740 posts tagged “iphone”
All AT&T iPhone 3G Stock Diverted to Pre-Pay Customers
While most of the attention has been on iPhone 3G stock at Apple Stores
(rightfully so, since Apple is hoarding most of them) anyone not in
driving distance of an Apple Store has to get theirs in AT&T land.
So here's the sorta good news, if you're patient: If you do AT&T's
direct fulfillment deal—pay for it in full, then they call you to pick
it up when it arrives—you'll get your phone in about two weeks on
average, guaranteed. And the bad news:
All the phones are going to the direct fulfillment program, so don't expect to just walk into a store and buy one. They're not getting them, and won't, until the shortage is over:
We hope to begin re-stocking our stores as soon as we can, but first priority goes to those customers who purchased through direct fulfillment.
Our advice? If you've gotta have one NOW, take Friday off, drive to an Apple Store before it opens, and make an urban camping trip out of it—bring beef jerky, a fishing pole (to fend off panhandlers) and guitar to sing Kumbaya, which, with any luck, will drive people out of line. [AT&T]
credit - http://gizmodo.com/5028669/all-att-iphone-3g-stock-diverted-to-pre+pay-customers
Most Expensive iPhone App Champion: MyAccountsToGo Costs More Than an Unsubsidized iPhone
At $449, MyAccountsToGo Dynamics GP and MyAccountsToGo SAP BusinessOne are the most expensive iPhone Apps
available as of right now. It's under the Finance category and is
designed for sales, marketing and finance people to access their
transactions, statements, and other corporate terms that we have no
clue about. Since the most we know about "business" is "business time",
we can't say whether or not the $449 is worth the cash, but we do know
that you should buy both apps and just make it an even $898. There's a free version if you want to know what the excitement's all about. Just don't accidentally buy the paid version.
credit - gizmondo.com
Episodic Makes Flash Videos iPhone-Friendly
Jason Kincaid
20 comments »
One of the most frustrating things about the iPhone is that it can’t
handle Flash, which has become the standard for streaming video on the
web. YouTube managed to work around this by transcoding all of its
videos into the H.264 format, but other video serving sites have failed
to follow suit. Today Episodic
,
a video web publishing company, has launched a new web app that looks
to solve this problem by converting Flash-based videos into a format
that the iPhone can play in its native Safari browser. The service
works with content uploaded to a number of different video sites,
including Blip, YouTube, and Metacafe.
The site takes standard RSS feeds and scans posts for any video
content, which it then converts to an iPhone-friendly format. Each
blog’s converted feed can be accessed from a static URL (for example,
you can check out a feed of WebbAlert at http://iphone.episodic.com/WebbAlert
from your iPhone). Hypothetically, a video blogger could redirect to
this static Episodic URL whenever an iPhone user visited their site.
While the video conversion seems to work well, Episodic’s app is still very limited. There’s currently no way to take a standard URL and convert that page’s content to video - you need to generate a playlist using an RSS feed. Some bloggers may also take issue with the fact that videos are now being hosted outside of their site (anyone can submit your site’s RSS feed for conversion). CEO Noam Lovinsky says that this shouldn’t be an issue, as the site is merely serving as a syndication platform, and will do everything it can to respect bloggers’ wishes.
Episodic is also hoping to help bloggers monetize their video content by offering an advertising and analytics service for streamed videos. Unfortunately there’s currently no way to authenticate who owns the videos - you could easily input an RSS feed and then start monetizing someone else’s content. Lovinsky says that the site is working on this issue, and that the company’s ultimate goal is “to help people get paid for the content they create”. In the future, the site intends to roll out a full-fledged video platform designed to help serial video creators generate professional content quickly.
credit - http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/22/episodic-makes-flash-videos-iphone-friendly/
Apple Launching App Store Beta Program
Jason Kincaid
20 comments »
Apple’s App Store has seen an unprecedented amount of success and exposure since its launch, with millions of total downloads and 909 applications already available. Unfortunately, Apple has been unable to keep up with the influx of submissions from developers (each app must be approved before it appears on the store), leaving many companies frustrated and confused as their apps sit in limbo.
