Jaybird Stereo Bluetooth Headphones Review

I've been in the market for a pair of Stereo Bluetooth headphones..I've looked at and read reviews on headsets by Sony Ericsson, LG, Motorola, Nokia and many many more. I'm looking for something that I can use to listen to music and take calls at the same time, I don't ...

What?! $11,000 insane iPhone bill!

Beware. If you brought your iPhone when travelling out of the country, please consider the roaming fees. Let's learn about Mythbusters co-host Adam Savage case. He was surfing the Internet while on a trip to Canada for a few hours, AT&T charged him for some $11,000! They shut down his ...

Video: iPhone 3GS disassembled

Just discovered an interesting video on iPhone 3GS disassembled process. According to the site, it's iPhone 3GS comprehensive take apart and repair directions for the touch panel, battery and LCD replacement. "Do not try this at home," the site warns :-) Click here to view the embedded video. [via DailyMobile.se]

White iPhone 3GS suffering heat and discoloration

The white iPhone 3GS reportedly overheats during a period of using the GPS and 3G of the phone, and its case changes color. Engadget says it turns a browner and Gizmodo reports as being pink. Looks like the iPhone 3GS is now available in black, white, brown and pink :-) ...

MMS on first-gen iPhone: how badly do you want it?

Dear first-gen iPhone owner, how badly do you want MMS on your phone? Thanks to hacking community, now you can enjoy MMS capability on your original iPhone with default SMS/MMS app and O.S 3.0! Gizmodo wrote: ...here we are with a truly integrated MMS experience courtesy of the all-powerful hacking community. Granted, ...

Juugari’s Jaadu RDP/VNC Review

With Jugaari's iPhone apps JaaduRDP and JaaduVNC , your desktop or laptop computer is never too far away. Imagine being able to remotely connect to your computer anywhere and anytime. Have you ever forgotten to send a file or an email only to remember once you arrived at your ...

People line up for iPhone 3GS debut in Japan

Apple released its new iPhone 3GS in Japan on Friday. According to the Asahi Shimbun, more than 200 people lined up at Softbank Mobile Corp.'s Omotesando store in Tokyo. The Japan's launch is a week after Apple introduced the new iPhone in the United States and Europe.  It's reported more than ...

iPhone 3GS boosts mobile YouTube uploads

Google says that mobile uploads to YouTube have increased by 400% just in a week, thanks to iPhone 3GS' technology. Looks like mostly iPhone 3GS users are also the big fans of the video-sharing site. Google has announced that uploads from mobile phones to YouTube have increased by 400% since last ...

Quick App: Reportage Twitter “Radio Tuner” for iPhone

If the iPhone and Twitter go together like chocolate and peanut butter, then for the most part current iPhone Twitter client developers give us many variations of the peanut butter cup. Tasty confections though they may be, and each unique and delicious in their own right, at the end they still tend towards variations of the peanut butter cup.

Enter Reportage from wherecloud [$2.99 - iTunes link], which rearranges those twin flavors like nouveau cuisine, utterly deconstructed and left for you to explore.

Too obscure? Okay, rewind. Reportage bills itself as a “radio tuner” for Twitter where followers are treated like stations on the FM dial and you can tune in (or tune out) to what they’re saying, and spin the dial to move from user “station” to user “station”.

It should be noted at the beginning that Reportage isn’t a general purpose Twitter workhouse. There are tons of those already. Like Birdhouse, which models itself on a “notebook” writing experience for Twitter, Reportage has also chosen to focus on one specific concept — pseudo-”live broadcast” of the Twitter users you follow.

Keep that in mind as we go along…

World View

Reportage is a single account Twitter client, so the setup is simple enough.

Once you’re done and enter — or subsequently launch Reportage — you’re placed into World view and presented with iPhone home screen-sized icons of the people you’re following, badged with the number of new tweets they’ve made since last you checked. The icons seem to be sorted by how recently they’ve tweeted, and only those that have tweeted fairly recently are shown.

There’s a refresh button top-right you can hit to update, at which point a a golden-yellow, highly contrasting status bar drops down at the top to give you visual reassurance something is really happening, and in a very nice touch, the icons animate as they fly around to re-order themselves.

Tap on an icon and you get a list view of that person’s tweets along with @mentions from people you also follow (with avatar for easy visual separation). If they’ve @mentioned you, it’s highlighted in green. A more button at the end does just what more buttons at the end tend to do.

