Category: I-phone

We’re proud to announce that our close cousin, MobileTuts has just launched an awesome new series on designing for the iPhone.

Here’s a brief description of the series:

“Are you a web designer, excited by the idea of designing iPhone apps, but unsure of how to get started? Or perhaps you’ve designed a couple of apps, but are looking to boost your skills with some fundamental knowledge of why we make certain design decisions for mobile? This series is for both novice and intermediate-level designers who want to make a big splash in the mobile design space!”

Learn how to design beautiful and usable mobile interfaces for iOS

The topics you can look forward to in this series include both hands-on techniques and examples as well as mobile related design theory. The following is a line-up of what we will cover over the course of this series:

• Designing for the iPhone Audience and the App Store
• How to Use iPhone and iPad Design Templates
• Designing Apps that Use All Available iPhone Functionality
• How to Design for the Different Types of iPhone Apps
• The Mobile Design Process
• The Pros and Cons of Using Apple Default vs. Custom Graphics
• Understanding Your App’s Target Audience
• Icon Design Tips for iPhone and iPad
• iPhone Mockup Tools and the Wireframing Process
• Creating Screenshots and Icons for iTunes

So jump on over to MobileTuts and get started the road to becoming a rockstar iPhone designer!

Though it’s still officially in the rumor stage (no announcement from Verizon or Apple), the idea that Verizon will start offering the iPhone early next year is seen as a fact by many sources.

Bloomberg, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal are just a few places where we’ve been seeing headlines announcing that the phone is already being manufactured and prepped for shipping.

What we want to know is, do you care? Have you had enough problems with AT&T to immediately go running to another carrier as soon as it becomes possible? Or perhaps you’re one of the thousands already using Verizon, waiting patiently for the iPhone to arrive.

Cast your vote and leave a comment below telling us what you think of AT&T and Verizon and where you’d like to see the iPhone go next!

While the little Trick or Treaters are out pounding the streets tonight in search of candy and mischief, we’ll be scaring you another way — with the TUAW Talkcast! Remember that you can also listen to past episodes on Talkshoe or subscribe to the Talkcast podcast in iTunes.

Why do I think it will be scary? Because there wasn’t much news last week, so we’ll be opening the mics to you, TUAW readers! We’ll take your calls on Talkshoe and open up the discussion to a lot of Apple-related topics such as the Verizon iPhone, the problems with iPhoto ’11 that were hopefully fixed with the update on Friday, and more.

To participate on TalkShoe, you can use the browser-only client, or you can try out the classic TalkShoe Pro Java client; however, for maximum fun, you should call in. For the web UI, just click the “TalkShoe Web” button on our profile page at 10 PM Sunday. To call in on regular phone or VOIP lines (take advantange of your free cellphone weekend minutes if you like): dial (724) 444-7444 and enter our talkcast ID, 45077 — during the call, you can request to talk by keying in *-8. Talk with you then!

Recording support for the talkcast is provided by Call Recorder from ecamm networks.

Join us for a spooky TUAW Talkcast tonight at 10 PM ET / 7 PM PT originally appeared on TUAW on Sun, 31 Oct 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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TUAW is giving away a gaggle of ghoulishly good gadgets over the next few days. The good part of the giveaways? You don’t need to wear a costume to win ’em.

Today’s entry in this week’s Trick or Treat with TUAW giveaway extravaganza is something that is both simple and classy, like that little black dress your girlfriend likes to wear. It’s the Sherwood + Meister Block22 iPad stand, and we’re giving one away.

Caleb Larsen is the chief designer at Sherwood + Meister, and he described the Block22 to us as “an iPad stand that reads more as a piece of furniture than a gadget.” Looking at the Block22 on my cherry wood office desk, I have to agree. It’s beautiful and functional.

Continue reading Trick or Treat with TUAW: Sherwood + Meister Block22 iPad stand

Trick or Treat with TUAW: Sherwood + Meister Block22 iPad stand originally appeared on TUAW on Sun, 31 Oct 2010 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It is a dark time for the smartphone market. Although the Blackberry has been destroyed, patent suits have driven handset makers from their hidden laboratories and pursued them across the galaxy.

Evading the dreaded Motorola patent suits, a pair of new lawsuits led by six Apple Multi-Touch and OS patents has established a new complaint for patent infringement on the remote ice world of The Western District of Wisconsin.

Steve Jobs, obsessed with suing Android handset makers, has dispatched thousands of patents into the far reaches of the US court system….

Continue reading Patent Wars, Episode V: Apple Strikes Back

Patent Wars, Episode V: Apple Strikes Back originally appeared on TUAW on Sun, 31 Oct 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The duck is amuck: the versatile & free multi-service Mac IM client Adium has reached a new milestone, version 1.4. The new version includes support for Twitter messaging, full IRC support, improved group chat services and bookmarks for persistent chats, an update to the underlying libpurple chat library, and many other tweaks and fixes. The new build requires Mac OS X 10.5.8 or newer.

