additional two years of use would typically cost an average of $1,050 per machine, based on analysis of actual costs associated with business notebook failures, including variations in failure rates over the life cycle as well as costs of repairs both in and out of warranty. The report also calculates that hanging onto outdated hardware typically costs an organization $9600 in diminished end user productivity.
“Failure Tax”
Additional findings of the study include:
- The cost to repair a failed notebook while under warranty is $1,070
- The cost to repair a failed notebook not under warranty is $1,525
- The per-machine "Failure Tax" for each notebook deployed in the organization is $138 in the first year and increases dramatically throughout the life of the machine, but will change based on variations in machine failure rates from different manufacturers and/or models.
Now, presumably J.Gold Associates’ main research focus was WinPC laptops, which begs the question: Would their conclusions similarly apply in the Apple notebook space?
Macs Probably Don’t Fit The Profile
The actual cost and advisability of keeping laptops, WinPC or Mac, in service past the three-year mark would vary widely with different models, individual users’ performance needs, and how well a particular unit was maintained and cared for. Apple laptops, which have historically had longer useful service lives than PC portables, but cost more up front, probably don’t fit the profile especially well. For example, the only current Mac notebook selling for less than the J.Gold Associates study’s $1,050 average repair cost under warranty figure is the entry-level 2.0 GHz white MacBook.
That said, a three-year system replacement interval has long been informally accepted by consensus as a sort of sweet spot benchmark that makes a sensible compromise between economy and keeping reasonably up-to-date. It’s also been my own provisional target for primary workhorse computer replacement over 17 years of Mac usership, usually unrealized and rarely exceeded.
Repair Often Not Economically Prudent
Moreover, my own empirical, deductive, and non-scientific take on repairing broken or damaged computers, especially once the warranty has expired, is that more often than not if it involves serious money, it’s probably not as economically prudent as just replacing the computer. My conviction on this point becoming firmer as laptop prices, including Apple’s, have dropped substantially over the past decade.
Whether you’re a business or an individual user, it makes little sense to spend $500 or $600 or more, not to mention the inconvenience of downtime, to repair a 2- or 3-year-old laptop when you can buy a brand new MacBook for $999 with the latest processors, state-of-the-art graphics, usually more standard RAM and hard drive capacity, the latest OS software, a fresh warranty, and so forth. That axiom would apply even more emphatically in the Windows PC laptop space, where the cost of buying new tends to be even more modest, especially at the lower end of the range. I hope my new aluminum MacBook lasts well past the arbitrary three-year threshold, but I’ll be surprised if I’m not seriously on the hunt for a system upgrade by then, if I indeed haven’t already taken the plunge.
But There Are Exceptions
That said, I’m actually typing this article on a 9-year-old Pismo PowerBook, which, albeit somewhat hotrodded with processor, optical drive, hard drive, RAM and other upgrades, is still providing excellent, dependable service running OS X Tiger for light to medium-duty computing tasks. My wife is still using a similar machine for her “daily driver” computer, so at least with Mac laptops, useful service life can demonstrably extend long beyond three years.
As with most things in life as well as computers, “it depends” on a vast spectrum of variables and rigid theoretical templates rarely apply perfectly to particular sets of circumstances, which need to be assessed on an individual basis. But three years is still the paradigmatic system replacement interval.
Переслать - Another New Apple Hire, This Time It's All Fun and Games
The news only just broke that Apple had hired at least two top chip executives, but it looks like that wasn’t the only skill set they were after. Another recent hire is raising eyebrows, because it seems to indicate that Apple is taking very seriously a group it appears to have largely ignored in the past. That group is gamers, who will hopefully be more of a focus for Apple now that former Xbox strategy guru Richard Teversham has joined the team.
Teversham has worked at Microsoft since 2005, and as such is the perfect person to consult if you want to learn how to successfully market your product as a gaming platform. The Xbox 360 continues to be one of the most popular game consoles, largely outpacing its Sony competitor, the PlayStation 3.
