AppStore posts

Over at TechRepublic's 10 Things blog, Debra Littlejohn Shinder has posted an article called "10 reasons why I'll be passing on the iPad." Some of her reasoning is sound, but quite a few of her points are easy to refute. It's worth looking at her post and the points it tries to make, because it's indicative of a widespread misunderstanding of not only the iPad's capabilities, but also its intended consumer base.

1. There's no physical keyboard

Debra's correct that the iPad has no physical keyboard. But what she fails to account for is that not only will Apple sell a keyboard dock for the iPad, the device can also be paired with any existing Bluetooth keyboard. Apple's reasoning for not including a physical keyboard on the iPad is even more compelling than for the iPhone, because unlike the iPhone, you at least have the option of pairing the iPad with a physical keyboard. In order to put a physical keyboard on the device itself, there'd be two options: keep the iPad the same size and sacrifice a third of the screen's real estate, or increase the iPad's size beyond what some (including Debra) already consider unwieldy in order to include a keyboard.

In landscape orientation, the iPad's virtual keyboard is nearly the size of a conventional keyboard, too, so while touch typing is going to be a challenge, it's a fair bet that typing on the iPad will be much faster and easier than the high end of 30 - 35 WPM thumb typing many people (myself included) achieve on the iPhone's far smaller keyboard. The lack of a physical keyboard on the iPhone hasn't measurably affected its sales; the iPad isn't likely to suffer many lost sales from this, either.

(Note: a few people have asked for a source on the Bluetooth keyboard issue, particularly my assertion that you can use any BT keyboard and not just Apple's wireless models. During her hands-on with the iPad following the device's announcement, Jacqui Cheng at Ars Technica verified that "You can use any bluetooth keyboard you want, instead of Apple's keyboard dock. You could use the case/stand with your existing bluetooth keyboard. You cannot use a bluetooth mouse, however.")


Check out the other nine points by clicking the Read More link below.

If you're one of the people who has, according to Adobe's John Nack, run the total number of downloads of the Photoshop.com Mobile [free, iTunes Link] app to 6.5 million, then we have information you need to know. Of course, you may have already checked the App Store app to find the update to version 1.1.021 of Photoshop Mobile for iPhone, but if you haven't then you should mosey on over to the App Store Updates and it should magically appear for you.

The new version of the Photoshop.com Mobile app adds a new sharpen tool, more photo borders, and (for U.S. users only) playback of videos hosted on Photoshop.com.

You'll need to be running iPhone 3.0 or later on your device to enjoy using Photoshop.com Mobile.

Peripheral manufacturer Logitech has released a free app that lets you turn your iPhone or iPod touch (or probably even your iPad, if you're Stephen Colbert) into a wireless mouse and keyboard. The free TouchMouse app [iTunes Link] is perfect for those situations where you've connected your Mac to a TV and want a way to control it from the comfy confines of your favorite couch.

There are actually two components to TouchMouse; the iPhone app and the Logitech TouchMouse Server software. The latter comes in Mac OS X and Windows (XP, Vista, and 7) versions, and must be installed on the Mac or PC in order to "host" the virtual mouse and keyboard created by TouchMouse.

The "mouse" has three buttons for your "clicking" pleasure, and uses the majority of your iPhone screen as a touchpad. With the touch of a button, you can bring up a keyboard to type on your Mac or PC.

There are other apps that can do the same thing if you're not a fan of Logitech. Air Mouse Pro [US$1.99, iTunes Link] is probably the most powerful and popular Wi-Fi mouse in the App Store, while Rowmote Pro [US$4.99, iTunes Link] has a large and vocal fan following. If you're looking for free (and who isn't?), Logitech's TouchMouse app can give you a taste of remote control at absolutely no cost.

There's a growing battle lately on the App Store over "check-in" apps -- Foursquare, Gowalla, and MyTown have all seen big gains in users lately (and a few other contenders have been roaming the periphery), and it looks like we're starting to see some innovation in the mix. Gowalla recently updated their free app [iTunes link], and introduced a new feature called Shared Trips. These are more or less tours (or a line of check-ins at different places around a given city), but they can feature all kinds of things: a set of bars, interesting buildings to see, the old bookstore/coffeeshop run, or any other ideas Gowalla users have. Trips can be shared and rated, and you'll be able to browse through the most popular trips and even earn badges in the app for creating or going on a popular trip.

