Category: Tutorials

Sometime a wiseacre editor (we have a few) suggests we do a Five Apps post for a particularly offbeat area of interest. And sometimes we actually start brainstorming these. While “Five apps for the lemur owner” isn’t likely to hit TUAW any time soon, “Five Apps for the dead” is about to have its day.

The last thing you want to worry about (literally) is whether or not your estate is in order. Last Will by Cybermill (US$9.99) provides an interactive legal form (US only) for you to fill out on your iPhone or iPad. Create a last will that details your beneficiaries and other final wishes. The app then uploads your details to Cybermill’s servers, where a customized PDF or RTF version of your will is created for you to download. Wills are specific to individual states and regulations vary, so Cybermill recommends that you still have legal counsel review your documents.

Frankly, trying to produce your will just on the phone is counterproductive since you still need to deal with the downloaded file eventually. While there was a Mac OS 9 version of Quicken’s WillMaker product, the current version is Windows-only; however, you can use Nolo’s online will tools to do the same thing.

Speaking of your final wishes, for just $2.99 the scarily named PTAJ Marketing will help you understand further details about Estate Planning, helping you to learn what it means to die intestate, what kinds of estate plans are available, and, well “much more.” Three dollars isn’t that costly, but you can probably get as much information or more from Ye Olde Google, the aforementioned Nolo.com site or even (gasp!) your local public library.

The Egyptian Book of the Dead is supposed to help you navigate through the afterlife where your sins will be weighed, compared against a feather, etcetera. You’re also going to meet up with Anubis, who — if you believe the Red Pyramid — is supposed to be rather hunky. You’ll probably not be in any state to appreciate that then, but right now you can appreciate this lovely free companion app to the British Museum exhibition that closed this past March.

For those newly dead folk looking to understand what bits aren’t working any more, we offer you the Human Anatomy App by Enlightened Games. Retailing for $1.99, this application shows all the wiggly parts under your skin, including “all the major processes and anatomical features of the human body.”

Finally, we round out this five-app collection with the Arlington Cemetery app. For $6.99, David Berndt introduces “some of the less known and most remarkable stories behind each and every headstone and marker.” Full of maps and photographs, it’s a way to honor the fallen who rest at this special United States military cemetery by preserving their memories and stories.

Five apps for the dead originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 09 Jun 2011 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The folks at AppleRumors Italia did a side-by-side video comparison of iOS 5 on both the iPhone 3GS and the iPhone 4. As you can see in the video, the two models perform similarly with only a small amount of lag apparent on the iPhone 3GS during certain tasks, like loading a complex web page.

The biggest difference is the lack of some features, like HDR and photo editing, on the older iPhone 3GS. Though this is only one video, the results are encouraging for those still rocking a third-generation iPhone.

Continue reading Video of iOS 5 on an iPhone 3GS and a 4 side by side

Video of iOS 5 on an iPhone 3GS and a 4 side by side originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 09 Jun 2011 11:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple has modified its subscription policy to remove the pricing requirement that forced content providers to sell in-app subscriptions at the same price it sells them outside the app. These older terms and conditions were supposed to go into effect on June 30, and caused a stir when they were first introduced and used to reject apps like Sony Reader from the App Store.

The older subscription terms stated:

11.13 Apps can read or play approved content (magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music, video) that is sold outside of the app, for which Apple will not receive any portion of the revenues, provided that the same content is also offered in the app using IAP at the same price or less than it is offered outside the app. This applies to both purchased content and subscriptions.

The new conditions, shown below, let providers set their own prices on subscriptions. Newspapers or magazines, for example, can raise the price of their iOS subscription prices to compensate for Apple’s 30% cut.

The terms also make it clear that subscribed content like books, video, music and more can be sent to an iOS device as long as there is no “Buy Now” button or link within the app that lets users buy this content in a browser/outside the app. For example, Amazon can send all your purchased Kindle books to your phone as long as it does not include an in-app button to buy books directly from Amazon’s website.

