Category: I-phone

Personally, I have no issue with plugging my iPhone into my Mac every evening before I head to bed, recharging it, backing up my contacts and photos, and syncing my podcasts and music when I want it to. But I’ve heard before that a surprising number of iPhone (and iPod touch) users don’t ever connect their devices to iTunes, and that theory is supported by Apple’s big drive to go “PC Free” in iOS 5, leaving a PC or Mac connection out of the equation completely.

For those not interested in connecting their iPhones to an actual computer every evening, Iomega is there with its SuperHero dock system, which I saw earlier this year at CES and tried out recently. The device is basically just a dock which plugs into the wall, and has only a power cord input and an SD card slot on it. Combined with an app you can pick up free from the App Store (and in fact, you’re prompted to download the app the first time you plug in), the dock automatically backs up photos and contacts onto an SD card, and charges your device.

The device was $69.99 at launch, but is now available for as low as $39.99, and at that price, I can see a lot of good uses for it beyond just the most basic of someone who might not understand iTunes or deal with a full sync every time they plug an iPhone in. This could be a good solution for an office or school backup system, where you might not be able to install iTunes and run a full sync on a work PC. Or it might just be a good way to offload your contacts and photos, keeping them in yet another location.

The actual setup runs smoothly — it really is designed for newbies, as it only takes about three taps to install the app early on, and afterward the app runs without any prompting. Plug your iPhone into the dock and let it go. Backup of contacts is quick, though photos takes significantly longer. I just got back from a trip, and loading the 17 photos I took with my iPhone took around 30 minutes.

Still, this kind of “set it and forget it” backup is very useful, and of course there are options to not run contact or photos backup if you don’t want to.

You can also restore contacts and photos directly from the dock itself, so if you ever need to replace your phone, that’s all very easy to do, even without a computer. Unfortunately, I don’t have multiple iPhones for testing, but presumably, you might be able to use this system to copy contacts over across multiple iPhones — each backup file is named separately on the SD card (controlled by another option), but it might be possible to plug in a different iPhone, and restore the contacts from there.

One issue I had is that there’s no way of pausing or cancelling a backup in progress, short of just pulling your iPhone out of the dock. But then again, that works all right, and the sync will just pick up where it left off when you replace the phone, so it’s probably better not to have the extra UI anyway.

Finally, there’s one more option to encrypt contacts with a password if you like, providing a layer of security (which might be important if you set this up at your workplace). That’s easy enough to do, though you have to remember that the security is only as good as your password, which you re-enter every time you run a restore.

Iomega’s SuperHero is a solid little device with quite a few different uses. Originally, I thought it was meant more as a dummy-proof way to get your iPhone backed up, but after using it, I can see quite a few places where a PC free way to get your iPhone’s contacts and photos saved on an SD card could come in handy. It also works with the iPod touch.

Even in Apple’s brand new world of iCloud, where all of this information will be automatically saved on their servers, I can see reasons why the especially careful or paranoid might still want that extra backup functionality built into a charger, and especially after the drops in the SuperHero’s price since launch, the SuperHero is a good deal. Iomega’s made a weird little creature here with this dock, but it seems destined to be the platypus of iOS backup, sticking to old ways even when normal evolution might have deemed otherwise.

Iomega’s SuperHero for iPhone provides an iTunes-free backup solution originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 08 Aug 2011 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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While OS X Lion automatically creates a recovery partition on your existing hard drive, many people have correctly pointed out that this does you no good if the hard drive itself fails. While many third-party solutions for creating a Lion recovery disk on an external drive have sprouted up over the past few weeks, there’s now an official solution from Apple: Lion Recovery Disk Assistant.

According to Apple, “Lion Recovery Disk Assistant lets you create Lion Recovery on an external drive that has all of the same capabilities as the built-in Lion Recovery: reinstall Lion, repair the disk using Disk Utility, restore from a Time Machine backup, or browse the web with Safari.”

The program will walk you through the process of creating a recovery disk on an external USB drive. The assistant notes that the external disk will be erased in the process of creating a recovery disk, however, so if you were hoping to use this solution to create a recovery disk on a drive that’s already loaded with other information, you might want to explore other options or find a dedicated drive that you can use instead.

Lion Recovery Disk Assistant is just over 1 megabyte and available for download now.

