iHome + Sleep

I was very happy to receive an iHome dock/clock for Christmas this year, and in the box there was a small note that said iHome apps would be coming to the iTunes Store in December.  They didn’t quite make that timeframe, but in early January the iHome + Sleep app went live.  I’ve since had a week to use it and I have to say, it was worth the wait.

From the home screen of the app you get a slick interface that shows you what you’d expect – the time.  From here you can setup different alarms, including the time, what music to sleep/wake to, what social networking messages to send out when you go to sleep or wake up, and you can even have the app keep a log of everything that happens on Twitter and Facebook while you’re asleep so you can get caught up first thing in the morning.  One of my favorite features though, is right up top on the main screen – the weather.  Knowing that it’s 19 degrees when I get up let’s me know I better get my butt in gear so the car will have time to defrost.

Another cool thing is the interface for adding alarms.  Rather than doing the normal text list of alarms, iHome has developed a slick punch-card system for your different alarms.  The card displays the name of the alarm, what time it’s set for, and even the album covers for whatever music you’re going to sleep or wake-up to.  You can flick through your various cards, and to set an alarm you drag it down into a slot much like “punching-in” to work.  It’s a pretty unique and satisfying user experience.

If that wasn’t enough, the iHome + Sleep app even tracks your sleep statistics.  At anytime you can hit a button and see how much sleep you got last night or what your average amount of sleep has been for the past week, month or year.  Very cool.  Finally, as you would expect, it works with my iHome dock exceptionally.

Oh, and did I mention it’s free?  Yup.  Free.  I had paid for an app that works as an iPhone alarm called “Awaken,” but iHome + Sleep blows it out of the water to the point that I’m probably going to uninstall it.  Anyways, if you’re an iPhone or iPod Touch user hit the iTunes Store link below to grab iHome + Sleep.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ihome-sleep/id346249053?mt=8

My Second Geocache

The iPhone is a wonderful device.  I can honestly say that without it I probably wouldn’t have gotten into geocaching.  Actually, without the Totally Rad Show’s segment on geocaching (embedded below) I probably wouldn’t have picked up on it in the first place, but that’s a whole different story.  Using the iPhone I’m able to locate geocaches via GPS and track them down using Google Maps, even using a compass as I get closer and closer to the cache to narrow the search.  From there I can log my visit, and see any other caches that are around me via a list sorted by distance (another handy reason to have GPS on your phone).

Anyways, I might start logging caches as I find them.  To be honest I’ve only found two to date, but whenever I find one from now on I’ll post pictures here (again, using the iPhone).  The first is below.  Before that though, I want to sing the praises of an application called, surprisingly enough, Geocaching.  It’s the most expensive application I’ve purchased weighing in at $9.99, but it’s been worth it so far.  The simple fact that it’s a cheap entry point to a fun hobby that will pay off in entertainment value alone is enough to garner my recommendation.

However, it’s the first app that has truly impressed me with the wide-range of functionality included with it.  As I mentioned you can search for nearby geocaches and navigate to them via Google Maps using the iPhone’s included GPS.  You can use a compass to point you in the right direction if the map isn’t sufficient.  On top of that it interfaces with Geocaching.com, a website which features a database of geocaches for finders and hiders alike.  The site has a ton of information (descriptions of caches, hints if you’re stuck, and user comments – and that’s just the beginning).  All of this is accessible with the Geocaching application.  I’ll include an iTunes link to it at the bottom.

So, here’s my latest (second) find.  Yes, it was attached to a ceramic dalmatian.  Yes, it’s a dalmatian because it’s part of a 101 Dalmatians-themed series of caches.  Come on people, I’m new to this! =)  I signed the log included in a tube container on the dog’s collar and was on my way (Signed “Dave Kemick 8/16/2009 – TRS” in case you’re in the area).

iTunes – Geocaching

DOOM Resurrection only $2.99!

