Calendar applications are great, but sometimes you need to track how many days until an upcoming event. Or in some cases, you might want to track how many consecutive days you’ve been doing something; handy for monitoring health and other activities. D-Day, found in the iTunes app store, is a free iOS program that manages both scenarios, making it a must-have app on my iPhone. The software is pretty simple; you just enter a date on one of the three tabs to track days left, days past, or days until someone’s birthday. You can easily customize the title of what you’re tracking and the events can be added to your native calendar app or be set to repeat. My main purpose for finding and using D-Day is my running streak, which I began on January 1, 2011. Today, for example, is my 400th consecutive day of running at least a mile. I need the daily counter that D-Day provides me for my running log. For additional fun, I keep track of my age in days. The app tells me that today I woke up for the 15,524th day. My kids swear I don’t look a day over 15,000, so the running must be helping. This slideshow requires JavaScript. Although my primary purpose for D-Day is my running streak, I’ve found it can be useful for so much more. People who stopped smoking and want to keep track of how long since that last light-up can use D-Day. Maybe you want to track how long it’s been since a quiet date with your significant other. (Trust me mobile younglings, this becomes important later in life as date night frequency drops off you’ve been alive for that 10,000 days!) Or perhaps you have a goal to lose 10 pounds in 100 days; D-Day can be your Read More
Games for the Weekend is a weekly feature aimed at helping you avoid doing something constructive with your downtime. Each Friday we’ll be recommending a game for Mac, iPhone or iPad that we think is awesome enough to keep you busy until Monday, at least. Mini Motor Racing and Mini Motor Racing HD ($0.99 iPhone, $1.99 iPad) are excellent top-down racing games from The Binary Mill. A good racing game requires three main features to come together: vehicle control, a variety of challenging courses and a heart-thumping soundtrack. Mini Motor Racing excels at all three. But the real kicker is the game’s head-to-head multiplayer action. Mini Motor Racing supports four styles of steering and an optional auto acceleration feature to accommodate your prefered style of gameplay. “Wheel” mode uses a virtual steering wheel on the left side of the screen very similar to the iconic d-pad. “Toggle” provides a left and right button on the left side of the screen, whereas “Tank” places the left and right on separately on either side. “Slider” allows the user to control the car by moving a slide bar to the left and right. Each style of play will cater to different drivers. Some prefer the Wheel, but I found Tank mode to be the easiest to control. The final control in all modes is a button that gives the car a boost of nitro during the race. Thanks to the way that the car navigates the track, as well as careful camera placement, you will never find the controls getting in the way of the game regardless of your control scheme of choice. The opening sequence and smooth 3-D transitions when navigating the game’s menu system attest to the development team’s attention to detail. There are over twenty different courses to choose from, and variations in weather and Read More
...you one of those people who just watch the game to catch a glimpse of the ads? No worries, you’ll find all of those online as well. There is also a bunch of second-screen action going on this year to deliver tweets and other extra content to your cell phone or iPad while you watch TV. And speak... Read More
WillCall, the San Francisco ticketing app we profiled just last week, is taking down the velvet ropes and letting customers into its app starting Thursday. The app, which is free, is available now in the iOS App Store and via the web for Android and Windows Phone 7 devices. WillCall helps people who want to make last-minute plans, specifically what kind of concert or performance they want to go to. At first, there will only be a few events listed per week, mostly for smaller venues and independent artists. As an example, the first list of acts available in the app will be: Shabazz Palaces at Yoshi’s, VHS or Beta at Rickshaw Stop or theater piece Jesus In India at the Magic Theatre. The coolest part of WillCall — besides enabling poor planners and procrastinators of the world — is its attempt to capture the inherently social nature of concert-going. Users of the app will get a push notification and an invitation when a friend buys a ticket to an event. “We recognize that folks are generally going to attend shows in groups, and this is our first attempt to making that as easy as possible,” said co-founder Donnie Dinch. WillCall, for now, is going to be most useful for those around the San Francisco area. However, Los Angeles and New York City are on tap for launch just after the SXSW conference next month, according to Dinch. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial. Read More
