All Reviews
Foodspotting: It’s Not Just for Food Photographers Anymore
Until now, I’ve thought of Foodspotting mostly as an iPhone app which my wife uses to share photos of her meal when we dine out. She loves it. So do enough other people that a million pictures have been uploaded since the app’s launch, making it feel a bit like an Instagram that’s entirely devoted to things you can eat..
But there’s probably a limit to how many folks there are in the world who want to obsessively photograph food. So the new version of Foodspotting that launched this week is designed to broaden the app’s appeal. The photo sharing’s still there–but it feels more like one feature in an app whose primary purpose is to let large numbers of people find and see the best dishes at local restaurants before they place an order.
The new Foodspotting lets you browse popular dishes at nearby restaurants, or pull up a “picture menu” of a specific eatery. Lists of picks from media outlets such as Zagat’s and New York magazine supplement the recommendations from Foodspotting users. And there’s a section of Specials–which consisted of 50% discounts at several restaurants when I checked–which is the start of Foodspotting’s strategy for making money.
With its new emphasis on finding places to go and stuff to eat, Foodspotting feels a bit more like a competitor to traditional sources of restaurant reviews such as Yelp. But the similarities don’t run deep. Foodspotting still focuses on pictures and thumbs-up ratings, not full-blown critiques. And there’s no way to steer other users away from disappointing dishes by giving anything a thumbs down.
Judging from my experience so far, Foodspotting also doesn’t have a Yelplike critical mass of content practically everywhere. At the moment, I’m in Newton Corner, Massachusetts–not exactly a hotbed of fine dining–and only see a few photos from a few restaurants. Yelp, however, has dozens of nearby establishments that have dozens of reviews apiece. (Back home in food-centric San Francisco, Foodspotting is a much richer resource.)
Of course, one of the goals of the new version is to ramp up more quickly. If it works, the app, which was already lots of fun, will be even more fun, and much more useful.
Foodspotting is available for iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry; the iPhone and Android editions are the first two to become available in this updated version.
Nomad Brush: Making iPad Painting More Painterly
30. January 2012
When I attended Macworld|iWorld last Thursday and Friday, the show floor was bustling with attendees. And in terms of bustle-per-square-foot, the busiest booth I saw probably belonged to Nomad Brush, which makes brushes that can be used for digital painting on the iPad and other tablets. The company provided me with one for review.
The only input device that the iPad was designed to be used with is the human finger, and designing a decent iPad-compatible stylus is tricky–most of them have blunt, squishy tips that don’t feel like a pen point. But with a brush, being blunt and squishy actually works–and the nicely-made Nomad Brush feels like a real art instrument.
It doesn’t feel exactly like one: For one thing, real brushes, dipped in paint, have a fluid feel that you don’t get when you’re dragging a dry brush over a tablet. And while a real brush is the most gloriously pressure-sensitive input device of them all, this one, like standard styluses, isn’t pressure-sensitive. But in art programs like ArtRage, SketchBook Pro, and Brushes, using Nomad Brush feels much more painterly than working with a garden-variety stylus.
I tried the $39 Nomad Compose, a model with a long brush on one end and a stubbier one on the other. The company makes other models, including the Nomad Play, a stubby version designed for kids. If you paint. draw, or doodle on an iPad, check them out.
Highlight, a Social Network for the Real World
24. January 2012
For all that Facebook does to help you organize your online relationships, it doesn’t do much to help you interact with folks in the physical world. Every time you enter a restaurant, conference, or hotel lobby, you’re surrounded by strangers who you might be linked to through mutual friends or shared interests. But it’s hard to know who’s who–and if people you know do happen to be nearby, you might or might not stumble across them.
Enter Highlight, a new iPhone app that aims to tell you about the people in your immediate vicinity. Install it on your phone and connect it to your Facebook account, and it’ll begin alerting you to other Highlight users who are within approximately a block and a half of you. You can pull up profiles with information on them from Facebook and send them text messages (such as “where are you, exactly?”). Founder Paul Davison told me that the app is designed to help you meet new people, refresh your memory about people you’ve met before, and alert you to friends who could be lurking right around the corner.
First Look Flipboard Lands on the iPhone, Winningly
6. December 2011
When social-magazine app Flipboard debuted on the iPad in July of last year, it instantly became the closest thing yet to a defining app for Apple’s new program–a beautifully-done program that was beautifully tailored to the platform’s strengths. It was hard to imagine it running on any other device.
Starting now, you don’t need to try and imagine what it might be like elsewhere: Flipboard is arriving on the iPhone. It should be available on the App Store around the time this post goes live.
StumbleUpon Gets Slightly Less Stumbly
5. December 2011
StumbleUpon, the venerable service for finding cool Web sites that has always emphasized serendipity over structure, is unveiling a major makeover tonight. The basic idea remains the same: You can find interesting sites, one after another, by pressing a Stumble button (and can recommend sites you like so other folks stumble upon them). But the StumbleUpon site and Web-based toolbar (now called the StumbleBar) have a new logo and a fresh coat of paint, and some new features make it easier to use StumbleUpon to wander around the Web in a slightly more organized fashion.