Doom Resurrection is a first person shooter from the folks at id Software, makers of the Doom, Wolfenstein, Quake and now Rage series of games.  It takes its cues from Doom 3 in particular, which was best-known for being a graphical revolution when it debuted on the PC back in 2004.  Resurrection uses assets from that same game but, as you would expect of the iPhone, doesn’t look quite as good.

The fact that it’s an FPS has been misleading to some, because it’s one of the multiple “on-rails” games that have found their way to the iPhone.  That being said it’s a full-featured experience that doesn’t borrow levels from its previous PC counterpart, and even though it doesn’t look as good as that game in particular, it’s one of the most impressive visual showcases on the platform.

Doom Resurrection was previously priced at $9.99, but at $2.99 it’s a steal.  Hurry though, this is a QuakeCon exclusive deal that will end at noon tomorrow (August 16th).  It’s worth noting that id’s iPhone version of Wolfenstein 3D is also on sale for only $0.99.  Links to both can be found below.

iTunes – Doom Resurrection

iTunes – Wolfenstein 3D

iPhone OS 3.0 for Consumers

I’m sure you all saw this one coming.  Here’s my run-through of what Apple announced at their iPhone OS 3.0 event earlier in the week.  Since most of what intrigued me in the keynote was related to their “features for consumers” I’m going to dedicate this post to those.  Some of the SDK additions for developers are interesting but that relies quite a bit on the actual developers putting them into good use.  So, without further ado:

Cut, Copy and Paste
Shocker of all shockers, Apple finally got their act together and found some way to accomplish the impossible task of integrating cut, copy and paste into the iPhone.  This has been a long time coming, and I’m glad it’s finally here.  With the new cut, copy and paste feature you’ll be able to, surprise, copy and paste text not just inside of one application, but across all applications on the iPhone.

Landscape Mode
Another obvious and necessary upgrade, landscape mode lets you run all of the standard Apple iPhone applications in landscape.  Most importantly, this means that you’ll be able to get the larger-format widescreen keyboard that was up until now exclusive to Safari in all of your Apple iPhone applications.  Note that I say Apple iPhone applications because, as far as I know, this will only count for their traditional suite of pre-installed apps (Mail, Notes, Contacts, etc.).  This update should help some of the folks out there with bigger fingers to type a bit more easily, especially in Mail.

MMS
Again, it seems as though with iPhone OS 3.0 Apple is just trying systematically tick off items on a fictional checklist titled “Cell Phone Necessities.”   With MMS you’ll finally be able to send and receive multimedia messages on the iPhone including pictures, sound files, and contact cards.  To me personally this isn’t a feature I’ve been waiting for since you can already do most of those things in email, but I know that a lot of consumers have been deterred from purchasing an iPhone because of its lack of support for MMS.

Voice Memos
Have you ever seen one of those commercials with an older lady using a small voice recorder to remember where she parked, or what to pick up at the grocery store?  That’s basically what voice memos are.  Using voice memos you can now use your iPhone to record short messages for later playback so you too can overcome your forgetfulness.  I think this is a feature that seems kind of hokey, but some may like it.

CalDAV and Calendar Subscriptions (.ics)
Getting calendars to sync properly on your touch device has always been a tall order.  Sure it can be done, but you have to jump through a lot of hoops if you’re not using exchange.  Now that the iPhone calendar app supports CalDAV hopefully keeping my Google Calendar synced won’t be as much of an issue.  I’m pretty excited for this feature, as I’d love to have my calendar events synced perfectly between calendar.google.com, iCal on the desktop and my mobile device.  Also being able to subscribe to calendars will be a nice addition.