App developer Readdle has been very busy lately. A big update arrived recently for its PDF Expert software, and now the company is also launching a brand new note-taking and PDF annotation iPad app called Remarks. Here’s a hands on look at what the app offers users. Remarks, like PDF Expert, offers PDF annotation and filling tools, but it’s a much more streamlined tool than that app, with a focus on making it easy to mark up and share documents, as well as create your own notes and notebooks independent of any pre-existing PDFs that can also be marked up and shared with other Remarks users for collaborative work. Remarks is that rare beast among PDF tools, either on or off the iPad: it features a simple, straightforward interface and everything work very quickly, with speedy response times for turning pages, adding notes, and basically anything else you’d want to do. Tools, including pens, highlighters, preset shapes and text entry, are clearly labeled with simple icons, and there’s no visual clutter or wealth of unnecessary options to distract you from what you actually need to get done. Loading Picture 1 of 7 Sharing may be one of Remarks’ best feature. Using email, you can easily share documents with other Remarks users, including annotated PDFs and notes created in the app itself. But in an upcoming update, Readdle is planning to introduce Dropbox, Box.net and other cloud storage sharing options, too, making it even more convenient for doing collaborative work. Paired with a Bluetooth keyboard or stylus, Remarks is even more useful. It features effective accidental touch or wrist-detection, meaning you can write naturally with a stylus without worrying about drawing in the wrong place, and regular Mac key shortcuts like Command+C, Command+V and Command+A work with keyboard text input. Remarks allows flexibility in Read More
Macworld | iWorld had some fantastic products. Ignoring anything that wasn’t actually shipping, since so many products never actually make it to market or do make it, but years behind schedule (Nighthawk anyone?), here are my top picks from the show. I was amazed as to how quickly I fell in love with the Flygrip’s simplicity of design and elegance It’s a clip that sticks on the back of an existing iPhone case, or Flygrip’s custom case. While it adds some bulk to the back of the case, it actually isn’t annoying. Quite the opposite. Fully retracted, it allows you too hold your iPhone securely with your ring and forefinger, leaving the rest of your hand able to type. Being able to text and tweet easily on the go made me a believer out of me. Not only does it make the iPhone easier to hold, but the Flygrip can also act as a kickstand for both portrait and landscape mode, which made catching up on email during lunch an absolute breeze. At $29.95, it’s affordable, and you don’t have to give up your existing case. Although Apple’s AirPrint only supports a limited set of printers, iOS products like Readdle’s Printer Pro and desktop products such as Ecamm’s Printopia have extended the iPad’s print capabilities. Lantronix has a desktop-and device-independent solution to make existing network printers available to any iOS device also on the network. The device supports up to 10 printers, and retails for $149.95. It’s a great option for small businesses that want to quickly and easily make their existing printers available to employee devices. The Prizm series of iPhone and iPad stands from Hub Innovations is another simple, elegant product. The stand is made up of two metal pieces that come together to hold your iOS device in place while charging Read More
If you wanted to play Minecraft and ran into this instead, you'd be very disappointed and out $1. Browsing recent App Store releases, I came across “Minecraft – Pocket Edition,” with a version 1.0 update. Thinking it might be the update that finally brings combat and additional block types to Mojang’s free-form world creation game, I quickly clicked through — only to find a completely different app that’s obviously trying to lure customers who aren’t paying close attention. The Minecraft – Pocket Edition released Jan. 26 is from developer Onliance, not Mojang, and despite having exactly the same name as the original, and using screenshots from the full release desktop version of the game, actually isn’t a game at all: it’s a guide or recipe list for use with the PC title (and doesn’t even really apply to the genuine Pocket Edition in its current form), but customers searching for the original would be hard-pressed to discover that at a glance. Here’s the introductory paragraph for Onliance’s app description: Minecraft is focused on creativity and building, allowing players to build constructions out of textured cubes in a 3D world. Gameplay in its commercial release has two principal modes: Survival, which requires players to acquire resources themselves and maintain their health and hunger; and Creative, where the player has an unlimited supply of resources, the ability to fly, and no concept of health or hunger. A third gameplay mode, named Hardcore, ratchets up the difficulty of surviving and forces the player to delete his or her world upon death. An outdated Classic version is also available for free, although it is no longer being developed. Creative Minecraft resembles Classic, but with many more features. Before clicking through to “…More” in the iTunes page for the app, you actually see only about the first Read More
