As a video platform, Vimeo has always played second fiddle to YouTube. Yet, Vimeo does attract a more professional grade of videographer and often the contents of Vimeo are much more polished than the much uploaded to YouTube from millions of would-be Internet stars. Vimeo finally has a new app for iOS and Android and it is everything you would expect from the platform in terms of quality video and performance. Users can view videos, manage their accounts and upload all from one app. The Android version of Vimeo requires 2.3 Gingerbread or above. Producteev (Free - iOS, Android) Talk about cross-platform. Producteev is a task manager available for Macs and Windows PCs, iOS and Android, IM and email. It is basically everywhere. As a task manager, one of its best features is the ability to work offline so you can access your tasks and projects from everywhere. Imagine being an intern working on Capitol Hill in D.C. and stuck on the Metro Orange Line between Roslyn and Foggy Bottom (if you have never worked in D.C., that is where the train goes under the river and there is absolutely no cell reception) then the ability to access your tasks offline on your phone is tantamount. You can also invite other users into the projects within the app with its workspace feature. Business is going mobile. We eventually envision that the cross-platform Apps of the Month section will be dominated by HTML5 mobile Web-based apps as opposed to those that happen to be released for both iOS and Android within the same month. So, we introduce our first HTML5-based Web app ever in this column with Lanyrd, the social conference directory. It made a big splash when we wrote about it for ReadWriteMobile on the last day of January and the Read More
Trover launches lists today, a new way to highlight the rich, guided tours its pioneer users create for the places they live. At its core, Trover is a location-based photo browser, putting its users' photos on a map you can explore. It uses social networks to help with discoveries, but its emphasis is on the things found by its users. In addition to lists, which will help highlight individual users more, today's update also adds @-mentions and redesigns the news feed to be more about the people. Trover has positioned itself as a "browser" for places, but when you talk to CEO Jason Karas, you hear that Trover is learning that the people are part of those places. The new version of Trover is still about discovering places, but it provides the authentic flavor that only the local folks can offer. World-Browsers Feel Like the Future Trover (available for iPhone and Android) is in a category of apps that matters to me. So-called "browsers for the world" represent the future I dreamed about as a kid, where our devices are not difficult or distracting, they're seamless extensions of and enhancements to our daily lives. Using a smartphone to find cool stuff to see and do is one of the most natural kinds of computing I can imagine. This is what drew me to Trover when it launched. But since then, another iPhone world-browser has drawn me in. I've been using Localscope, which I think is much closer to a "browser," per se, than Trover is. It's a sleek user interface to aid querying for and locating things. Localscope searches across virtually all major Web services that share location data, so you can click from Facebook to Twitter to Foursquare to Google Maps (and much more) until you find something interesting. It's Read More
Macworld | iWorld was last week, and as Apple-watchers expected, the emphasis was on the i-part. The iPhone and iPad are becoming blockbusters, so this must have been an exciting year to be at that show. I wasn't cool enough to be there, but I'm pretty sure I read the blogs of every single person who was. And there's one iPhone app they're all talking about this week: Launch Center. To a hardcore iPhone user, it seems like it should be relatively easy to explain what Launch Center does. But as the many meditative blog posts show, there's more here than meets the eye. Launch Center's creators at App Cubby are still figuring out for themselves what they're onto here. They've broken into something fundamental about iOS that it doesn't have yet, and they've made a $0.99 app we can all use to figure out together exactly what that is. Launching An Experiment Launch Center is one app for launching tasks across many apps. It can be a simple speed-dial-Mom or text-my-girlfriend launcher, or it can hook deeply into an app and, for example, go straight to Instagram's camera screen. You can also link to any Web URL, which it will open in Safari. It also comes loaded with some neat shortcuts like a "Flashlight" button to turn on the phone's LED. An update last week added scheduled tasks, so you can now associate an in-app action with a timed reminder. This all sounds so useful, but it's surprisingly hard to figure out how to work it in. @JonMwords hmm. I have "call girlfriend" and backup website. I talked to App Cubby founder David Barnard today, and it sounds like he and developer Justin Youens are still figuring it out, too. Barnard says they only put Launch Center in their iPhone Read More