The new version also adds bookmarks, which will let you remember your favorite check-in spot -- while you can't add them from the mobile app yet, you can browse them from there, and they're hoping to get the functionality in soon.

Obviously, this might not appeal to everybody -- there are lots of iPhone users out there (including me) who aren't so keen yet on sharing their location with everyone they know every time they leave the house. But it is interesting to note that this is a burgeoning mini-industry, brought on almost completely by the ubiquity of the iPhone and its up-and-coming competitors. Any time you have more than a few apps vying for a growing audience, you're going to end up with some interesting innovation. It'll be fun to see what kinds of ideas Gowalla and its competitors can come up with.

I first heard of Typewar from a Twitter pal who challenged me to beat his score on the web-based game. I was happy to see that my 26 years of Mac work had given me a fine eye for different fonts, as I was able to easily slam my buddy to the mat. If you've never played Typewar, it's deceptively simple -- you're shown a letter and asked to choose which typeface (i.e., "Optima" or "Gill Sans") is being displayed. Your score is calculated depending on the number of correct choices you make, and you're then compared to other people who are playing the game. Every once in a while, you get pushed to a new level and a new typeface is added to the game.

Now Typewar is available for the iPhone and iPod touch, so I decided to give the game a try in a portable format. It made the move well, and it's still a fun and challenging game. The app [US$1.99, iTunes Link] is from game inventor Eldarion and developers at Massively Overrated, and does an excellent job of moving the game to the iPhone.

You log into the game using your Twitter account or create an account to join in on the fun. The account allows you to keep track of your statistics, both so you can gain bragging rights against the rest of the Typewar world and know just how awesome your typeface identification skills really are. The game moves along quickly, with short delays at each level change as Typewar downloads a new typeface to your iPhone.

If you're a designer or just a Mac or iPhone user who likes typography, you'll love Typewar. Take a look at the gallery below for more pictures of the game in action.

Podcasting is an art best learned by experience. In order to be a good podcaster, it helps to have a good speaking voice, excellent topics to talk about (or fun guests), and equipment and software to assist you in recording and editing your podcast. It also helps to make a lot of mistakes, since you'll learn from them.

A while back, I wrote a post about how to use an iPhone 3GS, Garage Band, and Posterous to do "quick and easy" podcasting. While that method has the desired results -- your podcast has a feed that can be subscribed to, and it actually sounds pretty good -- it forces you to stick with one website on Posterous to create the feed. Many podcasts are associated with a website, so it's important in many cases to have the ability to upload a podcast file to an FTP server.

That, and my continuing quest to make my podcasting as easy as possible, is what got me interested in iPodcaStudio from Vault Multimedia. iPodcaStudio [$0.99, iTunes Link] is an iPhone app for recording, editing, and uploading your podcasts easily. While it isn't as full-featured as it could eventually be, iPodcaStudio is a good start at a complete podcast studio on your iPhone or iPod touch running iPhone OS 3.0 or greater.

I admit it. I am iPadded out. I am iTired. I am suffering from iBurnout. So it was with pleasure that I found an addicting little game for the iPhone and iPod touch called Crush the Castle [iTunes link]. It's a free medieval game where you use an ancient trebuchet to smash a variety of castles and the inhabitants standing nearby. Crush the Castle is physics based, so you have to swing a heavy projectile in the air and release at just the right point to flatten the castle off to the right of the trebuchet. After a few tries it gets damned addictive.

You have more than a dozen castles to crush in two different kingdoms. If you do well, you get some medals. If not, you are rebuked by the king. The animation is good, the physics seem accurate, and the sounds of castles coming down and soldiers screaming adds to the fun.

At each new level, the distance to the castles from your siege machine increases, so you really have to get the release point for the projectile just right.

Crush the Castle is a port of a Flash-based game which you can play for free online. If you really get into the mild mayhem, I'd suggest you look at the US$1.99 version [iTunes link] which has 90 levels, 10 types of ammo, and an editor so you can design your own castles before you knock them down.

