Recommended Read: “Talking to Siri” by Erica Sadun and Steven Sande

I got my iPhone 4S two weeks ago, and have been experimenting with Siri and my best American accent since then. In spite of the software still not supporting maps and directions in Italy (more countries, including Italy, will support Siri in 2012) and weather requests, I’m having my fun in playing around with Siri for things like messages, notes, emails and Wolfram Alpha questions (I thank Americans for giving me a reason to convert their units to the metric system). Siri makes for the perfect iPhone demo to non-iPhone users, but impressive presentations aside it’s actually a great tool to quickly “do stuff” that would require looking at your phone and manually interacting with apps otherwise. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve already asked Siri to send messages to my co-workers while I was driving, change songs, call my girlfriend, or create new calendar appointments.

A few days ago I was sent a link to “Talking to Siri: Learning the Language of Apple’s Intelligent Assistant” by TUAW’s Erica Sadun and Steven Sande. I’ve read the book using the Kindle app on my iOS devices and Amazon’s CloudReader on the web and, let me tell you, it’s a great book to learn more about Siri.

At first I was skeptical – why would I need a book when Siri is so intuitive? It turns out, Erica and Steve have put together an impressive collection of things Siri does that I didn’t know about, also explaining with a friendly and familiar style (if you’ve been reading TUAW, which I do) how you should ask things to Siri. The book is organized in sections, covering every system app that’s integrated with Siri as well as built-in tools such as Wolfram Alpha and Yelp. Erica and Steven have also included lots of screenshots and descriptions, so you’ll be able to immediately understand and see what they’re referring to in describing Siri. It’s an incredibly pleasant read for new iPhone 4S users, and a nice handbook to get started with Siri. Without spoiling much, let me just say that I’ve learned a lot about things you can ask Wolfram (built into Siri), how to keep adding new items to a note, sunrise and sunset times and recurring reminders.

“Talking to Siri” covers in great detail every possible combination of commands Siri supports, providing a comprehensive guide to know more about what Siri can do for you. You can buy the book on Amazon as Kindle edition.

Free and Integrated

Impressive milestone reached by WhatsApp, a free cross-platform messaging solution for iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Nokia phones: [via Ben Brooks]

Coinciding with our planet crossing the 7 billion population mark this week, last week WhatsApp crossed its own milestone for the first time by sending just over 1 billion messages in a single day. Similar to the awe we feel that our planet will now hold over 7 billion people, all of us at WhatsApp are extremely humbled and excited about the future.

I’ve been using WhatsApp for quite some time to communicate for free – even though I have a pretty good text messaging plan with my carrier – with my girlfriend and some close, non-tech savvy friends (who, however, are tech savvy enough to buy apps). WhatsApp sends free messages, but it’s a $0.99 app on the App Store. Ever since the release of iOS 5, I’ve deleted WhatsApp from my iPhone because my girlfriend and those friends have upgraded their iPhones to iOS 5, thus getting the benefits of iMessage.

I have many friends who don’t use and don’t even like iPhones. But going through my Address Book today – trying to figure out how many people are using iMessage – it’s amazing to see how every iPhone user I know has upgraded to iOS 5, and how other people I didn’t know had iPhones (or iPads, or iPods) are now “turning blue” when creating a new message. Put simply: there’s a lot of iMessage going on in my Address Book.

I’m sure WhatsApp will continue to prosper, add features and bet on its cross-platform nature. Keep in mind that BlackBerry users already have BBM, iOS users have iMessage, and Google-loving Android folks are probably using the native Google+ app for some occasional free messaging. Tools like WhatsApp – and WhatsApp is admittedly the most popular “third-party free messaging app” out there – clearly still have a market when it comes to cross-platform. They’re great if you message with a lot of friends using different phones.

