This Week's Sponsor:

Copilot Money

The Apple Editor’s Choice Award App for Tracking Your Money. Start Your Free Trial Today

Posts tagged with "iPhone"

Joystickers’ Classic Will Put Buttons On Your iOS Device

If you’re a hardcore iOS gamer and you’ve always felt like your iPhone and iPad could use some hardware button love in certain games (*cough*shooters and platforms*cough*), you should take a look at this new Kickstarter project by a Chicago-based startup called Joytstickers, which aims at improving the quality of your gaming by putting physical buttons on the shiny glass surface of your iOS device of choice.

Question is: how? The Classic, a product that’s been in development for 9 months, is a set of buttons that can stick to an iPhone’s screen thanks to a special “micro-suction cup material imported from Japan” that’s invisible to the naked eye but allows the material to stay put on the screen without damaging it or leaving any sign of attachment. As you can see in the promo video, they really just stick. The reason why Joystickers is doing this is to overcome the lack of tactile feedback when playing iOS games. Personally, I can say this sounds extremely good for games like Pizza Boy or shooters that require a “fixed” control position on a glass screen that, admittedly, doesn’t usually make gamers so excited. The only major problem for now is that there’s no solution for directional (D-Pad) controls, meaning that you’ll either have to stick 4 buttons on screen and forget about diagonal input or just use a Classic for non-directional virtual buttons.

The startup is also promoting a brush and a stylus for iOS, but we think The Classic is the most interesting product available on Joystickers’ Kickstarter page. You can back the project here by pledging $1 or more, and it will be funded if $25,000 is pledged by March 24th. [via MobileCrunch] Read more

iPhone App with Face Tracking Technology Lets You Try Virtual Glasses

The Total Immersion developers released a free iPhone app in the App Store a few days ago that uses augmented reality face-tracking technologies to let you try virtual glasses and see how they fit. The app – Atol les opticiens – was commissioned by French optician and eyeglasses retailer Atol and, apparently, it’s the first of its kind to land in the App Store that relies on this kind of face recognition to allow you to try various models of glasses. Unfortunately, the app is in French so if you want to try it prepare to see a lot of “telecharger” and “Oui”.

The developers write:

This is the most fully realized mobile commerce application ever to use augmented reality, and the first  AR app in the m-commerce space featuring face- tracking technology, newly available on mobile,” said Bruno Uzzan, co-founder and CEO, Total Immersion.  “Face tracking is ideally suited to purchases like eyeglass frames, where it’s essential to try before you buy.  In this environment, the m-commerce experience is both more convenient and more satisfying for consumers and merchants alike.  Product selection is virtually unlimited – and those with corrective lenses can keep them on through the AR fitting.

I tried the app and, after a few calibrations, it works pretty well. Check out the video below, and go download here. Read more

Canned Mail Lets You Save Time Sending Pre-Composed Emails

There are cool utilities for the iPhone, and then there are must-have apps you just can’t work without anymore once you’ve tried them. That has been the case for me with Canned by Sky Balloon, a neat little iPhone app that allows me to send pre-composed text messages to my favorite contacts, thus saving time typing when the subjects are always the same over and over. I’m talking about stuff like “Hey mom, remember to buy some pizza” or “Meet me in 5 at the station”. Canned, of all the apps I have, is probably the one I use the most.

But Sky Balloon knew that text messages were just the beginning, and so they listened to their userbase’s requests and developed a new version of Canned that’s meant for emails. Canned Mail, available at $0.99 in the App Store, lets you create pre-composed emails to send at any time to one of your Address Book contacts, or multiple ones at once. You can in fact create complete emails with subject / To / CC / BCC fields, save them in the app’s main screen and tap on them to send them in seconds.

If you find yourself sending the same emails every day, you need Canned Mail. Go download it here.

Apple Cuts The Minimum iAd Buy In Half

Now that the first run of iAd campaigns has concluded, AllThingsD is reporting that Apple has decided to cut the minimum required spending in half from a steep $1 million to $500,000. The change has presumably been made because whilst it has been reasonably successful, the number of ads being presented and filling ad spots actually decreased this year. As a result Apple may be wanting to attract some smaller scale advertisers which couldn’t afford to enter the platform previously and fill those ad spots.

Read more

#MacStoriesDeals - Tuesday

So, an unofficial iPad 2 announcement for Wednesday, March 2. Do you believe? Here are today’s deals on iOS, Mac, and Mac App Store apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get ‘em while they’re hot!

Read more

Wunderlist For iOS Gets A Hefty Update To 1.2.0

Wunderlist Features

Wunderlist Features

Wunderlist is an excellent, cross-platform alternative to apps like Things if you want to access your to-do lists anywhere, and today there’s a big update that brings even more functionality to the already flexible manager. Alongside visual improvements to the interface between a new icon, some sidebar adjustments, and three new backgrounds, the iOS version has been updated to support landscape mode, push notifications, and email tasking (manage your tasks from your inbox). Wunderlist also sports a new date picker and an “optimized” detail view for tasks. If you’re a Wunderlist user, check the App Store to download the latest free update.

Photopod Aggregates Your Photos From the Cloud: Flickr, Facebook, Dropbox, Twitter

It’s been rumored that with the next versions of iOS, and most notably the MobileMe service, Apple will heavily rely on the cloud to allow users to store media like photos, music and videos online and stream them at any time on the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. A move to cloud-based storage would allow the company to produce cheaper devices with less internal storage, and let users access personal content anywhere as long as an Internet connection is available at the same time.

Photopod, an iPhone app available in the App Store and developed by Dear Future Astronaut, wants to become the ultimate photo aggregator and manager by providing a unified interface to browse pictures stored on a variety of online services. Think of it as a way to access content anywhere (and download it) using an application that does everything automatically through a tabbed “accordion” UI that brings Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Dropbox, Picasa and your Camera Roll all together.

Once authorized with the aforementioned services in the Settings (note that Twitter will only fetch images shared through TwitPic on your account), the main screen of the app will display a series of vertical tabs you can expand to reveal their contents – namely photos. As you open a tab, a list of thumbnail previews slides down allowing you to see all the photos you’ve stored locally or online. Tapping on the share button in the upper right corner will let you select multiple photos at once to upload them to a specific service. It’s very cool as it also lets you upload pictures from one service to another, or from your device to the cloud. You can also download photos to view them offline, or enter a basic editing mode that enables you to rotate and crop pictures. Everything is kept simple and accessible. Flickr, Facebook and Picasa even get menus for sets and menus you’ve organized your photos with.

I like Photopod because it brings the most popular photo sharing services together into a beautiful package that’s easy to use, fast, reliable and intuitive. The app is available here at $1.99, don’t miss it.