Apple Confirms: Media Event on September 12

 

As first reported by The Loop’s Jim Dalrymple, Apple just sent out invitations to the press for a media event taking place on September 12 in San Francisco. The event will take place at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts at 10:00 AM.

Apple is widely rumored to be introducing the next-generation iPhone at the event. As it can be seen in the invitation’s graphic, the shadow of the number “12” is a actually a “5”, suggesting the new iPhone will, indeed, be called “iPhone 5”. In recent months, there has been a lot of speculation as to whether Apple would call the new device simply “the new iPhone” (following “the new iPad” earlier this year), although some suggested “iPhone 5” would make more sense in terms of marketing considering the previous 4/4S monickers. However, others noted that, because the new iPhone would be the sixth generation model, the “iPhone 6” name would be more appropriate.

Obviously, the invite’s image is only a hint of a possible product name, but a strong one nevertheless. If previous invites are of any indication (see “let’s talk” as related to Siri last year), there’s a good chance the device will be called “iPhone 5”.

Lately, a lot of purportedly “leaked” parts of the new device have also pointed to a major redesign featuring a taller screen, thinner and lighter design, new speaker and dock connector, and more powerful A6 processor. iMore was first to report weeks ago about the future redesigned dock connector and September event. According to the website, the new iPhone should go on sale on September 21.

The next major version of iOS, iOS 6, is also currently being tested by developers, and it’s expected to become publicly available a few days before the launch of the next iPhone.

Denominations: A Simple Currency Converter

Developed by Abraham Vegh, Denominations is a simple currency converter that focuses on the concept of converting money to another currency, rather than the functionality alone.

Most currency converters on the App Store feature a number pad for entering values – like a calculator – and a menu to choose currencies to compare. Denominations is different: instead of letting you enter your own numbers, it comes with a predefined set of amounts to compare. You can set two currencies, and quickly switch between them with the tap of a button. Denominations’ focus is on the idea of understanding conversions in another currency without having to think too much.

I don’t think Denominations can replace currency converters like Currencies – after all, I still need to convert the amounts I want – but I believe it has some neat possible usage scenarios worth considering. For instance, as a tourist I might just want to know “how many pounds are 10 Euros”, instead of doing my own manual conversion at the coffee shop. Or I might need to know that, approximately, my dinner will cost around 50 Euros, which Denominations says are worth 62 dollars today (rates are updated server-side every 15 minutes). Quick, at-a-glance information that doesn’t require me to think and manually enter numbers.

Denominations’ design is concise, with a flat color scheme that’s reminiscent of the simplicity of Clear, again signifying a trend in recent App Store releases to focus on information rather than ornamental menus. Developer Vegh is already working on adding more currencies, bug fixes, and tweaks for an upcoming version.

Denominations is available at $1.99 on the App Store.

Rovio Announces New “Bad Piggies” Game To Launch This Month

Finnish videogame maker Rovio has announced “Bad Piggies”, a spin-off of the popular Angry Birds franchise that will let users play from the pigs’ perspective. Titled “Bad Piggies” and set to launch later this month, the game will shift the focus from the birds – typically, the main characters – to the pigs. It is unclear how this will translate in terms of game mechanics, but Rovio promises “never-before-seen gameplay” without slingshots, Angry Birds’ tools to complete levels and clear them of pigs, the enemies.

There’s a lot of empathy towards the lovable enemies from the Angry Birds games, and we’ve been constantly asked: what about the pigs’ side of the story?” said Mikael Hed, CEO of Rovio. “Bad Piggies gives you the chance to play as the second-most-loved characters in the Angry Birds universe, and explore this rich world through their green eyes.

After the modest success of Amazing Alex – a new IP from Rovio based on the acquisition of a game previously called “Casey’s Contraptions” – Rovio kept on releasing updates to Angry Birds, adding new levels and options for free. Earlier this year, Rovio launched a new version of Angry Birds called “Space”, which was downloaded over 100 million times in just 76 days. Also earlier this year, back in May, Rovio announced the billionth download for the Angry Birds franchise, and reported revenue of over $100 million for the fiscal year 2011.

As a side note, an Angry Birds version featuring the pigs’ point of view was rumored all the way back in November 2010.