Search and Spotlight
Finally we come to search.  Search has been integrated into all of the standard Apple iPhone apps so you can now quickly and easily search through your inbox, contacts, calendar of events and so on.  Apple has also integrated a new homescreen, Spotlight, which lets you search the entire phone at once.  Say for instance I typed in “Ron” with Spotlight.  Not only would the Spotlight results show the emails I’ve received from my friend Ron, but also the songs on my iPod by the artist Ronnie Drew and a calendar event I set to have lunch at “Ron’s Cafe.”  Okay that last one was a bit of a stretch but check out the image below to get a better idea of how it works.

Conclusion
So that’s it.  Like I said there were no bombshells really, and most of the event was devoted to checking off some features that Apple has been inundated with requests for since the iPhone launched.  Some of the developer SDK additions seem promising but I can’t really comment on those until I get a chance to play with the apps that utilize them.  It was a pretty straight-forward and almost mundane event, but that leaves a lot left for WWDC in June.

Apple iPhone OS 3.0 Event

So this Tuesday, St. Patrick’s Day, Apple is going to have an event to demo the newest revision of the iPhone’s operating system.  Presumably this will just be a technical event to show new features to developers, and then at WWDC they’ll actually go live with OS 3.0.  At any rate I don’t feel like doing a speculation post, rather I’m going to say what I hope will happen.  It probably won’t, but here’s what I hope goes down.

I desperately need a new phone.  My current phone, a Samsung u740, is about 2 years old and is starting to give me some trouble.  Worst of all?  The battery lasts about 30 minutes these days.  I’ve spoken multiple times about getting the next generation iPhone when it comes out, but what I’m most concerned about is that the next edition of the iPhone will be unveiled at WWDC in June but it won’t actually be released until later in the year.  That would kill me.

So what I’m hoping will happen is that Apple will actually unveil the hardware at this event on Tuesday, and then at WWDC the phone will be available for purchase.  Even putting it off for that long will be kind of a stretch for me, but I’m willing to wait at least that long.  Anyways, what I’m banking on is that there will be significant enough changes to the iPhone’s hardware or features that they’ll have to demo it now so that developers will be able to hit the ground running when the phone comes out in June.  Will this happen?  Probably not, but it would be nice.

Either way this Tuesday should be pretty exciting.  It goes without saying that one of the iPhone’s biggest competitors is on its way to the market (Palm Pre), and it would be a classic move by Apple to up the ante completely just before the competition catches up with a comparable device.  Remember when Microsoft’s Zune came out?  Everyone was shocked that there was finally some solid competition in the MP3 player space, and then a few months later Apple debuts the iPhone and the game completely changes.  Maybe the next version of the iPhone and its software will have a similar affect on the smartphone market.

Is an Apple netbook a good idea?

Apple updates!

Yesterday Apple updated a bunch of products.  Most were just hardware updates (CPU speed bumps, graphics card updates, more RAM etc.) and there are so many to mention that I’ll just have to refer you to Apple.com or MacRumors if you want to see the nitty-gritty details.  Just know that if you were in the market for an iMac, Mac Pro or Mac Mini now’s probably the time to take the plunge.  I’m just happy because the iMac wasn’t significantly updated, no aesthetic redesign or anything, so I’m still pleased with my 24″ 3.06ghz iMac from last July.

What I did find interesting was a lesser-noted addition to Apple’s product line: the new wired wireless keyboard.  It’s basically a wired version of of their wireless keyboard which means that it’s shrunken down and has no number pad.  To me this is pretty odd.  The justification of forgoing a number pad on my wireless keyboard was that it was exactly that: wireless.  Who’s going to buy the same keyboard but now it has a wire and no numpad?  Dunno, like I said, it just seems goofy to me.

What most excites me about these updates is what wasn’t updated.  This smacks of “clearing the road for WWDC” to me.  With these updates they can get all of their spec-bumps out of the way and save the flashy stuff for WWDC.  After all, announcing a new iMac that looks just like the old iMac but is slightly faster doesn’t really excite audiences at a keynote.  Instead they can roll out the new version of the iPhone, which I’m hotly anticipating.  We might even see something a little more over-the-top like the iTablet everyone’s talking about these days.  Honestly though, if at WWDC they just spend a whole 2 hours talking about a new rev of the iPhone and how cool all of its new features are, I’ll be happy.

