Tag Archives | Apple. iPhone

Color: Share Photos With Those Around You–Automatically and Instantly

Back in November, entrepreneur Bill Nguyen–the founder of Lala and other companies–bought himself a cool domain name: Color.com. Now his new startup is announcing a cool free app to go with it: Color, a photo- and video-sharing program for iPhone and Android handsets. It should be available for both platforms tonight.

While I’ve met with the company, received a demo, and played with the app a bit, I haven’t had extensive hands-on time with the service. So this isn’t a review. But I’ve seen enough to know that Color is a fresh take on the seemingly well-trodden concept of photo/video sharing; it’s nothing at all like Flickr or Instagram or Path or other services you might be using. And if it lives up to its potential it could be a big hit.

Like umpteen other apps, Color lets you snap and share photos and videos. But instead of sharing them with people you specify, it shares them with people near you–and if those people are using the Color app to capture stuff, you can see it, too. It all happens in real time in one shared stream, without anyone involved having to do anything except shoot photos. And it creates a group-created visual record of events large (like a concert or a conference) and small (a birthday party or a dinner out).

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The Trouble With iPhone Web Apps

Readability made a bold statement earlier this month by releasing a web app alongside its native news reader for the iPhone. With Apple taking a 30 percent cut of subscription-based services offered through the iOS App Store, the web route allows Readibility to keep all the money for itself and content owners.

But here’s the problem: Web apps on iOS may be plagued with slower speeds and an occasional inability to run offline.

The Register brought these issues to light in a recent report on iOS web apps. The report mostly emphasized the slower speed of these HTML-based apps — reportedly, web apps saved to the iPhone’s home screen don’t use Apple’s brand-new Nitro JavasScript engine — but the bigger issue in my mind is the fragile state of offline support.

Before Apple released iOS 4.2 and iOS 4.3, you could run some web apps offline by installing them to the home screen. Now, the free web game Pie Guy doesn’t work without a connection, and accessing queued Readability articles on an airplane or in a subway tunnel is a shaky prospect.

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The iPad 2’s Display: Nice, But Not Perfect

My friend Dr. Ray Soneira of DisplayMate Technologies has reviewed the iPad 2′ screen, comparing it to the iPhone 4’s “retina” display. The news is mostly good–he likes the iPad 2’s display a lot and says that “retina” resolution isn’t all that important–but he also has some interesting technical quibbles which he says Apple could fix with a software update.

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Bizzy Wants You to Check Out Its New Feature: Check-Outs

Local-information service Bizzy debuted last August–and it’s been evolving ever since. It started out as a guide to local businesses that hoped the local businesses would get involved. When that proved tougher than expected, it shifted its strategy to providing a Web-based recommendation engine for neighborhood spots. Then it brought those recommendations to the iPhone and Android.

Now Bizzy is building on its recommendations with a new feature for its iOS and Android apps it calls check-outs–a sort of flipside of check-ins as seen in FourSquare, Facebook, and innumerable other places. You check in when you arrive at a location, so your friends know you’re there; you check out when you’re ready to go and have formed an opinion you want to share.

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Proof of An Unlocked Verizon iPhone

Video has surfaced on YouTube apparently showing that just like its AT&T counterpart, the Verizon iPhone can be unlocked and used with other carriers. There isn’t a whole lot of detail, but a call to *228 (the CDMA programming number) shows that this iPhone 4 is definitely on the network, and successfully able to be programmed to run on Cricket’s network.

It was only a matter of time before this happened. I’m surprised it took this long!

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Iomega’s SuperHero Has Feet of Clay

Backing up an iPhone, in case you hadn’t noticed, is a hassle. You do the job via iTunes, but it’s not a particularly intuitive experience, nor one that’s as automated as it should be. (The syncing that happens automatically when you connect an iPhone via USB falls very short of a full backup.) Unless you’re a lot more careful than I am about protecting your data, you probably don’t back up your iPhone as often as you should.

Enter Iomega’s SuperHero, which I wrote about when it was announced at CES in January. It’s an iPhone charging dock–it also works with the current version of the iPod Touch–that aims to make backup so easy that you’ll actually do it. Or contact and photo backup, at least–the SuperHero can’t protect apps, e-mail, calendars, and other items because Apple provides no way for third-party products to get at this data. Iomega provided a unit to me for review.

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I’m Not So Sure About Twitter’s New iPhone App

As I’ve periodically mentioned, I’ve been thoroughly impressed with Twitter for iPhone, the app formerly known as Tweetie. It’s not just a standout Twitter client and a wonder piece of iPhone software–I think that Loren Brichter, its creator, is one of the most gifted interface designers who’s ever worked in software for any device.

Today, Twitter rolled out an update to the app, and while the list of features makes it look like a meaty winner, I’ve been fumbling with it so far.

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