Category: Tutorials

Dear Aunt TUAW,

Why do all iPhone alarm clock apps have to simulate an old and unattractive 7-segment display? Or the old, cheap, unattractive flip-clock display? I understand the gee-wiz factor of emulating these classic displays, but aren’t we way past that point? I would love to see a simple, attractive and reliable alarm clock app for the iPhone without 7-segment or flip displays. Does such an app exist?

Thank you!

Your loving nephew,

Pete L.

My Darling Pete,

Auntie is right there with you on alarm clocks. Auntie is so over mornings. Just let her sleep in or bring the caffeine right to her, along with roses and a tasteful continental breakfast, as she rises to a well-designed iDevice app’s summons.

After receiving your letter, Auntie set out on a hunt for beautiful clocks. Thanks to many of her electronic nephews and nieces, she tracked down the following suggestions that offer alternatives to the humdrum.

Emerald Observatory (US$0.99) offers a stunning clock that’s full of astronomical information without sacrificing a clock or a daily alarm. Observatory was the single-most recommended application in Auntie’s search. The presentation includes the phase of the moon, the current time, sunrise and sunset times and much more.

Night Stand HD ($1.99) offers some handsome analog displays as well as those 7-segment and flip presentations you’re looking to skip.

Clockus ($0.99) puts a mechanical spin on 7-segment output with elements that flip and adjust to show the time.

Art Clock Van Gogh (free) provides a beautiful take on waking up. It has a criminally small audience (only nine ratings to date), and offers over 50 impressionist backgrounds.

Unfortunately, the highly recommended Pencil Clock from Paz Interactive seems to have disappeared from the store — but the screen shots that Auntie has been able to track down show that it really had a fabulous and non-traditional take on time.

Hopefully one of these apps will strike your fancy and help you transition away from the boring 7-segment/flip-clock run-of-the-mill alarm apps.

Love & hugs,

Auntie T.

Thanks to gonzopancho, NienorGT, pTracker, josh_m, Consumer_NeXT, mssres, rosskimes, zyafa, LucasTizma, jeffmc, and everyone else who tweeted suggestions…

Dear Aunt TUAW: Help me find a better alarm originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 21 Jun 2011 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ngmoco has picked up former EA developer Ben Cousins, the man behind much of that company’s free-to-play services at the EAsy division. He will establish a new studio under ngmoco called ngmoco Sweden, which will create games and content using ngmoco’s (and parent company DeNA’s) services and platforms.

At EA, Cousins was instrumental in setting up the free-to-play shooter Battlefield Heroes, as well as the more hardcore spinoff, Battlefield Play4Free, so it’s likely that in his new position at EA, he’ll be heading up some free-to-play projects more tailored to a traditional gaming audience than ngmoco’s current social and casual initiatives. Cousins also used to work at DICE, the company behind EA’s Battlefield series, which is also based in Sweden, so there could be a few employees from that developer following him across to the new division at ngmoco.

All in all, this is good news for iOS players and fans of ngmoco’s games in general. I can’t wait to see what titles come out of ngmoco Sweden first.

[via Joystiq]

Ngmoco hires Ben Cousins, creates Ngmoco Sweden originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 21 Jun 2011 17:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ages ago, we posted about LogMeIn’s new file management and transfer capability. It wasn’t until this weekend that it sunk in how utterly brilliant this feature is.

Look at me. I’m a parent to a teenager. (Yes, there’s proof.) When visiting Fort Collins over the weekend, disaster struck. I’d copied over the new “9 Lives of Chloe Whatsherface” to the iPad but I’d forgotten to transfer that all-essential “Teen Wolf“.

Horrors.

LogMeIn to the rescue. With its remote disk features, it gave me total access to my home computer including the Teen Wolf episode that my EyeTV 250 had recorded for us, which I easily copied to the iPad.

You can browse your entire computer. In my case that included the external drive I use for EyeTV recordings. Just select the file you need and tell LogMeIn where to transfer it to. There’s a complete local file file hierarchy you can use within the application and it works far better than it sounds.

Once there, iOS 4’s app-to-app document sharing let me move it over to VLC (yes, I am lucky enough to have downloaded it before bad things happened) so my child could revel in, well, whatever there is to revel in with regards to Teen Wolf.