Apple releases Lion Recovery Disk Assistant originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 08 Aug 2011 18:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We covered Monster Costume’s interactive children’s book Bartleby in 2010, and multiple TUAW reviewers found it to be a charming and well-crafted iPad app. Monster Costume is hard at work on Bartleby Volume 2, and even though I don’t have kids of my own and am about 25 years beyond the target age group for this app, it still looks like a lot of fun.

As you’ll see in the video demo below, Bartleby Vol. 2 is really taking iPad interactivity seriously. Like many other iPad apps, it allows you to plug your iPad into your TV and use the iPad as a sort of oversized controller for the game. The video shows an iPad 2 hooked into an HDTV via an HDMI dongle, which may seem clumsy and possibly a recipe for disaster with smaller kids — but if you’ve got an Apple TV 2, there may be a solution to that problem coming this fall. The upcoming iOS 5 update will allow wireless video via AirPlay for any app that supports it, and in fact, it seems the only reason Monster Costume isn’t showing off the AirPlay functionality already is because of Apple’s NDA for iOS 5 features.

AirPlay could turn the Apple TV 2 into a de facto game console for apps like Bartleby. Seeing this demo has now got me thinking about the upcoming Final Fantasy Tactics release for the iPad and hoping Square-Enix includes this feature, too.

Bartleby Volume 2 looks great so far, and Volume 1 is currently available for free until Volume 2’s release. If you’ve got young kids, definitely check it out.

Bartleby Airplay Demo from Monster Costume Inc. on Vimeo.

Preview of Bartleby Vol. 2 iPad app shows possibility of future AirPlay integration originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 08 Aug 2011 17:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I’m happy to report that The Huffington Post has updated their iPad app to version 3.0 today and has added a “Classic Edition” layout option to the app.

Back in December, The Huffington Post released version 2.0 of their iPad app. While in some ways it was an improvement over version 1.0. The developers went a little interactive-menu crazy and unveiled this new thing called newsglide. The intention of newsglide was to enhance navigation, but one also got the feeling that the company wanted to add eye-candy to their app just because it looked cool while using it. I wrote: “The old app had a very newspaper-like feel to it as far as navigation goes. The new app seems to be the love child that would result if the BBC for iPad and Twitter apps hooked up. Personally, I like my newspaper apps to have the layout of newspapers.”

With today’s version 3.0 release, newsglide is still there, but users can select between reading the app in newsglide view or classic view. Classic view is just that — it retains the look and layout of a classic newspaper. In my opinion, that’s all an iPad newspaper app has to do to be a good app. After all, a newspaper (even an Internet-only one) is meant to be read. It’s not important for me to feel like I’m Tom Cruise in Minority Report while reading about the latest economic troubles. I want the text, the information, and all new apps should focus on providing that over any eye-candy interactivity.

Pamela Maffei McCarthy, The New Yorker’s deputy editor, said it best when she told The New York Times shortly after it was announce that The New Yorker’s iPad edition was outselling other iPad magazines that had more eye-candy interactivity. “That was really important to us: to create an app all about reading,” she said. “There are some bells and whistles, but we’re very careful about that. We think about whether or not they add any value. And if they don’t, out the window they go.” I’m glad The Huffington Post seems to now agree and hopefully other newspapers will too. The Huffington Post for iPad is a free download.

Huffington Post adds ‘Classic Edition’ to iPad app originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 08 Aug 2011 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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According to Fortune, financial analysts from Deutsche Bank are predicting a rise in Apple’s global portable computer sales for the rest of this year. If the iPad is included in those numbers, the rise is downright astonishing, taking Apple from last place among the six vendors studied all the way up to first.

Including the iPad in this analysis may seem a questionable move, but if you want to get technical about it the device is a portable computer. Analysis shows that even if the iPad isn’t included in these numbers, Apple is still poised to see huge gains in 2011 thanks to the release of OS X Lion and high demand for the MacBook Air.

At the same time that Apple is expected to see sales and market share gains, every other PC maker is showing steep declines in Deutsche Bank’s analysis. The firm cites “stagnation” in the Microsoft/PC market and notes that so-called “Ultrabooks” are not yet price-competitive with Apple’s MacBook Air. The situation is even grimmer in the tablet market, which can still be handily summarized as “iPad… and then everything else.”

