Posts tagged with "iPhone"

Bump for iPhone Updated With App Sharing

Bump, a popular iPhone app to share data like music and contact information between devices, was updated earlier today to include support for app sharing. The app, which is a free download in the App Store and was listed among the most popular apps for iPhone, revolves around the simple concept of “bumping” your iPhone with another person to share various kinds of information, locally and within seconds.

The new app sharing functionality allows you to build a list of your most used iPhone apps and select the ones you want to recommend to a friend. Once the list is created, bump your iPhone and your friend will receive the apps you chose as direct links to the iTunes Store. Bump doesn’t of course share the actual application file, but it comes quite in handy if you have lots of interesting apps to share with someone and you don’t feel like sending him an email with all the apps’ names.

What’s really cool is that, unlike app recommendation services that plug into your Facebook or Twitter accounts, Bump does everything locally with people you really know are interested in what you’re sharing. You don’t have to “like” or “upvote” recommendations, you just share items you know the recipient will be interested in.

As the developers write on the company blog:

This has been our biggest feature request of late, and it makes sense as to why.  With more than 300,000 apps in the iTunes App Store, finding the best apps has become quite difficult.  Who wants to sort through the 100 weather apps just to find WeatherBug?  But what is the most common conversation among a group of iPhone users?  “Hey, what cool apps do you have?”

You can download Bump for free here.

Portal: A Revolutionary Browser for iPhone

Over the weekends, I usually spend a bit of my free time browsing the App Store and AppShopper, looking for new apps to try on my iPhone and iPad. Sometime I find interesting new things to test; sometimes I find great apps. Other times – but this is a very rare exception – I find really great apps I can’t stop using. This is the case with Portal Browser for iPhone.

I have been trying a lot of alternative browsers for iOS over the past months, as you may have noticed. Thanks to tweaks available in Cydia, I also installed several modifications to make Apple’s Safari a better, faster, more functional browser. Still, testing new browsers from third party developers has become one of my favorite “work hobbies”, as I believe there’s great room for experimentation and innovation in a mobile app to browse the Internet. I do believe we have only scratched the surface with mobile browsers on iOS and Android which, if you think about it, haven’t done much besides porting the desktop experience to a smaller screen. Portal for iPhone is the first step towards a much better approach to mobile browsing, entirely based on touch interactions, features and menus developed with the iPhone in mind. Don’t get me wrong: Safari is an excellent browser. But Portal, which is sold at $1.99 in the App Store, is more than the usual alternative: it’s a completely different take on mobile browsing. Read more

Hockey: An Open Source Platform For Distributing Ad-Hoc iOS Betas

Buzzworks has announced version one of a new open source platform for distributing ad-hoc betas to iOS testers called Hockey. As an alternative to TestFlight, Hockey faces stiff competition from developers seeking a “happy meal” solution for rapidly exchanging the latest iterations of applications with minimal setup. The immediate difference between TestFlight and Hockey comes down to the developer’s willingness or want to host their own their own apps: Hockey requires initial (though minimal) setup in combination with a PHP5 server. Arguably every developer has their own hosted nameapp.com website which they can utilize for this purpose, but what benefit does this provide to the developer? Satisfying the testers.

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Hipstamatic Photos Come To Life In UK Exhibition

Hipstamatic is one of the most popular and successful camera apps ever released for the iPhone: Apple included the app in the iTunes Rewind top selection of 2010 and even The New York Times ran a story on the front page featuring a photo by Damon Winter, shot using Hipstamatic for the iPhone 4. The application mimics the appearance of the original Hipstamatic 100 toy camera, created by the Dorbowski brothers and released in 157 limited edition models between 1982 and 1984.

At the Orange Dot Gallery in London, the “Exhibition for Hipstamatics” features 157 prints of photos realized with Hipstamatic for iPhone and selected from the fan-made website Hipstamatics, where users can submit images uploaded from their iOS devices. The iPhone photo gallery will be held until February 13th, and it’s surely a big improvement over the (hilarious) world’s smallest Instagram gallery we covered a few weeks ago.