When President Obama makes his State of the Union address Tuesday evening at 9:00 PM ET/6:00 PT, his speech will be carried on all the major broadcast and cable news networks. And for all those away from the TV, the State of the Union will be available online and on multiple mobile and connected platforms as well. ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC will all broadcast President Obama’s speech live, as will CNBC, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC. Many of those channels will also have live streams of their networks available; for instance, ABC News, CNN and CSPAN will all have make their feeds available online. For the official online feed of the address, tune into the White House’s live stream at www.whitehouse.gov/sotu. In addition to the stream of President Obama’s speech, the White House feed will include an enhanced version of the broadcast that will include charts, stats and other data that will provide additional backing for how he makes and defends his policy decisions. There will also be live streams for those on mobile and other devices. The Official White House iPhone app and Android app will broadcast the video live to mobile users. Viewers watching at home who might not have cable can also tune into the State of the Union live through WSJ Live’s connected devices apps, which can be accessed on the Apple iPad and Apple TV, Boxee Box, Roku, Vizio, Panasonic Connected TV, Samsung Smart TV, Sony Internet TV and Yahoo! Connected TV platforms. Finally, for those looking for the Republican response to President Obama’s address, Speaker John Boehner will stream the rebuttal on his YouTube channel. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial. Read More
Games for the Weekend is a weekly feature aimed at helping you avoid doing something constructive with your downtime. Each Friday we’ll be recommending a game for Mac, iPhone or iPad that we think is awesome enough to keep you busy until Monday, at least. Run Roo Run ($0.99 iPhone, $1.99 iPad) is a simple to learn, yet hard to master side-scrolling game that rewards split-second accuracy. If you were one of those gamers that toiled over Mario to get the timing of jumping from pipe to pipe just right, then this is the game for you. Run Roo Run forgoes complex touch-based controls, yet still delivers that satisfying rush when you make the right moves. Gameplay is very basic. The main character, Roo, begins running at an even pace across the screen. As Roo approaches an obstacle, you jump by tapping the screen. Jump too soon, and you land on the obstacle. Jump too late, and you run into the obstacle. Each level is timed: How long it takes to beat a level determines your reward, since the timer keeps going every time you run into an obstacle. Between jumping, double jumping, pausing and restarting, you end up driving yourself nuts trying to make it through a given level in record time. The game ends up being about mastering split-second timing and pattern recall. Each level occupies just a single screen, which combined, add up to Roo’s journey across Australia. With over four hundred individual screen challenges to overcome, the game seems almost endless. Roo learns new skills along the way to conquer new types of obstacles in order to keep things fresh. The game also keeps its edge by resetting quickly after each failed attempt; Roo is back up and ready to try again almost instantly, with no tedious intermediary screens getting in the way. You Read More
A page from "Alice for the iPad" by Atomic Antelope Since before Apple announced its education-oriented press event taking place this week, there’s been some speculation — including here — that a logical step would be to start selling digital textbooks directly through its iBookstore. It would make sense because Apple needs a way to juice iBook sales, it has a fantastic e-textbook reader in the iPad and because, well, what else would you announce at a small “education” event in New York City, the center of publishing? It turns out, it might not be that complicated. To begin with, if it were about books, it’s a little odd that many in the publishing business don’t know anything about what Apple’s about to announce. What if what the company reveals on Thursday is more consumer-oriented with an educational edge to it? It could be a publishing platform for building and making interactive kids books, with an emphasis on simple creation tools; something easy to use and geared toward helping people build their own digital storytelling projects. It could be like a publishing version of iMovie, iPhoto or GarageBand, a set of tools that enables anyone to put together and self-publish interactive books? That’s something that parents, teachers or independent content creators could use, and could certainly be considered “education.” The word “book,” by the way, is hard not to use in this context, but it’s not very accurate. As Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis told me last week when talking about the future of digital textbooks, “textbook” is wrong when what were are really talking about are digital learning tools, instead of paper pages. “That’s going to have to go away,” he said. “The future of publishing is learning software and analytics and feedback and rich technology.” Interactive books with feedback and rich content Read More
