Category: I-phone

The team at Tapbots is going to get an early Christmas present today — their Twitter client Tweetbot (US$2.99) was voted the best iPhone social networking app by readers in our continuing TUAW Best of 2011 polling.

The app, which launched in April of this year into a crowded Twitter client market, quickly became a favorite of many iPhone users. How popular was it in our voting? Tweetbot pulled in 56.7 percent of all of the votes from over one thousand readers.

As with the rest of the Tapbots product line, the user interface for Tweetbot shows that a remarkable amount of thought went into the design. Moving between timelines is fast and easy, there are configurable gestures to perform certain actions, and even the sounds and animation in the app are designed to give Tweetbot personality that doesn’t get in the way of communicating with the world.

Congratulations to Mark Jardine and Paul Haddad, the brains behind Tweetbot and the other great Tapbots apps. We can’t wait to see what you have in store for 2012.

Tweetbot wins TUAW Best of 2011 voting for best iPhone social networking app originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 24 Dec 2011 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Imagine my shock (not)! A new Software Usability Research Laboratory (SURL) study reported on The Loop shows that the iPad is keeping customers happy, with 83.65 percent of respondents saying that they were satisfied with the device.

SURL asked respondents to rate the user-friendliness of the iPad, and 62 percent rated the iPad as “excellent,” 21 percent said it was “good,” and 10 percent said it was the “best imaginable”. Only 4 percent thought the usability of the iPad was “fair,” 2 percent find it to be “poor,” and 2 percent rate the usability as “awful.”

What did people like the best about the iPad? The variety of apps, overall ease of use, the larger screen size (7″ Android tablets take note), and portability. On the other hand, respondents were not happy with the poor quality of some apps, didn’t like the inability of the iPad to play Adobe Flash, and had problems typing with the virtual keyboard.

Only 13 percent of respondents said that they use the iPad exclusively for work, but 52 percent say that they use an iPad at work — meaning that they use it personally as well. Most of the respondents using iPads for work use it as a reference tool (almost 95 percent) and to create or edit documents (about 70 percent).

One survey result I personally found interesting was that almost 23 percent of respondents also own or use an Amazon Kindle. This may indicate that users find the eInk Kindle’s ability to be easily read in bright sunshine to be a plus.

iPad customer satisfaction is (surprise!) quite high originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 24 Dec 2011 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The nominations are in, and the poll is ready to go! The TUAW Best of 2011 awards are all about you — the readers — and what you think is the cream of the crop of Apple or third-party products and software. To vote, select one entry from the top nominations made by readers. We’ll be announcing the winner in just a few days. Vote early and often!

TUAW is asking for your votes for the best iPhone utility app of 2011.

Since a majority of nominations were from the wrong categories, and some were even for the wrong platform, a straw poll of favorite iPhone utilities was taken with a sampling of Web luminaries and makes up our list of candidates.

The nominees are Flashlight (sale priced at US$0.99, regularly $1.99), Apple’s Airport Utility (free), Skyfire Web Browser ($2.99), 1Password for iPhone ($5.99), and the app that has saved a lot of iPhones, Apple’s Find My iPhone (free).

And now, let the voting begin! The results will be announced on December 26, 2011.

View Poll

TUAW Best of 2011: Vote for the best iPhone utility app originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 24 Dec 2011 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Well this must be bad news for Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, according to mobile market analytics specialist Flurry, developers are almost three times more likely to start development of an iOS App than to start an Android App.

Out of 55,000 companies that Flurry has been tracking, and more than 135,000 applications on their network in 2011, 73 percent of developers are working on iOS projects during the 4th quarter of 2011 compared to just 27 percent working on Android.

According to Peter Farago, vice president of marketing for Flurry “Over the year, developer support for Android has declined from more than one-third of all new projects, at the beginning of the year, down to roughly one-quarter by the end,”

Furthermore Flurry state that they believe the reason for the boost in the appeal of iOS is the fact that Apple has launched the iPhone on two new networks after three years of exclusivity on AT&T’s network. Apple has also seen an increase in popularity since the launch of the iPad 2 and the new iPhone S.

Finally according to Flurry there is one key factor that also plays a large role, the fact that developers are expected to earn 300 percent more revenue than their Android counterparts. If you’re a developer, would you rather develop apps and give them away, or have consumers pay for them?

When it comes to forecasting the next big thing, we turn to our secret weapon: the TUAW braintrust. We put the question to you and let you have your go at it. Today’s topic is Santa. What OS does he use?

According to Apple, he uses an iPhone 4S but we’re not necessarily swayed by Apple PR. We’re pretty sure that Rudolph is an avowed Red Nose Linux user, and Donner and Blitzen swear by any hardware that supports Thunderbolt.

So how does Santa compute? You tell us. Place your vote in this poll and then join in the comments with all your reasons.