LogMeIn Ignition for iPad retails at a hefty thirty bucks, which may put you off from buying it. But if you can swing the cash, between its excellent “give me my home computer on my iPad” features and now its file transfer update, it can really deliver some power-hitting performance.

As for the Cat-versus-Dog smackdown? My teenager far preferred Chloe, even with her risible fake claws[1].

Update: Commenters ask: “Why didn’t you use Air Video”. I adore Air Video and recommend it highly. We needed her to watch in the car while on the go, on a Wi-Fi only iPad. For the record, as a quick google will show, I have been using LogMeIn on my iPad for well over a year.

TUAW is commonly provided with not-for-resale licenses or promo codes to permit product evaluations and reviews. For more details, see our policy page. Promo code requests are not guarantees of reviews.

[1] It’s never too early to start SAT prep

LogMeIn goes disk — and saves my weekend originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 21 Jun 2011 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Final Cut Pro X (US$299) has only been available in the Mac App Store for a few hours, but that’s not keeping FCP fans from making amazing videos that showcase its features and capabilities.

As you’ll see in this 10-minute video from Matt Pearce, the new app borrows heavily from the UI of iMovie, but retains the power that Final Cut Pro is known for. In the video, Matt discusses some downloads that are available to add music clips and other features to FCPX. For your downloading pleasure, we present them to you:

Final Cut Pro X Content – over 1300 rights-free sound effects and audio effect presets

Motion 5 Content – including Motion templates, Library content, and sample media

ProApps QuickTime Codecs – recommended for all FCPX users, providing 8 different codecs

Update: One of our commenters pointed out the following information listed on the Mac App Store page for Final Cut Pro X — it can burn Blu-ray discs.

[via MacStories]

Final Cut Pro X hands-on video (Updated) originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 21 Jun 2011 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Trawling through and editing code can be loveless task. TextWrangler is a free app from the Mac App Store that could make it just a little bit more bearable.

Brought to you by Bare Bones Software, the folks behind Yojimbo and the incredibly powerful BBEdit, the free TextWrangler is pretty intuitive and feature rich. Starting out as BBEdit lite, TextWrangler is a fully fledged editor in its own right. You’ve got pattern matching, full search and replace, syntax highlighting for quite a few source code languages, code folding, which compresses the code down to a more manageable length, and many other text manipulation and batch processing features.

The interface is pretty simple to navigate with most needed tools available via an icon or keyboard shortcut, plus there is some decent text color-coding that makes reading code a little easier. You can open and save over FTP and SFTP, streamlining HTML authoring. TextWrangler even has support for both AppleScript and Mac OS X Unix scripting, making batch processing easy.

Whether you’re looking for a decent editor for HTML, CSS, XML or anything else, TextWrangler is a great free starting point. If you’re just looking for an editor for writing plaintext files, a replacement for TextEdit, or modifying XML, .plist files or something similar, then TextWrangler is more than up to the job.

TextWrangler is available for free in a slightly limited form from the Mac App Store and in its full glory from the Bare Bones Software website and will work on Mac OS X 10.5 and up.

Continue reading TUAW’s Daily Mac App: TextWrangler

TUAW’s Daily Mac App: TextWrangler originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 21 Jun 2011 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Neil Ticktin (Editor-in-Chief, MacTech Magazine and MacNews) interviews Steven Echtman of HearPlanet at WWDC 2011. HearPlanet offers an intriguing service: a location-based audio tour guide app. Available for iOS and Android, HearPlanet partners up with businesses and individuals to publish audio guides for locations and has optional coupon offers and informational links (like calling a location, or visiting a website). We covered HearPlanet a while back.

TUAW and MacTech Magazine teamed up to speak to developers at WWDC 2011 about the keynote and how Apple’s new technologies will help them and their customers. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll bring you those videos here, at MacTech.com and at MacNews.com. Also, check out the free trial subscription offer for MacTech Magazine here.

WWDC Interview: HearPlanet originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 21 Jun 2011 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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One of my major gripes while traveling is the lack of available wall sockets in hotels, as I often have two or three devices while my wife brings her iPhone and iPad. To help keep us from fighting over where to plug in our gadgets, Aluratek is now shipping the Mini Surge Dual USB Charging Station (US$19.99).

