The worst thing about having to deal with dozens of tasks and projects everyday is that I often forget about the other things I have to do, out of the MacStories context. Basic things like listening to music, walk the dog, getting through my inbox and reply to mails: daily habits I shouldn’t forget about, but I often do.
Daily Deeds is a new application for the iPhone which cleverly lets you annotate your habits, complete them everyday and forget about it.
If you have a jailbroken iPhone, it’s very likely that you installed a lot of apps, tweaks and extensions that are now slowing down your device. Perhaps you noticed that it’s not as fast as it used to be, applications like Mail take a little longer to start up, you have to respring every 30 minutes to see an increment in speed. You know why? Because the stuff you install from Cydia eats up memory, a lot of memory sometimes. Winterboard, for example, can take a lot of unoccupied RAM if you start enabling dozens of themes and graphical modifications; same applies for other apps like Action Menu, Pro Switcher - all these things constantly run in the background (they are based on MobileSubstrate) and they are the reason why your iPhone is slowing down.
Fortunately, there are some tricks and tips you can follow to optimize your iPhone, free up a lot of memory without the need of respringing / rebooting and get a fast and stable device once again. Here’s how.
Patently Apple has discovered some documents on USPTO today referring to a new application for iPhone Apple’s developing called “iGroups”. The app should be based on the MobileMe infrastructure, allowing users to create groups and communicate with people attending “live events”. The whole document is rich and worth a read, here’s an excerpt:
“Apple is working on a new communications based social networking application that they’re simply calling “iGroups.” According to the documents published by USPTO today, Apple’s iGroup will be a new service that will work on your iPhone and likely work with MobileMe. The idea is to allow groups of friends or colleagues attending such events as a concert, a tradeshow, business meeting, wedding or rally to stay in communication with each other as a group to share information or reactions to live events as they’re occurring. The technology behind the new iGroup social networking applications works with a very sophisticated cryptographic key generation system to ensure security and privacy of your communications. Interestingly, the patent states that if one of the devices in your group happens to be without true positioning technology, it appears that Apple’s MobileMe service will provide some sort of “virtual GPS” capability to that user so that they could be aware of the locations of others in the group. Apple’s patent provides us with example scenarios of both a concert and WWDC event to clarify the service.”
Geo location, real time communication, MobileMe and a lot more in a single application that seems to start from the solid foundations of services like Gowalla and Foursquare. Interesting.
“If true, the total number of iPads reserved or pre-ordered in the first week may be close to 400,000.”
Which means it will be a gold rush again for developers.
Remember when Amazon announced they were developing a Kindle app for Mac? It’s now available here, ready to be downloaded. It’s definitely straightforward and simple, but at least it’s something.
We’ve posted links to cool HTML5 and CSS3 implementations before, but this one is seriously one of the best I’ve recently stumbled upon. Joshua Jones from General Metrics managed to re-create the Safari 4 window only with HTML and CSS3, thanks to Webkit capabilities. You can see the demo webpage here.
No images, canvas or javascript - just CSS rendering, and as the developer notes, the easiest part was to create the Aqua window buttons using multiple gradients. The code is open source on GitHub. Also, the next “clone” should be MobileSafari.
I think it’s quite fair to say this opens a lot of possibilities, and shows what you can really achieve with compliant web standards and some good effort. If you’re still wondering, CSS3 is awesome, period.
Available at developer.apple.com.
From what we’ve been told so far, one major change include the Photos.app which, upon launch, will show 3 tabs: Photos, Albums and Camera. The camera tab seems to be there only for the Camera Connection Kit for iPad, thus putting an end to every camera rumor we’ve seen spreading around.
Thanks everyone who entered the FML giveaway. Also, we’d like to thank the Coding Dutchmen developers for the licenses they gave to MacStories.
Here are the winners:
John Espino
Davide85
leesui
Zara
James Eilers
Michael
Cindy
Daniele
Swiftman
You’ll receive the licenses in your inbox in a matter of a few days. Stay tuned for other giveaways coming this week.
In the meantime, you can follow the official MacStories Twitter account as @macstoriesnet.
We’ve been writing a lot about Basecamp recently, and how this 37signals product changed the way we organize our tasks and projects for MacStories. I personally use Omnifocus to keep my local database in sync with the online service through Spootnik, but there’s a variety of other tools we use, like Radar, Headquarters and now, Freshlog.
Freshlog is a Mac application that enables you to take a screenshot, comment it and upload it to Basecamp. I gave it a 3 days spin, here are my thoughts so far.
