Posts in “mobiles”
Take Great Before & After Photos With This iOS App
It seems like forever that I’ve been searching for an app that will allow me to take a photo using an existing photo for alignment. Either through my show, or other things in life, it’s fun to take before and after photos without having to bust out a tripod and leave a camera in place the entire time.
While searching the Apple App Store again last week, I finally found a an app that does this. It was well hidden, since the text for it was in Korean. It’s called Overlay Camera, and they have a Lite (free) version that does exactly what I want to do. The $0.99 pay version of the app adds the ability to blend the two photos (which I don’t want), and adds support for a front-facing camera. For me, the free version does just what I want it to.
Enable AirPlay Printing With Your Existing Printers
Enable AirPlay printing from all your iOS devices with all of your current printers!
After researching AirPlay-compatible printers (or lack thereof), I stumbled upon a different solution that works with your existing printers. The software is called FingerPrint that runs on your Windows or Mac desktop to act as an AirPlay host, and it works great!
Free 7 day trial, just 10 bucks–far cheaper than buying a new printer, and it works with what you’ve already got. Mac/Windows supported. It also supports Dropbox.
Another great feature is the “Open On My Mac/PC”. This is a very quick and easy way to send a photo to your desktop, short of email or transferring it otherwise. It send it instantly, and on my Mac, it opens up the photo in the Preview app. Nice!
Birds and Rope iPhone Apps
What’s with everyone’s fascination with iPhone games that involve birds and rope?
I’m drafting an idea for a new game called “Roping Birds” and it’s going to be the new #1 app!
Trimensional for iPhone 4
A very bizarre technology concept. You take your phone into a dark room and after cranking the brightness up all the way, fire up the app and use your front-facing iPhone 4 camera (or iPod, if you’ve got one). Trimensional takes 4 photos of light reflecting off your phone’s screen and onto your face. It then quickly builds a 3D image of your face (or any other object) that you can view in partial 3D within the app or email a still JPG image. Fairly cool tech demo, but limited in what you can do with it.
[iTunes]
Apple iPad Donkey Kong Desktop Coin-Op
The Apple iPad isn’t even out yet and there are some seriously awesome apps being discussed. NetFlix is one I’m really looking forward to. But then a friend told me about this one today… the iCade which has “hundreds” of old arcade games such as Donkey Kong, DigDug, Qbert, and more. Too bad it was just an April Fool’s joke. I’m still hoping it becomes a reality one day.
I’ve always been a big fan of classic coin-op game and I’d love to be able them old school style!
What is the user agent for the Apple iPad?
If you are a web developer and want to code Apple iPad-specific pages, then you’ll need to know the user agent for two reasons:
1. To be able to code your scripts to look for it
2. To change your user-agent in your browser/client to make HTTP requests
As of the pre-release Apple iPad, it is:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B367 Safari/531.21.10
How to create your own iPhone App cheap!
Through one of my projects, Appmodo, I learned about a fairly new online service that allows you to design and then launch your own App for the App Store. They can run on the iPod Touch and iPhones, too. I checked it out and we not only created an App for Appmodo but for my TV show, Motorz, as well.
The service is called AppMakr, and it allows you to save hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars from contracting out and having an iPhone developer do this for you. The catch? It’s completely RSS driven, which is fine–and if anything, it makes your life easier. You already have RSS feeds (whether you know it or not) if you have a blog, a YouTube channel, a Twitter account, and even a Flickr account. It will accept just about any RSS feed that you have–and you can create new ones if you want.
Once you have your list of RSS feeds that you want, you just build your App using their friendly and easy-to-use interface. You can re-arrange the order of the buttons, change the icons on the buttons, set up your own images for the App’s icon, splash screen, header graphic, and more. It’s truly a no-brainer!
After you’ve configured everything, you can play with it right in your web browser, or if you have a developer account you can configure all of that non-sense and download the App right to your phone for testing. Once you’re satisfied, pay for the App and then AppMakr will send it off to Apple for approval in the App Store. This process can take days or weeks, depending on backed up they are.
I’m so sold on the concept that I’ve asked them if there’s a way I can offer the readers of my blog a discount, and of course they came back with a promo code for me to share!
So, for a limited time from now until April 30th, 2010 you can use the discount code “CHRISTHIS” at AppMakr.com and obtain a 25% discount on your own App.
Verizon Wireless reps are fraudulent liars
This past July when I purchased my iPhone I had the choice of canceling my Verizon Wireless contract which expired this month, or continue it. After reviewing the cost differences, it was about the same cost to keep the plan active until December 2007 instead of paying the cancellation fee.
In order to do this, however, I had to merge my phone in with my wife’s phone and convert both plans to a family plan.
zunePhone Advertisement
Kathy sent this one to me… pretty funny for you Microsoft bashers out there.
How to disable the iPhone shutter camera sound
Earlier this year when I had my Motorola Q I posted this entry about how to disable the shutter sound of that phone. Now that I have the iPhone, I was trying to figure out how to do the same thing since the shutter sound effect is loud and annoying.