We think it’s great that photos coming from a smartphone camera are being showcased in real-life exhibition, inside an actual photo gallery. In case you had any doubts, this once again proves that software is the best addition to Apple’s hardware. [via The Apple Lounge]

Windows Phone 7 Theme Coming to iPhone

If you have an iPhone but you’ve been keeping an eye on the devices running the promising Windows Phone 7 operating system, I guess you know one of the biggest selling points of Microsoft’s mobile platform is the concept of “Springboard” that’s entirely different from those seen on iOS and Android. Instead of presenting a background with app icons, Windows Phone 7 offers “live updating tiles” with real-time information for third-party apps and default software like calendar and weather.

Theme creator Wyndwarrior thought it’d be nice to port the Windows Phone 7 experience to the iPhone, so he designed a theme that replicates Microsoft’s homescreen on the iPhone, live tiles and application list included. The theme is in pubic beta and more details will be added come the final release, in the meantime check out the demo video below. [ModMyI via AppAdvice] Read more

See-Through Springboard Coming to iPhone Via Jailbreak

A new tweak developed by Limenos, coming soon to Cydia, will enable users to activate the iPhone’s camera directly on the Springboard, and see the results in real-time as a live updating wallpaper. This tweak, which supports Activator gestures to come in the foreground inside a popup menu, will also let users set a picture as the Springboard’s background without opening the Photos app – something that’s pretty neat if you’re into that kind of backgrounds. CameraWallpaper can record videos and take photos with the rear and front-facing cameras and activate the iPhone’s flashlight, too.

More importantly, with CameraWallpaper it will be possible to achieve some sort of see-through Springboard that can come quite in handy if you’re walking and looking at your iPhone at the same time. We think it looks really interesting, so make sure to check out the demo video below. [Youtube via iSpazio] Read more

iPhone 4 Cases Now Available On Verizon’s Website

The Verizon iPhone is coming out on February 10th, and ahead of the official launch Verizon Wireless has updated its online store to feature new cases specifically made for the CDMA iPhone. After the announcement of the Verizon iPhone, many noticed some old cases for the GSM iPhone wouldn’t fit on the new unit; case makers were quick to announce CDMA counterparts would be released soon.

You can see some cases for the CDMA iPhone 4 on Verizon’s website here. There are cases from Griffin, Incipio, Belkin and InCase. Average prices seem to be around $24.99 and $29.99, similarly to the Bumpers Apple sells on its online stores. The cases available on Verizon’s website include leather ones, snap-in model and hard cover cases.

Apple is also making a new version of the bumper that fits both the GSM and CDMA iPhone.

[Thanks, Henry!] Read more

Rovio Announces “Angry Birds Rio”, Coming This March

There is a new Angry Birds game on the horizon, and this time it’ll be the result of an exclusive partnership between Rovio, the makers of the original game, and Hollywood studio 20th Century Fox. The game, named “Angry Birds Rio”, will be a crossover of Rovio’s series with the upcoming animated film Rio, which – guess what – tells the story of two birds, Blu and Jewel, that have to fight animal smugglers in Rio de Janeiro.

The new Angry Birds game will follow a plot similar to the movie: the original Angry Birds are kidnapped and taken to Rio de Janeiro, but they manage to escape and set out to save Blu and Jewel, the characters of the movie. Sounds like Rovio and 20th Century Fox really collaborated to make the series fit together – how couldn’t they, considering we’re talking about a blockbuster game and a new film from the creators of the Ice Age trilogy?

Angry Birds Rio will launch in March 2011 with 45 initial levels, and more will be added with software updates. The app will be released for “smartphone and tablets” – we guess iPhone and iPad support is pretty much obvious. No word on pricing yet, but we think $4.99 is the usual sweet spot. Full press release available here, and trailers of the movie and game embedded below. Read more