Category: I-phone

You wake up to the sound of a buzzing alarm clock and hit the snooze for a few more minutes of sleep before sitting up and checking out the day’s weather. Then in the evening you navigate back to your bed in the dark with a light from your pocket before curling up with a good book to ease you into a dreamy state. As your spouse falls asleep and begins to snore a sound is emitted that causes him/her to stir and move into a position where the snoring ceases. The next morning you rise feeling refreshed and log your sleep hours, viewing your statistics for the week.

The narrative above might conjure up a visual image of a nightstand cluttered with various household objects and electronics, but the 25 apps below can make this story a reality through the use of only one device: your iPhone!

Alarm Clocks

Alarm Clock 4

Sleep and wake up with your favorite music. Alarm Clock 4 combines all functions in one application! Multiple themes, editable functions and of course a flashlight!

Price: $0.99

Alarm!

“Alarm! is a beautiful alarm clock with useful features. You can set alarms, organize them and even share with other Alarm! users.”

Price: Free

Alarm Clock Free

“Alarm Clock Free turns your iPhone or iPod touch into a beautiful digital clock and alarm clock for free! ”

Price: Free

Radio Alarm – MP3/Radio/Nature Sound Alarm + Sleep Timer

“Using Radio Alarm, you can start your day feeling good by waking up to the sound of your favorite music (iPod MP3), radio channel, or nature.”

Price: Free

All-in-1 Clock – Alarm Weather Talking Time Clock

“Your dream all-in-1 clock now available with realtime detailed local area weather and talking time.”

Price: $0.99

iHome+Sleep

“At first glance, iHome+Sleep is a full screen clock that includes weather, iPod controls, and your choice of custom photo backgrounds. But there’s much more… iHome+Sleep allows users to define multiple sets of bedtime and wakeup settings such as alarms, wake & sleep music, social updates, personal reminders, and much more. Users can manage virtually any sleep lifestyle, which can be empowering, and fun.”

Price: Free

Sleep Phase wakeup clock

“An alarm clock that monitors and analyzes your sleep cycle and wakes you up in the lightest sleep phase, making you feel rested and relaxed. This is done by utilizing your devices microphone or accelerometer to sense your subtle movements when you are asleep.”

Price: $0.99

Reading

Stanza

“Read books on your iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad! Lexcycle Stanza brings the digital book revolution to your pocket with a reading interface that is unrivaled in its clarity and ease of use. With over 4 million downloads around the world, Stanza has become an iPhone phenomenon, and is featured as one of the top three Apple favorites in their “App Store Turns 1″ celebration.”

Price: Free

Kindle

“The Kindle app is optimized for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch, providing users the ability to read Kindle books using a beautiful, easy-to-use interface. You can discover and read over 630,000* books in the Kindle Store, including the latest best sellers and new releases.”

Price: Free

Barnes & Noble NOOK for iPhone

“Our app offers unique, unbeatable features, including our exclusive LendMe technology that lets you share eBooks with friends; our safe and secure eBooks Lifetime Library keeps your eBooks accessible anytime, anywhere no matter what device you own; our vast eBookstore includes free books as well as the ability to sample any eBook free at anytime.”

Price: Free

iBooks

“iBooks is an amazing way to download and read books. iBooks includes the iBookstore, where you can download the latest best-selling books or your favorite classics – day or night. Browse your library on a beautiful bookshelf, tap a book to open it, flip through pages with a swipe or a tap, and bookmark or add notes to your favorite passages.”

Price: Free

A Story Before Bed – Personalized Children’s Picture Books

“A Story Before Bed lets parents, grandparents, and anyone with a special child in their lives record audio and video of themselves reading a children’s book into their webcam right in their web browser. Children can watch these recordings anytime they like.”

Price: Free

Classics

“Escape into some of the greatest stories ever written. Experience digital reading in a way that is so natural, and so obvious, it just feels right. It begins with a collection of over a dozen hand-picked, literary masterpieces…”

Price: $2.99

SleepAid – Soundscapes

“SleepAid helps you sleep. Mask unwanted sounds in your environment with a selection of relaxing, neutral audio tracks. Continuous sound without melody or lyrics promotes better sleeping conditions.”

