Graham Spencer

917 posts on MacStories since January 2011

Former MacStories contributor.

graham@macstories.net

Multimedia JFK Biography Hits the iPhone and iPad

On the 20th of January 1961, John F Kennedy became the 35th President of the United States, now fifty years later there’s a new iPhone and iPad app that commemorates his life and achievements.

Historian and publisher Marc Schulman who developed the app whilst writing the text biography told Reuters “The paper book is limited, in that you can’t see all the supporting documents, videos and photographs.” The app, JFK Historymaker for iOS however is a rich multimedia experience full of videos, documents and includes the retrospective biography of the President.

The app comprises of many key sections including those documenting his family, him as a Congressional Candidate, the Space Program, Cuban Missile Crisis and his Assassination. Schulman emphasized that it enables the reader to do their own research so they don’t have to “rely just on my voice as the biographer.”

According to a November Gallup poll, JFK remains America’s most popular President with an 85% approval rating. Whether you approve of him and want to know more or you simply want to learn something about a pretty significant historical individual, JFK Historymaker undoubtedly seems like a treasure trove of information for the price of $4.99.

[Buy on iTunes]

[Via Reuters]

The Incident Gets Recreated In Real Life

Last week there was the real life Fruit Ninja, today another iOS game, The Incident has been emulated (or technically “sweded”) in real life and the video is just comical and begs to be watched. The Incident is of course the iOS game that makes you run and dodge objects falling from the sky.

The fans of The Incident that created this video were pretty ingenious in the way they put it together obviously avoiding actually dropping anvils from the sky, and the errrr “music” that accompanies it is just awesome. There really isn’t much else to say, just watch the video after the break!

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View Instagram’s Most Popular Photos on Instagreat!

Instagram has been a massive success but it is largely an experience that has been exclusive to its iPhone app. Not anymore though, web developers Elliott Kember and Hector Simpson have created Insta-great, a site that showcases all the most popular photo’s from Instagram.

The brilliantly designed site allows you to also drill down to photos by a specific person, in a specific place, on a specific date or photos using one of Instagram’s filters. Plus Elliot (who has a game of Snake running on top of his site!) and Hector added keyboard navigation which is another great touch to a really finessed site.

If you’re a fan of Instagram like I am, definitely check the site out, you’ll find yourself just scrolling through the photos for ages.

[Via Cult of Mac]

Flight Control Lands Nearly 4 Million Sales

Firemint, which recently acquired Infinite Interactive has posted on it’s blog some sales statistics of it’s popular Flight Control game that is currently featured in Apple’s Top Paid Apps of all time. As of the post it had sold 3,881,634 copies and has raked in $3.8 million dollars and that’s after Apple 30% take.

As demonstrated by the graph it released that is shown above (click for larger size) it’s pretty clear that Christmas and big feature updates really helped increase sales of the game. In particular the addition of Game Center support led to a peak of 120,000 sales, the largest peak since the release of the app. The new maps update and Retina display support were the other notable peaks.

Also notable is the sales by country, as the graph below the break shows, the US has the lion’s share followed by Great Britain, Australia and Germany.

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The iPad Screen Resolution Rumor Merry-Go-Round

Well in the past 24 hours we’ve had another two rumors regarding the iPad 2’s screen resolution. First there was DigiTimes that reported Apple would up the iPad’s screen resolution to that oft-reported figure of 2048 x 1536. Then Kevin Rose who had previously stated the iPad 2 would have a Retina Display reversed his position with a picture of text messages from his supposed source who said “no change in resolution” which he posted on Instagram.

Then there was also the suggestion that floated across various blogs and publications that Moore’s law suggested the iPad 2 wouldn’t have a retina display. Both DigiTimes and Kevin Rose have dubious accuracy regarding Apple rumors and this vicious back and forth contradictions of rumors regarding the display are certainly odd.

UPDATE: Oddly, Kevin Rose seems to have removed the Instagram photo which is now unaccessible and does not appear in his Instagram feed.

So readers, what are your thoughts on this whole high resolution/retina display on the iPad 2 rumor merry-go-round?

