This Week's Sponsor:

DEVONTHINK

Store, Organize, and Work the Smart Way

Posts tagged with "iPhone"

This Music Video Features iPhones with FaceTime

After the music video shot entirely using the iPad 2’s cameras, here comes another one – this time from Canadian band The Blue Stones – which features a couple of iPhone 4s and FaceTime. The video itself was recorded using an HD camera (you can tell from the 1080p option available in the Youtube embed), but band members had the idea to add a unique geek twist to the whole concept, and play the song back recording everything via FaceTime.

Duct tape was used to cover the FaceTime UI on the iPhones (pretty much like movie directors constantly modify the iPhone’s on-screen interface to maintain the “fiction” effect) and, overall, the result is interesting. If only because it shows how much popular iOS devices have become over the years and how FaceTime video quality is far from perfect most of the times (unlike Apple’s webpages suggests in the screenshots).

Check out the video below. [via TUAW]
Read more

#MacStoriesDeals - Monday

If you didn’t already know, we’ve set up a new twitter account for Deals, it’s @MacStoriesDeals. We’ll tweet the daily deals there as well as exclusive weekend deals too. Help spread the word! Here are today’s deals on iOS, Mac, and Mac App Store apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get ‘em while they’re hot!

Read more

WWDC To Be Software Focused, No iPhone 5 Launch?

There is speculation today from Loop Insight that this year’s WWDC, to be held from June 6 , will not include any new hardware announcements – namely the iPhone. Apple said in its press release earlier today that WWDC ’11 will  focus on unveiling “the future of iOS and Mac OS.”

Based on information from his sources and the focus of the press release, Jim Dalrymple believes that this means more than just a strong focus on iOS and OS X, but a complete focus on the software driving Apple’s hardware forward. The iPhone 5 has, until now, largely been expected to launch as previous iPhones have, during the WWDC launch. Dalrymple contemplates that instead of a new iPhone taking stage it would be Lion, which is set to launch around WWDC and the ever-important iOS.

Read more

Eavesdrop: Share Your iOS Music Library Over WiFi & Bluetooth

When I was in high school, I remember we didn’t have iPhones with wireless sharing capabilities or music streaming apps like Pandora and Spotify. But we did have some iPod Classics, and sharing headphones with friends asking you to listen to your “new songs” was normal. And sharing headphones was annoying: you were forced to mess with cables, you didn’t get the full quality of a song, you always ended up with broken earbuds after a few days. Though, like I said, that was normal.

We have better ways of listening to music nowadays: streaming aside, we have portable Bluetooth speakers like the Jambox and iPod nanos that fit in every pocket and are relatively cheap. Eavesdrop, a new app for the iPhone released a few days ago, aims at taking the whole “local music sharing with your friends” concept a step further by enabling you to broadcast your iPod.app library over WiFi and Bluetooth. Read more

Retina Display Featured In Latest “If You Don’t Have An iPhone” Ad

The iPhone 4’s Retina Display is the latest feature to be showcased in Apple’s new advertising campaign characterized by the “If you don’t have an iPhone” tag line. It highlights how without a Retina Display,  “movies aren’t this dramatic”, “maps aren’t this clear”, “emails aren’t this detailed” and “memories aren’t this memorable”.

Jump the break to watch this latest ad, as well as the other four featured in the “If you don’t have an iPhone” ad series which demonstrate Game Center, the App Store, iBooks and the iTunes store.

Read more

Kalimat Takes On Words With Friends; Remix For Speed Play

If you haven’t had enough of word based tile games for your iPhone, Kalimat is ready to take on Scrabble and Words With Friends as your go to game of choice. While I’m personally not a fan of the OpenFeint ecosystem in general, I was able to anonymously create a new profile with a gamer name to play online. Kalimat is interesting not because of differentiation in run of the mill gameplay, but because of its additional remix mode. Remix mode is interesting because there’s a timer (no casual thinking / cheating here), and you can swap out one letter per turn. The speed based gameplay is pretty wicked, and I thoroughly enjoyed this. There is also an additional secret tile (kind of like landing on a bonus in Jeopardy… okay it’s nothing like that) that awards you an additional fifty points. The Ali Baba can change the game at any time, so you’ll always want to be thinking of high scoring words to stay ahead. Kalimat supports multiple users, and the game board itself is easy to use with simple drag and drop controls. If a player drops a word on the board you’re unfamiliar with, you can look it up in the dictionary or simply chat with your opponent. For $2.99 in the App Store, Kalimat is a refreshing alternative in the word-game genre.

The Best PDF Reader for iPad, PDF Expert, Now Available on iPhone

I am a huge fan of PDF Expert on the iPad: developed by Readdle, I choose PDF Expert when I need to read documents on my iPad (and now iPad 2) because the app’s fast, has a nice interface, can import things from Dropbox and other online services and, most of all, has support for annotations / text notes / highlights / signatures and forms. Put simply: it’s great. And now it’s available on the iPhone, too.

First off, a complaint: I don’t like the fact that the iPhone version is sold separately at $9.99 and it’s not an universal app. Considering the similarities between the two versions, PDF Expert should become a universal app priced, perhaps, at a slightly higher price. PDF Expert for iPhone is basically a “mini” version of the iPad counterpart, and by “mini” I mean that it just fits on the smaller screen. All the features of PDF Expert for iPad have been ported over: highlights, notes, annotations, forms, online services, fast engine. It’s really the same app, working on the iPhone’s screen.

If you already own PDF Expert for the iPad, you know it’s a great app. So if you would like to have it on the iPhone as well, you’ll have to spend $9.99 again. If you don’t have PDF Expert, make sure to read my initial iPad review and then choose carefully between the two versions because it’s not a universal app.

Fring for iPhone Now Lets You Switch Between Cameras, Has In-App Purchases

After a series of updates that brought fullscreen video calling with “dynamic quality” and cheap calls to landline and mobile phones, the latest version of video calling + IM service fring for iPhone, released earlier this week, allows users to switch between the rear and front-facing cameras. Like in Apple’s FaceTime, you can switch cameras with the tap of a button and show your friend on the other end what’s around you and what are you looking at.

Another new feature of fring 1.2 is the possibility to purchase fringOut credit using your iTunes account. The developers have complied to Apple’s terms and have enabled in-app purchases as the easiest way to buy additional call minutes without even leaving the app.

This update also includes bug fixes and “improved battery efficiency”, but it’s no universal yet. We don’t know if the fring developers are planning to release an iPad 2 version, but we think it’d be perfect to extend the service to other iOS devices. You can find fring for free in the App Store.

#MacStoriesDeals - Friday

If you didn’t already know, we’ve set up a new twitter account for Deals, it’s @MacStoriesDeals. We’ll tweet the daily deals there as well as exclusive weekend deals too. Help spread the word! Here are today’s deals on iOS, Mac, and Mac App Store apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get ‘em while they’re hot!

Read more