Posts tagged with "iPhone"

BeachWeather: A Weather App To Check On Your Favorite Beaches (With A Huge Database)

In the past few weeks, I’ve bought, reviewed and overall enjoyed a couple of different weather apps for my iPhone. Let alone the useful weather widget Apple is introducing with iOS 5, I’ve found myself going back to apps like WeatherSnitch and the recently updated Shine (which now includes data for international locations) to check on forecasts and the simple weather data I need to get by on a daily basis. This new app by StudioDalton, however, called BeachWeather, might just be what I was looking for this summer’s vacation: rather than a new default weather app to tweak by adding the locations of the beaches I’ll visit throughout this summer, a beautiful and focused weather utility that’s specifically aimed at checking how’s weather like…at the beach. By weather, I mean forecasts, UV index, wind speeds, and air & sea temperature – not the most complex data points when having to check on whether or not you can go to the beach with your friends and family.

BeachWeather, released today, impressed me because of its colorful design (which kind of reminded me of Robocat’s Outside for the general color scheme) and, more importantly, huge database of locations available inside the app. See, every year I go with my friends to a beach 45 minutes away from my town, and that’s not exactly a “popular” beach. Not one of those you see on television or rendered on tourist guides. It’s next to the camping I spent most of my summers in, and I still enjoy going there when I’ve got some free time. But it’s certainly not one of those beaches you constantly stumble upon on Google Image Search when you’re looking for “vacation in Italy”. Yet, BeachWeather’s database had this very specific beach available, alongside others a few miles away from it. None of those can be deemed as “popular”, nor do they often appear in other weather apps for the iPhone. In fact, unlike other weather apps, BeachWeather is, well, focused on beaches, not cities and towns. I don’t know what kind of online database/service the developers are using, but I was definitely impressed with my (local) results. Obviously, your mileage may vary depending on your location, but after taking a peek inside other countries’ locations I can say the database is really, really huge.

In the app, you can add multiple locations by browsing by country, or getting recommendations based on your location. Recommendations were accurate and, in fact, I added the first three ones the app suggested. When dealing with multiple locations configured in BeachWeather, the app presents a “card” interface to swipe between available beaches and check on weather forecasts. The app provides a 3 day forecast with data organized in tabs and associated with an icon or color depending on what’s the weather like. At the bottom of the card, you can navigate between Today: Morning, Today: Afternoon, Tomorrow: Morning, Tomorrow: Afternoon, and a forecast for the third day. A screenshot of the card can be shared on Twitter, Facebook, or via email, and you can tap on the forecast’s icon to get a translucent black popup telling you what does it mean – e.g. “clear” or “mostly cloudy”. In my tests, weather data from BeachWeather seemed to fall in line with those of other websites like the Italian Meteo.it or the universal Yahoo Weather. Other apps like WeatherSnitch, Apple’s Weather and Shine reported forecasts similar to BeachWeather.

BeachWeather is a real gem if you’re like me and you need an answer to the question “What’s the weather like at the beach today?”. You can download BeachWeather at $0.99 on the App Store.

Verbs 2.0 Now Available for iPhone, Adds Pro Service

We covered Verbs back when it was released in December and again in January; it’s a great IM client for the iPhone that has a nice design and excellent execution.

Today #include tech posted on their blog that they have introduced a Pro version in today’s update (2.0) of Verbs. Verbs 2.0 focuses on performance, memory management, improved Address Book integration and photo uploading issues from the camera.

Version 2.0 features and improvements:

  • Enable Push Notifications and stay logged in for up to 7 days (Verbs Pro).
  • The text entry field grows vertically as you type longer messages.
  • Send Chat logs via email. (preview here)
  • Send links in received messages to Instapaper for reading later.
  • Horizontal swipe action in the chat view to switch between chats.
  • Pinch gesture to zoom out a conversation.
  • Tap and hold the unified accounts cell to sign in/out of all accounts.
  • Faster buddy list scrolling.
  • The collapse Offline buddies preference was not getting saved between launches.
  • Now displays AIM buddies “Mobile” status with a blue icon.
  • Shows buddy presence above the chat thumbnails.
  • Fixed the delay when the buddy list favorite header is tapped.
  • Resets the keyboard to display alphabets after sending a message.
  • Fixed issues with uploading pictures taken from camera.
  • Change application settings through URL Schemes.
  • Bug fixes and better memory management.