Adding to the frustration has been the difficulty associated with
testing an application. As Craig Hockenberry, one of the people behind
the popular app Twitterific explains:
The big problem here is that the only way to install software on an iPhone or iPod touch is with the App Store. There are also no provisions for beta testing… The only way to “test” a fix is to release the changes to tens of thousands of users. It’s the developer equivalent of playing Russian roulette.”
Now we’re hearing from an app developer that Apple is finally going to start rolling out a new beta program in the next few days
has released an Ad-Hoc program. Details are slim, but it seems like
Apple is capping the total number of beta participants at 100 per app.
In order to download a beta app, users will need to submit their
iPhone’s UDIDs number to the developer, who
will then need to flag its eligibility in the store itself. All betas
will still be distributed through the App Store - you won’t be able to
download one on an external site. The apps will be directly distributed by the developer.
It sounds like developers that haven’t had their apps approved yet
will still be able to participate in the beta program. This should
alleviate some of the developers’ anxiety (at least they’ll know their
app will work once it goes live), but it still doesn’t address the the
delays and lack of communication that many developers are complaining about.
Update: Our source was misinformed. This program, as a number
of commentors have said, is Apple’s Ad-Hoc program that is already
operational. Erica Sadun of TUAW writes:
credit - http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/22/apple-launching-app-store-beta-program/
ReQall's iPhone app saves brain cells, cell phone minutes
If you're not the type of person to carry around a notepad or voice recorder with you, there are a handful of Web services raring to help you out if you've got a mobile phone. ReQall, a service that launched back at Demo 07 has a great new iPhone application that does just that. I got in touch with Sunil Vemuri, ReQall's chief product officer who showed it off during one of today's CEO pitch sessions at the AlwaysOn Summit.
The application's killer feature is that it saves your notes both locally and to the cloud. It also sends these notes to ReQall's servers without using your voice minutes--that is as long as you can note down everything you want to say within the 30 second allotment. Previously you had to type them in to nix having to make a phone call. Vemuri says the service will transcribe them in just a few minutes, but since launching with the app store a few weeks ago, that time has gone up drastically--leading to some negative reviews. Vemuri told me they're working to get the time back to just a minute or two.
Another nice feature is the "Memory Jogger," which will pop up one of your upcoming reminders when you shake your phone in order to get you to start thinking about it ahead of time. It's fun, silly, and makes use of the device's accelerometer. I honestly doubt many people are going to use it, except by accident, but it sort of doubles like a flash card tester.
The new application is definitely a step up from the Web version that launched back in early March. It'll let you swipe back and forth between things noted in time, things, and people categories. One thing that's missing, though, is integration with the phone's built-in calendaring tool. This is due to a limitation in Apple's iPhone SDK, something Vemuri hopes will be changed in later revisions. For now he says a good workaround is to subscribe to the calendar feed provided by ReQall in your Exchange-compatible e-mail client.
Reqall's iPhone app gets around the issue of using your mobile phone minutes to make notes by sending your reminder as an audio file instead.
(Credit: reQall.com / QTech Inc.)credit - http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-9997975-2.html
July 24, 2008 — 09:30 AM PDT — by —
Seeing
as how Web services today are becoming more and more multi-faceted and
multi-functional, particularly in the social networking and social
media space, it really is open to debate what is and what is not part
of a specific segment of the market. Where blogging starts and where
networking ends, for instance, is a gray area that has grown ever
larger with time. Mobile utilities in particular have evolved to
contain powerful assets that accomplish several tasks at once.
Good ol’ run-of-the-mill blogging: TypePad and WordPress
If we burrow down to the core of the blogging world, there are several platforms which sport robust frameworks, and many of them are free to use. WordPress, TypePad, Blogger, Live Spaces, are just a few that sport mass userships and audiences. But only two currently reside as native, officially-released applications within the iPhone/iPod touch paradigm. They are, as we noted recently, TypePad and Wordpress.