But I’m thinking about people who know their friends are using iPhones, and engage in conversations with them on a daily basis. Free, native and integrated beats “free and third-party” any time for the majority of users when it comes to iOS-to-iOS communication. And it’s not like iOS-to-iOS messaging is a rare scenario nowadays, with over 250 million iOS devices out there and quite possibly a large percentage of them being iOS 5-enabled (iOS 5 runs on the older iPhone 3GS, iPod touch 3rd and 4th generation). iMessage works on the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. It’s free and supports text and media. Apple has got a few minor issues to iron out, but there’s no doubt the system has been working well for most users since its release two weeks ago. This should explain my friends’ excitement in upgrading to iOS 5, and my surprise in discovering several new iMessage users in my Address Book.

There’s difference between “free and third-party” and “free and integrated”: whereas free services may have a big initial bang but often fail to make real money in the long term, Apple can leverage free iMessages – integrated in the native messaging experience – to sell more devices. iMessage is just one of the features that will make people think “Maybe I should get an iPhone” – but it’s a powerful one. “Free messages between iPhone users” is something even my mom immediately understood.

Frictionless integration. Let’s check back on third-party messaging apps in six months.

Apple Posts New iPhone 4S Camera, iCloud and Siri Ads

Following the first Siri ad that was released last week, Apple uploaded three new commercials on its website and YouTube channel earlier today, showcasing once again the capabilities of the iPhone 4S’ voice assistant, as well as the improved camera and iCloud support.

The new commercials cover a wide range of hardware and software features of “the most amazing iPhone yet”, albeit some of them are also available on older generation models like the iPhone 4. The camera is described as “all new” with 8 megapixels and “advanced optics”, but the ad also focuses on what’s possible to do after a photo has been taken on an iPhone, showing the built-in photo editing functionalities that “no ordinary camera can do”. From the YouTube description:

With 8 megapixels, advanced optics and more, the all new camera on the iPhone 4S may be the only camera you need.

The second Siri commercial is similar to previous one, featuring different input requests from iPhone 4S users such as map directions, weather conditions, calendar appointements and Messages. Apple describes Siri as your “personal assistant for everything”.

The iCloud ad goes a little more technical – although with Apple’s usual clear and friendly style – to show iBooks and document sync across devices, Purchase history on iTunes, Photo Stream and Automatic Downloads for songs. “Now the things you do on your phone are everywhere you want them”.

Check out Apple’s new ads here, or watch the YouTube video embeds below.
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Plex 2.0 for iOS Brings Revamped Remote Access, New Home Screen - Plex 0.9.5 “Laika” Released

Back in April I wrote about Plex 1.1, a new iOS version of the popular media manager for Mac and Windows (as well as other connected devices such as Roku) that brought a new design, better streaming of movies and TV shows with Direct Play and Direct Streaming, and many changes from the original application that was released a year ago in November 2010.

With a series of releases announced via various blog posts, the Plex team launched last night version 2.0 of Plex for iOS, another major revamp of the mobile client for iPhone and iPad that brings an improved home screen design (for the grid UI that was introduced in 1.1), new remote access, better subtitle management and over 150 bug fixes. As previewed last week, the Plex team figured one of the most requested functionalities for the desktop media server – a utility that finds media on your computer or local network and handles transcoding, metadata and streaming to Plex clients – was better access of personal media (movies, music, TV shows) over the Internet. In its previous versions, Plex was capable of making a computer or external hard drive available over the Internet via port forwarding, but setup was far from easy and seamless, and the lack of any online counterpart for over-the-air sharing made it impossible to build a platform on top of a local Plex installation. With myPlex, Plex brings “real” remote access to all your media, allowing the app to communicate with my.plexapp.com through a user account (which you can create for free), letting users not only access servers (like your iMac or Mac mini) remotely, but also to share specific sections of a library with other Plex users.

myPlex is a full-featured solution to access, share and save content for later. “Access” means all your connected Plex media servers will show up online, readily available to show your sections and library; I haven’t been able to personally test the remote access part of myPlex as my router doesn’t want to play nice with port mapping, but I can see how the redesigned preference panel will make for a more intuitive experience when making a computer available online. Moreover, the screencasts posted by the Plex team (available below), show how easily it’s possible to connect media servers to myPlex.