If you think about it, the iPhone is the perfect product for WWDC.  At a developers conference you should talk about what developers are developing for, right?  Increasingly that’s the iPhone.  How many millions of applications have been downloaded from the App Store?  Sure, standard desktop applications are still important but iPhone apps are the new hotness right now.

Photos of the next-generation iPhone?

Just a quick post, I thought this was interesting.

http://www.macrumors.com/2009/02/12/leaked-photos-of-next-generation-iphone/

I’d like to see a switch to matte in the design of the phone.  Otherwise there isn’t much info to be gleaned from these shots, whether real or fake.

Mobile applications: the future of software development

I twittered a link to an article by Gizmodo yesterday in which it was announced that BlackBerry was bringing it’s own application store to their mobile products.  Obviously the success of the BlackBerry is fairly well known, but with the iPhone gaining more and more traction it’s not entirely unexpected that BlackBerry would want to throw their hat into the mobile application market along with the recently released T-Mobile G1 (powered by Google’s Android OS).  Could this be the new trend in application development?

As more and more emphasis is put on cloud computing it seems that there isn’t as much need for actual desktop applications anymore.  Presumably the ultimate goal of computing in the cloud is that we’ll be able to access server-based applications from a web browser, much like 280slides and Pixlr – two websites I’ve probably talked about a little too much recently.  I’ve also made reference to the Google applications (docs, calendar, mail) and Microsoft’s Live services (email, calendar, Skydrive, Live Mesh) as other good examples of where cloud computing might be headed.  So then, in 15 years will traditional desktop application developers still have a role in the tech industry?

I think that’s where all of this push for mobile applications comes in.  Obviously they’re successful.  I wrote a post about the developer of Trism for iPhone being on track to make $2 million by 2009.  There’s a market here.  Besides, isn’t that what we’ve wanted from our cellphones all along, that is to say a mobile computing device?  The phones in question (iPhone, Android, BlackBerry) have some features with all sorts of potential for developers – functionality that we dont necessarily see in even sophisticated computers today because they don’t lend themselves well.  I’m talking about GPS, video capturing, accelerometers and obviously telephony – and it shows with some of the more innovative apps to hit the phones’ respective stores.

Of course there is some room for improvement.  The G1 for instance, only has around 30 applications right now despite being completely open source.  Also a lot of the applications are a little too innovative for their own good; for example there’s an application that calculates your carbon footprint as you drive using GPS (it’s called Ecorio, seen here) and yet there isn’t a quality instant messenger app.  Some have speculated that this is because of Google’s $10 million contest for the best Android application, which may have spurred more incentive to make an overly ambitious application instead of focusing on something more basic (and yet essential).

It seems like common sense to me that as the shift to smaller devices happens that developers will have a home on mobile platforms.  It could be sort of a trend in which BlackBerry sees the iPhone and Andriod app stores and says “we need to get in on that as well” but based on some of the success stories so far I think mobile applications are here to stay.  They aren’t new, but now they’re beginning to take front stage.  I don’t dare say that this shift will be as important as the shift to the internet, but to say that mobile applications won’t have at least comparitive importance is rather shortsighted.  So if you’re a desktop application developer (or any developer in general) it might just be worth your while to grab a copy of the iPhone/Android/Blackberry(???) SDK and tinker around a bit. =)

Now Playing:
The Pogues – The Battle March Medley
Saints Row 2

My app store applications

So it’s been a while since I first started using Apple’s app store, and I’ve tested various different applications that provide various different functionality.  Based on what I have used so far and what I’m still using to this day, I figured I’d write a post outlining some of my favorites.  Granted I probably don’t install new applications as often as a lot of people do, so this list might not be full of the latest and greatest, but still if you own an iPhone or iPod Touch and you haven’t heard of the following applications you should go ahead and check them out.  Let’s get started!