Both versions get great reviews from users, and I'm in agreement. It's helping me forget all the endless iDebates over the iPad and work my iAggressions out on my iPhone.

The free version is no risk, except for the time you are sure to lose. Let me know if you get hooked too. Check out more screen shots below:

The iPhone wasn't designed from scratch to print things, but it can be done. I've reviewed some solutions in the past, including one that required you to run a small print server on your computer, which then directs your print jobs to any local printers. There are also some apps that print photos directly to printers.

I've just tried ePrint, which has some limitations, but gets the job done without any print servers. There are two versions of the app: The free version, ePrint Free [iTunes link] lets you print contacts, notes (more on that later), photo albums, and even brings up the camera so you can fire off a snapshot and print it immediately. The paid version [iTunes link], meanwhile, is U.S. $2.99 and adds the ability to print web pages as well

Setting up is easy. The app will find your printers in a snap if your phone is in Wi-Fi mode, and you are running Bonjour zero configuration setup on your network. You can also elect to enter the IP addresses of your printers as well. If your printer is color, and you send color images, you'll get them in color.

There are a few catches, however. To print a web page you either have to enter a URL for it in ePrint, or set a preference to bring up the last web page viewed. When you go to print notes in either app, it doesn't mean from your Notes app. ePrint can only print from the ePrint Notes app, although you can still copy and paste any text into it and print away. That's how I test-printed an email, because Apple doesn't allow any way to print an email or anything else directly. After doing a 'select all' on an email, I copied and pasted it into the ePrint Notes app, and it worked just fine.

Unfortunately, we weren't able to attend the event in San Francisco yesterday, but our good friends at Joystiq were, and they've brought back this video of Need for Speed: Shift [iTunes link] and a few other games running on the iPad. Not only can you see how the accelerometer works (exactly the same as the iPhone, basically), but you can see how the regular iPhone apps will upscale to full screen (via what looks like a small "button" in the corner) on the iPad. Of course, this video isn't ideal, but it actually looks better than I thought.

Hopefully, of course, developers will actually put in the effort to recreate their apps for the iPad's bigger screen. That's exactly what the makers of Flight Control have said they plan to do; that game will be "re-imagined" to work on the iPad. They talk about not only making use of the bigger screen space, but actually going to the "next generation" of their games. It'll be very interesting to see, as the App Store evolves with the iPad, what kinds of markets emerge. Will we eventually have a set of games that works best on the iPhone, and a set that works better on the "big" screen?

Two of the App Store's biggest hits last year have finally dropped free versions of their apps to try out. Of course, odds are probably slim that you haven't played or heard of these two yet, but just in case you were waiting to try them without paying, now is your chance.

First up, Call of Duty: World at War Zombies [iTunes link], which brought the undead to the WWII shooter, has a new lite version to play for free, which plays exactly like the $9.99 full version [iTunes link], but for only three rounds. Strangely enough, it's actually the exact same size download.

Rock Band made a splash when it debuted on the iPhone late last year [iTunes link] at $9.99. Since then, it's dropped to $6.99, but there is now a free demo available [iTunes link] that features only the Foo Fighters' "Learn to Fly." If you want to check out the controls, though, and perhaps see how they compare to the console versions, it's worth a download. We kind of like this precedent of releasing best-sellers for free after a delay, though there's probably still some tuning to do in just how much content is enabled in these trial versions.

My name is Steve, and I'm a recovering engineer. Although I'm no longer a practicing engineer, I still hold a Professional Engineer license and I'm still interested in most things dealing with engineering. That's why I perked up when I received an email from MultiEducator, Inc., a software development firm known previously for multimedia history CDs and their Historycentral.com website.

Their new Formulator Series of specialized iPhone calculators for engineers, architects, plumbers, and construction professionals features 22 individual apps priced between US$0.99 and US$17.99. Since my background is in Civil Engineering, I requested a review copy of Civil Engineering Formulator [US$4.99, iTunes Link] to get a feel for the depth and breadth of a typical Formulator Series app.