View Poll

(Photo by DGrinbergs, Flickr, licensed under Creative Commons)

You’re the Pundit: What OS does Santa use? originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 23 Dec 2011 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple’s Newsstand app, which premiered on iOS devices with the release of iOS 5, was designed to improve the sales of newspapers and magazines by giving publishers their own virtual shelf space in a highly visible app. Several other publications have already touted their success stories with Newsstand, and now Popular Science is joining the chorus.

The magazine, which is undoubtedly popular with the tech crowd, published cumulative subscription numbers recently. As reported by AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka and visible in the chart at the top of this post, PopSci not only saw a leap in subscriptions the second week of October — coincidentally the time when Newsstand was launched — but since that time has been capturing new subscribers at a faster rate. The numbers are courtesy of Mag+, the tablet publishing arm of PopSci publisher Bonnier.

Kafka notes that he personally uses the New York Times app less often than he did before it moved to Newsstand, and would like to be able to pull items off of the Newsstand shelf so that they’re closer to other items that he uses quite often. How about you, TUAW readers? Do you find that you read magazines and newspapers more or less often now that many have moved to Newsstand, or do you avoid Newsstand at all cost? Leave us your opinions in the comments.

Popular Science sees boost from Apple’s Newsstand originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 23 Dec 2011 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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During December and January, The Unofficial Apple Weblog is soliciting your nominations and votes for the best products for Mac, iPhone/iPod touch, and iPad. We’ll start with nominations in a category, and then tally your votes for the top-nominated products a few days later. The winner in each category receives the highly-coveted title of TUAW Best of 2011.

In the next category for the TUAW Best of 2011 awards, we’ll take a look at iPad accessories other than cases. We opened nominations for iPad cases yesterday, so if you get a chance be sure to throw your proverbial iPad case hat into the ring.

What are we talking about here? Just about anything that works with an iPad that isn’t a case. Think of things like docks, adapter cables, health interfaces (like the Withings Wi-Fi Body Scale or Blood Pressure Monitor), the ION Audio Piano Apprentice or other musical instrument interfaces.

TUAW wants to hear from you — what’s your favorite iPad accessory? Leave your nomination in the comments below. Voting will start soon!

Nominations close at 11:59 PM ET on December 25, 2011.

Nominate your favorite iPad accessory for TUAW’s Best of 2011 awards originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 23 Dec 2011 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ll do one more big app roundup post today before the holiday weekend. The App Store freeze went off as scheduled yesterday, so devs can no longer change their prices or upgrade their apps until next week, but in addition to the sales already covered so far, there are still a few more apps on sale worth pointing out for you:

• Konami’s got the charming Gesundheit on sale, 99 cents on the iPhone and $1.99 on the iPad.
• The very well-reviewed King of Dragon Pass is 20% off, $7.99.
• I already mentioned Chillingo having most of their titles on sale, but it’s worth mentioning as well that Anomaly: Warzone Earth and Swords and Soldiers are both on sale.
• Com2Us has put all of its titles on sale as well, including the popular Tower Defense: Lost Earth.
• Crescent Moon’s got Pocket RPG iPhone edition down to a buck, and it’s done the same with Rimelands and Aralon, two excellent games.
• Polarbit also has a bunch of fun titles on sale.
• And Telltale has big discounts going on its titles as well.

As I said yesterday, there’s lots more out there, so if there’s an app you’ve been wanting, chances are that it’s on sale. Unfortunately for smaller developers, I just checked the top paid apps on the store, and EA has claimed most of the spots already, with Angry Birds and Sega filling out most of the other real estate. It looks like Electronic Arts is all set to ring in the holidays with another huge batch of app sales, as people open up those new iPhones and iPads over the weekend.

More app sales: King of Dragon Pass, Swords and Soldiers and Crescent Moon RPGs originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 23 Dec 2011 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The votes are tallied for the best iPhone photography and video apps, and the winners have been named. 360 Panorama from Occipital pulled in over a third of the votes (36.8 percent) for take the Best iPhone Photography App award for 2011, while Apple’s iMovie grabbed the title for Best iPhone Video App of 2011 with 48.4 percent of reader votes.

360 Panorama (US$0.99) uses the gyroscope in your iPhone (also works with iPad and iPod touch) to stitch together panoramas in real time. Panoramas are GPS tagged and can be tweeted, posted on Facebook, or emailed, and share online. I personally use the app when I’m on vacations so when I get home I can enjoy the immersive experience of moving my iPhone or iPad around to view a stunning panorama.

It’s not surprising that Apple’s iMovie ($4.99) app grabbed the top spot in the video category. It is totally magical to shoot 1080p video on an iPhone and then add a theme, titles, and transitions to raw video to create a digital masterpiece.

Our congratulations go out to the teams at Occipital and Apple for their stellar work on these apps, and many thanks to the TUAW readers who nominated and voted for these apps in the TUAW Best of 2011.

TUAW Best of 2011: 360 Panorama and iMovie originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 23 Dec 2011 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you’re the type of person who looks at the design of a webpage, you’ll want to download and install WhatFont. WhatFont is a straightforward tool, designed by college student Chengyin Liu, that apparently parses the CSS of a website and pulls out the font used in a section of text. It also tries to figure out the font in an image, but the tool warns you that it’s not accurate. From what I’ve seen, WhatFont uses the CSS font tags of the surrounding text to guess the text on the image. The tool probably assumes websites will keep the font uniform across a page and not mix Helvetica text with Lucida Grande in an image.