WordPress arrived with its own utility after TypePad had introduced itself to users. Both have received good reviews so far. And why not, really. Both aptly manage the basic tasks of posting and editing blogs, and each enables the user to upload photos from a library or take new images via the iPhone’s onboard camera.
I have already offered my own impressions about both applications, and happen to favor TypePad’s application a bit more than the WordPress release because TypePad provides support for English and French, but both essentially get the same job done similarly well. Neither path will lead you astray. Quite honestly, as I said before, one’s choice of application will naturally fall to whichever platform one prefers as it appears on the desktop, and whether one has invested much time in either setting.
Micro-blogging
There
are even more choices in the microblogging realm, and if photos are
one’s main source of intrigue, the list is even more voluminous. So
let’s dig in. To start, there are the Twitter-specific applications: Twitterific, available for free and ad-supported [iTunes]; or as a paid-for premium version [iTunes]; Twittelator [iTunes]; and Twinkle [iTunes].
My experiences, coupled with feedback from others tells me Twitterific is the most pleasant, as it has the benefit of housing a browser within.
If you’re one to click on URLs posted by friends, this is definitely a convenient feature. And in my trials, it has proven quite reliable. It is most useful due to the fact that it makes any transfer out of Twitterific and into Safari Mobile unnecessary. Once you’ve taken a look at whatever webpage you were directed to, you can close the browser and immediately carry on with reading incoming feeds. No need to repetitively enter and exit applications.
Twinkle is aesthetically pleasing, no doubt, and it adds a location dimension to facilitate conversation among users within a given area. But the application has been known to crash regularly. According to Tapulous, Inc, the creator of Twinkle, an update should arrive this Friday, July 25, to fix bugs and “other minor problems.”
Miscellaneous and (even more) multi-functional
Here’s where it all comes down to personal tastes and desires. Some applications will connect you to numerous services for easy, synchronized posting. Others will help you satisfy only your tendencies as a photo blogger. Some will help you connect with friends, micro-blog a bit, and even post duplicate hellos and how-are-yous to Twitter. That’s because… well… it all comes back to Twitter, doesn’t it? Without further adieu, here are some items for your consideration listed in no particularly prearranged order.
LifeCast [iTunes]:
Manage your day’s events in organized fashion. Want to keep what you do
for work and for play exclusive? No problem. LifeCast is about keeping
things tidy. Also, non-English speakers will enjoy its slightly
multi-lingual reach. French, German, Italian, and Spanish are all
supported. Also, if you’d like to post text to Blogger, you may. The same goes for Tumblr (photos, too). Geo-tagging comes with.
Bluepulse [iTunes]: We gave this a brief review
some days ago. And while it wasn’t my personal cup of tea, it’s
something that others have shown an affinity for. If you’d like
something Twitter-esque (with a Twitter connection, to boot), albeit in
a way that allows you to message multiple people of your choosing —
rather than, say, everyone on your friends and followers list(s) — this
one’s a treat. The layout may take some getting used to, though. It
appears designed to make existing Bluepulse users comfortable when
making “the switch.”
ShoZu [iTunes]:
If this one were to be described in a single word (not yet recognized
by the grammar police), it would no doubt be “awesomeness.” You need
only look at the list of supported sites and services to get a grasp on
what this ShoZu
is all about. It is the Swiss Army knife of online social interaction
(so far as photo uploads and status updates and things are concerned,
anyway).
Pownce [iTunes]: Despite what the heads at Pownce
say, this one’s original intent was most definitely to give Twitter a
little slap-slap. Which seemed like it might’ve been possible, until it
didn’t. For what it’s worth, it’s still a nifty service. If you want it
on your iPhone, the download is available.
Kyte [iTunes]: Mobile photo blogging is super cool, for sure. But mobile slideshow blogging is exponentially more kick-ass. Kyte makes that happen. For this one you might need to take a few minutes to craft something nice, but it’s worth it.