Apple has warned investors to expect a decline in revenues for the next quarter due to a product transition. Without knowing what that transition is, we have no way of knowing how it will dampen the huge gains that Deutsche Bank and other financial analysts are predicting for the rest of the “Year of the iPad 2.”

Apple portables set to dominate latter half of 2011 originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 08 Aug 2011 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve heard before that Apple may be working on a service for iTunes called “Replay,” sort of a Netflix Watch Instantly-style service that lets you download and stream any movies or TV shows that you’ve purchased from iTunes. Obviously, with the iCloud infrastructure in place (and iTunes Match already announced and on the way out), it’s not too big a stretch to see that actually happening.

But if such a deal is underway, the latest reports say it won’t be available for a while. CNET says it has been poking around film studios about such a deal, and at least six different major studios have yet to sign agreements for a service like this. Apple has indeed been trying to chase down agreements that would allow customers to stream purchased movies any time, but those agreements aren’t done deals, and they’ll need to be before this thing gets off the ground.

The biggest sticking point seems to be a few older agreements with HBO and streaming service UltraViolet, which allow for some exclusive periods where only those companies can host digital downloads. Apple is probably willing to pay to unlock those periods, but studios aren’t in any position to make deals happen fast — they’d rather see demand (and thus prices) go up. At any rate, if Apple does want to make iTunes Replay happen, it still has at least one tough nut to crack here.

[via iPodNN]

iTunes Replay launch reportedly still far off originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 08 Aug 2011 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Apple TV 2 could become a new platform for playing HTML5-based games and applications. A hacker installed the Couch Surfer browser on a jailbroken Apple TV and used it to play an HTML5 version of BlackJack. The game is rudimentary, but it’s a sign that the Apple TV is capable of more than just TV shows and movies.

Circulating rumors suggest Apple may open up the Apple TV and add support for the App Store in a future firmware update or possibly a future model. Until that happens, these HTML5 apps could be an easy way for users to get their application fix.

[Via TechCrunch]

HTML5 game running on Apple TV originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 08 Aug 2011 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Need to sync bookmarks across multiple platforms and/or different browsers? You need Xmarks.

The service that was on its way out, then bought by LastPass, allows you to sync bookmarks to the cloud, between machines and between different browsers. Xmarks has extensions or plugins for Safari (installed as a preference pane), Chrome, Firefox and even Internet Explorer, so it’s got most mainstream browsers covered.

Xmarks will sync your bookmarks to the cloud and give you access to them through the my.xmarks.com if you’re somewhere without the Xmarks plugin installed. You can keep different profiles, one for work and one for home perhaps, and you can share your bookmarks with friends via RSS or the Xmarks site, all for the fantastic price of free.

It’s true that Safari, Firefox and Chrome will all sync your bookmarks from one computer to another, but not between different browsers. Xmarks lets you use Chrome on one machine and Safari on another. It’ll even let you sync your Chrome bookmarks to your iDevice through iTunes courtesy of a little Safari syncing intermediary.

Speaking of iOS, if you want access to your bookmarks through the Xmarks app on iOS, Android or Blackberry, Xmarks Premium at a yearly charge of $12 nets you that plus backup and restore for your bookmarks. Xmarks Premium also comes with open tab sync, so you can take your browsing sessions from machine to machine, browser to browser.

If you’ve ever wanted to sync your bookmarks between different browsers, the free Xmarks makes it quick and easy. Download Xmarks for your browser from here to get started.

Daily Mac App: Xmarks originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 08 Aug 2011 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Last June when Google started rolling out its new Facebook challenger, Google+, it didn’t take long for the company to release an iPhone app. However, that iPhone app couldn’t run on an iPod touch or an iPad. That’s been rectified now as today Google has updated the Google+ iOS app to bring support to the iPod touch and iPad. But for you Google+ fans, don’t get too excited. The Google+ iOS app still is not a universal app. Google has simply enabled the iPhone version of the app to run on the iPad.

That means that if you choose to run the Google+ app on your iPad, you’ll be running it in 2x mode to try to take advantage of the iPad’s large screen. It also means that Google joins a long list of social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn who are taking forever to get legitimate iPad apps out. To be fair, Google+ is newer than the rest, but if the company really wants to take on Facebook it should be leading by example and getting a native iPad app out there ASAP.

