Wall Street Journal, GQ, Vanity Fair, Wired, New Yorker, Glamour, Penguin Apps Coming to iPad

Rupert Murdoch is bringing a Wall Street Journal app to the iPad the media mogul confirmed in his own paper:

“In fact, we’ve been allowed to work on one, and it’s under padlock and key. The key is turned by Apple every night. But we will be on that with The Wall Street Journal.”

Condé Nast is also getting in on the action according to the New York Times:

GQ will have a tablet version of its April issue ready. Vanity Fair and Wired will follow with their June issues, and The New Yorker and Glamour will have issues in the summer (the company has not yet determined the exact timing for those).

They say GQ for iPhone has already sold 150,000 copies, and they’ll experiment with various advertising and pricing models. All the magazine apps will be developed internally with the exception of Wired, which was/is developed with Adobe.

Publisher Penguin wants to go so far as to abandon the limitations of the ePub format and make their books into apps, says Paid Content:

“We will be embedding audio, video and streaming in to everything we do. The .epub format, which is the standard for ebooks at the present, is designed to support traditional narrative text, but not this cool stuff that we’re now talking about.

Check out their video, after the break…

[via MacRumors x2, Gizmodo, 9to5Mac]

YouTube link

Wall Street Journal, GQ, Vanity Fair, Wired, New Yorker, Glamour, Penguin Apps Coming to iPad is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

Vlingo 2 adds more voice power to iPhone

Filed under: iPhone, App Review

In the burgeoning market for iPhone voice recognition apps, the free Dragon Dictate clearly holds the top spot. In fact, this paragraph was dictated using DragonDictate (with some minor edits after the fact). However, the application doesn't always shine when it comes to getting your text quickly and easily into different places where you might want to use it. You can send an e-mail or send a text message if you want to, but you can't update your Facebook status or send a Twitter message without copying and pasting. Performing a search requires an entirely separate app.

To make your dictation process easier -- at least when it comes to getting your text to go where you want, when you want -- there's the latest update to the Vlingo app, which we first reviewed last June. Vlingo 2.0 is trying to up the ante for text recognition by putting all the 'next step' options in one convenient place.

You can search (Google, Yahoo, or Bing), find map items, dial your contacts (with optional contact name upload to Vlingo's servers to improve recognition) and update your Facebook or Twitter status. For email or SMS, you have two in-app purchase options to extend the free app's capabilities; it's $6.99 for either SMS or email action, $9.99 for both.

Vlingo has gotten a thorough UI overhaul in this new version, and it's quite a bit easier to use than it was. The dictation button can be used in hold-down or tap-to-talk mode, and the app can be set to recognize speech on launch for maximum speed. You can specify what action you want by speaking it: "Email Joey, Subject how about some coffee, Message Got time to meet me at Starbucks? You're buying!" will create and address an outgoing email for you, all in one step.

Continue reading Vlingo 2 adds more voice power to iPhone

Vlingo 2 adds more voice power to iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 04 Mar 2010 00:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Vlingo 2 adds more voice power to iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 04 Mar 2010 00:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

E-mail, SMS paste come to Vlingo

Vlingo, a multi-featured voice recognition app, will release a new update Thursday, adding e-mail and SMS paste to its feature list.

The Significance of Steam and Valve’s Games for Mac

Earlier today, Valve Software released teaser images which indicated that their Steam platform as well as a number of their games would be coming to the Mac.

For those unfamiliar with this currently PC-only software, Steam is ...

My3G - Jailbreak App Enables 3G For “Wi-Fi Only” iPhone Apps

Put yourself in the picture with PixyMe

Filed under: iPhone, iPod touch, App Review

Do you remember the personalized movies that had been showing up in your email a while back? The one that sticks in my mind was a 'get out the vote' video the Obama campaign sent out a month before the presidential election. The story told by the video was that Obama lost by just one vote and it was you, whoever you are. You name was smoothly integrated into about a dozen places in the narrative. It was a real attention getter.

