The Blog of Brad
Posts tagged app store
Apps for Lent
Apr 3rd
I’m a Catholic: in the Catholic Church it’s tradition to forgo something you like for “Lent,” a period between “Ash Wednesday (this year February 17)” and “Easter Sunday (this year April 4)” and as such I’ve given up the App Store. Well we’re down to just one day left before chocolate and apps, and I’ve kept a list of interesting looking Apps mentioned by others and on App Of The Day by Jordan Satok ( @jordansatok ), here is the list I’ve come up with (fwiw this list was kept in Evernote for the longest time):
- Boxcar (free for first service; additional services $0.99 or $1.99) – mentioned by @netspencer – Boxcar is a notification platform built on Apple Push Notifications that allows easy Twitter push (mentions, DMs, etc…), push email notifications, remote Growl notification, and soon almost anything as they’ve opened up their APIs.
- WolframAlpha ($1.99) - mentioned on TUAW lately – WolframAlpha is an awesome tool and I use it daily (it’s an awesome aid for math class) but I’ve so far had to use the desktop web version on my iPhone (not exactly thrilling user experience). In the mean time I’ve used the mobile web version which is an automatic step up!
- Pastebot ($2.99) - mentioned by AppOfTheDay – Pastebot manages clipboards for the iPhone, it allows you to save snippets of text, sync them with your Mac, then save yourself time.
- ReelDirector ($7.99) – mentioned on MBW many times - does simple video editing on the iPhone with 27 transitions, titles, trimming, and export-to-email functionality.
- Digg (free) – mentioned everywhere on Twitter – provides easy access to Digg content: allows digging/burrying, commenting, submitting, and viewing.
Although I will resume purchasing Apps, it’s been interesting to give them up — every day was a challenge to not buy apps I see people using or talking about. Just a thought: it would be interesting to give up all apps, using them, buying them, talking about them, etc.. for a month or so.
Tweetie 2 – Preview Images Surface
Sep 28th
My favorite iPhone Twitter app, Tweetie, seems to be about to go 2.0 with the latest 3.0-only update of it’s top-10 selling social networking app. Since the dawn of Tweetie just 10 months ago I’ve loved every second I’ve spent with it, and even more loved seeing other iPhone users using and reviewing it. In these reviews you almost always see two basic phrases:
- “…done the Apple way…”
- “…has sex appeal…”
That is very high praise, especially coming from a market that is highly dominated in mind-share by Apple’s multimillion dollar industrial design. The more important detail is that there is finally a platform with developers dedicated to user experience…. remember Windows Mobile? Palm (before WebOS)? Blackberry(before the Curve)?
PocketPC Desktop crica 2000 - from Wikipedia
It wasn’t that long ago that the best applications that we any home-brew or even small corportate IT/IS department could do were stylus-driven, 256-color, and lacked so many refinements we’ve seen in Mac OS (just to list a few; button alignment, button size, button text, button format, screen layout, application flow, location of controls, speed and stability of custom elements, visual effects, and annoying tapping/clicking sounds).
As I’ve diverted from the promised content, I’ll note that based on this Tweet from Lauren (Tweetie programmer-extraordinaire), Tweetie 2 is definitely coming. Today TechCrunch, Mashable, and TwinCities have all posted preview screenshots. This looks good!
Links:
- atebits.com – BigBird Redux (Blog Post from Tweetie dev)
- TechCrunch – Preview Tweetie 2…
- Mashable – PREVIEW: Tweetie 2.0 for iPhone [Pics]
TwitterFon renamed Echofon, new features to come
Sep 14th
I presume that you’re familiar with the long-time iPhone Twitter client TwitterFon (App Store link: TwitterFon free (now called Echofon) and the paid $4.99 TwitterFon Pro (now called Echofon Pro)) and was interested to find that the developers are moving from their current name base to a new product that at first will be exactly the same, however as discussed in the developers’ blog post, some interesting new sync features between the iPhone client and TwitterFox (Firefox extension).
This is from echofon.com
I have not regularly used the TwitterFon app for iPhone, but will be interested to see what they release in the near future.
iPhone App: Shazam
Jul 4th
This is an amazing app which has been around since the inception of apps in July of 2008. Shazam is a free and amazing life tool, it identifies songs that are playing where you are by taking a thirty-second sample using the built-in microphone, and within a few seconds has analyzed the song and presented you with a useful screen displaying the song title, artist, album, and links for a Youtube video, to buy it in iTunes, and to Tweet about the song.
I’ve included some screen shots of it from my use—and in my few days of using it, I’ve found that it’s incredibly accurate at identifying music, even in noisy environments.
Get this app for free from the app store. [link]
Strangely, this app requires an iPhone, however could work on a 2G iPod Touch.
$15 & $30 HP Calculator Emulators
Jun 26th
I just saw Gizmodo’s post on HP having released iPhone/iPod Touch app emulators of their notable calculators.
HP 12C:
This is arguably the most famous HP financial calculator and has sold well for decades. The app that emulates this is $14.99 and 1 MB.
HP 15C:
This is the HP 15C scientific calculator. This app comes in at $29.99 and 1.6MB.
Read Gizmodo’s post about this for more information about these.
[My opinion]
As Gizmodo made clear; the physical calculators that these emulate are significantly more expensive (many times more expensive) and are perfectly emulated by this app. However they don’t mention that most non-free apps in the app store sell for about $1.99 (most sold are probably free!) and that makes the price tags of $15 and $30 irrelevant in most sense of the matter. However, if TI wants to make a graphing calculator app to save high school students (most of which have iPod Touches or iPhones) from having to buy the hardware analogues.
[/MY OPINION]
Links to the app:
This post significantly draws from Gizmodo’s post about these calculators.