Bad Piggies will launch on Thursday, September 27, on iOS, Mac, and Android. A teaser website is available here.

Review: Magellan Virtual Analog iPad Synthesizer

In my post about the current state of music-making and discovery on the iPad, I concluded with a roundup of the best, most sophisticated software to professionally create music on the iPad. As I did with shuffler.fm and discovery, I would today like to add a new app to the list of the best software synths available for the iPad. The app that I found worthy of being added is the newest product by music software company Yonac Inc, called Magellan.

Yonac made a name for itself by producing an extensive amount of music-related apps since early 2010. One of their most elaborate and popular efforts has been the Shredder guitar synth to create analog and digital synth leads or pads by playing guitar into the iPad through an interface like the IK Multimedia iRig or the Apogee JAM. The company was also right there when the iPad got unveiled. They developed and promoted one of the very first synth software for the iPad, the Yonac miniSynth.

Magellan is their new masterpiece. It’s a fully fleshed-out virtual analog synth with a lot of power. Let me sum up its basic feature set: two synthesizer engines running at the same time, each of them equipped with three oscillators for basic sound generation, frequency modulation, a step sequencer, and two filters plus eight effects. The app has got an easy to understand interface and produces an immense variety of sounds in very high audio quality. This review not only judges the quality and usability of Magellan, I will also give so detailed instructions and tricks so that you immediately can start making sophisticated music tracks with the app right after you’ve downloaded it. So, if you are curious, stay a while and let me explain you how Magellan works and why it may become a strong competitor to other high-end iPad synths like the KORG iMS-20 or the Sunrizer.

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August 2012 In Review

August has been the lull between July’s Mountain Lion release and September’s inevitable iPhone announcement. But that’s not to say it was a quiet month - it certainly wasn’t. On the news front, we saw Apple and Amazon reacting to Mat Honan’s ‘epic hacking’, the first Mountain Lion update, internal promotions at Apple and of course - the verdict in the Apple v. Samsung trial. August also saw big Pixelmator, Things, Instagram, Drafts and Buzz Contacts app updates amongst a bunch of other updates and new release apps. Finally, in the stories department, we wrote up a bunch of how-to’s and I talked about the rise of third party services and fall of Google in iOS. Be sure to stay tuned this September, it’s going to be a big month.

You can review past ‘Month In Review’ posts here.

The Highlights

 

Everything Else

 

Send Favorite Tweets To OmniFocus’ Inbox

In my daily “social networking workflow”, I use the “favorite” feature of Twitter as a todo list of sorts. I couldn’t find a way to add favorites to OmniFocus without leveraging email as a bridge, so I built a solution myself.

Using IFTTT, a single line of bash, Hazel, and AppleScript, I created a simple way to turn a favorite tweet into an OmniFocus task in the application’s inbox, ready for future processing. As an extra, I have also created a more “advanced” version that adds Automator to the mix to only extract URLs from favorite tweets. Read more

Use Dribbble and Instagram as an Apple TV Screen Saver

 

Tired of stock images of plants and animals when your Apple TV screen saver comes on? Why not make it a little more personal with some ingredients from Dribbble and Instagram? With a little IFTTT magic you can have your Apple TV showing your Dribbble and Instagram feeds with just a little fun hacking.

The interactive team over at BlingBlog.tv created a way to make this happen by using Dropbox and IFTTT then sprinkled some recipe magic to make this happen. I tried it last night and it worked perfectly; it only took me about 15 minutes to set up from start to finish. Here are the ingredients and the recipe:

Step 1: Dropbox
You’ll need a Dropbox account if you don’t already have one, but who doesn’t these days? If you don’t, you can sign up for free here.

Step 2: IFTTT
Okay, not everyone has an IFTTT account but you will need one to continue with this tutorial. IFTTT is a great service that lets you build recipes from many different web services. It’s free, so do yourself a favor and sign up if you already haven’t. When you do have an IFTTT account, you can continue.

Step 3: Get your ingredients together
To make the recipes that BlingBlog.tv created, some IFTTT channels will need to be activated. Go here to activate the RSS Feed Channel, the Dropbox Channel, and if you want Instagram, activate its channel as well.