[Via Cult of Mac, DigiTimes]

XBMC Comes to the iPhone, iPad, Apple TV 2

XBMC, a popular media center originally made for the first Xbox has become fairly widespread has been available for a variety of platforms, today that platform base extended to include the new Apple TV, iPhone and iPad.

The client on these new platforms is not stripped down to simply just view streams but is fully fledged with all the features you would come to expect it to have on a Windows PC. Because of this it is being distributed for the iOS devices through a Cydia repository and for the Apple TV through an apt-get install.

Scott Davilla one of the XBMC developers talked to TUAW and he revealed that development for the Apple TV 2 started only on November 1st last year and the iOS versions a few weeks later. He notes that the built in web server is currently disabled and the skin isn’t optimized but says improvements will be made including the possibility of implementing AirPlay into all the Apple related releases.

Perhaps one of the most interesting developments that occurred whilst XBMC was ported was the discovery of an API called VideoToolBox that allows hardware video decoding, encoding and scaling of the video size to match the final display size. So powerful is this API that Davilla and others that developed XBMC for iPad are able to stream full 1080p video with no transcoding to the iPad and it plays nearly perfectly, only dropping a few frames. Davilla’s confident however that the A4 processor can handle 1080p and will be working to ensure fully smooth playback.

TUAW put together some video’s demonstrating it running on all three of the new platforms, check it out here.

[Via XBMC, TUAW]

Leaked Screenshot of Internal iPhone with Gestures?

Well after the 4.3 Beta that previewed multitasking gestures on the iPad, there is now some supposed evidence that suggests that the iPhone is also being considered by Apple to have gestures thanks to an internal build that BGR claims to have gotten some screenshots of.

Obviously there is an issue with the supposedly leaked pictures, gestures on the iPhone would likely have to be different to those previewed on the iPad that used four or five finger swipes because they would be pretty unreasonable to use on the iPhone’s smaller screen. That said it remains possible that the text is left over from the iPad and whilst being tested internally has not been edited to reflect the iPhone’s gestures.

Engadget notes that information from it sources says that since the lost iPhone 4 debacle Apple made significant changes to how it keeps track of it’s devices and that it added clauses to screens saying “Confidential and Proprietary, if found, please contact…” listing a Cupertino 408 number. The photo’s BGR have gotten a hold have this message, adding credence to this leak. All three pictures posted after the break.

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Nuance Allowing Developers to Easily Add Speech Recognition to their Apps

If you’re an App developer you might be interested in Nuance’s (known for their speech recognition software) latest pursuit. Nuance is now enabling other developers to incorporate and take advantage of their speech recognition software and place it into third party apps, expanding any app’s functionality in a very cool way.

Nuance has previously teamed up with Ask.com to deliver their speech recognition technology to the Ask for iPhone app and have now opened up the Nuance Mobile Developer Program for all developers. By joining, Nuance says developers will gain access Dragon Mobile SDK with support for more than eight languages plus assorted support forums and documentation.

If you’re interested in using Dragon’s Mobile SDK to add speech recognition, head over here. Full announcement is posted after the break.

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Further Evidence of Camera in iPad 2 and Photo Booth and FaceTime Apps

After digging around the 4.3 Beta 2 of iOS for iPad, Mac Rumors has found fairly solid evidence that pretty much confirms not only a camera addition to the iPad but also the addition of a Camera app (obviously), FaceTime and Photo Booth apps.

An image (homeScreenOverlayFaceTime~ipad.png)  used by the iPad in the Setting’s app to preview the wallpaper was found by Mac Rumors to contain three extra icons that do not exist on the image contained in iOS 4.2, those additional icons were those for a FaceTime, Camera and Photo Booth app.

FaceTime and Photo Booth are also largely dependent on the presence of a front facing camera, whilst a Camera app would seem rather redundant without a rear facing camera and so it could be thus presumed that this latest discovery seems to confirm previous reports of both a front facing and rear facing camera on the iPad 2.

Mac Rumors also says they found filters for Photo Booth that included the effects of Thermal Camera, Mirror, X-Ray, Kaleidoscope, Light Tunnel, Squeeze, Twirl and Stretch.

[Via Mac Rumors]