Adium supports popular chat networks such as AIM/MobileMe, Google Talk (along with all other Jabber/XMPP-based chat services), MSN and Yahoo! Messenger; it also connects to Facebook chat and other services like QQ, Gadu-Gadu, Lotus Sametime and Novell Groupwise. No, it doesn’t do voice or video (or FaceTime), just sweet old text like our forefathers intended.

The Adium open source project keeps chugging along, despite a severe resource crunch and shortage of development hours. If you’re a savvy Mac programmer with an interest in the topic, the team would welcome your energy and contributions.

Adium 1.4 ships with support for Twitter, better group chat features originally appeared on TUAW on Sun, 31 Oct 2010 14:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Happy Halloween! Apple has its own Halloween round-up on the App Store here, and I’ve been rocking most of the same apps I covered a couple of years ago. We’ve also got a few apps, costumes and interactive books on our Halloween tag page. A search in iTunes for “Halloween” will yield hundreds of apps… of varying quality.

I highly recommend Angry Birds Halloween, in both the HD and regular versions, as they deliver all the fun of Angry Birds with new levels, a spooky background and jack-o-lanterns. Doodle Jump, another addictive game, has been decked out for Halloween. A quick look at the store will show you that a good number of other games and apps have received similar treatment for the holiday.

Halloween apps fall into a few categories: games with Halloween themes, soundboards, photo apps which add masks and other costumes to photos, eBooks, and a variety of novelty apps that could be labeled toys. We won’t go into many games, and I recommend using a soundboard app which allows you to record your own spooky sounds (as opposed to a once-a-year app), but if you’re looking for a fun app to manipulate photos for the little spooks I think Halloween ~ Postage from RogueSheep is quite excellent.

Read on for some more iPhone and iPad app suggestions. Have your own suggestions? Leave them in the comments!

Continue reading Halloween apps bring chills and thrills to iPhone and iPad

Halloween apps bring chills and thrills to iPhone and iPad originally appeared on TUAW on Sun, 31 Oct 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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As we reported earlier, Facebook is holding a mobile event next week, where much speculation is being made about whether or not we’ll all finally see an iPad version of the company’s official app. Until that happens, there’s still the terrific, unofficial Facebook iPad app Friendly, which has just undergone a major upgrade to version 3.0.

With Friendly’s update comes quite a few improvements and enhancements, including the ability to sign in to multiple accounts on launch or on the fly, uploading photos, an “enhanced browser,” and multiple bug fixes. The multiple account feature is an interesting one, as it makes the iPad a little more multi-user friendly in allowing different family members to sign in to the service on the same device. However, it doesn’t appear that each account can be easily locked out from others accessing it once they are signed in the first time, so if you have something you’d like to remain private, beware.

It’s probably unlikely any official app from Facebook will have a multi-user feature, so if that’s something you’d make good use of, paying the US$0.99 for Friendly might be the way to go.

iPad Facebook app Friendly updated with multiple account support originally appeared on TUAW on Sun, 31 Oct 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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For consumers, unless you jailbreak your iPhone, the only effective way to get apps onto it is via Apple’s own App Store. From the beginning of the App Store, Apple has offered an alternative method of distributing apps that is meant for use by businesses to their employees. Unfortunately, that approach is cumbersome. It requires setting up servers and internal “app stores” for managing who gets those apps and pulling them back from lost or stolen phones or employees who leave.

Ondeego has expanded its AppCentral distribution system from its original Blackberry and Java mobile roots, and it now supports iPhones. AppCentral is essentially a hosted enterprise app store service that allows businesses to create an account, then easily open a private iPhone app distribution channel.

For smaller companies or those with only a few apps, this can make a lot more sense than going through the effort of setting up and maintaining their own systems. AppCentral allows managers to see and control who gets which apps and disable them remotely if needed. Only businesses in the iPhone Developer Enterprise Program can use AppCentral, because the special security certificate provided by Apple is required. The AppCentral for iPhone program is currently open for beta testers. Read on to see a video describing the service.

Continue reading Enterprise iOS app distribution made easier by Ondeego

Enterprise iOS app distribution made easier by Ondeego originally appeared on TUAW on Sun, 31 Oct 2010 08:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The launch of iTunes 10 in September left a lot users disappointed for several reasons. In addition to the lack of a complete rewrite that many people were hoping for, the highly underwhelming Ping social network was added, and the subsequent 10.0.1 update replaced the former Genius sidebar content with Ping.

Thankfully, despite Apple’s insistence on tightly controlling the user experience (which is generally a good thing), the company has been willing to reverse course from time to time to restore functionality or designs that users preferred. Users that miss the Genius sidebar content will be happy to learn that Apple has made server-side changes to iTunes (meaning no software update is required on your end) so that we now have Genius recommendations back in the iTunes sidebar.