The job he’s apparently signed up for with Apple is in an education-related capacity at their European office. Maybe Apple’s planning on adding more educational gaming to their line-up? Hopefully the unusual department switch is just Apple learning from their non-compete trials and tribulations with Mark Papermaster, and involves them landing Teversham somewhere safe before they move him into a gaming-related capacity.
As I mentioned before, this is only the latest in a string of hires, which seems to indicate that Apple is either in a growth phase or is shaking things up in a big way. In either case, executive-level hires generally indicates a change in the way a company does business, so expect to see some very buzz-worthy developments coming out of Cupertino in the near future.
Переслать - iPhone Wins Out in J.D. Power Satisfaction Survey
They’re probably still on a high from the sale of their billionth app, but Apple now has more cause to celebrate thanks to consumer research firm J.D. Power and Associates.
A recent survey by the firm found that the iPhone ranked highest in customer satisfaction among cellphone owners so far in 2009. It topped the whole survey, beating out all others in both the smartphone and regular ol’ dumphone category, too. Nothing to sneeze at for a phone that once incurred such vocal complaints. Maybe the soothing balm of the upcoming OS 3.0 features has mitigated some of the iPhone’s early perceived failings.
The iPhone’s total score was 791 out of a possible 1,000. Next closest were LG and Samsung smartphones, which scored 772 and 759, respectively. Compare that to the smartphone category average of 751, and it looks like the iPhone has a handy lead. Users surveyed attribute their satisfaction with the phone to ease of use and OS and hardware features and quality. Of the smartphones rated, those that ran Windows Mobile were, unsurprisingly, ranked on average lower than others. Even BlackBerry didn’t do very well, earning a 739. Traditional phones ranked much lower, with an average of 707 points.
This survey is very good news for Apple going into June’s WWDC. If even half the rumors are true, the phone they plan on releasing at the annual conference will beat the iPhone’s current feature set considerably. Of course, the Pre will also likely be released around the same time, so that’s a whole new variable with which to contend. All I know is that my own satisfaction has risen quite a bit since installing the OS 3.0 beta, so I don’t see Apple running into the same kind of software trouble they had with the launch of 2.0, which should keep ratings high.
Переслать - Rumor Has It: iMovie App Included In Apple's New iPhone
As is normal in the days, weeks, and months leading up to an event like the WWDC, the rumor mill has started working some serious overtime. Which is both a blessing and a curse to those of us in the business of blogging about Apple, and also to those of us who just keenly follow the company’s actions. There’s so much speculation being thrown around, it’s hard to tell what to believe. A new rumor about the upcoming iPhone strikes me as likely, though, and maybe you’ll agree.The rumor, from a source talking to BusinessWeek, suggests that not only will the new iPhone hardware boast video recording capabilities, but that it will actually be a veritable mobile video editing platform, too, complete with built-in software. The software in question will reportedly be a native iPhone iMovie app, which will offer users a number of editing features, and possibly the ability to share your creations via MMS.
This makes sense for a company that pioneered the first truly, fully Internet-capable phone. If you want to capitalize on and build that reputation, your next logical step is to move into video creation, editing, and sharing, as it becomes more popular online via sites like YouTube, Vimeo and Ustream.tv. They’ve already shown that they’re aware of, and interested in investing in, the trend with iMovie ‘09, which has built-in video-sharing services.
And if you consider how many additional developers and types of applications video recording and editing capabilities would bring to the App Store, then saying no to video just doesn’t make sense from a business perspective. Plus, talk about a reason to buy a new device. Even if I have to sell my soul (i.e. sign up for yet another three-year contract), I’m upgrading if the next iPhone does have video editing support.