WhatFont is one of those basic tools that’s nice to have around when you need it. Sure you could do it be hand by looking at the source code, but WhatFont takes the tedious part of parsing code and does it for you. It’s available for free from Chengyin Liu’s website.

Friday Favorite: WhatFont, a website font analysis tool originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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SAP’s CIO Oliver Bussmann has a singularly interesting point of view on using the iPads in a business environment: He oversaw the implementation of iPads at SAP, which was an early adopter of using Apple’s tablet in a full-scale company. He recently talked with the folks at InfoWorld, and says that going about the process open-mindedly was the best way to do it. SAP figured, right when the iPad was announced, that its employees would be using them anyway, so the company took a very ad hoc approach to supporting them in the workplace, building on what its employees did with iPads rather than trying to structure actual work functions around them.

Bussmann seems to say that the biggest issue on an iPad is security, but technology is getting better all the time, apparently, and the latest version of iOS 5 introduces some new improvements that should help IT departments with all of the headaches that come from having sensitive information available on the iPads.

Most interestingly, however, Bussmann says that iPads do have one important advantage over traditional PCs in a business environment: Users seem much more willing to interact with and “explore” data on the iPad. I agree with this — even in my own iPad usage, I’m much more ready to search for a good restaurant or browse through ticket prices sitting on my couch with an iPad versus sitting in front of a computer screen. I don’t know if that difference has been fully explored by developers yet, but it’s definitely something to think about going forward, especially when implementing the iPad in a specifically business environment.

Managing 12,000 iPads: SAP CIO shares lessons learned originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 23 Dec 2011 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Here’s a project for Arduino fans with an old iPhone sitting in their junk drawer. Following these instructions from Will O’Brien, you can craft a remote start system that’s triggered by SMS. The setup requires an Avatal 3117 remote start, an iPhone breakout board, an Arduino, a switching supply cell charger and a handful of transistors, resistors and diodes.

The system is controlled by the iPhone which talks to the Arduino controller. The iPhone can receive an SMS message that tells the car to start. A perl script running on the iPhone will then send the command to the Arduino. When it receives the start command, the Arduino will ground the wire to the remote start and fire up the car.

O’Brien has a working prototype and posted both the source code and the schematic for the design on his website. He’s considering putting it together and selling it as a neat and tidy kit for those who want to try this hack without heating up the soldering iron.

[Via Make Magazine]

DIY auto remote uses iPhone and Arduino to start a car originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 23 Dec 2011 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A new report from comScore shows that Apple netted more online visitors in the U.S. in November than retail giant Walmart.

Apple’s sites got more than 79 million unique visitors from the U.S. compared with under 59 million for Walmart. The reason behind these numbers? iTunes downloads, Ad Age says.

Neither site topped Amazon, which drew more than 112 million unique visitors and was the highest-ranked retail site on comScore’s matrix, which included visitors from homes, businesses and academic networks. It’ll be interesting to see how these numbers will change for this month, when people use their gifted iTunes cards and new gadgets to grab even more content from iTunes.

[via All Things D]

Apple grabs more online visitors than Walmart this season originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 23 Dec 2011 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Fans of vintage arcade games know that the popular and free emulation tool MAME (stands for “Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator”) can be used to recreate the experience of classic coin-op and console videogames on PCs, Macs and jailbroken iOS devices.

The catch, of course, is that in order to run the old games you need a copy of the game ROM code; said copies are essentially unavailable via legitimate licensing (except for a few Exidy games). The other catch is that full-scale emulators aren’t particularly welcome on the iOS App Store; the ones that have made it through the review process are careful to lock down the ability to run arbitrary third-party programs.

That’s why it was more than a little bit surprising to see iMAME show up in the App Store this week. The game emulator (which, if you judge it by its splash screen, seems to be a straight-up clone of the jailbreak-only iMAME4All app) plays the ten Exidy legit games as one would expect. The unsung trick, however, is that by using a file transfer tool like PhoneView or iExplorer, it’s trivially easy to throw in additional ROMs and have iMAME spin them up. (I’ve been playing Track & Field for days and still haven’t gotten past the long jump.)

It seemed too good to last, and sure enough it was. Running arbitrary emulated code is an App Store no-no, and as of 1:30pm today the iMAME app is no longer available in the US store. Sad news for everyone who ran out to buy a discounted iCade cabinet for the holiday.

Commenter Spencer points out that he & at least one other developer have built patched versions of the jailbreak-only iMAME4All project that will compile in Xcode and install on properly provisioned, un-jailbroken devices. This only applies, however, to active participants in Apple’s $99/year iOS developer program; otherwise there’s no way to install the patched app.

Arcade emulator iMAME punted out of App Store originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 23 Dec 2011 13:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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