After every birthday and Christmas, I’ll often spend a little bit of time about the warm glow of my monitor, keyboard and coffee in hand. As the printer churns sheets of countless thank you letters, I cross yet another name off a sticky note with a blue pen. Yet, I wish instead of this sticky note, I had an iPhone app that could track and organize everything for me. GiftList is an iPhone and iPod Touch application designed to keep track of all the presents you receive throughout the year, so you’ll never forget to send a proper “thank you” note (you all should really).
GiftList, So you’ll Never Forget
TeamViewer, Remote Desktop Simplicity
How many mobile devices can claim that they’re actually good at allowing me to login into Grandma’s computer to inspect her Windows’ problems? Not many (does Android have anything spectacular?). There are two versions of TeamViewer in the App Store, one being free, and the other being one hundred dollars. I’m focusing on the free version, specifically because it’s most likely all you need for personal use - accessing your private computers or to help friends/family (this is straight from the TeamViewer page people).
HTML5 Video, Minus Ogg - Fixing Firefox Video Problems
That of Mozilla’s Firefox not supporting the de-facto standard H264 video format is a well known problem many people wrote about recently. I think John made the best analysis of the situation, depicting the absurd situation Mozilla is throwing itself into by supporting the .ogg format, together with Opera. From the post:
“So, even those using the latest version of Firefox will be treated like they’re using a legacy browser. Mozilla’s intransigence in the name of “openness” will result in Firefox users being served video using the closed Flash Player plugin, and behind the scenes the video is likely to be encoded using H.264 anyway.”
Whether Mozilla will finally understand that H264 is the format to support it’s unknown to us, but - technically speaking - there are some problems that Philip Hutchison over at Pipwerks tried to fix with a simple script. Indeed, Firefox does support the HTML5 <video> tag, but the linked video file should be encoded in .ogg rather than H264. As Philip writes:
“Firefox is essentially forcing people to offer two versions of each video: an Ogg version and an MP4 version. In my opinion — and the opinion of many others — this simply will not do. Providing two different video files is not realistic, Ogg’s quality is inferior to H.264, and many computers and mobile devices have direct hardware support for H.264 but not Ogg. Firefox’s HTML5 video is rendered useless.”
The problem is, Firefox 3.6 knows it can’t play an MP4 file but it loads the <video> element anyway, just because it’s a supported tag. This script will detect if HTML5 is supported, see if it’s Firefox who tries to open it and if so, the video element is deleted and the flash fallback stays there.
But all in all, if Mozilla really wants to stay in the market and keep a good slice of the market share, they need to accept standards and stop rambling about openness with unsupported, inferior formats. I think openness is when you support something widely accepted as a high quality standard, and not when you stick with license-free but unpopular or even closed formats.
From Personal to Project, HomeMarks Houses Bookmarks
I have a knack for collecting bookmarks, especially when they’re project related. I remember back in January of this year, when I was putting together the crafty little shack that is Apple-Bits, I was saving HTML after CSS after PHP article like crazy. I had to have folders and sub folders full of at least 40 different web design bookmarks. Without a shred of web developer in me, I needed all the reference materials I could find, and I wish that, at the time, I had HomeMarks.
Sneak Peek at “On This Day”, New App from Sophiestication
Sophia Teutschler is unstoppable. Not only she’s just released her stunning new Wikipedia app for iPhone Articles (be sure to check out our review if you missed it. Then go buy the app.), but she’s already giving the last touches to a new app called “On this Day” which will be available as soon as Articles will have sold m0re than 10.000 copies. We received an early build of the new application and, guess what, it’s awesome.
Air Contacts, When Wireless Sharing is Bliss. Review and Giveaway.
Cellphones are inevitably fragile. I can’t count the number of times I’ve logged onto Facebook, with status messages ablaze of, “Send me a text, lost my contacts.” And of course we send a quick hello, secretly hoping that we never have to do it again. We with Macs can copy everything between our Address Book and our Contacts on the iPhone, but not everyone has such luxury. Sometimes something crummy will happen, and you’ll inevitably lose every contact that has ever bestowed your device. So what the heck can you do without a Mac or a PC, to get all those contacts back? The answer is quite simple, quite brilliant, or perhaps quite amazing. Any term here can apply to Air Contacts, an excellent contact sharing application.
On the Gold Rush, March 27th and Waiting
You’ve probably heard that Apple is officially accepting submissions for iPad apps that will go into the iPad App Store; to be part of the “grand opening”, you’ll have to submit your app for review by March 27th. And unless specific conditions are met, I suggest you don’t do so.
It’s perfectly reasonable that developers want to jump on the wagon as soon as possible, submitting the app next week thus having it available when the iPad comes out and people will to spend money because they want new apps. Users will open the App Store knowing that they’re about to spend money because they need apps for their new toy, and we all know that a device is what apps make it. It’s a good thing that you (devs) are hurrying to have a stable version of your new app, and I understand that being among the first ones will be a terrific opportunity for you to get noticed, rise the charts and make money. But if you don’t pay attention now, that’s not gonna happen.
You don’t want to have an app that doesn’t work, just as you don’t want your inbox full of emails from users complaining about menus not working and crappy support for multitouch gestures. You won’t be able to test your new app on an actual iPad before the 27th, you’ll be submitting an application tested with a mouse and keyboard rather than hands and fingers. That’s insane. As much as the iPad simulator can work just fine, and as much as you think you’re good at Cocoa development, you’ll submit an incomplete software. Would you buy a car, knowing that its creators have never tested it on the road? I wouldn’t, honestly.
But spending bucks in the App Store is different from buying a new car. People will just fire up their credit cards and buy, buy, buy. So probably you’re playing this game, and you’re going to submit an incomplete and untested application because you know that people will buy it anyway. Now, let me ask you this: how long is that going to last, before people will start telling everyone that your app doesn’t work? Reviews will start appearing in the iTunes page and, eventually, you’ll be screwed. You’ll be the developer that thought he could make money just by selling crap on the first day. Are you sure you want to play this game?
I think that being a developer doesn’t only involve being good at Cocoa. You have a reputation, you’ve got an user base of customers that trust you, and you can’t betray them for an early gold rush. This is a different situation from the launch of the iPhone App Store: you had the chance to test your app on a real device back then, you knew how things were working, you knew how it would feel.
You have to remember that feeling an application is way more important than just having it available. And by submitting your incomplete application by March 27th, you’re putting the gold rush before the feel, and yourself.
WindowFlow, via Keyboard & Pane
We’ve done our fair share of window management applications here at MacStories. SizeUp, Mercury Mover, and Zooom/2 have all entered the market in hopes of improving how you interact with your Mac’s windows. And they’re all equally interesting, because they incorporate similar shortcuts while going about resizing and moving in completely different ways.
Today’s application, WindowFlow, adds a new element to the mix that could replace the infamous ⌘-Tab.
Cloud App for Mac Gets a Release Date: It’s April 1st.
It may sound like a joke, but it’s not: with a blog post Linebreak has announced the official release date of the long-awaited Cloud app, the Mac app that should revolutionize the way you share stuff on the web which we previously covered here.
Cloud app has gone under some major changes and improvements during these past months, the web app has been rewritten and the Mac client should sport some new Cocoa goodness as well. Also, the developers say they’ll open an API next week, so if you’re a developer and you’d like to integrate Cloud’s feature into your own app, now you can.
You should look forward to April 1st. It’s gonna be a great day for Mac users.