While Emoji is enabled for our friends in Japan, the United States never received the same love and attention, and at times, had hissy fits over Emoji keyboards available in the App Store. So while iOS 4 does and doesn’t have emoji available to customers, Apple is intending on updating the little emoticons to be used with applications like FaceTime and Google Maps. At least I think so according to Patently Apple’s latest finding, which shows Apple taking a deep interest in making stock and custom emoji prevalent in certain applications.
Apple to Integrate New Emoji Modules into iOS?
vBookz is iBooks for Text-to-Speech
While authors are agreeable when it comes to audio playback of their creative works, books published or listed in the public domain under Project Gutenburg have the freedom to be used however the reader wishes. vBookz for the iPad gives readers a mechanical (though well) sounding text-to-speech playback of their favorite open books, yet as Kyle VanHermet from Gizmodo writes,
“But if you’re not already text-to-speech inclined, vBookz probably won’t leave you a convert. I still found that it took more effort to listen to the books than to read them myself, and where I might, in some instance, listen to an audiobook, I don’t think I’d ever be able to make it through a novel’s full text-to-speech recital.”
Designed to be an aid for the visually impaired, vBooks is $5 from the iTunes App Store.
Sencha Touch Delivers an HTML 5 Framework to Mobile Devices
We might not be able to deliver cross-platform Flash applications to mobile devices, but we can implement HTML5. Sencha is a combination of efforts from jQTouch, Raphaël, and Ext JS who’ve delivered the first public beta of Sencha Touch, which is the first HTML5 Framework for mobile devices. HTML5 applications allow powerful web apps to be used offline, across mobile devices (iPhone & Android), and can take advantage of third party analytics services.
OnLive Games Running on the iPad [Video]
We’ve talked about OnLive before. A revolutionary service that will allow you to stream videogames to your computer / TV / mobile device using a simple set-top box or a browser plugin. You’ll be able to play Crysis on 2004 PC. Now you get it, it could change the way we think about videogames forever.
When Guitar Hero Meets Classical Music: Street Orchestra for iPhone [Video]
I’m not exactly into music games, but this app for iPhone could help me rediscover the genre. If you know what Guitar Hero is, that it shouldn’t be difficult to understand the main concept of Street Orchestra: you have to tap on “music notes” coming down from a “panel” to keep playing a specific song. It’s very simple and addictive.
Steve Jobs Interview at D8 Now Available on iTunes
Awesome Gadgets We’ll Never See: Flexible iPhone Speaker
“The Flexible Speaker for the iPhone is quite a departure from conventional speaker styles. More like a pretty hanging charm on the phone, this device makes use of “Flat Flexible Laminated, (FFT) Loudspeaker technology” to its advantage. Read: paper-thin & foldable. The folding aspect is relevant; coz with each un-fold of the connecting speaker, the volume goes up.”
[Yanko]
It would be such an instant purchase.
iFixit’s Mac mini Teardown
Removing RAM is easy, supports up to 8GB of RAM, single brushless fan, creative placements for antennas.
iTunes 9.2 With iOS4 Support is Out
Call us crazy but why didn’t Apple just include this in the 10.6.4 update? Either way, you too can grab iTunes 9.2 via Software Update on your Macintosh.