The sidebar now combines the functionality of the Genius and Ping. Genius recommendations are always available, and if you use Ping your activity is also displayed. Recommendations now appear as soon as a song is selected, before it’s even played. It’s a step in the right direction; hopefully next year we’ll finally get the ground up re-write that iTunes so desperately needs.

iTunes restores Genius sidebar originally appeared on TUAW on Sun, 31 Oct 2010 07:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Based on the latest comments from VLC media player lead developer Rémi Denis-Courmont, it seems likely that the iOS version of the app probably won’t be available much longer. Denis-Courmont claims that Apple is violating the GNU public license (GPL) under which VLC is released by applying DRM to it.

While VLC is available free of charge for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on the App Store, it’s not possible to copy it from one device to another. Every copy of an iOS app is tied to a specific user account when it is downloaded, regardless of whether you pay for it or not. The GPL requires that any software using that license and any derivative works be able to be freely copied and distributed.

Apparently the developers that created the iOS version of VLC made a mistake in submitting the app, because the GPL is incompatible with Apple’s App Store rules. Earlier this year, an iOS version of the game GNU Go was removed from the store because of the GPL incompatibility. It’s a shame that VLC will be going away, because it is one of the best media players available on the App Store, with support for virtually every conceivable audio and video codec. On the bright side, the end of VLC for iOS may be good news for those waiting for an Android version as resources are redirected.

[via iLounge]

Grab your iOS version of VLC now… it may be gone soon originally appeared on TUAW on Sun, 31 Oct 2010 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Colocation facilities are typically stuffed full of various rack-mounted servers running all manner of websites and other tasks with fat pipe connections to internet backbones. One company, MacMiniColo, offers colocation services and is dedicated to hosting Mac mini servers. Long before Apple introduced the dedicated Mac mini server a year ago, MacMiniColo has been setting up all flavors of the headless Mac for customers.

The Mini makes an excellent server thanks to its compact dimensions, low power consumption, good reliability and reasonable power. Servers don’t generally need a lot of inputs and outputs, just a fast ethernet connection — and the Mini server comes with a gigabit port.

MacMiniColo currently has a promotional deal available that expires tonight, at 12 AM Pacific Time (so if you want to take advantage of the offer, head to MacMiniColo’s site now). You can get six months of colocation service for your Mini for just US$10 a month with 200 GB per month of bandwidth. After the first six months, pricing reverts to one of the regular plans that start at $35 per month. That should be enough time to try it out and see if the company can meet your needs. TUAW’s Steve Sande used MacMiniColo for some time. You can either send in your existing Mini to the data center in Las Vegas or have MacMiniColo provide one for your needs.

MacMiniColo will host your Mac Mini server for just $10/month for 6 months originally appeared on TUAW on Sun, 31 Oct 2010 06:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple Store offline… and back up with no changes originally appeared on TUAW on Sun, 31 Oct 2010 01:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Growing up, election night in my house was always how I imagined the Super Bowl to be for most people. We huddled around the TV and excitedly watched the incoming results with hope and trepidation. But of course election night just isn’t a silly game, and the final “score” literally affects hundreds of millions of people, sometimes for decades.

As someone who hasn’t owned a TV in four years, I was pleased to see that ABC News has updated their app to provide a fully interactive electorate map. The map shows you the normal color-coded blue and red states for the Senate and how their political makeup stands now. It also shows you the color-coded districts for the House. But what’s coolest about this map is its interactivity.

First, you can tap the “results” tab and, starting at 7 PM Tuesday night, an empty House and Senate map will start filling with colors based on who’s won in that state or district. But the interactivity goes further. ABC has built in a “What If?” game that lets you play out different scenarios of the final outcomes for the House and Senate races if certain candidates win. For Senate races, for example, simply tap a state and a pop-up will appear with all the candidates running. Tap the name of the person you think will win, and the electorate map will change colors for that state. The bar chart for the total number of seats needed for a majority will also change based on your predictions.

ABC News for iPad is a free download.

Track election night on your iPad with the ABC News app originally appeared on TUAW on Sat, 30 Oct 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sonos music systems are showing up in a lot of homes. They put music into any room of your house without hassle or wires. There are other solutions, including a good one from Apple, but the Sonos system is elegant and it “just works.”

Now Sonos has added a wireless dock. Plug it into the wall, put your iPhone or iPod on it, and your device charges. You’ll then have audio books, music, and podcasts broadcast to every room of your house that has a Sonos equipped entertainment system.

Even better, you can control your iPhone or iPod from your usual Sonos controllers, including the free iPad and iPhone apps.

Installation was easy. Using the Sonos app on my iPad I added a new device. I was instructed to press the little button on the back of the dock; within seconds my iPhone appeared on the source list, and I could play music or assign the audio to one room or any combination of rooms. It’s that easy.

I was thinking how great it would be for out of town guests. I have a Sonos system in the guestroom — all they need to do is plunk down their iPhone or iPod, and all their content is available.

Sonos has always been very Apple friendly, and this new wireless dock makes it even more so. The device sells for US$119, but when it was announced I thought it might cost more. Sonos owners who have iPods, iPhones or iPod touches should take a look at this product.

Sonos adds slick wireless dock for iPods and iPhones originally appeared on TUAW on Sat, 30 Oct 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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