When you see as many apps as we do at RWW, you begin to feel like it's all been done. So many of the everyday jobs for apps to do can already be done by at least one app (if not dozens). How many ways can you share photos with your friends? How many social networks and check-ins and restaurant-discovery services do we need? Lately, we've started to see a new class of app emerge just for managing these tasks across their various apps. The idea of apps for our apps sounds ridiculous, but some of them are neat, and some are downright lifesavers. Here's a round-up of apps you should use if you want to bring your many social networks into one dedicated place. Viewing Photos A photo app called Pixable exists just to pull the photos from your Facebook and Twitter feeds into one attractive place. It allows further sorting of the photos into all kinds of categories, but its reach across social networks is what stands out. Pixable announced today that it reached a million downloads on iOS, and it also has a mobile Web version for users of other platforms. Hopefully the creators will roll Instagram, Google+ and a few other services into this app. Then we'd only have to launch one app to see all our photos. Videos For viewing all the videos in your various social networks, Showyou is amazing. It brings any video from your Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, Vimoe and Vodpod accounts into one sleek, sliding touchscreen theater (Vodpod is a video curation site by Remixation, the company that makes Showyou). Apple people can even AirPlay the videos over to their Apple TV from the iPhone or iPad version. Showyou is available for iOS devices and the Kindle Fire. If this app appeals Read More
Forget the random pictures of babies and puppies, alarming status updates from family members and political rants. On My-ArtMap, you will be immersed in art. It's as simple as that. The site, which is targeted at an international audience, is available in English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish and Chinese. You can create a username and password for the site, or login using Facebook Connect. It is also available as an iPhone app. My-ArtMap is a social network exclusively for the art and art market. Like the Art World, it is populated by art professionals, including auction houses, galleries, museums and art collectors. The site just exited beta, shortly after acquiring many new members from Spain, Italy and Germany. It is heavily focused on Europe, at least for the time being. "Facebook is a great project, but the international art market is very closed and the requirements especially for this market are really different in comparison to other markets," says ArtMap CEO Stefan Sebök. "Facebook and Google are too big and not specialized enough for the art market!" The site's news feed is known as the Newscafe. Much like Facebook, it surfaces stories posted by fellow users. But unlike the Facebook algorithm, My-ArtMap does not differentiate between highlighted and most recent stories. The "Galleries" section allows users to create their own virtual art galleries around specific topics. These images can either have a certain theme, or could be a collection of artwork. For some reason, even though I set the language to English, the text in this section keeps popping up in German. Users can also create groups around a specific topic to discuss ideas privately. The site still has quite a few quirks. It's unclear how the Newscafe algorithm sorts stories, and sometimes the text doesn't translate. Still, this is Read More
National Geographic Maps has partnered with AllTrails, an online network for outdoor enthusiasts, to launch a co-branded service at alltrails.com. The site aims to be a comprehensive destination for people planning hikes or other backcountry outings. Its 200,000 users can browse nearby or search for trails, post reviews and photos and share trails with friends. Users who have completed a trail are listed on its page. Trail profiles give time and distance measurements, weather forecasts and routes overlaid on topographic maps. AllTrails initially used Google Maps data but found it to be too inaccurate for safe planning of wilderness trips. After Google began to charge for access to the Google Maps SDK, AllTrails began to explore other partnerships. Today's announcement with National Geographic is the beginning of an integration that will move AllTrails away from Google. After Google announced they would charge for developer access to Maps, AllTrails founder/CEO Russell Cook says that "a handful of projects were kicked off to improve the open source alternatives but there wasn't nearly as much activity as I expected." After Google revealed the pricing in Q4 of 2011, Cook says "things kicked into high gear." The pricing was "significantly higher than I think anyone anticipated," Cook says. "Most publishers are lucky to consistently monetize their site traffic at $1 CPM, let alone be able to build profitable business models while paying Google $4 CPM for mapping." "Deep down I think the developer community knew that at some point the Google APIs they were using would stop being free," Cook says, "but I don't think they ever expected the price gouging. My personal opinion is that Google has every right to charge for the services they are providing but their recent actions have been very short sighted." Even before Google announced it would charge for Read More
When the iPad first launched two years ago, it was derided by some for its limitations. The first iteration didn't even have a camera on it, and it may never get a physical keyboard, so the notion of the device being used for content creation was laughable. Instead, the iPad was seen as a tool best used to lean back and consume content. For the most part, that's how things have played out. People use their iPads for reading, watching video, listening to music and gaming. Despite that, the iPad is finding a place in business all over the world. About 67% of iPad-owning professionals use their tablets at work, even if the vast majority of the devices are not supplied by employers, according to a recent survey by IDG. Of those people, 93% use the device for work-related communication. The iPad's role in business and worker productivity is fueled in large part by the efforts of app developers. Between the "Business" and "Productivity" sections of the App Store, there are over 12,000 iPad applications available for download. Some of the more popular choices include apps for word processing, document reading and signing, remote desktop, file-syncing, communication and collaboration. There are numerous apps that turn your iPad into a whiteboard, let you attend virtual meetings and focus more intently on what you're writing. For any business or sole proprietor with goods to sell, downloading Square or one of its competitors is just a no-brainer at this point. There's no shortage of business intelligence apps and even IT can use server admin tools, FTP clients and mobile device management software. The iPad and its chief competitors in the tablet space are not poised to replace laptops and desktops just yet, a fact confirmed in IDG's survey. Only 6% of respondents said their Read More