Price: $1.99

Sound Machines

Easy Relax Ultimate

” Unlike other ambient noise applications, Easy Relax takes full advantage of the sound power of iPhone with which you can make your own relax themes by mixing background music with several ambient noises and configure volume level, interval, random factor, playback speed independently.”

Price: $2.99

Flashlights

Flashlight

“Flashlight uses the LED light on iPhone 4 and fills your screen with bright white light to illuminate your world when you find yourself in a dark spot or concert. Includes fully customizable special effects including: Strobe Light, Trippy, S.O.S., Yin-Yang, Holiday Lights and more!”

Price: Free

Brightest Flashlight Pro

“Brightest Flashlight Pro is a great flashlight that offers you the brightest flashlight settings for your iPhone, iPhone 4 LED, iPod and iPad! Very Handy for night time illumination. Use Brightest Flashlight Pro not only as a Flashlight, but as a night light and reading lamp as well!”

Price: $0.99

iHandy Flashlight Pro

“iHandy Flashlight is more than just a convenient flashlight. It’s actually your ultimate lighting gadget that serves as numerous purposes.”

Price: $0.99

Weather

The Weather Channel

“The Weather Channel takes your weather experience to the next level with full screen maps, pollen forecasts, and more.”

Price: Free

Outside – Visual Weather Forecast

“Outside is a visual weather forecast with custom push notifications like you’ve never seen before. Outside combines current weather and local forecasts with custom push notifications. Look out the window and see what the weather is like through stunning visuals. Swipe the days to see the forecasts, or setup and receive alerts when the weather is just right.”

Price: $2.99

PocketWeather – #1 Weather App

“Get worldwide weather reports directly to your iPhone/iPod Touch anytime! PocketWeather is the most powerful weather tracking solution for iPhone/iPod Touch, featuring a robust weather engine wrapped with a stylish, simple to use user interface.”

Price: $2.99

Emo Weather

“Listen to music about relationships and breakups? Straight jet black hair covering at least one eye? Sensitive and misunderstood? Do any of these characteristics describe you or someone you know? Then this app is for you!”

Price: $0.99

The Weather

“The Weather lets you do what you’ve always wanted to with your weather app – see things your way. Want the barometric pressure RIGHT NEXT TO the the temperature? Fine with us. With The Weather, that choice is yours to make. Customization means you can put whatever bit of data wherever you want on the page.”

Price: $0.99

WeatherBug Elite

“WeatherBug Elite is the premier source for truly live, local weather – providing users access to the largest network of professional weather stations in the US and thousands of locations around the world.”

Price: $0.99

Miscellaneous

myZeo (Sleep Viewer)

“The Zeo Personal Sleep Coach is the first science-based product and service that tracks your sleep data and helps you improve it (like Nike+ or RunKeeper for your sleep). myZeo (Sleep Viewer) is an app to help you visualize your progress.”

Price: Free

Snore Stopper

“Does your spouse’s snoring wake you up every night? With this application, that’s history! This program detects snoring (you can adjust the sensitivity) and stops it by emitting a sound that disturbs the snorer in his sleep.”

Price: $0.99

What’s On Your Night Stand?

I hope these twenty-five apps have provided you with a few extra utilities for your nightstand. Leave a comment below and let us know what apps you use as your start or end your day!

Before I get rolling here, let me warn you — I’m not a frequent user of iTunes. I don’t spend all of my time purchasing new music, videos, and movies, nor do I obsess over creating playlists to share with my friends.

However, I do use it often enough that after firing up iTunes 10 last night, I immediately found some things I wasn’t fond of and some other items I quickly loved. Am I going to lose sleep over the things I don’t like? Nope. But I hope that it gets TUAW readers thinking about what they like and dislike about the new iteration of iTunes.

