This Week's Sponsor:

Textastic

The Powerful Code Editor for iPad and iPhone — Now Free to Try

Pixelfari: It’s Safari, In 8-bit. And It’s Totally Awesome.

Pixelfari by Neven Mrgan is the coolest Safari mod I’ve ever seen. The app, very buggy and released as an experiment by Mrgan, is basically a skin for Apple’s browser completely realized in 8-bit style. Like those old Nintendo games, or The Incident from Mrgan himself. It’s pixel art applied to a browser: toolbars, fonts, menus, preferences – everything. It’s unreadable as hell. But at the same time, my beloved geeks, it’s kind of a dream come true: Nintendo from the 80s meets Apple. Mrgan writes:

Ladies and gents, fellow humans — presenting Pixelfari, a pixely, 8-bitty version of everyone’s favorite browser. Enjoy chunky fonts, blocky graphics, and a general sense of giddy inefficiency. Spearheaded by yours truly and developed by a very clever friend.

Maybe we’re all getting excited about this because it’s a neat hack no one ever did before. Still, you can’t take the 8-bit love away from me. So go download the app here , right now. Enjoy. Read more

Pulse Moves Beyond RSS - We Already Love The Reddit Section

A few days after an update that brought proper Google Reader sync and faster loading times, the developers of Pulse News Reader for iPad issued a small update on their online backend (it means you don’t need to check for updates in iTunes) to bring extensive support for a series of APIs. What Alphonso Labs is doing is very simple: they’re slowly moving beyond RSS. And with this move, they have embraced APIs as the new way to fetch content from various services like Reddit, Vimeo, Youtube and Digg.

RSS, as many have noted, sounds very geeky - something we find impossible to explain to our mothers. RSS provides the plumbing to visualize a variety of news sources, but it is never mentioned in the app. We added a layer of usability that really resonated with our mainstream users.

For a lot of our users, Pulse has now become their go-to “browser” for consuming content. And this content does not have to be restricted to RSS feeds. Today, we’re adding SIX brand new sources to Pulse.

Read more

Quick Weather with QuickWeather

I love watching the weather and enjoy checking extended forecasts via my iPhone. The weather category in the App Store is flooded with sub-par apps with horrible UIs. Even some of the more popular ones look like they are being neglected in the pixel department. There are some great weather apps there but this review is only about one, a newcomer to the App Store, QuickWeather.

Although I like weather data, sometimes I want a simple weather reading that gives me some visual stimulation, not just numbers. If my hometown weather isn’t the best, I usually check Destin, Florida, where it’s always sunny and where my family goes once a year. QuickWeather, by App Jon, simply does this; it’s a beautiful app that makes it easy to quickly access weather anywhere in the world. Read more

First Screenshots Of Opera for iPad [Update: Video]

At Mobile World Congress 2011 the folks over at Softpedia managed to get their hands on preliminary version of Opera for iPad, and apparently they were impressed by the speed of the browser. Released on the iPhone last year, Opera for iOS raised some doubts over the quality of the app, mainly due to scrolling smoothness and font rendering on pinching and zooming – clearly inferior to Apple’s Mobile Safari. Opera for iPad is set to provide a much better experience on the tablet screen, with an interface that reminds of the desktop version (visual tabs on top) and menus accessible from a huge Opera button in the upper left corner. The developers also confirm the iPad app has been built on the same engine the powers Opera desktop.

The app runs very smooth, and allows for some rapid movement between visual tabs (open pages). Visual tabs allow users to have several web pages open concurrently and quickly switch between them using tabs. Each tab allows users to preview a thumbnail, as well as the page title and icon for each web page they have open.

Where the default touchscreen keyboard provides a less-than-optimal user experience, users can take advantage of Opera’s virtual keyboard to type and edit information without having to leave the page they are viewing.

I’m curious to see this Opera virtual keyboard and see how it compares to the iPad’s default one. No release date was provided by Opera at MWC, but Softpedia speculates we might see the app in the Store as early as next week. It will likely be free, and quickly jump the charts of free software like the iPhone counterpart did.

Check out more screenshots of Opera for iPad below. Read more

Why The 4-inch iPhone Screen Won’t Happen This Year→

Why The 4-inch iPhone Screen Won’t Happen This Year

In a great “Doing the math” post, Chris Rawson at TUAW outlines the single reason why the next iPhone won’t get the rumored 4-inch screen:

Apple could work around that issue by slightly increasing the iPhone 5’s width, but there’s another problem. If Apple increases the screen size to 4” but retains the same 960 x 640 pixel dimensions, the PPI (pixels per inch) value drops to about 289 ppi – well below the iPhone 4 Retina Display’s 326 ppi, and just barely at the threshold of a “Retina Display” level of quality. To maintain 326 ppi, the pixel dimensions on a hypothetical 4-inch, 3:2 screen must increase to the neighborhood of 1080 x 720, plus or minus a few pixels.

