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Think about the Thanksgiving holiday here in the US and you think of travel to see family and friends, and fighting congested highways and roads. It’s a holiday fact of life. Here’s a suggestion for a bit of relief: the Inrix Traffic app for iOS. It’s free (and no ads) and it provides real-time traffic maps, traffic forecasts, accident and incident reports for every interstate, highway and major arterial and city streets.

Reviews of INRIX traffic products are generally positive, because the data they collect is sourced from long-haul trucks, taxis, delivery vans and commercial fleets, along with the usual consumer input and traffic sensors. The app also has predictive technology that analyzes the hard data, and takes factors like day of the week, weather, accidents and road work, and holiday traffic to figure out what is coming, not just what the current situation is.

The company already predicts that there will be “up to a third less traffic over the Thanksgiving holiday this year compared to 2010,” but we’ll still see up to a 20% increase in travel times anyway, especially on the last afternoon communte on Wednesday. “Travelers leaving for their holiday weekend combined with commuters heading home from work will result in the evening rush hour peaking an hour earlier than normal with traffic congestion building on the nation’s worst traffic corridors starting at 2 p.m. with the average trip taking up to 20 percent longer than normal,” says Inrix.

I tried the app around southern Arizona and it worked well, although I’m not in a generally bad area for rush hour. Accidents were noted, and the information was current. The traffic flow maps seemed to reflect current conditions, and you can drag the map around on your iPhone and look at other areas besides your own. I saw the app update with new information several times.

You’ll note that the app offers to sell you an extended paid service with additional information and access to traffic cameras, but I thought the free version gave me plenty of what I needed for any trip or commute.

Version 3.5 is the latest planned release, and should appear very soon in the App Store. It has more traffic sources for more roads, and better details on accidents and delays.

Of course some of the Navigation apps have either free or extra-cost traffic information, but INRIX is free, it works, and for many users it is worth a spot on your iPhone. Have safe, and hopefully swift, travels next week during the holiday and don’t forget to check out Steve Sande’s 5 apps for Thanksgiving post to see other apps you might need on Turkey Day.

For the holidays and beyond: INRIX Traffic originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 19 Nov 2011 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Most premium iPad cases are pretty similar. Some are bags, some flips cases, some sleeves — Germanmade has done something a bit different with their book-style case.

Construction and design

Made from leather stretched over veneer, the case has a uniquely organic feel. From the outside it looks just like a leather-bound book. The sides resemble mottled pages, with the hardback cover completing the look.

Both the wood veneer and surface cover material are exquisitely finished, giving a genuinely luxury feel. The inside of the case is finished in natural wood and an inlay color of your choice, in this case white. It’s put together really well too, feeling pretty solid all round, yet reasonably light for the size and amount of material used. While I wouldn’t want to drop the iPad in the case, it’s likely to be held pretty well; although the case itself is likely to come off pretty knackered from a fall of any decent height.

Use

The case fits the iPad 2 very well, holding it securely in place with small rubber friction pads in the corners. The front flap is held in place by a thin strip of black elastic that reminds me of those gorgeous moleskine notebooks. In the lid are the required magnets to shut off the iPad 2 upon closing — a nice touch.

The wood of the case is shaped to give you access to all that the iPad does without taking it out of the case. Cut outs allow access to the side switch and volume rocker, dock connector port, headphones and power button; there’s even a shaped cut out for the speaker on the back of the iPad 2, which projects the sound forward. There’s no access to the back camera, but taking the iPad in and out of the case is a breeze thanks to thumb-sized cutouts for leverage

The case also has two tricks up its sleeve. The first is that the front flap can be folded around the back to create a landscape support for typing. It provides just enough of an angle to make using the keyboard just that little bit easier on your wrists like Apple’s Smart Cover does.

The second trick is a vertical stand. Cut into the wood at the bottom left edge of the case are two grooves that you can place the naked iPad in, propping it up vertically in either landscape or portrait orientation. It’s extremely stable and makes a nice desktop stand as long as you’ve got enough room for it.

The case comes in two space variants. One of them just takes the iPad; the other is a little thicker and takes the iPad as well as an iPhone, a pen and a pad of paper, which are hidden behind the iPad in the case. It makes an excellent alternative to a small briefcase for light office duties and keeps everything nice and secure.

Verdict

If you’re looking for something a bit different, something sophisticated that doesn’t look out of place on a desk full of books, then the Germanmade series of iPad and iPad 2 cases are just the ticket. They’re not the most portable of protection for your tablet, but looking like a book you can just carry them on their own, without fear of them being pinched.

They’re available in both iPad and iPad 2 flavors, with and without the spaces for the iPhone and bits. They’re well finished, hand made, and available in a plethora of different finishes and colors. They command a price that’s well above average for iPad cases, but the unique styling and quality handmade fit and finish certainly set it apart from the rest. Be sure to check out the gallery above for some close-ups of the individual features.

Germanmade cases can be had for between US$100 and $160 plus shipping depending on model and cover material.

Germanmade handmade wood and leather g.2 iPad-Case for iPad 2 originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 19 Nov 2011 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We mentioned earlier this week that Disney CEO Bob Iger was invited to join up to Apple’s Board of Directors, and Fortune reports that as part of his deal, Iger got 142 restricted shares of AAPL, totalling a nice bonus of over $55,000 at current market value. Nice work, if you can get it!

We joke — Iger has been a key player at Disney for a while, overseeing both the recent purchase of Marvel Entertainment, as well as the acquisition of Pixar, which of course was headed up by none other than Steve Jobs. $55k is nothing for Iger, though — last year, he picked up more than $29 million in compensation from Disney, according to SEC filings.

And Iger has one other thing going for him that he and I share: He’s a Bachelor of Science alumni from the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College in upstate New York. Go Bombers!

Bob Iger picks up $55,000 in stock for joining Apple’s Board originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 19 Nov 2011 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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By now just about everyone knows that you can use Siri to take dictation on an iPhone 4S, but what you may not know is that you can also use it on a Mac. If you have an app on your iPhone that allows you to access your Mac’s keyboard functions remotely, you can use Siri’s dictation feature on the iPhone 4S to dictate text to your Mac.

One example of an iPhone app that you can use to dictate to your Mac is Mobile Mouse. The app already allows you to control your keyboard and mouse from your iPhone, but using the new dictation button on the keyboard, you can also dictate text to your Mac. (Reader Amalesh Panse pointed out, via Twitter, that Magic Mouse works fine with Windows too.) So long as you have a cursor inserted into a text field, you can use the dictation button on your iPhone’s keyboard to use Siri to dictate texts directly to your Mac using Mobile Mouse or a similar app. Conversion into text happens rather quickly, almost as quickly as it does on the iPhone’s native interface.

In practice the dictation is actually quite accurate; it does make mistakes, but I managed to dictate almost all of this post using Siri via Mobile Mouse with only a few adjustments. Apart from being an extremely cool trick, this feature could also allow you to bypass paying upwards of $50 for a product like Dragon Express, which does essentially the same thing (perhaps better).

The best part is, there are no settings that you need to tweak in order to get this to work. If you already have Mobile Mouse installed on your iPhone (and Mobile Mouse Server on your Mac), you’re already able to use Siri to dictate text to your computer. Seeing words I’ve spoken into my phone appear on my Mac’s screen as if by magic is one of those whiz-bang things that totally reminds me we’re living in the future.

Thanks for the tip Rohan!

How to use Siri for voice dictation on a Mac with Mobile Mouse originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 19 Nov 2011 10:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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