Here are the new terms as reported by MacRumors:

11.14 Apps can read or play approved content (specifically magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music, and video) that is subscribed to or purchased outside of the app, as long as there is no button or external link in the app to buy the approved content. Apple will not receive any portion of the revenues for approved content that is subscribed to or purchased outside of the app

Apple alters in-app subscription terms, relaxes price controls originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 09 Jun 2011 10:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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“The Mothership has landed in Cupertino,” says Cupertino Mayor Gilbert Wong. These words were uttered during a press conference to confirm that the California city will welcome the new Apple campus with open arms. The decision is not based on any preferential treatment for Apple because of its reputation. It’s a financial one. Apple is one of the largest tax payers in the city, and its directors don’t want to lose this revenue.

The circular building will be built on land Apple purchased from HP. The new campus will be four stories high and enclosed in custom-made curved glass. The area surrounding the building will be re-landscaped with 6,000 trees. The building will also include its own energy center and will use California’s power supply only as a backup.

In his address to the city yesterday, Steve Jobs says he hopes the building will open in 2015. You can follow the progress of this huge project at http://www.cupertino.org/apple.

Cupertino: “There is no chance that we’re saying no” to Apple’s new building originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 09 Jun 2011 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Reeder, a popular Google Reader client on iOS, is now out of beta and available on the Mac App Store. While the beta version of Reeder for the Mac was free to test, the 1.0 release will set you back US$9.99, more than twice the price of the iPad version.

That $9.99 offers syncing with Google Reader (which you can set up for free), plus integration with Readability, Instapaper, ReadItLater, Pinboard, Delicious, Zootool and more. The app has a customizable, multi-column interface that’s superficially similar to the iPad version, and Reeder includes gesture support and customizable shortcuts.

If you read a lot of news on your Mac, Reeder definitely looks like a big step up from reading RSS feeds in Safari or Mail. We’ve got several Reeder fans on the TUAW staff, and one of them will likely be providing a full review of Reeder in the near future.

Reeder for Mac now available on Mac App Store originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 09 Jun 2011 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I’m going to see what Chillingo has to offer here at E3 later on today, but in the meantime, this recent release on the App Store is gaining some popularity (and has been featured by Apple as iPhone game of the week this week). It’s sort of a liquid physics puzzler — there’s oil coming out of a spigot at the top of each level, and you’ve got to funnel it down, using a series of platform pieces, into a waiting “mouth” somewhere on screen. Gameplay is simple but interesting as the game very slowly opens up, level by level, into more and more creative ways to find solutions.

The standard Chillingo polish is here as well — each level has the usual three star rating, a timer that tracks how fast you complete things and even a score depending on how well you do. Leaderboard and achievements are tracked with Game Center and Crystal, and there’s a fun social feature for sharing levels with friends as well.

Feed Me Oil is a fun little physics outing that doesn’t do a lot of new things, but does what it does in a polished and fun way. It’s only US$0.99, so give it a look when you want a little physics thinking to do.

TUAW’s Daily iPhone App: Feed Me Oil originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 09 Jun 2011 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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On this trip to WWDC I packed light. One backpack, a MacBook Air and a camera light. I haven’t had my Air for very long, and I’ve been trying to install only essential software on it and see what I can do without. I’ve been impressed enough with iMovie’s capabilities (once you get past what I consider to be a terrible UI), so I didn’t bother loading Final Cut Studio. I forgot, however, to whip up some “bumpers” (intro/outro) for our videos before I left. I’m used to using Apple’s Motion to handle that, but I found myself looking for an easy alternative. The solution I found was Keynote, and a grand solution it is.

I’m certain many of our intrepid readers have used this method in the past, but it was new to me. If you’ve never used Keynote, think of it as PowerPoint on a type of steroids that automatically make presentations not look like steaming piles of bullet points. With the animation and build tools available in the object inspector, I was able to drag in a couple of logos, type a little text and create a five-second intro in about five minutes. I created the whole thing in one frame, easily timed and sequenced the animations and output a QuickTime file ready to drop into iMovie. I have to say, the process was a thing of beauty.