The most interesting UI concept is found at the bottom of the list: the manifestation of the above-mentioned “radio tuner” — the other active user icons arrange themselves in a horizontal band and you can flick through them, a vertical band just like an old-style radio, indicating which one is currently tuned in. To highlight attention to UI detail, if you flick to a point in-between two icons, Reportage will drift on or back and center itself on the closest one.

Needless to say, you then get the newly “tuned” person’s tweet list.

Profile View

Tap on a tweet and you get that user’s name, follower count, and location along with the contents of the tweet and a date stamp.

I didn’t see nor could I find any “in reply to” indicator or button to allow tracing back through the reply train, which is something I personally do quite often but doesn’t really fit the “radio tuner” metaphor. Also, no indicator of which client was used to post the tweet, which is something that admittedly only client aficionados may miss.

If an @mention is in the tweet, tapping it brings up a webview of that user’s twitter.com/[username] page which is a tad disjointing. It would be nice if that could stay part of the Reportage user experience.

Tapping on an avatar (presented if the user is in your current World view) will take you to the Reportage profile page, however.

Tapping the small info icon at the bottom right brings up a screen displaying fuller stats, including followers, following, and updates, Twitter bio, homepage, etc. as well as a Follow/Unfollow toggle.

Interestingly, there’s also a Mute/Unmute toggle, which nicely fits the radio metaphor. Muted users are still displayed everywhere I could see, however an icon overlay shows that they’ve been muted. (I’m tempted to use the feature just for tweeting screenshots, however…)

Along the bottom are options to reply, resend (which uses the RT/re-tweet rather than via approach), message (direct message/DM), and star/unstar.

Star, which might be confused with Twitter’s own public “favorite” system, in Reportage allows you to favorite a user. Favored users get a star icon overlay and seem to become sticky in the World view so they don’t disappear if they’ve become tweeting slackers, momentarily or otherwise. It also gives them a place on the separate Star View screen we’ll get to later.

Composing Tweets

Heading back to the World view, the “compose new tweet” icon is top left and provides exactly the needed typing, location, picture adding, and trashing (clearing current contents) functionality you need.

Star View

Tabs along the bottom let you switch from Wold view to other views. Next in line is the aforementioned Star view, which is identical but contains only your Starred, or favored, twitter users.

At this point it’s important to remember that caveat about users only tending to exist if they’re in the World view. Combined with @mention links going to webviews rather than in-Reportage pages, it makes adding less-frequent twitter uses a challenge. For example, I wanted to add Dieter to my Star view — and while I may be the archetypal “dumb user” — I just couldn’t find a way to do it other than to wait and see if he’d pop up in my World view eventually.

Those who appreciate the concept of groups if not their complexity might find the Star view suits their needs very well.

Local view

Next along is Local view, which provides a list of location-based tweets within a user-selectable 1, 5, or 15 miles.

Me view

Last is your own [Username], or Me view. Tapping on your own view gives you a list of your recent tweets interleaved with @mentions sent in your general direction.

A Public/Private button lets you toggle to direct messages rather than @mentions. Somewhat confusingly to me at least, the dark rather than light button represents the current state, and labels not withstanding, hitting either button at any time switches between the two states. However, DMs are distinguished by a purple/burgundy color rather than green color so it’s apparent enough which type you’re looking at.

Again here, Reportage seems to limit you to users currently in your World view. Dieter, for example, @mentioned me yesterday wasn’t there, while someone more active who hadn’t @mentioned me for 5 days was.

Note, you can exit Reportage, go to Settings > Reportage > Filter and change the World filter anywhere from 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, or none (no filtering). This didn’t expand the amount of users in my World view, however, but it did seem to increase the amount of @mentions in my [username] view. I still couldn’t get to Dieter, though, as the “more” loading stopped going back as far (12 hours only). My conclusion: Reportage doesn’t much care for Dieter.

(Joking, of course. We have every confidence wherecloud is working to address some of this — as appropriate to their app’s focus — in an update release.)

Conclusion

So this Quick App turned into anything but. Sorry for that. Blame Reportage for engaging my Twitter geek. Now, I can’t help coming back to Birdhouse by way of comparison. In Reportage we have another innovative take on a specialized, focused Twitter application designed to address the shortcomings of general purpose clients.

With the “radio tuner” metaphor, in keeping with Gruber’s Design Playground theory, Reportage works amazingly well at presenting and navigating current views of the Twitter users you follow, all wrapped up in a startlingly good UI.