Переслать - Think the iPhone Keyboard Sucks? Think Again
One of the most common complaints I hear from non-iPhone users (and some who have them, too) is with regards to the on-screen keyboard. BlackBerry users revere and lionize their precious hardware QWERTYs, and people with landscape sliders from LG and others never stop rubbing it in. I’ve been a staunch defender of the iPhone’s touchscreen keyboard all along, often pointing out that tests have found typing on it to be faster and more accurate than even on a full-size Palm QWERTY.Now I have some more ammunition, thanks to a test run by Crave UK. Apparently they have very little to do with their time, so they came up with ridiculous scenarios for tech performance tests. Their latest involved an Apple iPhone, an Asus Eee PC, and a Citroen C4 (which is a $1.47 million rally car, in case you were wondering). The task was to type “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” that old stand-by sentence containing every letter in the English language that I used to type until my fingers were raw in Grade 9 high school business class. Not so hard, right? Right, when you’re sitting at a desk, not moving. Different story in a rally car running at top speed and taking turns.
CNET has the entire amusing video of how things went, but I’ll cut to the chase: iPhone wins handily. Reason? The auto-correct feature (although I suspect the iPhone’s being a true handheld device also has something to do with it). Good thing, too, because I can’t count how many times I’ve been in a rally car and thought to myself, “This would be a great time to type out my resumé.”
Переслать - Less Than 24 Hours in the TAB Paintbrush/Backblaze Contest
With less than 24 hours left in our Paintbrush/Backblaze Contest, we need more entries!
We’re really looking for some awesomely cheesy drawings here, so don’t feel like you need to be a pro artist. The cheesier, the better!
As a reminder, we’re giving away two 1-year subscriptions to Backblaze to the most badical drawings! The contest ends tomorrow (Friday) at 1PM MST, so get to it!
Переслать - TAB Welcomes: David Klein
Hello fellow Apple lovers. I have recently joined TheAppleBlog as a contributor. Allow me to give you all a little background as to who David Klein really is…
My first computer was a Macintosh LC, and I have since been a Mac enthusiast. My latest purchase was a Dell Mini 9 on which I installed OS X (very cool). In high school I worked at an Apple retail chain in Northern California called Computerware. After my first year at Cornell University, I had an internship in Apple’s hardware engineering department in Cupertino’s HQ. Yes, I sat near Sir Stevie several times in the cafeteria. Yes, he is extremely intimidating.
I worked in Cornell’s IT department supporting Mac users over the phone (I don’t recommend ever working tech support over the phone). I was the president of the Cornell University Mac User Group for a couple semesters. Now, I use Macs exclusively as a user interface designer at a startup in Palo Alto, CA. When I needed a few extra dollars to pay for student loans I worked at Palo Alto’s Apple Store nights and weekends. At that store you never know when Sir Stevie will walk in and sniff around to make sure everything is running to his standards.
I was a reviews editor at Powerpage.org for some time, but now I write all about Apple here. My goal is to make you all think about and use Apple’s products and those of its competitors in new ways. Whether or not you agree or disagree with my thoughts or how-to instructions, you should leave comments. I’ll do my best to respond to everyone.
You can get a feed of my articles here: http://theappleblog.com/author/tehdik/
Also, you can find me on Twitter and Flickr.
Below is a picture of me riding the cable car in San Francisco.
Переслать - Simplify Music 2.0 Does What iTunes and iPhone Should Do Natively
Around when I first got my iPhone, I used to use Simplify Media to really wow anyone who cared to listen to me gloat about my new toy. The app, if you’ve never heard of it, allows you to stream your home iTunes library from any computer with the desktop client installed directly to your iPhone. You can browse your library and change tracks, all remotely. Very handy if you have a 40GB library, but only 8 to 16GB of storage on your iPhone.I stopped using it shortly after, because I missed a lot of the features from the iPhone’s built-in iPod app, especially playlists. Simplify Music 2.0 is a completely different app, and while the new features probably could’ve been introduced via an update to Simplify Media (which many downloaded as a free release when it originally came out), they are significant enough to justify the $3 (on sale, $6 starting May 14) purchase price.