Dislikes:

1. What’s with the close / minimize / maximize buttons being vertical in the top “toolbar” of iTunes 10 (see example at right)? As I stated to my cohorts here at TUAW this morning, doesn’t that fly in the face of 10 years of experience with OS X and even violate Apple’s Human Interface Guidlines? Fortunately, there’s relief. A tweet from @rudyrichter showed how to fix this — pop into Terminal and type or paste in “defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -1”, press Return, relaunch iTunes and life is back to normal.
2. I miss the colorful icons in the sidebar. There used to be color in the icons for Library, Store, and Shared Items. What happened to the color? It looks so … drab over there now. If anyone can come up with a defaults command to bring the colors back, I’ll give ’em a nickel. Hey, they also removed color icons in the preferences. I want my color back! Everything is so grey and boring. Perhaps that’s Apple’s way of saying “focus on the content we’re trying to sell you, not the application.”

TUAWFive dislikes plus five likes equals iTunes 10 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 02 Sep 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Last month, Google released Priority Inbox, a system that learns which messages are the most important to you and highlights them automatically over time. It’s in beta right now and Google is slowly turning it on for its users. If you’re tired of waiting, or if you use Apple’s Mail and not Gmail, you’ll appreciate this setup from Ben Brooks.

Ben explains how a combination of rules acts as his “priority inbox” for Mail. He’s got some basic rules in place, like one that identifies messages from Apple and one that files backups away. Others are more clever.

For instance, he’s written one that first notices if his work address is in the CC field, and then checks if his name appears in the message body. If not, it’s highlighted red and stored away. That way, it’s marked “less important” in Priority Inbox terms.

Conversely, another rule searches for messages from people on a pre-defined “Important” list and flags them. Taken individually the rules are clever but not amazing. Combined, however, they make for an effective system. Go and read the whole post.

[Via Shawn Blanc]

TUAWSet up your own Priority Inbox with Apple’s Mail originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If I had to make a list of the top ten features I thought would be included in the iOS 4.1 update, HDR photography would not have been on it. HDR really came out of the blue, and one developer told me he was ‘shocked’ to hear that the feature was included in the next iPhone update.

Let’s back up a minute. HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography is a method where pictures are taken at different exposures and combined into one image. Since the iPhone and most monitors can’t really display the full light to dark range of the image, the HDR software tone maps the picture, so you see details in the shadows and don’t blow out the highlights, such as a bright sky. HDR images are controversial. Some people hate them, and think it produces garish pictures. Others love the flexibility to shoot pictures in challenging lighting conditions.

I like to use HDR at times when shooting landscapes, and recently documented a photo trek where I was able to use HDR apps on the iPhone.

TUAWiOS 4.1 with HDR built-in comes as a shock to HDR app developers originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple has jumped into the social media pool with both feet by introducing Ping to iTunes 10. Since this is brand-new, we’ll show you how to set it up and start pinging your friends. Whatever that means.

After installing iTunes 10, you’ll see the Ping button. Click it to enter your Apple ID and begin the process of creating your profile. It’ll pull the information stored on the account, like name and address, but fortunately you can edit it. You can add a photo to represent yourself as well. There are many PhotoBooth-style filters available, so have fun playing around.

Note that your photo won’t go live until Apple approves it. Mine took a good 20 minutes to show up, and others have said the same thing. Just be patient, it’ll get there.

Click below to read more.

TUAWiTunes 101: How to set up Ping originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 02 Sep 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Billboard has announced that it will be giving awards out for iOS music apps (of all things). At the Music App Summit on October 5th, Billboard will choose winning iOS apps in six different categories, from Best Artist App and Best Music Creation App to Best Branded Music App. You can find the full list of nominees after the break, and there are some recognizable names on there, including a Phish touring app, TUAW favorite I am T-Pain, and the now Disney-owned Tap Tap Revenge.

Winners will be announced at the summit, and they will be selected by a panel of judges that includes (not kidding about this) MC Hammer and a bunch of CEOs and marketing folks. It seems silly (and let’s face it… it is), but Billboard is a big deal in the music industry, and this means that the dinosaur-like recording giants are at least starting to notice the effect that apps have on artist profiles. Plus, it’s good to see LaDiDa get a little more attention — I liked that one.

TUAWBillboard nominates music app awards originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 02 Sep 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you have a secret love affair with shoulder padded t-shirts (that you wear around the house when no one’s looking), and you instinctively roll up your sleeves when you put on your favourite blazer jacket (and don’t get why people look at you funny), then here’s an app for you.