Design

What’s so great about this little white box? In one small package it offers two USB charging ports and three grounded AC outlets (American-style plugs), all while providing 612 Joules of power surge protection.

The prongs on the plug on the back of the Mini Surge fold flat for travel, keeping them from damage in transit and from scratching any of your gizmos. Unlike some portable power solutions I’ve tried before, the prongs on the Mini Surge lock into place so you know they’re going to stay extended when plugging the device into a socket.

The Mini Surge is designed to handle up to 1800 Watts of power at a current of 15 Amps. If you’re planning on plugging in a lot of “big equipment,” ensure that you won’t exceed that limit. Most portable electronics won’t have a problem.

Using the Mini Surge Dual USB Charging Station

Fortunately, I have a lot of stuff that I need to charge up and keep powered, so I have the perfect setup for trying this out. I plugged an iPhone 4 (with a cable to charge up a Mophie Juice Pack Air) and an iPad into the USB ports, and my MacBook Air, Apple Battery Charger, and an iPad 2 with charging brick into the AC outlets.

I’m not sure of the total power load on the Mini Surge as a result, but the device didn’t get warm at all. There’s a green LED to let you know that the surge protection is working — if you are hit with a surge the light will go out if the protection is no longer sufficient to keep your gadgets safe.

I love the fact, even with five devices connected, I still had an empty socket on my wall.

Conclusion

There are similar solutions available from other brand-name vendors. Belkin’s Mini Surge Protector with USB Charger (US$24.99) also has three AC outlets and two USB ports. While the prongs on the plug don’t fold down as they do on the Aluratek Mini Surge, the Belkin device does rotate through 360° so that you can actually fit two of them on one standard two-socket outlet — one pointing up, one pointing down, or each pointing an opposite direction sideways.

For a few years, I’ve had a Kensington Portable Power Outlet ($24.99). It also has three AC outlets, two USB ports, and surge protection, but has the added flexibility of a 17″ flat power cord that means it can also be a short extension cable.

In terms of price and size, the Aluratek Mini Surge Dual USB Charging Station really has the edge. I have a personal mission to keep reducing the amount of bulk carried on my travels, and this is an attractive and lightweight way to keep all of my devices powered up without carrying too many adapters.

Aluratek Mini Surge Dual USB Charging Station: Pocket-sized power package originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 21 Jun 2011 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We spoke to Nilay Patel of Selligy at WWDC, and he was kind enough to show us Meeting Spot, an app for visitors in San Francisco attending events near Moscone Center. Selligy’s backend technology sounds promising, as it goes beyond mere location-based data or simple keyword matches, and tries to bring you better information. In essence, they want you to get recommendations as though you had a resident there telling you all the cool, somewhat hidden places to check out. In practice the app worked reasonably well, perhaps better than Urbanspoon but not as thorough as Yelp (although you can see Yelp pages for venues). We’re looking forward to seeing Selligy’s tech expand beyond niche apps like this one. Check out the demo below.

Video App Demo: Meeting Spot originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 21 Jun 2011 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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1Password 3.6 is out now with a plethora of changes. Most notably, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion is now supported while OS X 10.5 Leopard and PowerPC support has been dropped.

David Chartier writes that the number of 1Password customers who are using Leopard or a PowerPC-based Mac has fallen into the single digits. Dropping Leopard/PowerPC support enables developers to shrink 1Password’s size by 12 percent.

Chartier told TUAW that AgileBits looked into adopting Snow Leopard features such as Grand Central Dispatch in January 2010. The Snow Leopard features make it easier to do things under the hood, having a big impact on user-end experience, but essentially weren’t possible with Leopard.

AgileBits co-founders made the final decision to pull Leopard support after consulting with the rest of the team, including support personnel and developers. Chartier said that less than six percent of 1Password users are on Leopard.

Leopard users can download an older version of 1Password as needed.

Lion support, on the other hand, means that 1Password will be compatible with the OS from the day it’s available in the Mac App Store. The Safari extension also received an update to match it to the Chrome extension that debuted in November.

Other changes to 1Password include:

• Adds support for Firefox 5 while dropping support for Firefox 3.
• Adds support for Fluid
• Adds support for the upcoming Dropbox 1.2
• Changed the About page to reflect the company’s name change to AgileBits.
• Removed Camino extension
• Can use Amazon CloudFront as an alternate download location
• A number of other bug fixes and changes

1Password 3.6 for Mac requires OS X 10.6 or higher. A single-user license is US$39.99 and a family license is $59.99. Upgrade pricing varies, depending on the original date of purchase. A free trial is available.