Besides the iPad “compatibility,” today’s update brings Huddle settings and aggregated circle add notifications along with the usual performance and stability improvements. Google+ is a free download.

Google+ iOS app now compatible with iPad originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 08 Aug 2011 14:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Orange UK is kicking off its Orange Film To Go promotion this week. The promotion lets Orange customers download a new film from iTunes each week. Starting Thursday, Orange customers can redeem their free movie by texting ‘FILMTOGO’ to 85060. They can also request a redemption code directly from Orange’s website or through the Orange Film To Go mobile app. Once redeemed, the movie can be downloaded to a laptop, PC or an Apple iOS device. The promotion will launch with My Blueberry Nights, The Wrestler, and The Ghost and Che: Part One. Additional download titles will be added each week.

[Via 9to5 Mac]

Orange UK to offer free weekly iTunes movie download originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 08 Aug 2011 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You’ll get all the top stories of the day in three to five minutes, perfect for a quick review of what’s happening in the Apple world.

You can listen to today’s Apple stories by clicking the inline player below (requires Flash). In the near future, you’ll be able to subscribe to a podcast feed for easy updates that you can listen to through iTunes.

Daily Update for August 8, 2011 originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 08 Aug 2011 14:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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At one point in my career, I trained business analysts in the tools and techniques of their trade. One feature of business analysis methodologies is that they use a lot of diagrams to visually represent use cases, process flows, and relationships. During those classes I talked a lot about creating and sending diagrams to others, but I never dreamed that we’d be able to collaborate on them from just about any device. That’s what the LucidChart HTML5 web app brings to the picture — amazing diagramming tools and online collaboration.

A lot of the business analysts I know have refused to switch to Apple products due to a lack of one single application on the platform — Microsoft Visio. Sure, the application can run on a virtual machine on a Mac, but a lot of these folks tell me that they don’t want to run VMs. Here’s some good news for those people; LucidChart lets you import Visio documents so you can wave goodbye to that anchor around your neck, and you can start doing your work on an iPad or Mac. Can you use LucidChart on an iPhone? Yes, but it’s a painful experience on such a small screen.

I had a chance to try out LucidChart both on my Mac and an iPad, and I found it to be fast, full-featured, and easy to use. You can try out the web app for free, and then there are different subscription levels. An individual account with up to 5 collaborators and 100 MB of storage is US$4.95 a month or $39.95 per year. For those who want the premium features — Microsoft Visio .vdx file import, wireframing/iPhone mockups, and revision history — there’s a professional account that costs $9.95 a month or $99.95 per year. That account is still for one user, but unlimited collaborators can work on the document and there’s a full 1 GB of storage.

Teams and workgroups can have team accounts that start at $25 per month ($249 per year) for multiple users, unlimited collaborators, and storage starting at 5 GB. The team accounts have all of the professional account features plus shared templates and images. Educators can also get free accounts during 2011.

As this is a web app, there is no need to install software. You simply point your browser to LucidChart.com and log in. The site displays a clean interface showing documents, team, community, forums, account and referrals. The documents page (below) displays all documents that you have created and stored on the system. This is also where you can create subfolders to store project documents, import Visio files, or create new documents from scratch.

Clicking or tapping the big “New Document” button displays a window showing templates for different types of categories. For instance, in the Drawings category are three different types of Venn Diagrams and in Flowcharts are templates for business, sales, and support processes. Need a powerful mind-mapping tool on your iPad? There’s a Mind Map template. Creating network diagrams is a breeze with the template that is available, and TUAW readers who are busy with startups will love the org chart templates.

The Software/Web templates are quite useful. There are software/web templates, UI design templates, sample ERD and data flow templates, a site map template, and a tool for creating iPhone app mockups (see below). For those who are eloquent fans of the Unified Modeling Language (UML), there are templates for activity, sequence, class and state diagrams, as well as the ever-popular UML Use Case diagram. Are you a fan of swim lanes? Got ’em.

Just to get a feel for how easy or hard it is to use LucidChart on the Mac and iPad, I made a handful of charts and also created a mockup of a TUAW TV Live app (no, we’re not actually doing one — but it was a fun thing to try). What’s very cool is that you can start a document on your Mac (or PC if you swing that way), then pick up your work on the iPad when you leave the office.