The Lost Interview: Steve Jobs, Unfiltered
14. November 2011
Even an Apple cynic like myself must admit that Steve Jobs drastically changed the world we live in, and mostly for the better. I’m writing this on a Windows computer, I have a Creative Zen music player, and my smartphone is powered by Android. Yet I doubt that any of these would be in existence today without innovations for which Jobs played a significant role.
He was also a charismatic leader and public figure, who held people in thrall with his product announcements and presentations.
But does that mean you would enjoy watching a 16-year-old, 70-minute, videotaped interview, visually consisting of one continuous close-up of his face?
Surprisingly, the answer is Yes. That charisma, combined with the simple fact that Jobs had some interesting things to say back in 1995, make Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview–a film playing in special theatrical engagements around the country this week–a reasonably interesting and informative film. But it could have been much better.
Hipmunk’s Flight Search: Just as Hip on Android
1. October 2011
Slowly but surely, many of the best iOS apps are coming to Android, and their quality once they get there is improving. Case in point: The excellent air travel search engine Hipmunk, which arrived in a version for Android phones this week. Its Android version is just as good as the iOS one–good looking, easy to use, and brilliantly useful. (It ranks flight options by a price/complexity formula it calls “Agony,” and, as you can see above, shows which flights have Wi-Fi.
Hipmunk does flight search better than competitors such as Kayak and Bing Travel, but it’s not the only airfare research tool you’ll ever need, mostly because it only shows prices available through Orbitz, and routes you there when you’re ready to buy. Still, even if you just use the app to look for flights you’ll buy elsewhere, it’s invaluable. And it’s nice to see it didn’t get watered down on its way to Android.
Now Jawbone’s Jambox Does 3D Sound
26. August 2011
Jambox–Jawbone’s nifty super-small, battery-powered Bluetooth speaker/speakerphone gadget–got even a little niftier this week. Jawbone released version 2.0 of the Jambox’s software. It’s available on new Jamboxes, and current owners can download the free upgrade via the MyTalk service. The big new feature is LiveAudio, a technology that’s designed to make sound more multidimensional, including support for binaural recordings–ones recorded using a special technique that only needs two speakers to create a 3D audio effect that can be spectacular. Jawbone provided me with a unit with the new software for review.
Targus Lap Lounge: A Nifty Accessory for Couch Potatoes
3. August 2011
Since buying my iPad 2, I’ve found myself consuming more digital video than ever. This is especially true in the mornings, as I lay in bed trying to catch up on the news of the day (and watch Al Jazeera through its awesome iPad app).
Enter Targus and its upcoming Lap Lounge, an iPad 2 stand that is meant to do exactly what its name suggests: sit comfortably in your lap when you’re lounging around in the house, on the plane, and so forth.
I Tried to Love Samsung’s Chromebook. I Failed
25. July 2011
Last Thursday morning, as I packed for a three-day trip to San Diego for Comic-Con, I couldn’t decide whether to take my trusty first-generation MacBook Air, or use the trip as an excuse to review Samsung’s Series 5 Chromebook, which I’d just received. So I didn’t decide–I took both.
And then, once I’d arrived at the airport, I realized that I’d forgotten to bring the Air’s AC adapter. The Blogging Gods clearly wanted me to try the Series 5, one of the first commercially-available devices that runs Google’s Chrome OS.
The notion of using a laptop purely as a window to the Web–which is the Chrome OS proposition–isn’t inherently unappealing to me. (In fact, I tried to do just that back in 2008, in a project I called Operation Foxbook, long before Google announced Chrome OS.) Using Google’s first Chromebook, last year’s experimental CR-48, had left me more skeptical about Chrome OS rather than less so. But I still want to be impressed with a truly Web-centric computing device. Sadly, my time with the Series 5 at Comic-Con was frustrating in multiple ways. Google and its hardware partners are selling Chromebooks to the public at prices which aren’t lower than those for similar Windows laptops, but the Series 5, like the CR-48,still feels like an experiment.
New MacBook Airs: Thin, Light, and Utterly Mainstream
20. July 2011
When Steve Jobs unveiled the first MacBook Air at Macworld Expo back in January of 2008, he induced lots of oohs and aahs over its astoundingly thin case. I don’t, however, remember many people declaring that it was Apple’s first pass at building the garden-variety Mac of the future. I sure didn’t–in part because I was too busy bemoaning the things that it lacked, such as built-in Ethernet.
Super-thin laptops similar in concept to the Air have been around since at least Digital’s 1994 HiNote Ultra. People have usually assumed that they were aimed at well-heeled businesspeople with decidedly undemanding computing needs–or at least at folks whose real computer is something brawnier and more feature rich.