PixyMe (US $1.99) brings a static version of this technology to your iPhone or iPod touch. This beautifully designed and rendered app lets you incorporate any name or short phrase seamlessly into an eCard or postcard, appearing as though it were part of the photograph. The resulting personalized photo can be either emailed, sent to Facebook, saved in your photo album, or sent as a high-quality physical postcard to any address in the world. It works remarkably well, as you can see from the picture on the right and the gallery below.

It's unfortunate that this app has the all too common problem of dropping you into the fray with scant instructions. That would be okay for a simple one-trick-pony, but this app is fairly complex and has functions that need explanation. There is an info screen at the end of all the options, but all it gives you are the raw basics and a link to get to the PixyMe site. What you probably don't know is that on the site is a great introduction and all the information you need to get started quickly in a video tour. You can view it at the end of this post. I feel that this video should be incorporated into the app or directly linked to rather than dropping you at the site. That's my only complaint. The rest of the app is a delight.

Continue reading Put yourself in the picture with PixyMe

Put yourself in the picture with PixyMe originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 03 Mar 2010 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Put yourself in the picture with PixyMe originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 03 Mar 2010 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

TiPb Live! Tonight at 8pm ET/5pm PT (1am GMT)

Join Chad, Mickey, Rene — and quite possibly Dieter — for… well a battle royal over Apple vs. HTC and a look back to see if anything else happened this week!

If you have any questions, leave a comment below, hit us up on Twitter @tipb, or better still — join us live in the chat room via http://www.tipb.com/live

REMINDER: You can watch us live on your iPhone with the Ustream Viewer app [Free - iTunes link]. Just wait until the show starts (8pm ET) and search for iPhone. We’ll pop up. Literally.

Chat with you soon!

TiPb Live! Tonight at 8pm ET/5pm PT (1am GMT) is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

Buzzie Unofficial Google Buzz App Hits App Store

The first unofficial Google Buzz application, Buzzie, [$1.99 on sale - iTunes Link] has made it’s way into the Apple App Store.

Up until this point all Google Buzz users have had to rely on Google’s web interface, even on Google’s own Android OS, so Buzzie is a welcomed addition within the App Store. Whether or not Google decides to step up and release their own native application remains to be seen. The way things have been going between Google and Apple lately, who knows if they’d even be interested in attempting to get a official Buzz application into the App Store… or if it would be approved?

So if you use Buzz and give Buzzie a try, let us know how it works for you!

[Via Gizmodo]

Buzzie Unofficial Google Buzz App Hits App Store is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

Apple Wants To Stream Movies To iPhone, iPad From iTunes Cloud

My New iPhone: 52 Simple Projects to Get You Started - Book Review

I've never been a fan of reading books on any of Apple's devices. I mean I've owned desktops, laptops, and now an iPhone and till this book, I've never had to read a book on how to operate Apple's devices.However, this book, "My New iPhone: 52 Projects for Every iPhone ...

Review: SuperGlued for iPhone

When it comes to an app that can find a concert, let you share your thoughts with other concert-goers (through Twitter), and search based on your location, SuperGlued shows a lot of promise. But the app didn't always work quite right in our tests.

Boston creates app to report road problems

Filed under: Software, Freeware, iTunes, iPhone

Since moving to LA, I haven't quite had to deal with the potholes that Spring in Chicago usually brings (not that roads are any better out here, but at least they don't have to deal with all of the freezing and thawing). But despite the yearly flat tires and ruined alignments, Chicago hasn't gone quite as far as Boston, where the city government has developed not one but two apps to enable its citizens to report on potholes and other city issues.

Citizens Connect is an app developed late last year by the city that enables locals to report graffiti, potholes, broken streetlights, and other urban issues in the Boston area, and now they're working on a new app, nicknamed BUMP (for Boston Urban Mechanic Profiler), that will automatically transmit road conditions to a central database using the iPhone's accelerometer and data connection. That seems tough to do with all of the extra noise that must come from an accelerometer, but they are working with a researcher from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, so maybe they will be able to pull it off. Interesting to see metropolitan areas like this using newer technology to keep an eye on what's up in their city. Of course, actually fixing the potholes will take a little more work, but knowing what's wrong is helpful.