Back in June Akai Professional released SynthStation for the iPhone / iPod touch, and we got excited. Very excited. Why? Because we love synths, especially when they are the old school type (cue Terminator soundtrack). And it just so happens to be that Akai has got a rather large name for itself when it comes to synths, especially the old school type. So we decided to take a closer look. You know, any opportunity to lay down some ominous beats over a sea of warm pulsating analog synth.

SynthStation is an all-in-one mobile music creation setup. It comprises of three virtual analog synths sonically tailored for melodies, chords and bass lines respectively. To go with your texture, there’s a comprehensive and customizable drum kit, too. Add some awesome sounding synth effects, a sequencer, on the fly input and tweaking, a mixer to pull it all together and you’ve got yourself a package that Thom Yorke may even appreciate for his next solo project.

TUAWCount The Beats: Akai brings the analog synth to your iPhone, and more originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 02 Sep 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A few months ago, Twitter announced that they had acquired Tweetie and the web (I refuse to use the word “blogosphere” because it is a stupid word) exploded with predictions that they had effectively killed off the market for 3rd party Twitter applications by offering a free alternative.

With the release of Twitter as a universal app that now includes iPad support (read the official announcement here) I feel confident that the reports of the death of 3rd party Twitter applications have been greatly exaggerated.

The UI for Twitter for iPad is, without question, unlike any other Twitter application that we’ve seen. Opinions around the TUAW offices differ on whether this difference is “awesome” or “an abomination.” I definitely range towards the latter end of the scale, and judging by most of the comments of people that I follow on Twitter, the initial reaction is definitely one of “too busy” and “over designed.”

This is in sharp contrast to Twitterrific, which just released a major update for the iPad and iPhone where the Iconfactory made dramatic simplifications to the app, while retaining the most important features for the most users. (Craig Hockenberry talked about those changes here.)

TUAWOfficial Twitter app updated for iPad originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 02 Sep 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You saw them in the keynote today, now watch them again in the privacy of your own home: the new iPod touch and iPod nano television ads are live on Apple.com and on Apple’s YouTube channel. “All kinds of fun,” indeed.

(If you’re a fan of NBC’s Chuck, like some of us are, you may appreciate that Cake’s Short Skirt/Long Jacket — the show’s theme song — is featured in the new nano ad.)

[via MacRumors]

TUAWNew iPod commercials now on Apple.com and YouTube originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 01 Sep 2010 21:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Have you been waiting all day for iTunes 10 to go live? It finally has. Although the download page remains a little spotty, this direct link seems to work fine for downloading. We’re installing our version right now and will update with fun iTunes facts as we discover them.

Happy Pinging, everyone!

Update: Windows link to supplement the OS X one above. And an x64 link as well. (Thank you to everyone pitching in in the comments!)

Update: See our gallery of installation and setup screenshots.

p.s. Hey, we’re on Ping! Come share our awful musical tastes (Erica Sadun, Steven Sande, Victor Agreda, Dave Caolo, etc)! And let us share yours!

TUAWiTunes 10. It lives originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 01 Sep 2010 21:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sometimes you roll along, having a pretty good day… and sometimes, you just want a giant worm to rise up out of the ground and destroy everything. Super Mega Worm is for that second type of day. (You’ll have to find something else for the first — Doodle Jump, perhaps?) It’s a game where you control a gigantic worm on a 2D field. You use a slider (or the accelerometer) to direct it through the soil and up onto the surface of the Earth, where puny little humans await their inevitable destruction. The game is funny in a morbid way; you end up cheering for the little worm as it grows (and learns new abilities) over time, and eventually, you’ll find yourself reveling in the destruction of the human race.

Quality pixelated graphics and excellent sounds help immersion a lot, and the control scheme is surprisingly fitting for the kind of movement that the worm does. There’s even a little mini-game in jumping off of various vehicles into the atmosphere and exploring the game field in both directions. Super Mega Worm isn’t really a title for the faint of heart; even though the graphics are pretty retro, things get gory fast. But if you’ve ever found yourself laughing at or cheering for the monster in a horror movie, Super Mega Worm will probably dig its way into your free time. The game is US$2.99 on the App Store right now.

