Remember myPhoneDesktop? It’s that neat utility for iPhone we reviewed here that lets you share any kind of information you want from your Mac to your iPhone, using the Cloud and push notifications.
myPhoneDesktop Updated for iPad, 10 Copies Up for Grabs
Split the Bill, Leave a Tip, Checkmate. Review & Giveaway!
On the fringe of my college campus exists a slew of restaurants. Chinese. Greek. Mexican. No matter where you go, you’re gonna have to sit down and eventually tip your hot, um, friendly waitress. But if there’s one thing I can’t do in my head, it’s percentages (especially if more than one person is involved). How the heck do you tip? Does each person leave a dollar? What if one person forgets to bring cash? (Damn card carrying bastard!) For situations such as these, there is Checkmate. Read more
Marketcircle Announces Billings Pro [Beta]
Marketcircle has just announced that they’re working on a Pro version of their award winning time tracking and freelancing tool, Billings, which we reviewed here.
The Pro version will come with support for multi-user tracking and billing, meaning that it will be geared towards small and medium teams and offices. You can sign up for the beta testing group here. We can’t wait.
Reshaping the Night With Instapaper for iPad
Imagine this: it’s 5am in the morning, your wife is sleeping. But you’re awake, and you don’t want to leave the internet as you’ve got some cool conversations going on with your Twitter followers that just can’t be interrupted now, even if your wife is sleeping and you feel a little bit guilty about it. You stayed up until 5am again. Every day, every night, with the usual excuse that you have to work on your website, you decide to avoid the bed and focus on the latest stories from John Gruber instead. You know everything about iPhone multitasking. You got pissed off when that Adobe’s employee published that post against Apple, you installed iPhone OS 4.0 Beta 1 and you watched Twitter’s Chirp live streaming while having a good cup of coffee. You’re an internet guru, but that doesn’t mean you have excuses for staying up all night again, alone in the dark with your glasses shining in the light of your Macbook.
Then one day, completely enlightened, you thought that maybe, just maybe, you should find a productivity purpose for your dirty little AM secret and do something good for yourself instead of faving tweets. Perhaps you should work? No, something more intellectual. Something that requires darkness, a comfortable chair and silence: you realized you can read in those morning hours. A calm, relaxing and stress-free read you’re usually not able to have during the day because everything is too fast, too short. Read can’t happen when writing blog posts. Definitely not.
Maybe it’s time to give Instapaper another spin.
Steve Jobs Replies To Email: “Are You Nuts?”
Once again, Steve Jobs replied to another email, and this time in quite a different mood. Paul Shadwell emailed el Jobso expressing his frustration about Apple’s delays for the international iPad shipping and lack of pricing information, and he got a nice “Are you nuts?” as response.
Full conversation and screenshots after the break.
AutoCAD for Mac Coming Soon, References Spotted In SDK
We’ve heard many rumors and news about a native version of AutoCAD for Mac in the works, but we still lack an official confirmation about the release date or other specific details.
It turns out that some people have spotted comments and references in the header files of the latest ObjectARX 2011 SDK (the Autodesk programming environment) suggesting that the Mac version is the works and should come pretty soon, but it’s not exactly imminent. We’ve included the code after the break, be sure to check it out if you’re really interesting in knowing everything about your favorite Windows app coming to Mac OS X.
Soon.
Apple Job Posting Suggests iPad 2nd Gen with Camera
Apple has posted a job offer on jobs.apple.com (link here) suggesting that they’re indeed already working on a second generation iPad which should have a digital camera.
“Job title: Performance QA Engineer, iPad Media
Description: The Media Systems team is looking for a software quality engineer with a strong technical background to test still, video and audio capture and playback frameworks. Build on your QA experience and knowledge of digital camera technology (still and video) to develop and maintain testing frameworks for both capture and playback pipelines…Experience with tuning of and image pipeline, including, but not limited to AWB, Color Correction, AutoExposure, FrameRate adjustments is a plus.”
We know that a new model is coming next year. Not a reason to not love the iPad now, though.
What Apple Needs to Learn About Selling Books
Laura Miller has as insightful post about the importance of metadata for books, and what Apple’s iBooks Store really lacks:
“Let’s say I recently read and enjoyed Val McDermid’s “A Place of Execution,” and I want to find more crime fiction like it. On iBooks, I can discover McDermid’s other novels easily enough, but that’s pretty much it. The only other metadata about “A Place of Execution” that the Apple store gives me to work with is that this title belongs to the “Mysteries & Thrillers” category. So does Lisa Lutz’s “The Spellmans Strike Back,” a comic mystery that’s part of a series about the misadventures of a family of wacky detectives in San Francisco. Sure, they’re both crime fiction, but Lutz’s book couldn’t be more different in flavor from McDermid’s gloomy, flinty procedurals set in Northern England and Scotland.
Eventually, iBooks might collect some reader reviews for McDermid’s book; the store is too new to have many reviews at the moment, but the software does provide for it. I might learn from those reviews that McDermid writes in a mystery subgenre sometimes called “tartan noir.” If I’m lucky, the review mentioning this fact might also list some of the other authors who work in the same vein. Then I could search iBooks for their names, seeking more bleak detective fiction to feed my newly acquired appetite. But that’s a long chain of maybes.”
And I couldn’t agree more. The iBooks Store’s (but I’d put the App Store itself on board, too) navigation and organization are flawed. Apple, fix it.
Tweetie 2 for Mac Early Preview (Kinda)
Loren Brichter has had a lot on his plate recently. After all, the man who crafted the incredible beauty that is Tweetie now sings under the umbrella of Twitter. But before this whole spiel was made public, he led us on to a little preview of of the next version of Tweetie 2 for Mac. Obviously it was a joke, but somebody apparently took it to the next level.
Read more