Update: Chartier clarified that the redesigned Safari extension will only be seen in Lion. Snow Leopard users retain the current extension.

Update 2: Chartier let us know that the redesigned Safari extension will be available to Snow Leopard users once Apple releases Safari 5.1, which is currently in developer preview.

1Password 3.6 adds Lion support, drops Leopard/PowerPCs (Updated) originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 21 Jun 2011 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A survey by RBC Capital Markets states the obvious: a majority of iPhone owners will use Apple’s new free iCloud service when it launches this fall.

According to the survey, 76% of iPhone owners will use the free iCloud service and another 30% will use the US$25 yearly iTunes Match service. iMessage may be as popular as iCloud with 73% of iPhone users looking forward to using iOS-specific messaging service.

This high rate of adoption is not surprising. Who wouldn’t use a free service that is bundled into the OS and makes life easier by seamlessly syncing information across devices?

76% of iPhone users will adopt iCloud originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 21 Jun 2011 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Firefox 5 has landed and is now available to the public. The latest version of the popular web browser includes over 1,000 improvements, the most notable of which is a new Do Not Track privacy feature. This feature is found in the preferences and lets you easily opt-out of online tracking found on some websites.

Other new features include support for CSS animations, improved HTML 5 support and a new Add-ON SDK for web developers. The familiar Awesome bar sits at the top of the browser along with App tabs for common apps and Panorama tabs that can be organized into groups.

The Mac version of Firefox 5 is available here for download. Enjoy!

Firefox 5 for Mac is available, brings updated UI and new privacy feature originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 21 Jun 2011 12:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Kanex is well-known for their cable solutions; items like the Mini DisplayPort to HDMI cable are great for pumping video from Macs to HDTVs. Now the company has come out with the AirBlue Portable Bluetooth Music Receiver (US$49) — a small device that you plug into speakers, AV receivers, automobile AUX ports, and other common audio inputs — and then beam music to from your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad.

Kanex provided one of these small black disc-like receivers for testing purposes, and it’s a handy little device for getting rid of a few more cables in your life … although you will need a cable to connect it to your audio input.

Setup and pairing

Setup of the AirBlue is a piece of cake. For a cord-cutting solution, the AirBlue comes with a lot of little cables (below). One of these is a standard USB to Mini-USB cable that’s used to charge the unit. Charging the AirBlue will take about 4 – 5 hours, and once it is fully charged it will work for up to 20 hours.

When the Airblue is full of power, you can then take the little 2″ diameter flat black disc and plug one of the included cables into it — a standard 3.5 mm to 3.5 mm audio cable or a 3.5 mm to RL audio cable for speakers.

Pairing the unit is also quite easy. Dead center in the top of the disc is a small button with a built-in blue LED light. Pressing it for 6 seconds puts it into discovery mode, indicated by the LED flashing about 4 times per second. At this point I picked up my iPhone, went to Settings > General > Bluetooth, and saw the Kanex AirBlue show up in the list of Bluetooth devices (below). With a single tap, the iPhone and AirBlue were paired.

Using the AirBlue

I was particularly interested in using the AirBlue in my car, a Honda CR-V that has a center console between the driver and passenger seats that contains an auxiliary audio port. My mission? To blast tunes from the iPhone to the sound system in my car and also see what would happen if I tried to use it to listen to Navigon Mobile Navigator turn-by-turn instructions.

Rather than use the standard 3.5 mm to 3.5 mm audio cable that came with the AirBlue, I took the opportunity to try out an Ipevo Bendi ($14.95 for two). It’s a semi-rigid audio connector; think of a pipe cleaner (chenille stem for the non-smokers out there) with audio cables in it. I like the fact that the Bendi held the AirBlue up and off of the console.

Once plugged into the AUX port, I turned the AirBlue back on by holding down the power button for a few seconds, and then launched a Grateful Dead tune in the iPod app on the iPhone. With a tap on the AirPlay button, I was able to select the AirBlue as the recipient of the music (below) and had “Friend of the Devil” blasting from my car speakers.