What specifically makes it worth $3? Playlist creation and modification, for one. And you’re not limited to your own library for tracks to add to that, either, so long as your friends also have the Simplify desktop server app running, and have given you share permissions. You’ll be able to browse any library you have access to, search them all by artist, track title, album, etc., and tag any song on any library as a favorite. Taking a cue from a new iPhone OS 3.0 feature, there’s also a scrub bar built in to the app that allows you to search through tracks.
If you’re not interested in these features, and just want the basic streaming capabilities, the original Simplify is still available for $4. As someone who has at least a couple different libraries running on multiple computers, I’m very interested in the new features in Simplify Music 2.0. Frankly, they should’ve been (and still should be) offered by Apple as just something the iPhone can naturally do, but if they’d rather leave it to third-party solutions, Simplify Music will do just fine.
Переслать - The Apple Ad Effect: How a Promo Appearance Affects App Sales
Ever wonder how being included in one of Apple’s iPhone and App Store ads affects sales? Positively, would be my uninformed guess. And it looks like, in this case at least, my gut feeling is an accurate reflection of reality. A recent blog post by Michael D. Jensen, developer of Analytics App for the iPhone/iPod Touch, reveals specific details behind a sales spike following his app’s appearance in an Apple print ad.
Analytics App, which provides on-the-go access to all of your Google Analytics data via your iPhone or iPod Touch, was recently featured in an ad for Fortune magazine with the tagline “Helping you run your small business, one app at a time.” In total, the ad featured 12 third-party apps (a full page), showing each on the springboard linked to a brief description. For Analytics App, the caption reads: "Want to see how your web site's performing? Analytics App shows you your site's unique visitors, page views and other statistics using a series of customizable reports." The same ad appeared in the Wall Street Journal more recently, and the Analytics App icon showed up in Apple’s “Thanks a billion” celebration ad on the WSJ’s web site, among others.
Image courtesy of Michael D. Jensen
Jensen took a look at his sales figures to work out the effect of the print ad on his revenue. He found that in the week following the appearance of the initial print ad, sales of his app rose an impressive 53 percent over previous weeks. That’s a nice spike, considering the advertising is free (unless you count Apple’s 30 percent cut on every app sold). As Jensen points out, he definitely gets better media presence via Apple than he could ever hope to fund on his own.
Way back in February, Hit Tennis developer Mark Johnson noted a similar spike following the appearance of his app in an iPod Touch TV advertisement. His sales improved a whopping 500 percent, but then dipped back down steadily. It makes sense that TV would have a more significant effect on sales, thanks to its much wider reach.
So, not surprisingly, being backed by Apple publicly lends you some serious street cred. The stat to watch is how it affects sales over the long haul. I’m willing to bet the halo effect is a lot more shortlived than some might expect, and is probably directly tied to the run lifetime of the ad itself.
Переслать - Apple on the Road: A Traveler's Tale
Going on vacation used to be such a quaint exercise. You took your camera (plus batteries and rolls of film) and, if you wanted much more than that, you took a notebook to jot down your thoughts. If you had a bit more money, you might have dragged a camcorder with you (do you remember how big those things used to be?) plus the spare tapes, batteries and back-brace for when you wanted to shoot without a tripod.
(If you don't get the joke, and really, you won't unless you're over 30, you have to appreciate that those things used to weigh a lot.)
Today, going on vacation is much the same. There’s still a healthy checklist of media essentials, but they've changed in form and function quite considerably.
So, I went to Scotland last weekend, and, like any good geek, I spared little thought for appropriate clothes and footwear, but instead filled my case with only the most crucial gadgets. Here's the rundown.
Hardware
- Canon EOS 450D
- Assorted lenses for the Canon
- Tripod
- Sony Handycam HDR-TG1
- MacBook Pro
- Airport Express
- iPhone 3G
Storage
- Memory Stick Pro Duo Mk II
- SDHC
Miscellaneous
- Card adaptors (x2)
- USB cable
- HDMI-USB cable
- Ethernet cable
- Battery packs (x3)
- Chargers (x4)
- Multi-adaptor
I could have traveled a bit lighter had I taken my MacBook Air instead of the Pro, but the Handycam records in 1080i HD, and the first-generation Air just can't handle HD video without slowing to a terrible crawl.
