Due 1.2 Alerts You It’s The Best Reminder App for iPhone

Back in September I reviewed Due, an interesting new app to quickly create reminders and set up timers on your iPhone. The first version of the app featured a cool UI and a good set of functionalities, allowing you to easily switch between the reminder and timer window. Most of all, the best thing about Due was that it looked great and enabled you to just forget about the app once reminders were set.

It’s really simple: once you enter a new item you can choose a due date & time, but there are some handy shortcuts in the same screen. If you find yourself constantly using some reminders as countdowns, you can create a timer. That’s it. The interface is clean and polished, and the app doesn’t even need an internet connection to work as it’s based on iOS 4′s local notification system.

The new 1.2 version, which was approved yesterday and I have been beta testing for a while, adds terrific new features to an already great package. If you tap on a reminder in the main screen, for instance, you’ll be presented a bar containing shortcuts to turn snooze on and off, set the reminder as repeating, reschedule the whole thing to 10 minutes, 1 hour or 1 day later. Useful. The developer added reminder management (something many fans hoped they would not, in order to keep the app simple) but by stuffing it in a bar you’ll only see after a tap, they didn’t clutter anything. It feels good.

Due for iPhone is available at $2.99 in the App Store. Check out the huge changelog with all the new features and more screenshots below. Read more

iPad Drawings on Display in Paris

The iPad drawings of David Hockney are being displayed at the Pierre Bergé in Paris. The Yves Saint Laurent Foundation dedicated its 14th exhibition to over 200 of Hockney’s iPhone and iPad drawings. It’s showing now thru January 30th, 2011. If I lived there, this would be so cool to go see. If you’re close, check it out!

Hockney used the Brushes.app to create these digital paintings and the way he carried his iPad around was very original - custom pockets in his suits, which you can read more about here. His jacket pocket has a deep inside pocket that the iPad, or as he calls it ‘sketchbook’, fits snugly into.

Another cool thing about the exhibition is that it is being presented on iPhones and iPads; the brightness and vibrant color originally intended by the artist are respected. To see a video from the exhibition, click here. This is just another example of what a great product Apple’s iDevices are, they can be used in so many ways and people keep coming up with great ideas to use it for.

[via kottke.org via Fondation Pierre Bergé]

New York Times Uses Hipstamatic Photos For Front Page Story→

New York Times Uses Hipstamatic Photos For Front Page Story

When NYT photog Damon Winter went to northern Afghanistan to catalog the efforts of the First Battalion, 87th Infantry of the 10th Mountain Division, he took all the fancy camera equipment you would expect. He’d shoot video of firefights with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II, sure. But he also grabbed still photos using Hipstamatic, an app that lets you choose among a huge selection of filters.

Front page photo here. Impressive.

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iOS 4.2.1 RAM Usage Visualized

iOS 4.2 is a major new update for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad – built on the strong foundation of iOS 4 – which introduces many new features, fixes and overall performance improvements. If you ever wondered how much iOS 4.2 improved the experience from a memory usage standpoint, take a look at the graph below, compiled by the guys over at iPadevice.

The graph doesn’t come with a provided scale, but it gives you a quick idea of the performance improvements Apple focused on for the release of iOS 4.2 for iPad.

SBSettings Now iOS 4.2.1-Ready | Cydia

Good news keep coming for early iOS 4.2.1 jailbreakers: if you installed Cydia on your newly updated device this morning using redsn0w, you might want to fire up Cydia again and check for updates. SBSettings, the popular utility to access iPhone and iPad functionalities such as respring, reboot and a variety of shortcuts, is now fully compatible with iOS 4.2.1.

The new 3.2.1 update fixes a statusbar free memory issue, the date display on iOS 4.2.1 and permissions on SBSettings data storage folder. It’s available now in Cydia.

Beatles In iTunes: 2 Million Songs Sold, 450,000 Album Downloads

Unless you’ve been living in a yellow submarine for the past three weeks, I guess you heard about the Beatles coming to iTunes. In fact, Apple thought the day the Beatles’ library was released in iTunes would be a day we’ll remember for the rest of our lives.

Life-changing event or not, the Beatles in iTunes have sold over 2 million songs so far and generated 450,000 album downloads, Billboard reports.

In US the best-selling album was Abbey Road and best-selling song was Here Comes the Sun.

Backed by a strong advertising campaign which also happens to promote iTunes, it looks like there was room for The Beatles in people’s music libraries, after all. One could argue whether 2 million songs sold with all that campaign are much or not, we’re just going to wait for Billboard to provide additional numbers and information before judging.