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The New York Times Enables In-App Subscriptions For Their iPad And iPhone Apps

The New York Times has today released an update for their iPad and iPhone apps that now enables users to purchase in-app subscriptions for their content that is behind a paywall. There are three subscriptions available for the content, the first is $15 for website plus iPhone access, then $20 for website plus iPad and finally all digital access (website, iPad and iPhone) for $35 – all of which are charged on a monthly basis.

The implementation of Apple’s subscription service comes the day after the rumored deadline that was imposed by Apple. Although that deadline was made somewhat easier for content providers after Apple backed down on certain requirements of the subscription guidelines. Most notably is that they are no longer forced to offer in-app purchases or subscriptions for content and that they can offer the content at a different price to what they offer on their websites.

However, one rule that didn’t change was that if an app offered In-App purchases or subscriptions, they cannot offer users an external link to purchase content from outside the Apple ecosystem. The New York Times seems to have played nice with this rule, but has offered existing subscribers an easy way to gain access to the content for free – as is permitted by Apple. Today’s implementation comes after they first implemented their paywall for the iPad app in April of this year and nearly four months after they first promised that they would implement iOS subscriptions. It also follows the adoption of iOS subscriptions by other publications such as Wired Magazine, The Daily, The Telegraph and Bloomberg’s BusinessWeek.

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AppShopper 1.4: Top 200, App Ratings, Reviews, and more

Last week, Arnold Kim gave twitter a little preview of some new features and functionality of AppShopper 1.4 for iOS. The new update was just approved by Apple and now has features like Top 200 and App ratings. Other new features include:

  • Links to 3rd party app reviews like 148apps and TouchArcade
  • Automatically load apps when scrolling to the bottom of a list
  • New filters for search
  • Email notification settings
  • Disable push notifications during certain times of the day (Yeah!)
  • In-app AppShopper account registration
  • Share an app’s info via Twitter, Facebook, email and more
  • Various bug fixes

Screenshots for iPhone and iPad after the break.

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Inside Google+ Mobile Web App

Two days ago Google launched Google+, the company’s latest effort to get into the social networking space and build a platform to share content and connect people. For those who missed the coverage (you can find some detailed reports here and here), here’s the gist of Plus: it’s a social network connected to your Google account that looks a lot like Facebook but it’s got a cleaner design and a set of different “apps” tied together by the Plus brand. What does it mean for consumers? It means that whilst Circles, Huddle, Hangouts and Sparks could be seen as separate services and concepts, they’re in fact sections of the entire Google+ website. Yesterday, Google started allowing people to send invites to other users, which resulted in a massive explosion of invite requests on Twitter and thousands of new sign-ups. After a few hours, Google was forced to close invites due to “insane demand” and promise more coming in the next few weeks as the service scales to accomodate new users and more content.

Google+ has a strong mobile counterpart, too. As the service aims at empowering Google users to share and connect at any time from anywhere, Google built native apps for Android and iOS devices to let users enjoy the Google+ experience on the go, and upload media such as photos and videos shot with their phones. Furthermore, the mobile apps get access to Huddle, a group messaging feature built into Google+ that some are already eyeing as Google’s response to iMessage, only it works on both iOS and Android. However, the official iPhone app is not available yet, and Google says it’s “coming soon”. In the meantime though, users can try a mobile optimized web app, which relies on Google’s recent mobile UI changes to lay out a unified interface to access Google+ and switch between various Google services.

Last night, I signed up for Google+ and played around with the website. Today, I decided to take a look at the mobile web app which, surprisingly enough, might just be the nicest thing Google has ever done on iOS’ Mobile Safari. Read more

Jailbreak Tweak Could Let You Run Multiple iPhone Apps Side By Side On The iPad

In what can only be described as borderline ridiculous, but a very awesome tweak, Aaron Ash has managed to hack together a way in which two iPhone apps can run side by side on the iPad. In a blog post, Ash makes it clear that at this stage it is only really a proof of concept, not yet ready for a public release. In particular there are some bugs that are preventing audio from playing and accelerometer data from being detected by the apps.

The bottom right button turns on “edit mode” which allows you to rearrange applications, and rotate them (Angry Birds normally runs in landscape, here they’re turned). I’m debating on if I should go for the typical desktop feel or make it more SpringBoard-like and keep apps in preset locations.

Nonetheless he says he managed to “waste plenty of time already playing 2 games of Angry Birds at the same time” on the same screen. In fact he managed at one stage to play 3 at a time, which worked until he added a fourth, which crashed the tweak. He notes that “performance is actually pretty good, definitely useable” but with those bugs he says he probably wont release it for a few months. That said, he does note that he might show the tweak off at the jailbreak meetup in New York that is happening on Saturday, July 10th.