Also, the Canon DSLR spits out gorgeous, RAW-format photos in glorious 10-megapixel resolution, and that demands the power of a machine at least as competent as the MacBook Pro. Choosing the MacBook Pro certainly added weight to the journey (significantly so, when compared with the Air's feather-light 3 pounds) but you just can't argue with the gain in graphics performance.
At the End of the Day…
Each day in Edinburgh yielded hundreds of photos and dozens of videos. In the evenings I dumped the data from the camera storage cards to the MacBook Pro hard drive — a convenient and fast "backup" solution which allowed me to keep the used-space on the cards as low as possible. In addition, I used iPhoto and iMovie to import the day’s captures, making them easily available to the entire iLife and iWork suites.
Sadly, the hotel offered a horrible pay-per-hour broadband service with a customer portal so convoluted it rendered my Airport Express utterly useless. I was looking forward to creating a small private wireless network the MacBook and iPhone could enjoy; instead, I was permanently tethered to the wall.
So, why couldn't all this media management wait until I got home? I suppose it could have, but I wanted to enjoy the immediacy of getting back to the hotel room and, after a few minutes of importing-and-sorting, email my photos to friends and family. I also had an opportunity to test the ecosystem of iPhone, MacBook Pro plus cameras to see how well they worked together.
More than anything, it was an opportunity to test my Apple gear on the road, to see how well Leopard and iLife did in the field. It should come as no surprise then, when I say they performed admirably. What can I say that hasn't been said already? iLife rocks. iPhoto and iMovie make media asset management simple and sexy. I didn't just look forward to reviewing my photos at the end of each day — I looked forward to using iPhoto to do it!
Simply Heaven
There were some (small) drawbacks. The MacBook Pro sports only two USB ports, which is usually fine when I'm at my home office or in a Starbucks somewhere. In a hotel room, where I'm connecting cameras and iPhones (both for syncing and for charging) those two ports feel suddenly meager. Maybe that's my own fault for not bringing a hub, but looking at the PC laptops out there, many of which feature four or more USB ports as standard, I found myself wishing Apple hadn't been quite so minimal in their designs.
After being spoiled by the exceptional battery life of the Air, it's a real shock to the system to get "only" two hours out of the MacBook Pro. Sure, disabling the discreet graphics card helps, as does turning off the Bluetooth radio. And let's not forget that two hours is still an hour and a half more than most other laptops can hope to offer!
But the thing that was missing — most obviously missing — was the place of my iPhone in all of this. I took no photos on the iPhone because the built-in camera is a joke. I recorded no video because I don't want to jailbreak my phone.
The combination of MacBook Pro, Mac OS X and iLife '09 was symbiotic heaven. Everything worked perfectly together, and I never once had any issues with drivers, required updates, missing codecs or any of the myriad issues that so often plague other systems. I just really wanted my iPhone to be a part of that beautiful symphony. Instead, it just sort of sat there, desperately seeking a decent signal (usually missing in Edinburgh, it seemed to me).
The bottom line — and this is coming from someone who has been traveling far and wide for many years, usually with non-Apple solutions — is that the MacBook is a far better device for road-warriors than I imagined. IBM ThinkPads, Acer TravelMates and other traveler-friendly laptops are crammed full of software and gimmicks that make them apparently near-indispensable for those who find themselves traveling between hotels most of the time. PC manufacturers spend much time tweaking their laptops to be "ultimate" tools for road-warriors, but this usually means skimping on performance in favor of energy efficiency and battery life. (And in those cases, six, ten or fifty USB ports are worthless when the machine is so hopelessly underpowered it could barely cope with one attached device!)
