Posts tagged with "iPhone"

Socialcam Aims At Becoming Instagram for Video

There is no doubt  Instagram has changed the way iOS users look at image sharing on their iPhones: with a few taps, you can take a picture with your device, apply some filters to make it “cooler”, send it to the Instagram’s cloud to share it with your friends and everyone else. Instagram’s appeal lies in the simplicity of the concept, and 2 million users in a few months can’t be wrong.

But the App Store image sharing scene isn’t just about Instagram. Service picplz has collected a pretty huge userbase lately as well, making it the direct competitor to Instagram and one of the most popular apps to quickly share photos from an iPhone. Videos, however, have always been one kind of a problem for iOS aficionados: put simply, there is no easy way to share a video with your friends. Email is slow with attachments, Facebook’s video uploading isn’t intuitive at all (and again, uploading is slow), Youtube is more meant for videos that need to be viewed publicly.

TechCrunch offers a preview of Socialcam, a new iPhone app from the creators of Justin.tv that, like Instagram, will allow users to upload videos with a few taps and share them with their friends using Facebook’s Connect feature. Socialcam, currently in beta and launching in the first weeks of March, has a tabbed interface with a huge “Camera” button in the middle similar to Instagram’s UI and will let you upload, browse videos shared by others, like and comment them.

The app, which will be available for both Android and iPhone, is pretty simple: after firing it up you’re asked to log-in via Facebook Connect, which is currently the only login option. The app presents you with a list of your Facebook friends who are already on Socialcam and asks if you’d like to ‘Follow’ them (Socialcam uses a one-way follower model like Twitter). After that, you’ll spend most of your time looking at the stream of Socialcam videos posted by your friends. Each video is represented by four frame grabs — tapping on one will cause the video player to pop open the clip will start playing immediately. You can leave comments and ‘Like’ each video, and you can also tag your friends in clips. If you tag a friend who isn’t on Socialcam, it will still show up on their Facebook wall (and the video is playable directly from there — you don’t have to click a link).

You can sign up to be notified about Socialcam news here, and hopefully more details will be available in the coming weeks ahead of the app’s launch.

#MacStoriesDeals - Monday

Ah Monday, so will we see new MacBooks this week? Tuesdays are usually hardware update days for Apple. 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!

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WiFi2HiFi Makes Streaming Music From Your Computer to a HiFi Easy

Just released today is WiFi2HiFi, a new iPhone and iPod Touch app that effectively allows you to use your device to stream audio from your computer to an iPod dock, stereo system or anything else that can connect to the 3.5mm jack or the 30-pin port. It virtually emulates the AirPort Express feature of streaming audio from a computer to connected sound system, but how well does it work? I was given a pre-release build to review and a review follows the break.

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Are Existing iPhone Owners Buying The Verizon iPhone?→

Are Existing iPhone Owners Buying The Verizon iPhone?

Marco Arment makes the case for non-record initial Verizon iPhone sales due to the fact that the device is mostly selling to existing iPhone owners coming from AT&T. Why the analysis? Because Instapaper’s numbers in the App Store haven’t gone under the usual increase of a new product release / major update / holiday season:

And my sales haven’t noticed. Ranks have held nearly constant, but so have volumes.

Assuming the correlation is approximately sound, this can be explained by three possibilities:

- Very few Verizon iPhones have been sold. I don’t think this is likely.
- Verizon iPhone owners are buying very few apps relative to other iPhone owners. This also seems unlikely.
- Most Verizon iPhones have been sold to existing iPhone or iPod Touch1 owners, who therefore already own most or all of the apps they want. This seems like the most likely explanation by far.

Assuming the analysis is correct, I guess we’ll see a lot of Verizon iPhone sales when contracts are up in June. Also in June: iPhone 5, quite possibly available on Verizon as well. This summer is going to be interesting for U.S. carriers.

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Last.fm Updates iPhone App with Retina Graphics, Recommendations

In spite of the lack of appreciation for Apple’s new subscription system from Last.fm’s co-founder Richard Jones, the popular music service released an update to their official iPhone client today – and it’s a rather big update. Version 3.0 of the app, available here, adds the much requested Retina Display graphics with an improved interface design (about time, considering the iPhone 4 was released 8 months ago), Last.fm music recommendations for artists and new albums you might like, possibility to (finally) check your profile on the go, including top charts, friends and recently played tracks.

Last.fm 3.0 for iPhone, however, comes with other features, too. First, a menu to check on concerts available in your area (sadly, no one wants to play here in Viterbo) and the events your friends are attending. This is pretty cool and adds another layer of social interactivity to Last.fm, and it’s also something Apple has been rumored to be willing to implement in iTunes for a long time. You can now listen to two new radio stations or, alternatively, edit existing ones directly from your device to restrict them to a specific tag. Two weeks ago, Last.fm announced the Radio functionality would soon become a subscriber-only feature (thus the issues with Apple’s new policies).

Last.fm 3.0 for iPhone is available for free here.

Fruit Ninja Sells 6 Million Copies, Slices 150 Billion Fruit and Decides to Fund a Fruit Orchard!

Less than a year since launching, Fruit Ninja has been purchased a whopping 6 million times on the iPhone and over 150 billion fruit have been sliced and slaughtered! In an odd twist of events, Halfbrick has decided to in their words, “make amends for fruit death worldwide” by working together with the ‘Fruit Tree Planting Foundation’ to establish and fully fund a fruit orchard.

Halfbrick has chosen to fund an orchard in a low-income Native American community to not only provide fresh fruit as sustenance to the community but also allow the community to have some long-term income. The project is part of the Fruit Tree Planting Foundation’s Reservation Restoration program and will be fully run by them at the cost of Halfbrick and you will be able to receive updates from the Halfbrick blog and the FTPF website.

[Via Joystiq]

iPad and iPhone Beats Kindle In The UK, But Not In The US

Market research firm Book Marketing Ltd has revealed to GigaOM that in the UK both the iPad and iPhone are beating the Kindle as an eBook reader most used by consumers based on data from last September. The story however is very different in the US however with the Kindle far ahead after stellar growth throughout 2010 as the graph below the break demonstrates.

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Make GIFs From Your iPhone With Giffer!

If you’re looking to create the next hit animated .gif for Internet laughs, Giffer! for the iPhone can chain photographs together to create those animated favorites. While you can’t take photographs from Giffer!, you can choose from several pics in your library to link together a series of images for quick animations which can be shared to Facebook, Twitter, or copied to the clipboard for easy pasting into MMS or an online message board. The animations are super easy to create: simply add photos from the library, adjust a few settings like frame delay and background color, give your .gif a name, and you’re off watching your creation in a mobile theater. It’s very cool, I love the button styles in the app, and you’ll find lots more to like once you’ve embarrassed a few friends on Facebook. Giffer! is only a $1.99 in the App Store.