Archive for the ‘apps’ Category

All Palm Apps Temporarily 50% Off [Deals]

Woah! From June 18 to July 9, all apps in the Palm App Catalog will be half price. Pretty decent deal. [Pre Central via BGR] More »










Handhelds – Palm OS – PalmPre – Palm App Catalog – WebOS

Older iPhones Gain Video Recording

The first- and second-generation iPhones are now capable of video recording, and you won’t even need to do any hacking.

Last week, Wired.com reported that Apple released its restrictions on a private API for video capturing. As a result, Apple approved Ustream, a live video streaming app that’s free in the App Store. The extra bonus? In addition to streaming-video capability, the app has a video recorder, too — and that also works with older iPhones.

Permitting the video API in third-party apps should open doors to a host of apps offering video recording for older iPhones. Today, The Unofficial Apple Weblog’s Erica Sadun pointed out a $1 app called Camcorder for shooting video with older iPhones. Its interface is straight to the point: You launch the app, and there’s a Record button to start capturing. However, Sadun noted the frame rate is slow on an iPhone 3G, and you can’t do much with the recorded video except watch it on your iPhone. She added that the GUI is flimsy.

Based on those comments, we’d say “pass.” But look forward to some slick video-recording apps optimized for older iPhones. It’s inevitable developers will capitalize on this opportunity.

This should come as good news for many owners of the previous-generation iPhones. Previously, video recording was exclusive to the new iPhone 3GS. Owners of the original iPhone and the iPhone 3G could only gain access to video recording by jailbreaking the iPhone, but that’s no longer the case.

Camcorder Download Link [iTunes]

Ustream Download Link [iTunes]

See Also:

• 6 Reasons to Jailbreak Your iPhone
• Why the IPhone Doesn’t Record Video
• Apple Hints at Video Conferencing for Future iPhones
• Apple’s Next Media Frontier Will Be Streaming Video

iPhone Apps That Bloggers Need

Most bloggers are going to do the majority of their speedy writing in front of a computer. But occasionally there will be instances — breaking-news scenarios — where all we can rely on is our trusty phone to do our jobs.

Gadget Lab’s friends at WP Beginner, a WordPress enthusiast blog, has compiled a list of 10 must-have iPhone apps for bloggers: mobile software that could help bloggers while they’re on the run, or on an everyday basis in general. The list includes a blogging app, a Twitter client, note-taking utilities and others.

The WordPress app [iTunes] for iPhone is a good suggestion: It’s a slick app that works well with WordPress blogs in a friendly way. (Yes, Wired.com uses WordPress.) So long as you’re a decent typist with the iPhone’s virtual keyboard, posting one or two paragraphs of a breaking news story on the scene with the WordPress app should be no sweat.

Another app mentioned is Evernote [iTunes] a popular cloud-based note-taking service — one I’ve personally found very useful as a writer who does his work on multiple gadgets. My contacts list, for example, is saved on Evernote, so I look up sources’ phone numbers and e-mail addresses on any computer or phone so long as I have an internet connection.

Twitterific [iTunes], a free Twitter client, also made it to the list, which makes sense: Twitter certainly helps bloggers stay plugged in to the news. However, we’re big fans of Tweetie 2, a Twitter app we think has a superior interface, so we’d suggest getting that instead. It just costs $3.

Visit WP Beginner for the full list of apps. What iPhone apps would you add to this list of must-haves for bloggers? Add your apps in the comments below. To give you some ideas, here are some more of Gadget Lab’s suggestions: News Feed, a $1 news content aggregator; and Scanner 911, a $1 police radio scanner for bloggers and journalists chasing down crime scoops.

See Also:

• 10 Most Awesome iPhone Apps of 2008
• iPhone 3.0 Wish List: Accessory-Powered Apps We Want
• 22 iPhone Apps for Science Geeks
• Apple Promotes All-Time Top iPhone Apps

Photo: johanl/Flickr

Google Maps Navigation: A Free, Ass-Kicking, Turn-by-Turn Mobile App [Apps]

Google’s free turn-by-turn navigation for Maps is the news this morning and even in Beta, they got a lot right. It has Google Maps tech, like street and satellite view and search-driven voice controls. Here’s what you need to know.

• It’s android OS 2.0 only for now. And will be available when devices like that ship. (Google demo’d the app to us on a Droid, FWIW.) Other platform support will be announced “by carriers and phone makers” when they’re ready, but Google implied they are working closely with Apple now on it.
• Addresses are input by both text and voice (using the same tech as in the iPhone’s Google mobile app). But the app can take things like business names and restaurant types as well as soft queries like “that museum that has the king tut exhibit” and return a list of suggested locations
• The traffic data, as on Google Maps, is driven by multiple sources. Typically, this means data from local road authority services like the Bay Area’s Caltrans department’s highway cameras, but also data from cellphones using Google Maps.
• It’s free, and there are no ads. There’s nothing like it in the App store that’s less than $50 bucks a year.
• Maps cache along your intended route, so even if your connection dies along the way the route will still show you what you need to see, and voice synthesis of street names still works, too.
• Like most cloud map services, you’ll never need to update your map data.
• It has satellite view, which is super cool for context on the street, but also, it has streetview. Streetview images come up, overlayed with arrows, when you’re supposed to turn. Or at your final destination. Since streetview images have metadata on direction faced and position, Google Maps Navigation intelligently draws the arrows where you’re supposed to go. Sort of.
• Traffic icon is simple — green, yellow and red according to flow of traffic, with time to arrival numbers next to the symbol. If you click on the traffic icon, the map zooms out to show congestion points along your route.
• There’s no multiple route selection to help you plan a day’s drive of many locations. But you can search for locations (gas, eateries) along your route, and those results will show up on the map as long as they’re within a radius that moves long your path.
• You can go to a navigation point by simply holding onto a point on the map.
• You can bookmark locations as icons on your Android phone’s home page.
• If Google sells this in the app store for zero dollars, those millions of bucks Apple makes off of GPS app sales will likely disappear. It’s not for us to worry about until there’s no more GPS competition except Google, and we’re dependent on their pace of progress, but no competition is a bad thing. And it’s a little strange that Google’s search money is going to pay for a free map app that is competitive with stuff that costs $100 a year from full time GPS makers like TomTom. Unfair is the word that comes to mind. But I can’t say I don’t want this App.
• The data on the map, like traffic, satellite view and points of interest, are called layers. Google said it would be easy for them to add more layer, so its ostensibly possible to add things like Google Latitude support, and other neat tricks. Maybe they’ll open up an API for it.
• There’s a landscape and portrait mode, as well as a big-icon UI for dashboard usage.
A visual tour of Google Maps Navigation:

Google developing free navigation app?

We already know plenty of people who’ve eschewed traditional turn-by-turn GPS systems in favor of plotting it out for free on Google Maps, and now there’s whispers that Mountain View is coming after the rest of the market with a free nav app. That’s at least what nav services providers are saying to Forbes, who think El Goog is gearing up to release a free ad-supported navigation app after making moves to use its own US maps instead licensing data from Tele Atlas and putting ads on the iPhone Maps app. Obviously that would shake things up a ton — and make Android devices a huge bargain — but we’ll see where this all leads over the next few months.

[Via Fierce Mobile Content; thanks Elad]

Filed under: Cellphones, GPS, Handhelds, Software

Google developing free navigation app? originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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