Below is a sample of the results, created in Keynote and soundtracked in GarageBand. I won’t claim they’re genius, but it was a surprisingly elegant solution in a pinch. Even if you never use higher-end production tools, keep Keynote in mind next time you need custom titles or video intros. Combine it with some loops in GarageBand and have some stylish video ready to go in just a few minutes. You can grab Keynote in the Mac App Store as a standalone app for US$19.99.

Mac 101: Using Keynote as Motion in a bind originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 09 Jun 2011 05:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The guys from Munich (actually Puchheim, near Munich) have done it again. Boinx Software has updated BoinxTV to version 1.8 and created a special new iPhone and iPad app named Orientator (free) to control 3D graphics effects in BoinxTV. Even better, Boinx developed LibOrientator, a library for iOS developers who may want to include features in their apps that enable control of BoinxTV layers.

BoinxTV is a powerful video console app for Mac OS X that provides professional TV effects and editing to humble consumers like myself. I use the app every week for TUAW TV Live, and although I haven’t yet mastered most of the BoinxTV toolset, it helps me to combine video from several cameras and other inputs, movie clips, photos, lower thirds graphics and audio into a (hopefully) professional looking video podcast.

What Orientator does is read the values for device motion, the gyroscope, accelerometer, location, magnetometer and other orientation data, and send that info over a Wi-Fi connection to BoinxTV on your Mac. While Orientator is fun for just looking at the readouts of the sensors in your iOS device (as shown above), it’s even more useful when used to control video layers in BoinxTV. For displaying apps that don’t contain the LibOrientator library and use the special BoinxTV layers, the company suggests simply velcroing an iPhone to an iPad 2 to send the orientation data to your Mac.

There’s a full description of how to use Orientator to help record iOS demos and training apps on the Boinx website, and the video below should give you a good idea of how Orientator controls special BoinxTV layers. The update to BoinxTV is available from within the application by selecting BoinxTV > Software Update.

BoinxTV adds motion magic with LibOrientator originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 09 Jun 2011 01:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Notcom has released TinyUmbrella 5.00.00 which is now available for download. TinyUmbrella 5.00.00 can save iOS 5 beta SHSH blobs for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. You can download TinyUmbrella…

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i0nic, the hacker behind untethered iOS 4.3.3 jailbreak, tweeted that his untethered jailbreak that was being used on top on Limera1n exploit has been patched in iOS 5 firmware. This is what i0nic…

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Apple Rumors Italia did a side-by-side comparison of iOS 5 running on the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4. It looks like the 3GS version of the iPhone will run most features in iOS 5 just fine.

Crash reports can be a great way to diagnose problems within your apps – but it can be difficult to organize the reports and actually turn them into meaningful data.

I have found out about an open source project known as Quincy Kit with many useful features such as placing the crash report in a database (PHP server code included), allowing the user the option to provide their contact information, and if the crash is known you can even provide the user with feedback telling them if the crash is known and being fixed.

You can find the QuincyKit official site for QuincyKit here where you can find further details including instructions and the download:
http://quincykit.net

Looks like a very useful crash reporting solution.

 

©2011 iPhone, iOS 4, iPad SDK Development Tutorial and Programming Tips. All Rights Reserved.

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Apple has included many different user interface components within the Cocoa Touch API, but sometimes you just want to give things a customized look.  There are some great open source libraries allowing you to do just that.

I have recent found an excellent library from Sam Vermette that mimics UISegmentedControl allowing you to make some great looking switches, and easily allowing you to control the fonts, colors, shadows and more of the components.

You can check out the library and instructions on how to use it  on Github here:
https://github.com/samvermette/SVSegmentedControl

Great if you have some UISwitch’s or UISegmentedControls within your app but want things to look more suitable for your app.

©2011 iPhone, iOS 4, iPad SDK Development Tutorial and Programming Tips. All Rights Reserved.

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