Sharing plays another big role on myPlex: whereas in previous iterations of Plex users could only share content with others by opening up their routers for external access, providing a friend with the required authentication system to access a Plex installation, myPlex makes it extremely easy to pick a folder (say a Music collection, or a TV series), enter an email address of another Plex user, and start sharing content online. Users can share an entire Plex library or just some sections, and obviously the system will take advantage of Direct Play and Direct Streaming between remote connected users and libraries whenever possible. myPlex is a simpler interface on top of the old (manual, URL-based) sharing process, and it’s deeply integrated with the updated iOS and Mac clients. Read more

Innovative 3D Mapping Company C3 Technologies Reportedly Acquired By Apple

When the innovative 3D mapping company C3 Technologies was discovered to have been acquired and shut down by its buyer, amongst the speculation was that Apple had been the buyer after its previous purchase of Placebase and Poly9 (both software mapping firms). Today, 9to5 Mac is claiming to have a source that confirms Apple was behind the purchase of C3 Technologies and has now got the team (who are still located in Sweden) to work as a division of the iOS team.

Sources say that C3 Technologies CEO Mattias Astrom, C3 Technologies CFO Kjell Cederstrand, and lead C3 Technologies Product Manager Ludvig Emgard are now working within Apple’s iOS division. The leading trio, along with most of the former C3 Technologies team, is still working as a team in Sweden (interestingly, the division is now called “Sputnik”), where the C3 Technologies company was located prior to the Apple acquisition.

What C3 Technologies did was develop software that could create detailed 3D ‘maps’ through from aerial photography with very little human input or moderation. The two videos after the break give an explanation of how it works and a real demonstration of what C3 Technologies could produce through its software.

Speculation is now turning to what Apple has in store after purchasing these three mapping companies (Poly9 and C3 are specifically focused on 3D mapping) as well as making the remark earlier this year (in response to the location data debacle) that: “Apple is now collecting anonymous traffic data to build a crowd-sourced traffic database with the goal of providing iPhone users an improved traffic service in the next couple of years”. It was a curious admission by Apple and despite re-signing with Google to provide iOS with its mapping service, the question is now whether Apple may be trying to replace Google’s offering with its own - or perhaps to merely complement it with new offerings.

[Via 9to5 Mac]

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#MacStoriesDeals - Friday

Halloween sales are upon us! Be sure to also check out our Amazon Mac Download below. Here are today’s @MacStoriesDeals on iOS, Mac, and Mac App Store apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get them before they end!

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iOS 5 Reminders From an OmniFocus User’s Perspective

When I first got my hands on the new Reminders app in iOS 5, I launched it and scoffed under my breath. Sure it was cute but it was not for me. I have spent so much time developing a bond with OmniFocus that I don’t know if it could ever be broken. It probably sounds dramatic but OmniFocus and I have been through some hard times together, probably some of the worst in my life.

My wife hates when she sees OmniFocus projects related to something personal in our marriage but it is my trusted system and I use it for everything. I have never found a suite of applications that can do for me what OmniFocus does. I have tried so many productivity and task management apps that I refuse to count them for fear of realizing the amount of money I have wasted. I have a natural (or unnatural if you ask my wife) attraction to this genre of apps so of course I was excited to take a look at the new Reminders app.

Reminders is a simple, albeit extremely well done, list-making application. Its main appeal is the “geo-fencing” feature that will trigger a reminder based on your proximity to a predefined location. The concept is amazing to me. The only problem is Reminders does not easily integrate in to my existing system, thus I probably won’t be able to truly utilize it.

Enter Siri. Read more

#MacStoriesDeals - Thursday

Halloween sales are upon us! Be sure to also check out our Amazon Mac Download below. Here are today’s @MacStoriesDeals on iOS, Mac, and Mac App Store apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get them before they end!

Read more