Boston creates app to report road problems originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Boston creates app to report road problems originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

iTunes Unhappy Amazon is Getting Early Bird Album Specials from Record Labels

Billboard is reporting that Amazon MP3’s deals with record labels to offer certain albums a day early and a few bucks cheaper have caused iTunes to raise a few eyebrows… and flex some not-so-subtle music muscle.

In exchange for a Daily Deal promotion on a new album, Amazon has been asking labels to provide it with a one-day exclusive before street date and such digital marketing support as a banner ad on an artist’s MySpace page and messages on label and artist Web sites and social network feeds.

“When that happened,” the executive says, “iTunes said, ‘Enough of that s–t.’ “

As a result some labels have been opting out of the Amazon MP3 deal while others claim the situation is fluid and they’ll opt in and out depending on the album and the amount of exposure iTunes is likely to give them. One major label exec who remains nameless, however, shot back:

“[iTunes is] . . . diverting their energy from ‘let’s make this machine better’ to ‘let’s protect what we got.’ “

The battle is over the initial, high volume sales when a new album hits the streets. If Amazon can dash in and scoop iTunes, they stand to syphon off a lot of the sales, and iTunes doesn’t want to stand for that. Of course, the record labels could just give everyone the albums early and for less… We’d be just fine with that!

This, of course, is particularly interesting in light of the similar Apple vs. Amazon battles we’ve been seeing over eBooks pricing, where Amazon and not Apple is the entrenched market leader and Apple’s iBooks the scrappy new comer. Can they fight — and win — wars on so many fronts?

iTunes Unhappy Amazon is Getting Early Bird Album Specials from Record Labels is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

Apple iPad Will Go On Sale On March 26?

Valve Leaks Teaser Images for Announcement of Steam (and Games) for Mac [Updatedx4]

Last week, Valve Software generated some excitement among gaming fans who noticed Mac OS X menu components and other items in the most recent release of the company's Steam distribution platform for the PC. Combined with reports of Valve recruiting ...

Valve Teases Upcoming Half-Life Release for Mac [Updated]

Last week, Valve Software generated some excitement among gaming fans who noticed Mac OS X menu components and other items in the most recent release of the company's Steam distribution platform for the PC. Combined with reports of Valve recruiting ...

Voalté One iPhone and iPad apps streamline healthcare communications

Filed under: iPhone, iPad

We've posted about the use of both the iPhone and iPad in the healthcare industry before, and there are a number of apps that have been developed to take advantage of the iPhone in hospitals and clinics. One of our readers pointed out that Voalté, a company that specializes in hospital paging and communications, has had a free iPhone app available for over a month.

The free Voalté One app works to integrate VoIP calling, text-messaging, and all of the alarms and alerts from patient monitoring systems onto an iPhone or iPod touch. Of course, there's more to using this than just installing the app on an iPhone -- the company designs and builds communication systems for hospitals -- so deploying an iPhone or iPad-based solution isn't exactly "free."

Screenshots found in the App Store show the app being used by a nurse to designate available or busy time, sending quick messages with a single tap, and a directory of hospital personnel listed by their current availability.

Voalté has also announced a version of the app for iPad. The company realizes that the size of the iPad isn't exactly perfect for nurses on the go, so they're targeting physicians and other clinicians who can benefit from the larger screen real estate for viewing medical images or educating patients. Voalté says that they'll have the iPad app available when the device ships, presumably later this month.

Thanks to reader Alex B. for the tip!

Voalté One iPhone and iPad apps streamline healthcare communications originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Voalté One iPhone and iPad apps streamline healthcare communications originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Adobe Talks About Apple Not Supporting Flash on iPhone, Clash With HTML5 & More

China Unicom to use Android despite Google-China row

Chinese state-owned mobile carrier China Unicom will use Google’s Android OS on phones, despite a row between Google and the Chinese government.

Rupert Murdoch Confirms Plans for Wall Street Journal iPad Application

The Wall Street Journal reports (subscription required) on comments from Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and CEO of parent company News Corp., who noted that the newspaper will be present on the iPad and that Ap...