Can’t wait to see where wherecould goes with it next.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Quick App: Reportage Twitter “Radio Tuner” for iPhone

WWDC Demo: Pix Remix for iPhone, iPod touch (preview)

Filed under: Multimedia, WWDC, iPhone, iPod touch

Pix Remix isn't yet on the App Store, but I'm hoping it lands soon. If you've ever tried the Ken Burns effect in iPhoto to move photos around during a slideshow, you know how frustrating it is when the effect chops off the faces or other important parts of your photo while moving. Pix Remix does this better, plus more, all on your iPhone with your photos.

With Pix Remix you choose the photos you want (on your iPhone or iPod touch), put them in order, then create a slideshow using a path for the camera. You control the zoom as well, so instead of cutting off faces you can zoom into them instead. As you can see in the video, it's quite simple. This is the "pan and zoom" type of slideshow.

Pix Remix features a collage mode that reminds me of Microsoft's Surface technology -- a set of photos sit on a virtual table, and you can zoom, move and rotate them with your fingers. It looks like someone placing photos on a flat surface, except you can animate them.

Those are a couple of the slideshow options, and there's the option to add captions as well, or you can create a simple slideshow with nothing but transitions and captions. The final piece of the puzzle: export. You can send your slideshows to Twitter or Facebook or via email. I noticed the other day there were inactive links for a "reader" app, presumably to watch Remix slideshows on another iPhone without the full app, but that has been removed.

We'll keep an eye out for when Pix Remix hits the store, so check our Twitter feed for the latest updates.

WWDC Demo: Pix Remix for iPhone, iPod touch (preview) originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 01 Jul 2009 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

WWDC Demo: Pix Remix for iPhone, iPod touch (preview) originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 01 Jul 2009 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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iPhone OS 3.1 Features: Non-Destructive Video Editing, Voice Control Over Bluetooth and More

Apple yesterday seeded iPhone OS 3.1 and iPhone SDK 3.1 betas to developers for testing, and users have been digging through the new releases to document new features. Among the changes found so far by readers in our forums, at Redmond Pie, and at M...

Video: iPhone copy and paste is a ‘pretty incredible thing’… for 1999

Look Apple, your copy and paste feature is pretty intuitive and all but let's face it, you're late to the party. About two full software revisions late we'd say. And listing it as one of the "pretty incredible things" in your latest ad about the iPhone 3G S iPhone 3GS is kind of silly since it's available on your previous models too. Maybe you're just being ironic?

Filed under: Cellphones

Video: iPhone copy and paste is a 'pretty incredible thing'... for 1999 originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 01 Jul 2009 08:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Is this what’s in the next iPhone update?

Filed under: iPhone, SDK, iPod touch

The iPhone Blog is reporting what's purported to be in the next, and hopefully imminent iPhone update to version 3.1. As we've reported, developers were seeded with the beta Tuesday.

Here's the list:

• Voice Control now works over Bluetooth
• Updated AT&T profile to 4.2 (MMS is now enabled)
• Improvements to OpenGL and Quartz.
• iPhone vibrates when moving icons
• Non-destructive video editing means trimming a clip no longer saves over the original video but gives you the option to "Save as copy..."
• APIs to allow third party apps to access videos and edit them.
• Updated modem firmware to 5.08.01

If true, it will put smiles on a lot of iPhone owners' faces. The omission of Bluetooth voice control seemed downright silly. Losing your original video after an edit seemed pretty counter-intuitive as well. It also appears MMS will appear in the update, but that only matters if AT&T turns it on.

No firm dates for the update of course, but if the above is accurate it will be a good one.

Thanks Brad for the tip

Is this what's in the next iPhone update? originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 01 Jul 2009 07:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Is this what's in the next iPhone update? originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 01 Jul 2009 07:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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iPhone 3.1 firmware beta posted for developers

Although iPhone OS 3.0 is just cooling off, Apple has already given developers early access to iPhone OS 3.1 with new hooks for video support. Seeded to developers on Tuesday night, the first beta and a matching SDK are said by those familiar with the releases to include roughly a dozen new extensions for the OpenGL [...]

Review: iVideo Cocktailas

If you have any doubts about how to make a drink or you just want to see how professional barmen ply their trade, the video lessons in iVideo Cocktails will not disappoint.