As long as you have iBrickr (Win) or Breezy (Mac) it’s very easy. Just install the Mobile Finder app through the Installer.app. The Finder app allows you to browse all of the folders and files on your iPhone, just like you can do on your Mac or PC.
The solution is to find the offending sound file and rename it so when the iPhone’s OS looks for the file it can’t find it. It still takes the picture without failure.
Before you continue, note that using any 3rd party app or modifying any system file can cause problems with your iPhone, so if you bust your phone while messing around with it, don’t go crying at me. Just restore your iPhone using the restore feature in iTunes if you screw something up.
Navigate to the folder /System/Library/Audio/UISounds. There you will find all of your system’s user interface sound files. Scroll down to the “photoShutter.caf” file and double-tap it to view its file properties. Now tap once on the Filename, then rename it to something else. I renamed mine to “photoShutter-old.caf”.
Now exit the Mobile Finder.app and take a picture. Now sound will be heard!
Now before you ask, I do not know how to change these sound files to something else, but if you know, please post a comment!
Change your iPhone carrier graphic with ease
Do you like staring at your “AT&T” or “cingular” carrier graphic at the top of your iPhone? Well, I don’t, and apparently others are joining the carrier graphic changing party. Today The Spicy Chicken released a new app for the iPhone that does a lot more than their previous DocSwap app. It allows you to change the carrier image, the dock background, plus the ring, mute, silent and speaker graphics with ease.
iPhone Leopard theme rocks
I’m totally digging on this new Leopard theme that was released today for Summerboard. I especially love the rounded corners at the top.
If you haven’t already, go get iBrickr (Windows) or Breezy (Mac) and then install the Installer app. Once you have that puppy installed, you can install a ton of third-party apps, games, and themes for your iPhone over the air!
And yes, that’s a Pirate app there toward the bottom… figured I’d mess with it since it is, after all, International Talk Like A Pirate Day!
Donkey Kong on the iPhone
My favorite all-time game, on the iPhone using the NES emulator. Controls aren’t the best but it works!
In order to make this happen you need iBrickr (Windows) or Breezy (Mac) and then the NES app. You can also install this “over the air” using the Installer app if you have that installed.
If you need games for the Nintendo emulator, just head on over to this ROM download site — there are over 900 of them. Some of them work well with the iPhone NES emulator, while some of them are unplayable. I’ve had good luck with Donkey Kong, Galaga, Galaxian, Pacman, Space Invaders, Super Mario Brothers, and Dig Dug.
I have loved playing Donkey Kong since I was a kid playing the original coin-op version. One day I have to convince my wife to get me the original coin-op for Christhis (er, Christmas).
Syncing Google Calendar with iPhone
When it comes to the Apple iPhone and Windows iTunes, you can synchronize your bookmarks with Internet Explorer or Windows Safari, and contacts from Outlook or Yahoo! but when it comes to synchronizing your calendar you are severely limited, unless all you use is Outlook, because that’s all you can directly sync with at the moment.
I was an Outlook user for years until I gave Microsoft the (thunder) Bird. The biggest problem with making the change from Outlook to Thunderbird was the loss of my synchronization between my iPhone and my calendar, because I don’t use Outlook anymore. I do use Google Calendar (GCal) because it allows me to access my calendar from anywhere (like Gmail) and share calendars between my family.
So how do you sync the iPhone with Google Calendar?
Well, you can’t. But through some sneaky workarounds, it is possible. Since the iPhone only knows how to sync with Outlook, the trick is to get your GCal appointments synced with Outlook.
This is possible with some commercial (pay) services such as ScheduleWorld and SyncMyCal, however the route I went after trying his free trial was David Levinson’s gSyncit. It’s a whole 10 bucks and it works great. After throwin’ down $10 via PayPal and instantly getting the registration code by email, it got rid of the nags, enabled automatic synchronization, and allowed me to add the other 3 GCal calendars that I needed to sync with Outlook. Plus, you don’t need to touch GCal and copy ICAL URLs. Just supply gSyncit with your GCal username and password, then it gives you a list of Google Calendars to sync with.
You can sync both ways, too… from GCal to Outlook, and vice-versa. I am currently only syncing one-way (from GCal to Outlook) so I can’t comment on how well it works the other way.
After configuring gSyncit and clicking the Sync button on my Outlook toolbar, I was able to sync my iPhone through iTunes with ease. Now all my Google appointments are on my iPhone!
…now if I could just figure out a way to get the Chargers to beat the Patriots…
Apple OK with iPhone hacking
Interesting stuff:
“In an interview given to Gearlog, Apple VP of Hardware Product Marketing Greg Joswiak confirmed that the iPhone and iPod Touch run the same software, and said that Apple is not bothered by the flood of native, third party software for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Joswiak defined the Apple stance as neutral, and while they will not intentionally break the apps with firmware updates, they will not go out of their way to prevent updates from breaking apps either. So iPhone coders, rejoice, you’ll live to hack another day.” – Gizmodo
