Everyone always says, “There’s an app for that”, but what you don’t often hear is, “There’s a story for that app”. I chatted with NibiruTech, the team behind the recently reviewed MobileRSS to learn more about what it’s like having to deal with a government that doesn’t let you browse the web the way it should be.
Developing Behind the Great Firewall of China - An Interview with NibiruTech
Opera Mini for iPhone, First Impressions
“Whatever its performance turns out to be like, Opera Mini has some features that might lead some folks to opt for it over Safari, at least on a part-time basis. It’s got Opera’s Speed Dial feature, which lets you get to favorite Web sites with one tap. It uses Opera Link to synchronize bookmarks with other copies of Opera on different devices. It lets you search for text within the current page, a pretty basic feature which Safari lacks.
On the other hand, Mini doesn’t try to match the desktop-like accuracy with which Safari renders Web pages: It just displays a rough approximation (albeit an acceptable one, at least on the pages I visited). And I don’t think it offers Safari’s ability to play YouTube videos.”
Radar Winners Announced
Thanks everyone who entered the Radar giveaway. Also, we’d like to thank the Madewithbits developers for the licenses they gave to MacStories.
Here are the winners:
x0r
David
oykun.yilmaz
Thibaut Ninove
ralph
Davide85
Michael
Martin Král
Dennis
Knox
You’ll receive the licenses in your inbox in a matter of a few days. Stay tuned for other giveaways coming this week.
In the meantime, you can follow the official MacStories Twitter account as @macstoriesnet.
SpringBoard Rotator Brings Landscape Mode To The iPhone Home Screen
If you ever wished to use your iPhone in landscape mode even when playing around with the home screen, soon you’ll be able to do it. iPhoneHellas has just published an exclusive preview of SpringBoard Rotator, a soon to be released in Cydia tool that will allow you to rotate your iPhone and enjoy a landscape-enabled springboard.
As you can see it doesn’t stop at rotating icons or other similar tricks, a landscape statusbar and wallpaper are injected into the iPhone, icons are stretched and same happens to the dock. Sure it needs more stability and more space between the icons (I’m not a huge fan of pages cluttered with 30+ icons) but it’s really promising. Check out the embedded video below.
Macbuzzer Launches, Get a Free License of Rucksack
Remember Rucksack, the archive manager app we talked about some weeks ago? Thanks to this new kid on the block of Mac bundles (yeah, another one), Macbuzzer, you can get a free license of Rucksack by simply tweeting a message, much like you had to do with MacHeist.
Included in the bundle are Sponge, MainMenu and Thoughts app, and each of them has some discount applied.
Matt Gemmell On Selling Source Code
“For whatever reason, there are only a handful of people selling code components on the Apple platforms. I suspect that’s less about the market and much more about perceived worthiness; we do all tend to collectively reinforce the perception that only the very best stuff will do, and it’s incredibly difficult to convince yourself your code is even worthy of being open source, much less paid for in its raw form. I’ve had to twist the arms of so many Mac developers to convince them that they have a component worth sharing with others.”
Camtasia for Mac, Screencasting Made Simple
I’ve made a couple MacStories screencasts before, and while I can’t particularly say they are good, (in fact, they’re hilariously bad), they’ve all been done with Screenflow. That is, until recently. While it’s not the fault of Screenflow that’s the problem - rather me, who has not a proper Mic nor recording skill - Screenflow never felt right. I don’t know, I could never find the proper documentation I wanted, I couldn’t get the effects I wanted, and perhaps it was lazy on my part to not actually play around with it for a couple of weeks, but I could just never get into the flow. When Camtasia came along, they bombarded me with documentation, easy to follow tutorials, and ultimately, it’s become my #1 choice in screencasting software. Having used Camtasia and Screenflow together, if you know one you can use the other quite seamlessly.
Savings Goal, for that Special Something
Win a Copy of Radar for Basecamp
Radar, which we mentioned in our Basecamp and Backpack post here, is a small and simple utility which displays Growl notifications for every new item in your Basecamp account.
We have 10 licenses up for grabs, all you have to do is leave a comment here. No tweeting required!
Winners will be announced on Monday, March 15th.
Good luck!