Just to check the range of the Bluetooth connection — advertised as 30 feet — I opened the doors on the car, grabbed the iPhone, and started walking away from the car. I was well over 70 feet away before the signal actually dropped, and could easily stand 60 feet away and still hear the music playing.

Navigon Mobile Navigator is set up to work with the iPod app, reducing the volume level of music when the application decides it needs to talk to you. Sure enough, “Sugar Magnolia” faded away in volume as the Navigon app tried to give me directions to a nearby gas station, and then increased the volume back to normal once it was done. Very nice!

Conclusion

There are a lot of similar solutions available for Bluetooth connections to speakers. For example, the Belkin Bluetooth Music Receiver ($49.99) is about the same size and also comes with similar cables. Monoprice sells a generic receiver for $19.92, so if you’re looking for a device you can probably find one that’s less expensive. However, I’m happy with the Kanex AirBlue’s range, ease of setup, looks, and excellent low-noise sound quality. It’s tiny enough to go on trips with me and my iPhone, and will work great in rental cars.

The Kanex AirBlue is currently available for pre-order on the Kanex website.

Kanex AirBlue: A portable Bluetooth music solution originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 21 Jun 2011 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The iPhone 4 is now the most popular camera on Flickr, with a caveat. More on that in a minute. The smartphone’s 5-megapixel shooter has finally surpassed the Nikon D90 as the top camera on the photo hosting and sharing service. It’s been a slow and steady rise for the iPhone 4 since its debut in June 2010. The cameraphone now sits above the powerhouse D90, the Canon EOS 5D Mark II, Canon EOS Digital Rebel XSi and the EOS Rebel T1i.

Not surprisingly, the iPhone 4 also dominates in the cameraphone category with its closest competitor, the iPhone 3G, a distant second. The only non-Apple product in the top five cameraphones is the Android-powered HTC Evo 4G which sits at the bottom along with the iPod touch.

This isn’t the first time an iPhone has topped the Flickr popularity chart. In 2008, the original model reached number one despite its 2-megapixel camera.

The caveat is in Flickr’s fine print. Specifically, it notes that “camera phones are undercounted.” Statistics reflect the service’s ability to identify the camera used to take a photo of video. Flickr admits that it’s successful “about 2/3 of the time.” Still, Flickr receives over 4,800 images shot with iPhone 4s per day, accounting for about 9 million photos. The iPhone 3 remains the overall champion, accounting for almost 36 million submissions.

iPhone 4 most popular camera on Flickr originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 21 Jun 2011 11:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple’s retail improvement and expansion continues in both Hawaii and Florida. The Ala Moana store in Hawaii is slated for a complete overhaul starting soon. The retail outlet will be moving several doors down to a temporary location that will house the Apple Store until construction on its permanent home is completed. The project will cost US$250,000 but it’s money well spent as the Ala Moana store is located in one of the top U.S. malls for foot traffic and per-purchase totals.

Upgrading an Apple Store is not always smooth sailing, though. Apple recently pulled a proposal to demolish and move to a new building near its current Miami Beach, Florida location. According to the proposal, Apple would move from its current store on 738 Lincoln Road to a new store at 1001. The move was derailed by the city’s Historic Preservation Board which rejected the plans because they wanted the new building to be smaller and match the historic architecture of this district in the Florida city.

[Via Macnn]

Hawaii, Miami Apple Stores to be remodeled originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 21 Jun 2011 10:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Just as we were digesting the Final Cut Pro X arrival, word comes that Apple is also unveiling a new Time Capsule model. The 3TB model appears in the image header of the Time Capsule page on Apple’s website, but full product details are not yet available. We’ll keep you updated as new information is released.

The part numbers and FCC IDs of the new units leaked last night, so it was reasonable to expect the actual devices pretty quickly. TUAW first reported that an AirPort/Time Capsule refresh was in the works back on June 1, when retail supplies of the wireless routers began to dry up.

Update: The new 3 TB Time Capsule will be priced at $499 and is available now on Apple’s web site. The 2TB is $299. Looks like the product got a capacity bump, but that rumored tie-in to iCloud did not materialize.

[hat tip MacStories]

Apple unveils new 3 TB Time Capsule model (Updated) originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 21 Jun 2011 09:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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