Snoozing to Awaken. Review and Giveaway.

With the market saturated by dozens of iPhone and iPod docks, no doubt do we at least have one in our homes that sport some form of alarm function. For those that utilize this tool, traveling becomes an issue when we can’t take our iPhone alarm clocks with us. The guys over at Embraceware understand that iPhone affectionados appreciate the simple comfort of waking up to their favorite morning power song, so they’ve taken their top notch Mac utility and made it mini.

Awaken for the iPhone is the dream app for those in need of a portable night stand that can kick some cool tunes.

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Contribute to shutup.css on Github

Shutup, the custom stylesheet from Steven Frank that automatically hides the comments section of many popular websites, is now hosted on Github. You can contribute to it by adding features or a bug fix. Thanks to Maximilian Schoening (@mschoening) from Bylinebreak and Steven (@stevenf).

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It Could Be a Mac App: LiveStats 2, A Real-Time Look at Your Visitors

Once upon a time, there was a group of guys somewhere near London that believed website analytics could have been so much more. They could have been different, focused on users. Then, it came the day that belief took shape and they crafted LiveStats, the one and only live traffic monitoring web application. And I mean “one and only”, because anything else was just nothing compared to LiveStats. The guys were called GoSquared, and maybe they didn’t realize they created a “king” back then.

LiveStats was a great tool, I’ve been using it since it first release, and it provided a great way to monitor your incoming traffic in real time. But hey, why am I talking like this? “Was”, “provided”? Because the GoSquared team has just released the 2.0 version of LiveStats, and many things have changed. LiveStats has just got a lot better.

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Apple Rolls Out iTunes Web Previews for the App Store

A few months after the iTunes Store got web previews, Apple finally decided to implement the feature for the App Store too. The layout of the page is clean and very similar to the App Store’s one, but you can’t obviously buy an app from there. Also, Apple removed the “customers also bought” form the bottom of the page.  It was about time, anyway.

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App Store Web

App Store Web

Marco Arment on iPad Apps Sales

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“But there’s another dilemma: it looks like there will be significant pressure, both political and technical, for universal apps that run on both the iPad and the iPhone. Like multiple-iPhone owners, this only counts as one sale, since one purchase of the app will run on both devices. So for any apps that use a universal edition, their entire existing customer-base will result in zero new sales. “

3D Bookshelf: When eBooks Feel the Power of Graphics

They say that most of times releasing a product is just about good timing. Understanding what people need in that precise moment, being sure that your app will be the only one that can appease the users for months. Until a new app will show up and beat yours to death, people usually adds. Then there’s another situation, pretty weird actually: you announce and release a product while one of your biggest competitors has announced a similar app that will go out in a few months and it promises to revolutionize your same market niche. Yeah, that sucks.

In this case, if you consider that a) the biggest competitor is Apple and b) the aforementioned app is iBooks, you can easily realize that c) it’s a game over before the game even starts. Man I wouldn’t recommend this stuff to my worst enemy. Or maybe yes. Anyway, fortunately the Ideal Biunary guys are not my enemies, and their newest app 3D Bookshelf is very good and promising.

Even though it’s very similar to iBooks and Classics, we should take a look at it. Because it has some chances to survive.

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