Brad Arsenault (dot com)
The Blog of Brad
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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.
Sims 3 for iPhone
Apr 7th
I know I’m probably just about the last one to talk about this, but Sims 3 is coming to the iPhone platform later this year (June 2) as well as PC, Mac, and other mobile devices (including the Nintendo DS). I just have to wonder why EA bothers. Why does EA bother to spend valuable time developing and porting applications to BREW, J2ME cell phones, and have to package the game for the DS? The iPhone and iPod Touch (in North America) sales have passes ~23m while the DS still sits around just 10 million–the iPhone/Touch marketplace (app store) is a thriving place to sell apps and with trivial apps like iFart Mobile getting many hundred-thousand purchases, a game will do much better (at least that’s what I think).
Look at the cost of developing the game for the Nintendo DS:
- learning the older hardware and writing for it
- dealing with the low storage, memory, and video memory capacity
- dealing with the (in my opinion) poor touch (pen) API’s
- packaging and manufacturing the cartridges for the device (and shipping!)
Whereas the iPhone/Touch platform offers:
- Write in Objective-C with a great API
- get the more computer-esque abilities of the iPhone/Touch
- need I say more about the upcoming thousands of API’s?
- sell the app in a thriving market place (app store) where there are millions of devices of looking at one spot
Just my opinion.
**The stats I’ve used are from quick Google searches and I don’t stand behind them 100%