Today, Apple is releasing two new Airs, the successors to the much-improved ones it rolled out last October. It isn’t pitching the new models as specialty machines. Even more than with their predecessors from last year, it’s treating them as well-rounded, versatile computers that happen to be really thin and really light. In fact, a tagline it’s using–”The ultimate everyday notebook”–doesn’t even mention their lack of bulk. And just to clarify things, it’s discontinuing the last machine in its lineup that was simply called a MacBook. From now on, if you want a Mac portable, you’ll choose between a MacBook Air and a MacBook Pro.
For the past few days, I’ve been reviewing a 13″ model loaned to me by Apple, but I didn’t need any arm-twisting to accept the notion of it as a mainstream notebook. I’ve already been using its predecessor as my primary system since last fall, dual-booting it between OS X and Windows 7. (And spending a fair amount of time explaining to curious passers-by that it really is the computer I spend most of my time on.)
Dragon Go! Voice Search for iPhone is Surprisingly Intelligent
14. July 2011
The other day I received a package, or I should say what in hindsight seems a waste of one: a large box, inside which lay a jumbo-sized cardboard egg, from within which I plucked a tiny rectangular piece of colored paper slightly larger than a business card. On the card, a picture of an iPhone, a greenish tongue of flame, and the words “Introducing…. Dragon Go!”
This is apparently someone’s savvy marketing idea to get my attention (or squander cardboard), perhaps hoping to conjure some latent connection to the dragon eggs featured in HBO’s recently completed (and as of today, multi-Emmy-nominated) first season of Game of Thrones. Intentional or no, I’m making my way through the HBO series now, and here I am, writing about Dragon Go!. Mission accomplished, outsourced PR person!
Dragon, as many of you may know, is the call sign for a suite of speech-recognition tools, the forerunner of which, DragonDictate, was released in the early 1980s for DOS. It’s since been recognized as perhaps the most accurate of the consumer-grade speech recognition utilities (at one point, employed as a computer systems engineer, I provided tech support to a quadriplegic who used Dragon Naturally Speaking—as it was called by 1997—to run his entire home office).
Katango: Your Facebook Friends, Grouped Automatically
12. July 2011
When Google+ arrived at the end of June, it made a splash in part based on its defining notion: you have different kinds of friends and don’t want to share everything with all of them all of the time. This week a new iPhone group-messaging app called Katangoo is debuting. And its defining feature–which it came up with a long time before Google+ went public–is that people have different kinds of friends and dont want to share everything with all of them all of the time.
Katango’s distinctive feature is that it uses artificial intelligence to analyze all your Facebook friends, identify common attributes, and then automatically sort them into groups of people with something in common. The more friends you have, the more time this approach might save compared to you trying to organize them by hand.
BlinQ TV, a $9.99 Social Universal Remote for Your iPhone
1. July 2011
Back, in July, I wrote about Peel, a software-and-hardware system that turns an iPhone or iPod Touch into a slick universal TV remote. It’s neat. But it costs $99.95, and involves two doohickeys–one that you plug into your router, and one that sits near your TV.
Ryz Media’s BlinQ TV has a new twist on the same basic idea–and the most striking difference is the hardware. Instead of routing commands from your iPhone over Wi-Fi into a gizmo like the Peel’s “Fruit” and then into the TV via infrared, BlinQ gives you a lollipop-shaped IR blaster that plugs into the phone’s headphone jack and lets you control a TV, set-top box, and other living-room devices with no intermediary hardware. It costs one-tenth as much as Peel: $9.99.
New Flipboard: Even Better!
30. June 2011
My iPad is bursting at the seams with wonderful applications. If I had to pick just one of them as the romantic ideal of what a tablet app can and should be, it would be Flipboard. This “social magazine”–which brings together stuff from Facebook, Twitter, and the entire Web into a wonderfully browsable package–simply couldn’t have existed in the pre-iPad era. And its user interface is a thing of wonder: an amazingly polished, fun experience that both feels like a magazine and like nothing I’ve ever seen before. It’s not just the best one I’ve seen on an iPad app; it’s one of the best ones I’ve seen on anything.
Can you tell that I kind of like this program? Well, now I like it even more. The company is rolling out an update today, and cofounder Mike McCue briefed me on it last week and gave me the chance to spend a couple of days with it before it hit the App Store.
Flipboard hasn’t changed radically, but there are a bunch of improvements that make it even more….well, Flipboardy.
HTC Evo 3D Review: Average Phone, Cheap Trick
29. June 2011
If you’re thinking about buying the HTC Evo 3D on Sprint, the first thing you should do is ignore the 3D.
The phone’s namesake features — a glasses-free 3D display and dual cameras to shoot your own 3D content — amount to little more than a cheap party trick. And with a dearth of 3D movies and games to enjoy on the smartphone, the Evo 3D’s design and performance in two dimensions is far more important.
Strip away the gimmicks, and the Evo 3D is just average among high-end Android handsets. It’s a phone that provides lots of power through a 1.2 GHz dual-core processor, but falters on design.
Compared to the graceful curves and smooth materials of HTC’s newly-launched Sensation 4G, the Evo 3D’s figure is no triumph. It’s not uncomfortably large despite a 4.3-inch, 960-by-540 resolution display, but its boxy shape and considerable weight lack elegance.
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