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When the Heck are we Getting Wireless Syncing?

Coming home upon the professor’s early dismissal of class, I decided that the thirty minute drive between headquarters and the college campus should be appropriately followed up with a bit of app updating, Instapaper goodness, a podcast or two, and a well deserved nap. Hastily stripping off my dress shirt, I slipped into the comfort of my couch, propped the iPad against a knee, and immediately ventured into the iPod app. And immediately I was disappointed that I didn’t have the latest podcasts downloaded yet. Oh, the inconvenience of it all!

Aching knees still intact after climbing no less than six flights of stairs just forty five minutes earlier, I hobbled into the office and fumbled for that connect-cable-thing we still get with Apple mobile devices. In five minutes, my iPad had launched iTunes, backed up its wares and slurped down the latest podcasts through only the prettiest cable cluttering my shelf space. Yes, the cable saved the day, but consider me lazy: I shouldn’t even need the cable.

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Dunk: A First Great Dribbble Client for iPhone

Dribbble is a website where designers can share previews of their latest creations. The most viewed submissions go to the home page, thus allowing the designer to get his name out there. It’s a pretty popular service to get feedback on early mockups of new websites and apps, but some says it’s pointless and dominated by “elitists”. As long as I can stay up to date with new apps coming out for iPhone and iPad, I don’t care.

The Dribbble staff understood that the next step would be that of opening an API and they did so. They came at a point where opening up to 3rd party developers would be absolutely necessary to get the Dribbble name out in the App Store. Because if you have an online service nowadays, you need to have mobile applications, too. Otherwise, you’re missing out. That’s what the experts say.

Actually, I think the idea of viewing Dribbble images on iPhone and iPad might work. I’m no designer and I have no reason to ask for an invite (yeah, it’s an invite-only website), but I enjoy browsing through screenshots of designers I respect and admire. From today on we’ll be taking a look at all the Dribbble clients coming out in the near future (trust me, there’ll be many of them) so let’s just start with Dunk by Robocat.

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Apple Granted Patent for “Slide to Unlock”

When Apple introduced the iPhone and Steve Jobs showed how to unlock it for the first time, people went “ooohhh”. Back then, it was a revolution. Over the years smartphone makers and OS designers for touch screen-enabled mobile devices have been trying to copy Apple’s unique implementations and to reach the bar set high by Cupertino’s magical designers.

Three years ago Apple filed patents for the two most distinctive features of the iPhone: “slide to unlock” in the lockscreen and pop-up letters when you type on the virtual keyboard. Perhaps you’re so used to them you wouldn’t even think there’s a need to patent them.

Indeed there is, and United States Patent and Trademark Office has granted Apple two design patents titled “Animated graphical user interface for a display screen or portion thereof ” that will allow Steve to keep on sliding on his iPhone 5 while wandering around Google’s campus without the fear of being observed by Eric Schmidt and his evil design team.

I guess that’s what Apple patents are all about.

[via TUAW]

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Super Prober: Sort Of Like Chrome for iPad, Gone Wrong

Two years of App Store and I still haven’t found a decent alternative to Mobile Safari. Something I could keep on my homescreen for more than 2 days. The reason is obvious: you are not Apple. Developing a browser is not like building a Twitter client: we’re talking about the primary tool to access the web here. And if Apple ships an almost state-of-the-art mobile browser by default, well then - sorry if I don’t trust you.

Mobile Safari is a simple application that lets you navigate the web, we call it “browser”. Developing a browser for a cellphone is a difficult task: you don’t have windows, you don’t have tabs, favicons don’t make sense on a small screen. Also, the elegant interface of the iPhone makes it really hard to implement features seen in desktop browser without looking awkward.  Have you seen Opera Mini? Exactly.

But the iPad is magical, right? It’s got a larger display, it’s a tablet, you can put your hands on it! Let’s develop a full-featured browser for the iPad! Not so fast, cowboy. For as much as the iPad is indeed bigger and more suitable to richer applications, take a second look at what Apple offers: Safari for the iPad is, again, simple. Sure, it has those beautiful thumbnail previews for open tabs. Sure, there’s a bookmark bar. Still, it doesn’t overwhelm you with dozens of features that would probably look cool in the App Store description page, but kill usability. Mercury Browser, I’m looking at you.

It turns out, though, someone decided to develop some kind of Chrome-like browser for the iPad and call it Super Prober. I went into the App Store and bought it. Here’s what happened.

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Elements Brings Dropbox Integration to Your Notes - 3 Codes Up for Grabs

Two weeks ago we posted an exclusive sneak peek at Elements for iPhone and iPad, a new text editor by Second Gear Software that stores your notes in Dropbox, so that you’ll have them always available no matter the device you’re using. Whether it’s the iPhone, iPad, desktop Mac or even a Windows PC, just log in your Dropbox account and you’ll find the notes created with Elements in there.

The app was finally released in the App Store a few hours ago.

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Actually, Apple Has Been Using Liquidmetal All Along

Last week we found out that Apple had closed a deal with Liquidmetal, a Californian-based manufacturer of an alloy that is extremely light, hard and that shows a glass-like structure. From what we heard, Apple had acquired “substantially all of [Liquidmetal’s] intellectual property assets,” not to mention a “perpetual, worldwide, fully-paid, exclusive license to commercialize such intellectual property in the field of consumer electronic products in exchange for a license fee.” [Engadget]

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Flickit Pro 2.1 Released with Background Uploading to Flickr

Flickit Pro, the Green Volcano Software client for Flickr.com, was updated to version 2.1 last night, which brings full support for iOS 4 and iPhone 4. Besides improved video quality upload and overall upload speeds, version 2.1 brings the much-request background uploading to Flickr and UI optimizations for the Retina Display.

I’ve been beta testing Flickit Pro 2.1, and it works like this: in the Settings you can choose to hide / show a notification for when the upload is complete. Choose some photos, send them to Flickr, close the app and they will be uploaded anyway. It works really well.

Personally, I think Flickit Pro is the best Flickr client for the iPhone. The new and improved version makes it even better. Available at $4.99 in the App Store.