Step 4: Recipes
Anytime a new item is added to Dribbble’s popular feed, or your own follow feed if you have an account, it is downloaded to Dropbox. If you have the Instagram channel activated, you can pick a few different users as well to really mix up your screen saver. IFTTT will save an Instagram picture every time that user account posts a new picture. Here are the links here and here that BlingBlog.tv posted if you want to modify or use their recipes. Note that you will need to make sure every recipe points to the same Dropbox folder. Every one of my recipes for this tutorial point to my Dropbox/IFTTT/Instagram folder, even my Dribbble feed.

Step 5: Screen Saver Info
Did I mention this also works on your Mac? Just point to your Dropbox folder via the screen saver system prefs and you’re done with this tutorial. For your Apple TV, you will need to turn on iTunes’ Home Sharing on the Mac that has the Dropbox folder. After that is done, navigate to File > Home Sharing > ‘Choose Photos to Share with Apple TV…’ in iTunes and navigate to the same Dropbox folder (see image below).

Then, go to your Apple TV > Computers menu and add your Apple ID to link to your Mac’s photo library if you haven’t already done so. Now, go to Screen saver and choose your user Photo library as the source. Here is a resulting picture from my own Apple TV using this recipe. As you can see, it’s showing images saved from the IFTTT recipe – I like the origami effect the best. So, if you get tired of looking at your photos or the boring stock ones that Apple ships, try this recipe for some inspiration!

Here are some FAQs that BlingBlog posted:

  • At the beginning of the week, delete all of the stuff from last week. Sometimes, it’s hard to let go, but this screensaver isn’t for nostalgia; it’s for inspiration. Bring on some new stuff!
  • IFTTT/Instagram recipes only let you choose one user per recipe. We have 3 or 4 different ones going.
  • You aren’t limited to just dribbble or Instagram, IFTTT can also hook up to Flickr or any other photo streaming service that has an rss feed.
  • Apple TV doesn’t automatically update as new images come in, so you have to stop the screensaver and repeat Step 5 from above. And make sure your iTunes is open when it is refreshing the feed.

Tweetbot Mute Filters For U.S. Elections→

Tweetbot Mute Filters For U.S. Elections

I’ve recently become annoyed with the amount of tweets in my timeline about the upcoming United States elections, so I set out to find a way to mute those tweets without necessarily unfollowing people. In case you missed it, Tweetbot 2.4 introduced support for keyword mute filtering, allowing you to mute (read: make invisible in the timeline) any keyword, with support for regular expression. I manually added hashtags and keywords to the list of filters on my iPhone, iPad, and Mac, but it turns out someone already made a set of filters you can easily install on your devices.

Thanks to Jono Hunt, you can head over this GitHub page and check out the 2012 U.S. elections regular expression he built for Tweetbot. You can add keywords in the middle if you feel like you should be blocking more from your timeline. To install the filter, open the Mute Filters view in Tweetbot, hit the Edit button, then the + button in the upper left corner and select Mute Keyword. Paste the filter, and turn on  Regular Expression. You can set a duration (I chose “forever”) and mute mentions for the filter as well. To make sure you’re entering the expression correctly, Tweetbot will also display matching tweets already in your timeline.

Jono has built other mute filters for recurring tweets besides the elections, so check them out here.

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Kindle for iOS Updated To 3.2 with Adjustable Margins

The official Kindle app for iOS has been updated to version 3.2. Following the redesign introduced with version 3.0 last March, the app was heavily criticized for its implementation of wide margins, which was eventually fixed with an update earlier this summer. Now, the app has been updated with a new setting to control “adjustable margins”. You can choose between three different layout options, as pictured above. The option is available on the iPad from the View Options menu, which also includes settings for font size, brightness, and background color.

Speaking of brightness, Amazon says the control slider has been updated to be more responsive and optimized for “better viewing”. The app’s changelog also focuses on “rapid highlights”, a way to mark important passages of a book for future reference that had been implemented by almost any other eBook reader or PDF viewer on the App Store. This option is available under “My Notes & Marks” in the Go To menu.

Among other changes for Print Replica Textbooks, Kindle 3.2 looks like a solid update that addresses a common annoyance of the app. You can find the update on the App Store.