Until now, I never had much confidence (or patience) in the other laptops I've owned to want to use them in the field…well, nothing beyond simple document creation or email correspondence. But I never once doubted that the MacBook would be a true workhorse — reliable and consistent.
As though the point needed hammering-home, a friend of mine also spent the weekend away, taking his Acer TravelMate with him. While he was away, connected to his hotel's Wi-Fi, Windows Update pushed some patches to both his network adapter and his email client (in this case, Windows Live Mail). After a restart, his network adapter failed to initialize. One painfully slow driver-rollback later, he got back online, but his email client wouldn't load — not until he had completely removed Windows Live Mail and installed a fresh copy of Windows Live Essentials (because "Essentials" is precisely the right word to communicate "Email and Photos" to everyone, right?)
This means he never got the photos I emailed him while I was in Scotland. He had to wait until he got home and could solve his software problem. And because MSN Mobile wouldn't recognize his live.com email address, he couldn't use his phone to stay in touch, either. Ouch.
I'm off on vacation again soon — a week in Turkey this time — and boy, am I glad I'm taking a MacBook with me. If you haven't made your MacBook a standard part of your vacation packing-list, I heartily recommend it. You'll wonder why you never did before.
Переслать - App Review: The New York Times Crosswords Daily 2009
App Quick Stats
It’s only fitting that a serious crossword puzzle app has a seriously verbose title.
The daily puzzles offered up by The New York Times are a classic staple in many crossword puzzle players’ diets. Kicking off each week with Monday’s easy offering, the puzzles get gradually more difficult each day, peaking with a fiendishly difficult grid on Friday.
The New York Times Crosswords Daily 2009 is the official NYT crossword app. The app features daily downloads of the latest New York Times crossword puzzle, alongside leaderboards and player profiles.
Sophisticated and Stylish (6 letters)
The game opens with a seriously smooth New York vibe: the Big Apple’s skyline sits atop the menu, rendered with a newspaper-style aesthetic, all backed with light-hearted jazz.
The cheery music and mellow tone was initially off-putting, perhaps due to my current diet of awful iPhone action games. After a few minutes though, I had adjusted to the breezy pace of the game and started to appreciate the gorgeous menu animations.
Zipping through the different menu screens, the animations are utterly gorgeous. Before even setting a single letter on to the grid, it was clear that this is a different breed of iPhone game — it’s smart, paced and incredibly classy.
To Make A Link (7 letters)
Prior to playing, you’ll need to set up a profile, which enables you to access the game’s array of community features and downloadable puzzles. Even though the registration process takes place within the app, it’s still a bore. I resented having to give my email address away, simply to access the game content.
Another issue with the registration process is that you’re automatically given a Magmic Profile. Magmic, the developers of the app, had, quite unexpectedly, created a profile for me on their site. It seems somewhat inappropriate for Magmic to be harvesting user-data for the game in order to create unrelated public profiles on their site (and without prior warning, too).
Once registered, the app is given an injection of content. You’re immediately able to download and play the latest daily crossword from The New York Times. There’s also a small archive of puzzles available to play, dating as far back as 2002. And best of all, downloading happens in a snap, which means you can be playing a fresh puzzle only moments after opening the app.
Corbijn’s Directorial Debut (7 letters)
Once a crossword has been opened, the timer starts ticking, giving the game a sense of pace and competition. Navigating each crossword is surprisingly intuitive. I expected clumsy navigation, and yet the interface design is solid and incredibly easy to grasp.
To select a square on the grid, you simply tap it. The clue is then displayed at the bottom of the screen. Tapping the same square again toggles between Across and Down, while using the left and right arrows (which flank the clue text) scrolls through the clues sequentially. You’re even able to zoom in and out of the grid by pinching, Mobile Safari-style.
Separate to the main crossword grid is an excellent clue view screen. The clue view screen is a useful tool when attempting to solve a grid; it’s a space where the clues are clearly laid out, enabling prolonged perusal and consideration. Plus, solutions can also be entered on this screen, too, enhancing its usefulness.