A look at the web page for Civil Engineering Formulator shows that the app began with 75 formulas in the Civil Engineering areas of beams, bridges, columns, elevators, piles, plates, roads, soil, and structural steel. Over the next few months, the app is to grow to more than 200 formulas, at which time the price will increase for new buyers. Civil Engineering Formulator also includes almost 100 conversion formulas, as well as 50 area calculations.

Earlier today, Google made a mobile web version of Google Voice available for the iPhone. To understand the significance of this move, here's a bit of back story.

Apple pulled all Google Voice related apps from the App Store back in July, which led to an FCC inquiry, which led Apple to claim they had not rejected but were "studying" Google Voice, which Google contradicted. The biggest surprise in the whole scenario is that AT&T said that they had no problem with Google Voice on the iPhone. Months later, there's still no official Google Voice app in the App Store. You can view the long version of the story here.

The mobile web version announced today (iPhone 3.0 required), while not the first, utilizes HTML 5 to accomplish some new and impressive tasks. For example, it lets you display your Google Voice number on outgoing calls and provides easy access to voice mail plus text messaging (send and receive). Additionally, you can dial with the virtual keypad and read transcripts of messages.

It's not all roses, of course. For instance, it won't access your iPhone's contact list or push incoming SMS.

Unless they're going to limit the capabilities of the iPhone's browser, or somehow block access, there isn't much Apple can do to prevent users from trying it out.

Note that this is limited to the US. To try it out, point Mobile Safari to http://m.google.com/voice. Pro tip: Add a bookmark to your iPhone's home screen to launch with a tap.

[Via ZDnet]

Belkin has announced the release of their latest FM transmitter for the iPhone and iPod touch, the TuneCast Auto Live. You know these things -- they plug into your iPhone or iPod touch's dock connector, and then send a local FM signal out to your car's radio, enabling wireless transmission of your music or podcasts. I've got a Belkin transmitter already (the TuneCast Auto -- more on that in a second), but I'm interested in this new one, because it can be used with a free iPhone app [iTunes link] that will actually use your iPhone's GPS information to find a good station for you right away.

That seems helpful -- my current issue with my Belkin is that here in Los Angeles, where the radio stations are almost as thick as the fast food joints, I can't seem to find a solid station to keep it on that's clear enough to actually listen to. If you're in a busy urban area, there's so many signals flying around that these transmitters are more or less useless. I don't know if the GPS app would help me (seems like I'd have to keep changing the car's station while I move even if I could find a clear signal here in the city), but if you're in the market for an FM transmitter and are in a place with a little more room on the radio dial, the $79.99 TuneCast is as good a choice as any. As for me, I'll probably go for an aux hookup straight into my dash the next time I have some car audio upgrade money.

In just a few days, a UK couple will welcome their "iPhone baby."

After three years of unsuccessful attempts at pregnancy, the couple downloaded an unnamed fertility calculator app. The mother-to-be, who wishes to remain anonymous, entered her temperature and other information daily. The app then did the necessary calculations to determine when she'd be most fertile. Just two months later, the couple had a little one on the way.

Since the Telegraph story doesn't name the app the couple used, we've gathered a few with similar functionality:

1. Fertility and Pregnancy Calculator [iTunes link] Much like the app in the story, this one will help a woman determine when she's most fertile. After that, she can use it to track Jr.'s development. Free.
2. iFertility [iTunes link] iFertility helps women track their Basal Body Temperature and adds an option to share logs with her doctor either via the app or email. $1.99
3. Fertility Foods [iTunes link] This ebook for the iPhone and iPod touch by Dr. Jeremy Groll presents a diet-based method of increasing ovulation and getting pregnant. Dr. Groll is an OB/GYN specializing in the treatment of infertile couples. This book is an Iceburg Reader book, which are very well done. $15.99

A Barry White album wouldn't hurt, either.

As a parent of toddlers, I get much use out of Pocket God [iTunes link], which my 6-year-old loves, PicPosterous [iTunes link] for uploading snapshots to a family gallery and Pickin' Time [iTunes link], which both the 6-year-old and 5-year-old love. We even used Ambiance [iTunes link] for my son when we left his white noise machine at home while on vacation.

Last week an iPhone app helped save a life, and this week it helped create one. The tablet better have some REAL magic up its sleeve in order to top that.