App developers would then have three sets of resolutions to support for the iPhone instead of two, and scaling from 960 x 640 to 1080 x 720 wouldn’t be anywhere near as simple as the pixel-doubling that got developers by in the early days before they were able to scale apps up from 480 x 320 resolution.

Apple doesn’t want to lose the appeal of the Retina Display, and on other other hand they can’t come up with a third resolution a year after the introduction of the iPhone 4. That would be hell for third-party developers.

Whole post is a must-read. Check out all the numbers here.

Permalink

Dayboard: Animated Clock, Weather and Twitter Widget for iPad

Dayboard by Blend is a beautiful and, at the same time, interesting application for all those who prefer to keep their iPads on the desk as a clock widget / second monitor while they’re working. The app, sold at $0.99 in the App Store, combines a minimal, elegant and sexy design with clock, weather, calendar and Twitter widgets displayed on screen at the same time.

Dayboard provides all kinds of information without being just a flip clock – like many other apps in the App Store. Upon launch you’ll be asked to grant location access to the app, and I’ve noticed Dayboard reliably and correctly fetches my current location – which, for some reason, has been kind of a problem with several apps lately. Together with location and weather info, Dayboard displays time and date. On top of the animated flip clock, there’s a button to switch from dark theme to light theme. Last, a widget at the bottom rotates Twitter trends – and you can even pick local trends for your country or stick with the worldwide ones. You can’t tap on them to load Twitter in Safari, but the animation is pretty cool.

Dayboard is available at $0.99 in the App Store. Give it a try if you’re looking for a great addition to your desk.

Warner Bros’ Ingenious Move: Sell Movies As Apps

A day after the release of the updated iOS App Store Review Guidelines, it appears that Warner Bros. has already figured out a better way to avoid the iTunes Movie Store’s country limitations and offer content for all mobile devices and users: they are selling movies as apps. The apps, Inception: App Edition and The Dark Night: App Edition, are actually quite interesting as they pack a lot of extras like interactive video trivia, soundboard, ringtones and art galleries, thus seemingly respecting Apple’s new rule on songs, movies and books sold as applications:

2.21

Apps that are simply a song or movie should be submitted to the iTunes store. Apps that are simply a book should be submitted to the iBookstore.

These are not “simply a movie”. Warner Bros. has built two apps that offer a native interface for iPhone and iPad, they are available for free in the App Store and allow you to stream a movie or download it for $11.99 and $9.99, respectively. The Inception app, for instance, even comes with movie posters,” behind the scenes” content and music by Hans Zimmer that you can stream via AirPlay. No details on resolution / quality, but it appears that everything can be streamed on 3G as well – perhaps the apps adjust quality automatically basing on your connection’s speed.

This is interesting, as Warner Bros. has cleverly implemented in-app purchases and the features offered by building a native app to bypass Apple’s guidelines and, overall, provide a great experience to customers. We would like to see more of these experiments in the future. [Inception, The Dark Knight via 9to5mac]

Verizon iPhone Sales Low, Under Apple’s Expectations?

BGR is reporting numbers shared by one of their Apple sources about sales and pre-orders of the Verizon iPhone which apparently are “performing a little under what Apple and Verizon anticipated”. BGR has posted the following numbers from 5 Apple Stores combined, including “two very, very prominent stores”:

  • Thursday: Verizon = 909, AT&T = 539
  • Friday: Verizon = 916, AT&T = 680
  • Saturday: Verizon = 660, AT&T = 471
  • Sunday: Verizon = 796, AT&T = 701
  • Monday: Verizon = 711, AT&T = 618

These numbers refer to first five days of availability of the device in 5 different Apple retail stores. BGR also reports pre-orders amounted to 550,000 units. As for who’s buying the Verizon iPhone:

We also have some statistics on who’s buying Verizon iPhones to share with you: 30% of people buying Verizon iPhones were Android users, just over 25% of people buying iPhone 4 were BlackBerry users, and only 14% of people buying the Verizon iPhone were AT&T iPhone owners. The remaining percent didn’t want to say, didn’t have a smartphone, or didn’t have a phone prior to making their iPhone 4 purchases last week.

As of today, Apple hasn’t announced how many Verizon iPhones were sold or pre-ordered. We do know, however, that the iPhone 4 broke Verizon’s sales record in two hours. Also, looking at the numbers posted by BGR, it’s clear that Verizon is selling more phones than AT&T anyway – we’d be curious to know how many Apple planned to sell in the first week.

To sum up, Verizon is already outselling AT&T (in “prominent stores”) with a 8-month old device, yet it’s not meeting Apple’s expectations. Interesting.