Google has released a new way to securely log into Google accounts on public computers. Using a smartphone, scan the QR code generated at accounts.google.com/sesame. The Google login prompt will appear on your phone, and logging in there will log you into a session on the desktop. This prevents the user from having to type sensitive login credentials into a public machine, which could be compromised with keylogging software. The new QR code feature is an alternative to Google's 2-step verification. This generates a unique short code on your mobile, which you must input for each desktop login, using the presence of your phone as a form of identification. Adoption of QR codes is a slow-growing oddity. The last study we saw indicated that 5% of U.S. adults have scanned the 2D bar codes with their smartphones. QR codes allow us to put hyperlinks anywhere in the real world. We've seen some neat use cases, such as a project to put QR links to Wikipedia entries on their corresponding real-world places. But most of the current use of QR codes is in pretty mundane marketing campaigns, and lots of people find them inscrutable. Google's use of QR codes as a security feature is much more compelling than a Cheetos ad. Android users can use Google Goggles, and iOS users can use the free Google Search app. If you choose to use sesame to log in to your Google account, PC World has some great security tips. If you're logging in on a computer using public Wi-Fi, it's safer to use the cellular data network on your phone, so packet sniffers can't catch the whole exchange. Also, make sure the site on the desktop uses a secure HTTPS connection from the real google.com domain, or else you're on the wrong site, and Read More
An alteration made for the latest 2.0 version of the Dropbox app for Android in order to better comply with the rules of the operating system resulted in the removal of some features that, in the 1.x versions, users had come to rely upon. As a result, Dropbox team members these past few weeks have found themselves in damage control mode, as they work to stem a rising tide of frustration from users, some of whom aren't yet buying the company's message that these changes were necessary. The biggest change the new version makes is to the storage locations for files downloaded from users' Dropbox storage areas to their phones. One is the cache for files that may be useful on the phone, like pictures and music. Another is for documents that may then be opened up in apps on the phone, like the QuickOffice productivity suite or the KeePassDroid password cache. The new version of the Dropbox app moves these locations to directories specified in the Android guidelines. But the change was implemented before users and developers were ready. The Android app for Dropbox has been generally available only since mid-2010. During that time, both users and developers had come to recognize sdcard/dropbox as the storage location for downloaded files. Other apps could rely on those files appearing there, so when they were launched automatically, the files would be loaded with them. After upgrading to 2.0, Dropbox for Android users discovered that feature no longer worked. They panicked. One furious developer contacted me personally. In an e-mail, Dropbox forums member ro m. expressed his outrage that developers were never told about the change of methodology prior to the 2.0 update. "The worst part is that while the upgrade migrates data that originated from the Dropbox app to the new location," Read More
That the Web has revolutionized music is not exactly a news flash, but most people typically think about that in terms of music consumption. iTunes. YouTube. SoundCloud. Spotify. Group listening sites like Turntable.fm. Recommendation engines like those of Pandora, Last.fm and the Echo Nest. Now voice-controlled Internet radio apps are coming pre-installed in new cars. There's no doubt that they way people discover and listen to music has changed radically, and will continue to do so. The Internet and mobile technology are beginning to have an equally significant impact on the creation of music itself. Extremely powerful recording, DJing and sequencing software is making its way from laptops to tablets and smartphones, for example. Now, the way people learn to play music in the first place is changing as well. These days, instead of traveling across town to attend music lessons, many people are using tools like Skype to learn from a distance, just as they can do things like attend meetings and take academic courses regardless of their physical location. The new model allows for more flexible learning and in many cases improves the regularity of lessons since it avoids things like traffic jams and bad weather. Even if one doesn't get one-on-one lessons via Skype, the Web is loaded with music education resources for all skill levels. When a few friends and I started a band last year, I decided to brush up some more advanced drumming techniques, since it had been a few years since I last played. Much like Lynda.com and Tuts+offer video tutorials for software and coding, there a number of sites out there who do the same for drummers and other musicians. I found one in particular that published a free video podcast, enabling me to download the lessons to my phone or iPad and Read More