As you’d expect, the web app is very similar on both platforms. There are a few differences in terms of location of tool palettes when you’re on the iPad, and of course you’re navigating around the app with finger taps instead of mouse or trackpad clicks. Once you’ve learned how to use the app on one platform, you know how to use it on all platforms.

To share a document with others, there’s a small share link at the bottom of the page on the desktop version. You can send a link to the document to your collaborators, and for others who happen to be on line, you can actually view the document and chat about it in real time. The share button is actually much more visible and easier to get to on the iPad being at the top of the screen, but there is no chat function on the tablet as far as I could see.

All in all, if you’re a system analyst, developer, or anyone else who needs to easily make and edit diagrams, flow charts, and other such materials, be sure to take a look at LucidChart. The individual account is very competitive with other Apple-oriented diagramming and drawing applications. For example, the very capable OmniGraffle from OmniGroup runs $99 for the regular version ($199 for OmniGraffle Professional) and doesn’t include the many collaborative features of LucidChart. The LucidChart license allows you to run the app on any of your devices; you’d need to buy a license for OmniGraffle for iPad (an additional $49) to be able to work on that device.

It’s not all about costs, though. There are other tangible benefits, such as cloud storage of your documents and collaboration with others. The one negative with LucidChart is that it really does require an internet connection to be useful. Although I was able to use the app offline for a short while to make changes to drawings, it often locked up until the internet connection was re-established. However, for engineers or others who might need to work on documents in the field, LucidChart works very well with a 3G connection.

Be sure to take a look at the gallery to see some screenshots of LucidChart in action, and if you’re intrigued, sign up for a free trial.

LucidChart web app brings diagramming prowess, collaboration to Mac and iPad originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 08 Aug 2011 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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According to a writer at a local Charlotte, North Carolina blog, a source inside the upcoming Apple Store in the Northlake area says it could open as soon as August 25 or 26. This store won’t be far from Apple’s big North Carolina data center. Last May, we heard that it was moving from a proposed site near the South Park Mall, landing about 30 miles away from Apple’s big complex.

It looks like work has gone well, however — if this source is legit, folks in Northlake will be able to visit the new store by the end of this month. Congrats!

Northlake, North Carolina Apple Store to open this month originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 08 Aug 2011 13:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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PhotoMind came about because its creator realized he kept forgetting to deal with the photos he was taking on his iPhone. I’ve run into this same issue, as it is all too easy to keep snapping away on your iPhone (or iPad, I guess), only to go sync and forget to launch iPhoto (which I avoid like the plague these days) or otherwise forget to pull the pics off your iOS device. Oddly enough PhotoMind won’t necessarily help you with this problem, but does something else — it sets timed reminders for photos.

Why would you use a photo as a reminder? I can think of dozens of reasons. While I use Evernote to capture all sorts of things, having reminders for some of those photo notes would be useful — stuff that falls under the “look this up when you get home” category, specifically. There’s also the odd use case where you’re at a party and want to remember to email a person you just met something you were discussing.

PhotoMind allows you to email these pics and save them to your camera roll, so beyond a reminder app you can still use the photos elsewhere. Take a look at the app in action below.

Video App Demo: PhotoMind originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 08 Aug 2011 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Although Skype has been working fine with OS X Lion — heck, I used version 5.1 for last week’s TUAW TV Live and it worked wonderfully — the team at Skype has made another revision to the popular internet calling / video chat application.

Skype 5.3 for Mac OS X is now available for download and installation, and it brings several new features to users. Probably the biggest improvement is that you can now make HD quality video calls on Skype when using the “FaceTime HD Cameras” built into the newest iMacs and MacBook Pros or third-party HD webcams like the Logitech C910. Skype recommends that your broadband internet upload and download speeds be at least 1.5 Mbps.

Skype also made some changes to the user interface, making the Mac app a bit more like the iPad version of the software. It’s billed as Lion-compatible, but doesn’t include features like full-screen mode or multi-touch gestures.

If you’re already a Skype user, you can download and install the update using the Check for Updates item under the Skype menu.

Skype 5.3 adds Lion support, HD video calls originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 08 Aug 2011 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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