Summing Up
Magmic says that the app “includes access to daily and archived puzzles until the end of 2009.” It’s not clear exactly what this means, though. Does the app stop downloading all crosswords — even old ones from the NYT archives — when we hit 2010? The lack of clarity is an issue; if the app is essentially a subscription, it should be made clearer from the offset.
Setting the app’s description discrepancy aside, despite it’s overly verbose title, The New York Times Crossword Daily 2009 was an unexpected pleasure to play. The app’s design is classy, and the excellent user interface means that solving the crossword on the iPhone is just as engaging as the real thing.
The real joy of this app is the way in which it stretches your mental capacity. And taking on such a challenge — giving your brain-box a thorough testing — really does make you feel immediately smarter.
Переслать - Site Sponsor: I'll Take Jeopardy for $2,000
It would seem Jeopardy has taken over TheAppleBlog for the day!
Jeopardy is one of those “classics” that I remember watching at grandma’s house growing up. Unfortunately, I was absolutely horrible at getting any of the questions right.
Regardless of my inability to answer who forged the Potomac River in 1801, playing this app on my iPhone brings back some great memories.
Jeopardy for iPhone boasts 360 different categories and thousands of possible answers. And with multiple levels of difficulty, there’s some pretty serious re-playability here.
You can snag Jeopardy for iPhone now for $4.99…not the $2,000 the subject line might have hinted at. I just needed a good headline.
Переслать - Apple's Chip Design Dream Team, and What They'll Do
This week saw Apple hiring not one, but two former ATI/AMD chip designers. Just one would be enough to arouse speculation, but two in the same week is being seen by many, including the Wall Street Journal, as nothing short of a public declaration that they do indeed intend to start building their own chips.
Note also that these hires coincide with Mark Papermaster’s official return to work at Apple, which was delayed owing to the legal settlement between them and his former employer, IBM. Papermaster was instrumental in developing the PowerPC architecture with IBM.
One of the new hires this week was Raja Koduri, who was formerly chief technology officer at AMD in their graphics group. The other person brought on board, Bob Drebin, held the very same title before Koduri. Aside from these two high-profile hires, Apple also has ongoing active job postings for various chip-related positions, including some that actually admit to involving “testing the functional correctness of Apple silicon.”
The WSJ article also reminds readers that Apple acquired chip maker P.A. Semi last year. They suggest that the chip company was then tasked with designing a brand new, more energy-efficient ARM processor for the iPhone (which has terrible battery life, as anyone who has one can attest), and that the new hires represent a continuation and extension of this strategy.
But what reason could Apple have for wanting to develop their own chips? After all, outsourcing is more cost-effective, and a preventative measure against corporate bloat. In Apple’s case, however, bringing the development of that core component of their computers and media players in-house might actually make more sense. The WSJ points out that in building their own chips, Apple (which is notoriously secretive) would have to share far less information with chip suppliers. Third-party suppliers are probably the source of most of Apple’s early product leaks, as reports from DigiTimes and other Asian news sources repeatedly indicate.
Internal chip development would also stop the flow of information from Apple to chip makers, and through them to other computer/electronic device manufacturers. It’s basically the same reason Willy Wonka used Oompa Loompah labor, which was to hamper corporate espionage. Don’t get your hopes up for catchy, cautionary song and dance numbers, though, since it looks like Apple is still limited to boring old human workers.
If Apple is working to develop their own chips, they’re going about it the right way: hiring lots of experience, and not rushing a bad or underdeveloped product out the door. The Journal expects a 2010 date for the introduction of any proprietary Apple chips, but don’t be surprised if it takes longer than that for desktops and notebooks to get Apple-designed brains.
Переслать - Apple Launches MobileMe 24/7 Live Chat Support…and No One Noticed
No wonder this went unnoticed by most people. In the grand history of non-newsworthy news, this is right up there.
