Posts tagged with "iPhone"

Review: FLAC Player for iPhone

If you care about your digital music library and you care about quality, I guess you know what the FLAC format is all about. The Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) is an advanced (free and open source) audio compression codec that allows decompression into a perfect copy of the original audio data. Basically, it’s a high-quality compression method that generates state-of-the-art rips and (here’s the downside) huge data files.  If you lose a CD you care about but have a FLAC digital copy, you have an exact duplicate.

To give you an example, a standard 13-tracks album can go up to 450MB in size. Now think about encoding that Beatles collection you have in FLAC and you get the idea.

FLAC is great, but isn’t as supported by hardware makers as other standards such as MP3 are. Luckily enough for iPhone owners, there’s an for that (sorry Apple, I know it’s a trademark now). FLAC Player for iPhone (and iPad, it’s a universal app) is a simple way to import your lossless albums and songs on your iDevice and listen to them. Read more

New York Band Performs Live On iPhones [Video]

We know there are hundreds of music applications for the iPhone out there; some even managed to win an Apple Design Award earlier this year. Yet, we also know there are some people on the internet who regularly quickly diss iOS devices as “consumption-only” devices.

So take a look at the video below. Brooklyn-based band Atomic Tom performed one of their hits  - “Take Me Out”  - entirely on their iPhones, in the subway. At first the crowd thought they were going to bomb the train (seriously? with those hipster moustache?), but Atomic Tom eventually managed to make quite an impression on the passengers. Great video.

[9to5 via Recombu] Read more

Humail: A New “Emotional” Email Client for iPhone

When it comes down to email, my choice is simple: Gmail. I use Gmail for my work email addresses (everything runs smoothly on Google Apps), and I have a dozen of personal accounts I’ve used in these past years to keep my identity well conceived on the internet. I know you do that, too. Here’s a good tip: create a Gmail account just for your signups (Facebook, Twitter, Gowalla, etc) and forget about your main inbox getting overloaded. It saved my life.

Anyway, while I use the Gmail web interface on the desktop, I’m forced to stick with Mail.app on the iPhone and iPad: the app works fine (could be a lot better though), but the main reason why I don’t use and haven’t even tried other clients is because there are no other clients on iOS. I don’t know if this is about high development costs (maybe) or some restrictions imposed by Apple (likely), still we’re not getting the possibility of installing 3r party mail clients like on our Macs and PCs. That sucks.

There are some Gmail-specific applications in the App Store: Mailroom is one of them, and I love it. It’s like a mobile version of Mailplane, a Cocoa wrapper for multiple Gmail accounts. I use it on a daily basis, but it’s not (and can’t be) my default client. I’ve recently stumbled upon this new app called “Humail” which aims at becoming your new “personal” and “emotional” email client. I gave it a try, and here’s what’s behind the marketing slogans of Humail. Read more

Tasks Touch: The Simplenote of GTD Apps

Maybe you don’t need OmniFocus, and you don’t need Things. You don’t care about whatever David Allen has to say and seriously - the Emergent Task Planner? You just want to enter tasks and have them always available, right? I got you. You’re that kind of user who don’t care about features and UX innovations as long as what needs to be accomplished during the day is driven by a simple software that doesn’t get in the way and doesn’t require you to read a manual.

You’re anything like me, but I think I’ve got the app that might just change your productivity worfklow on the iPhone: meet Tasks Touch, the Simplenote of productivity apps. Read more

US iPhone Data for International Visitors: A Guide→

US iPhone Data for International Visitors: A Guide

I’ve just returned from a two-week holiday on the West Coast of the US, and during my trip was asked a number of times how I was using mobile data whilst away. As I gather a number of people are interested, here’s what I was doing during the trip. This method will likely work for most carriers around the world (you just have to get the right SIM card and set up your unlocked iPhone’s data settings correctly): but I’ve tried and tested it on AT&T with a GoPhone account.

Great tips.

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Take Five: New App From The Iconfactory For When You Forget To Un-Pause Your Music

I love waking up to new apps from people I respect and admire. The Iconfactory guys are among these people: how couldn’t the makers of Twitterrific not be in the list? They’re great developers and experienced designers that don’t fail to surprise on each new app release.

Take Five is a new app for iPhone from The Iconafctory aimed at letting you remember about the music you paused and never turned back on. Admittedly, this is quite a common problem: not all iPhone apps support automatic resume after a phone call interruption (Spotify, for example) and so many times we simply forget to press the play button again. Take Five automatically fades your music back in after 5 minutes. Why didn’t we think of this before? Read more

Posterous Releases Official iPhone App

Posterous, the popular free blogging platform that’s been called many times in the past the “real alternative to Tumblr”, just got an official iPhone client. The app, simply called Posterous and free in the App Store, allows you to send posts with any kind of text and media in it to your Posterous powered blog. The app is meant to be running on devices with iOS 4 multitasking: you can select material to upload to your blog, close the app and open another one, the upload will continue in the background. Read more

The WSJ Reports About CDMA iPhone Again: This Time, In India

The WSJ is back with more CDMA iPhone rumors: less than a week after the latest “scoop” about Apple and Verizon getting ready to release a CDMA-enabled model of the iPhone, the WSJ is now reporting that India’s Reliance Communications and Tata Teleservices have been in talks with Apple for five months about a CDMA iPhone.

The talks with Reliance Communications Ltd. and Tata Teleservices Ltd. –which offer mobile phone services based on CDMA technology–come soon after news that Apple is making a version of its iPhone that Verizon Wireless will sell early next year in the U.S. Verizon Wireless offers mobile phone services based on CDMA technology.

“Tata has been in talks with them [Apple] for four to five months now,” said one person familiar with the negotiations.

“This [talks] has been going on as India is a big market for CDMA. It [any launch] should benefit both parties,” the second person said.

It is unclear though when any launch may take place, these people said. Read more