Air Sharing

Ever wish you could use your iPhone or iPod Touch as an external hard drive?  Better yet it’d be nice to view some important documents from the device as well.  That’s what Air Sharing does.  When you set up Air Sharing you set up a connection between your Mac and your touch device.  What that means is that you can easily mount your iPhone or iPod Touch to your Mac wirelessly.  Once mounted you can drag and drop files from your Mac to your iPhone completely seemlessly.  I’ve found it’s been particularly useful for .pdf and .doc files I’ve been given in classes.  If I’m in class and I need to reference something in the notes I just pull out my iPod Touch and I’m good to go with Air Sharing.  Air Sharing is also free, which is a good bonus.

Remember the Milk

There are a ton…and I mean a ton of to-do applications for the iPhone.  Some are free and some are paid, and as expected some are fairly basic while others offer a lot of functionality.  My to-do list is a website, however.  Remember the Milk has an excellent web app built specifically for the iPhone which sings on the device and looks better than most to-do software applications I’ve seen in the app store.  I think there has been a lot of people who have forgotten that Apple was pushing web applications pretty hard before they unveiled the SDK for the iPhone, and Remember the Milk is certainly not a website which should go overlooked.

Aside from the pretty interface which allows you to add tasks to your various lists, set priorities, set due dates and so on (all of the features you’d expect with a to-do list), RTM integrates into a lot of other applications as well.  For instance, I recently started using Mozilla Labs’ Ubiquity extension, and there’s already a nice command for adding and viewing your tasks straight from Firefox.  RTM also has a Firefox plugin which shows your tasks inline with your gmail account and (as I’ve mentioned before) using gmail in a web browser without my tasks sitting to the right has since become foreign to me.  Finally there’s even an RTM dashboard widget which allows you to tick off completed tasks throughout the day.  If you haven’t used Remember the Milk and you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, check out i.rememberthemilk.com from your touch device and give it a spin.  The only drawback is that it costs $25 after the initial 15-day trial period, but I loved it so much I dropped the cash without thinking twice.

Wikipanion

This is a fairly simple application.  We all know that Safari is excellent on the iPhone.  Still, there’s sometimes when you just want to search Wikipedia and get some information that is pre-formatted for easy reading on the iPhone.  That’s what Wikipanion does.  All you have to do is open Wikipanion, search for Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes and the application pulls down the article after formatting it for the iPhone’s screen.  It also has predictive queries so if you start by typing a few letters of your keyword chances are pretty good that one of Wikipanion’s suggestions will be what you’re looking for.  Wikipanion is another great free app.

1Password

It’s obvious that one of the best parts about Apple’s touch devices is that they’re mobile computers.  As a result, you probably find yourself logging into your web services from the device quite often.  However, if there’s one complaint that anyone can make about the iPhone it’s that the keyboard is a little unfriendly when it comes to inputting strong passwords.  1Password allows you to safely and securely store your passwords on your iPhone or iPod Touch.  Using 1Password you only have to remember…you guessed it…one password in order to access your others.  After inputting your master password you get access to your concealed account credentials, and from 1Password you can login to various sites.  1Password is free for now despite being a paid application on the Mac, so if you’re even slightly interested I’d check it out before they decide to start charging.

So there you have it.  Those are the applications (aside from ones I’ve mentioned in previous posts) which I’m enjoying the most right now.  Honorable mentions go to Twitterific which is still my favorite Twitter client on the iPod Touch and Bloomberg, an awesome stock application that blows Apple’s Stocks app out of the water.  The only reason I’m giving those two an honorable mention is because Twitterific isn’t exactly the most obscure application, and Bloomberg is really only useful if you’re a stock junkie…otherwise it’s just pretty to look at.  =)

Now Playing:
Deftones – Teenager (Idiot Version)
The Orange Box