Two days ago, Apple updated their MobileMe News page with the announcement of 24/7 Live Chat support. If you have a problem with MobileMe, and the topics on the main support pages don't help, you can hit the "Chat now" button to start a real-time chat session with a MobileMe expert.
I can't say for certain, but I reckon this is how most of those discussions will play out:
Customer: My Contacts have stopped syncing with my iPhone.
Support Agent: OK, I'll try to help you with that. There's no reported problem with the MobileMe service. I need to check your iPhone settings…
[Time passes as settings are checked and rechecked.]
Support Agent: That should correct the issue.
Customer: (Pause) Yeah, my contacts are still not syncing.
Support Agent: You just need to give it a little more time to catch up.
Customer: How much more time?
Support Agent: (Cheerful) Not long!
[24 hours later]
Customer: My Contacts have stopped syncing with my iPhone.
Support Agent: OK, I'll try to help you with that. There's no reported problem with the MobileMe service. I need to check your iPhone settings…
OK, all joking aside, I've used MobileMe since its first difficult days, and it's far better now. Apple has continued to improve the service to the point where outages are few and far between and syncing is (usually) a smooth and hassle-free experience. You know…it just works…
…except when it doesn't. And when it doesn't work, in my experience at least, it's for absolutely no good reason whatsoever. In fact, as I write this, I'm about four weeks into a period of "slow" email synchronicity; by that, I mean that my Calendar and Contacts tend to sync between my devices almost instantaneously. Email once did that, too — but not now. Now, I have to tell my iPhone's Mail app to refresh. But, nothing has changed. This is just one of those MobileMe oddities that tends to come and go over time.
Still, adding this kind of real-live-person-at-the-end-of-a-phone support to MobileMe speaks volumes about Apple's confidence in the service, and how seriously they're taking it. And that's great news for crazies like me who long ago stumped-up the green and paid for MobileMe. Of course, I can't live without it now.
Maybe I should try calling to test the accuracy of my little imagined exchange?
Переслать - iPhone OS 3.0 Beta 4: Multiple iTunes Accounts
In iPhone OS Beta 3, there was a hint of a new feature that would presumably let a user change settings of the built-in App Store. With iPhone OS 3.0 Beta 4, seeded to developers earlier today, it has turned out to be a useful new feature: users can finally switch between multiple iTunes accounts within iPhone.
If you are someone who has multiple iTunes accounts, you’ve probably noticed how the App Store often gets confused about the number of updates available for download when it comes to over-the-air app updates; it may display an erroneous number of updates available, may fail to find any updates even when they are available, or may only display the number of updates for one or the other account. The only way to juggle multiple iTunes accounts is via iTunes on the desktop; you have to sign in to a particular account, get the updates for all the apps purchased with that account, sync your device, sign out, and repeat the steps for any other accounts.
With Beta 4, you’ll be able to easily switch between accounts from within the App Store or the iTunes Store on your device.
There is now a new “Sign In” button at the bottom of the Featured page in App Store. Apparently, you’ll be able to create a new iTunes account, though this does not seem to be working at the moment.
In Settings, the “Store” entry that was a placeholder in Beta 3, and which did nothing, has gained an icon and is now working. Tapping on it brings you to a page where you can sign in and out of an account or view account information.
If you choose “View Account”, you’ll be prompted to sign in once more, just like how it is when viewing account information in iTunes on the desktop.
Once you’ve done so, you’ll be presented with information such as your contact details and the balance remaining in your account. You will also be able to redeem gift codes from within this page, instead of having to find the “Redeem” button in the Downloads section of the built-in iTunes app, a step I have always felt to be rather counterintuitive.
Переслать - TAB Paintbrush/Backblaze Contest Continues
We’ve had a couple of really great entries for our Paintbrush/Backblaze Contest but would love to see more!
We’re really looking for some awesomely cheesy drawings here, so don’t feel like you need to be a pro artist. The cheesier, the better!
As a reminder, we’re giving away two 1-year subscriptions to Backblaze to the most badical drawings! The contest ends this Friday, so get to it!
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