TUAWTUAW’s Daily App: Super Mega Worm originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 02 Sep 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The public servants at the FCC are earning their keep today, favoring us with several PDFs full of lovely, detailed images of both the internal and external design of the soon-to-ship iPod touch.

Check out the gallery below for several of the pictures, and consider how much nicer it will be when you actually have the new hotness in hand.

[via Engadget, their video hands-on of the new iPod is after the break]

TUAWFCC dissects the new iPod touch originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 01 Sep 2010 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Booyah has released an iPhone and iPod touch version of its Facebook game, InCrowd, and it’s now available on the App Store. The app, like the very popular MyTown, uses location check-ins to create a game around social networking. But unlike MyTown, this app was originally released as a Facebook game. Booyah originally started InCrowd as its first Facebook venture, but it’s now bringing the game back to the iPhone, where it’s presumably more comfortable at development. But the Facebook and iPhone versions work together (in fact, you need a Facebook account to play it), so check-ins on either platform can be seen in the app.

As for the game itself, it’s exactly the kind of thing that’s very popular among the huge tween audience for Facebook games — there’s a cartoonish avatar that can interact with friends socially, and checking-in to certain places earns the avatars popularity and status. There’s a microtransaction element as well — interacting uses energy, and if you don’t want to wait for a refresh, you can spend 99 cents to get more. Standard social gaming stuff, although Booyah is pretty good at putting it together by now.

Booyah remains a company to watch in the social gaming space — it doesn’t seem to have had quite the success it wanted on Facebook, but the company is flexible enough to switch a game like this over to Apple’s platform without skipping a beat. We’ll have to wait and see whether or not the free app gains MyTown’s level of adoption, however.

TUAWBooyah releases InCrowd for iPhone and iPod touch originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 01 Sep 2010 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In case you’re just getting off of work, just waking up, or your plane just landed after a 15-hour flight, here’s all of today’s Apple news condensed into one quick post:

• Steve Jobs looked good at today’s event, which was attended by Steve Wozniak. Steve J. did a nice shout-out to his “partner in crime” at the beginning of the presentation.
• Jobs announced that there are now 300 Apple Retail Stores in 10 countries, with new stores opening in Spain soon. The Apple Stores get more than 1 million visitors combined on some days — the primary reason why the company dropped their presence at Macworld Expo.
• Other stats — 120,000,000 iOS devices, 230,000 new iOS activations per day (not including updates), 6.5 billion downloads from the App Store, 250,000 apps on the App Store.
• iOS 4.1 will be out next week, featuring fixes for the proximity sensor, Bluetooth, and iPhone 3G issues. There will also be support for HDR (High Dynamic Range) photos, the ability to upload HD video to other devices (Apple TV) over WiFi (this is known as AirPlay), 99¢ TV show rentals, and GameCenter. The latter will bring a new level of interactive gaming to the platform.
• In November, we’ll see iOS 4.2 for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. This adds printing support, AirPlay, multi-tasking, and folders (among other features) to the iPad.

TUAWA roundup of today’s Apple news originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 01 Sep 2010 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Wow! We have a lot to talk about today on TUAW TV Live. There’s so much to talk about that two of us are going to be chatting it up on the show this afternoon. Mike Rose is joining me to talk about the new iPods, the updates to iTunes, Ping, and that new Apple TV. As usual, you can join in on the discussion — we’d love to see how you feel about the new product lineup for fall.

Now it’s time to get on with the show! To join in from your Mac or PC, just go to the next page by clicking the link at the bottom of this post, and you’ll find a live stream viewer and a chat tool. The chat tool allows you to join in on the fun by asking questions or making comments.

If you’re driving somewhere and would like to watch TUAW TV Live while you’re stuck in traffic, please don’t — keep your eyes on the road! However, if someone else is doing the driving, you can watch the show on your iPhone by downloading the free Ustream Viewing Application.

iPad users haven’t been forgotten, either, as you can tune in to TUAW TV Live on your iPad! That link will send you to a non-Flash page, although you won’t have access to our chat tool.

TUAWTUAW TV Live: The Apple event aftershow with Steve and Mike originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 01 Sep 2010 16:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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