Clowdy Photo Blogger [iTunes]:
The name says it all. It also lets you see photos taken “nearby” to
where you stand. A number of downloads currently available in the App
Store do this as well, but Clowdy works the photo realm exclusively.
It’s free, and it’s all of 0.1MB large.
Graffitio [iTunes]:
This operates with the same location-based concept as Clowdy, but it’s
text-based. The best way to explain it is to offer an example. Say
you’re at a restaurant. You can check Graffitio to see if a
Facebook-like “wall” has been created for the place. If so, you can
post a public message to it. If a wall doesn’t exist, create one. If
enough people participate in the experiment and visit various locations
regularly, it starts to become a rather interesting series of
whiteboards.
Speaking of Facebook, the Web’s largest social network (arguably) has its own application [iTunes], as many have already learned, and in some respects, it’s about blogging, too. If you’re one to routinely update your status, and your friends do too, what’s to say you all aren’t blogging? And with the recent update to the application, introduced late last week, you can post to your own wall as well as those of friends. Upload photos seamlessly too.
WordPress app hits the iPhone fashionably late
Just a week and a half ago WordPress for the iPhone was announced with a pretty killer screencast detailing what you could do with it. Tuesday morning it finally showed up on the app store, and I've had ample time to play with it. The good news is that it's very enjoyable to use and quite capable for creating posts on the go. The bad news? You've got to have an iPhone or iPod Touch to take advantage of it.
The key benefit to using this app is writing and publishing quick posts on the go. What I found after using it, though, is that it offers up far more to the discerning user who wants to use it as a very powerful publishing tool. You can upload photos either from your existing library or snap a quick shot with your phone's camera. I can see this leading to many food-related photo blogs. Also nice is that whatever you write can be saved on your phone, so you can work on dozens of posts at once and only publish when you want. There's also a great preview function that will show you what your post will look like without kicking you off to Safari.
I successfully connected two Wordpress.com hosted blogs to the app in just a minute or two, although I ran into problems connecting my personal hosted blog that uses the software install from WordPress.org. It's worth noting you'll need version 2.5.1 or higher to hook it up to a hosted blog, although updating to the recently released 2.6 is definitely worth it for all those extra publishing goodies.
Unfortunately there are some serious shortcomings to the iPhone that bring the app down a notch. If you're used to adding links to your posts there's not a lot you can do without copy and paste. HTML code is fully supported, so as long as you're good with your href tagging (which is brutal on the iPhone's built-in keyboard) you'll be able to add links from memory just fine.
Another quibble of mine is that drafts created on your computer won't show up in your post queue on the iPhone app, meaning you won't be able to start a post on your computer and finish it on the road. Ideally, future revisions will include better shortcuts for adding links and some support for fetching drafts from the cloud.
Hardcore users with a lot of readers will also be pining for some sort of comment management feature in future revisions. As it stands, you'll have to log in to your WordPress dashboard from Safari and administrate them from there, which isn't terrible, but it would be far more enjoyable to write and manage in one place.
All in all, it's off to a great start, and compared to competitor TypePad, which had its app available at the launch of the app store, WordPress is just as full featured and opens up mobile blogging to the millions of WordPress.com and WordPress.org users.
I've embedded screenshots and the screencast below.
Sarah Perez / ReadWriteWeb:
Amit Agarwal / Digital Inspiration:iPhone for WordPress Application Now Live on iPhone App Store
Save Money By Sending Free SMS on iPhone
Here's
how you can use the reverse concept of using AIM on your computer to
directly message someone's phone via SMS to save money on text
messaging fees for your iPhone—or any phone that has a proper data
implementation of AIM. Just load up the AIM app on your phone, then
send a text message to the number of the person you want to text.
Example: +12125551234. Your buddy can reply to that message and you'll
get the response on your chat window, but it's not as useful as it can
be until the iPhone gets background messaging in September. Still,
spamming Jesus with free text messages is always fun. [Max OS X Hints]
credit - http://gizmodo.com/5027729/save-money-by-sending-free-sms-on-iphone
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