One thing the iPhone (and iPod Touch) does not have is a large amount of Dribbble clients, but most people who have an iDevice don’t have a Dribbble account or even know what Dribbble is for that matter. Swish, by Stunnify members Joshua Lee Tucker and Mathieu White, is taking a shot at the competition. Read more
Swish - Nothin’ But Pixels!
Fring Update: Full-Screen Video Calling, “Dynamic Video Quality”
Fring, a popular VoIP service that allows you make regular phone calls, video calls and chat, released an update to their official iPhone client today which brings a number of new features and fixes.
First off, fring is introducing a new video calling technology called DVQ (Dynamic Video Quality) that automatically adjusts the quality of a video calling session according to your bandwidth in order to provide an always-good experience. I’m testing it on 3G and, admittedly, it works pretty well. There’s also a new video quality indicator that enables you to check on the quality of the connection in real-time. Neat. Read more
How To: Install and Run iMovie On The iPad [Tutorial]
The current version of iMovie available in the App Store can’t run on the iPad. Apple specifically built it for the iPhone, and there’s no way to install it on the tablet. iTunes returns an error when trying to do so. As you can guess though, it would be great to be able to edit and manage videos on the iPad: thanks to its larger screen, multi-touch video editing would turn out to be much more comfortable.
Luckily for us, the folks over at iPadevice (Italian) have found a way to install and run iMovie on the iPad, but a jailbroken device is required. If you happen to have a jailbroken iPad running iOS 4.2 and you’ve always wanted to run iMovie on it, check out the tutorial below. Read more
Official Google Books iOS App Goes Live
Google launched its official eBook store earlier today, and promised an official iOS app for iPhone and iPad would follow in a few hours. The app is now available for free in iTunes here.
Google Books allows you to check on Google’s 2 million book catalogue and download ebooks to read them on your iPhone and iPad. The app comes with the same page turning animations of Apple’s iBooks, but the overall interface is quite different and similar to Google’s standard color schemes. Google Books features an offline reading mode to read books when you don’t have an active internet connection (useful on WiFi iPads when on the go), possibility to search within a book and adjust a font’s size, a night reading mode.
Surprisingly enough, the app doesn’t seem to support landscape mode on the iPad. I found the scrubber at the bottom to be particularly useful to jump between chapters of a book. Last, the app lets you download 3 books for free: “Pride and Prejudice”, “Frankeinstein, or, The Modern Prometeus” and “Wonderful Stories for Children”.
Check out the full changelog and more screenshots below.
Turn Your iPhone’s Spotlight Into A Quick App Launcher | Cydia Store
ListLauncher is a new $0.99 tweak available in the Cydia Store which turns the standard iPhone Spotlight into an easy way to launch apps on your device. By default, when you move to the left side of your homescreen you’ll see a blank Spotlight page with just a search box. Once you install ListLauncher from Cydia, the Spotlight start page will become a list of all apps installed on your iPhone, but you’ll still be able to start typing to search for something.
ListLauncher simply takes over the standard Spotlight page to display a list with all your apps. Pretty useful for all those who have way too many stuff on their iPhones and would like to have a quick and easy way to retrieve apps at any time. I wish a next update will bring the possibility to jump to specific letters much like in the Contacts app.
Watch a demo video below. Read more
Steve Jobs, Romantic→
Steve Jobs, Romantic
Remember the original Apple-1 that was up for auction at Christie’s in London? An Italian businessman bought it for more than $200,000, and together with the actual computer he also got an old letter from Steve Jobs and a paper with the first Apple Logo.
The Economist snapped some pictures of both the papers.
In fact, the first Apple logo is the work of Ronald Wayne, who some refer to as Apple’s third co-founder (besides Mr Jobs and Steve Wozniak). It depicts Isaac Newton sitting under a tree with an apple about to fall on his head. The inscription on the logo’s border is a quote from William Wordsworth, a romantic English poet: “Newton… a mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought… alone.” Could it be that Mr Jobs himself is a hidden romantic?
New Report Claims Verizon Doesn’t Want The iPhone On Other U.S. Carriers
Well well, look who’s back: the Verizon iPhone. Actually, it’s just “more Verizon iPhone rumors”, but we’ll settle with that. For now. So anyway, in spite of the several rumors claiming that the mythical device is finally coming in the first quarter of 2011 (and indeed, won’t be a simple “Verizon iPhone” but CDMA unit capable of running on multiple CDMA networks worldwide) we still haven’t seen anything real yet. Not a single leaked and blurry picture, not a single document – nothing. Just rumors.
The latest report from Kaufman Bros.’ analyst Shaw Wu claims Apple “got the terms it wanted from Verizon” and the device should be coming in early 2011. Nothing new to see here. Read more
Is This The Finder You Want in OS X Lion?
With the Mac App Store reportedly around the corner and OS X Lion set to ship sometimes next summer, we are going to see hundreds of new apps coming to the Mac in the next months. Thanks to a unified purchase system modeled after the insanely successful iOS App Store and all the excitement around a major new version of OS X, developers are jumping to the Mac once again. The interesting apps released in these past weeks confirm that the Mac is far from “dead”.
Still, there’s one application users would like Apple to slightly tweak and / or completely change: the Finder. Some would be fine with a tweaked version inspired by TotalFinder, some claim Apple is going after a Finder-less model just like on iOS. And while we don’t think Apple is going to kill the Finder just yet, we’re definitely playing around with the idea of a massive update to OS X default file manager come Lion next year. Read more
Pure Reader: Amazing Google Reader Mod
A lot of people started using RSS once again when Reeder for Mac (public beta) came out last week. It is a beautiful app that brings the power of Google Reader to the desktop with a lot of additional functionalities such as support for sharing on multiple social networks and background loading of webpages. But many users are still tied to Google Reader in the browser, that pinned tab that they just can’t close.
If so, take a look at Pure Reader, a browser extension by designer Na Wong. Read more