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Evidence Found of Proper Cut/Copy/Paste in webOS SDK
Caught this over at the Palminfocenter. "If there was some kind of medal for "services to the online Palm community", then Jason Robitaille should be given fifty of them. The prolific homebrew developer of webOS Quick Install and Internalz has made a discovery equivalent to finding an oasis in the desert: placeholder code in the webOS Mojo SDK for improved cut/copy/paste support." Good news my friends, more after the jump.
Yelp for the Palm Pre is out
[From Hans] Yelp for the Palm Pre is out. That's right, Yelp for Palm® Pre™ is the latest addition to our growing library of mobile apps that keeps you dialed into the best local businesses while you are on the go.With the Yelp for Palm Pre app, you can:
Use location aware technology to find bars, restaurants, drugstores, etc. nearby
Read reviews for a business, browse photos, and map its location
Text business information to friends or save it for later in your Contacts. (these are a little something just for you Palm Pre owners out there!) Make the jump.
Another Palm Pre ad
[From Hans] Episode 4 of the new Palm Pre Canadian commercials and it seems that the latest ad may well be insulting Canada's US friends down south. "f only the opening words were used in proper English and the sentence actually made sense. That statement alone “unlike our neighbours to the south” will start some comments that are not Palm Pre related. Us Canadians are truly passionate and active when it comes our sports but we gotta admit that the United States is incredibly active and very competitive when it comes the their athletic endeavours." MobileSyrup after the jump.
Palm Pre gets virtual keyboard, unofficially
I just noticed this over at the CNET or I should say that Hans did and email me overnight. "The WebOS Internals crew on Friday released a virtual keyboard patch for the Palm Pre.
Now, with the homebrew patch installed (homebrew apps are developed and distributed through third-party sources, not Palm or through the official App Catalog), Pre users can type without opening the slider keyboard.
Having an onscreen keyboard is a godsend for browsing the Web in landscape mode. Instead of rotating the phone and using the built-in keyboard, users can now just double-tap the gesture area and type away--without all the twisting, sliding, and pressing." Read in full.
My iPhone comes back from the rain
Yesterday I was sitting outside reading an ebook on my iPhone. After a while I went inside, leaving the iPhone on the arm of the deck chair. A little while later a torrential rainstorm hit and I completely forgot that the poor iPhone was sitting outside. After a couple of rainy hours I saw it and brought it inside. It had been sitting outside, face down, in the rain for quite a while.
Well, it didn't work. The backlight wouldn't go on, but I could see the icons on the dark screen. None of the buttons worked. I shook it over the sink to get out some water, but nothing came out. So I figured the best thing to do was to leave it alone. I put it into the charging cradle, thinking that maybe by charging it I would create a bit of heat which would help dry it out. About 3 hours later the backlight started to flicker on and off. Then the backlight went off completely again and the machine started to boot up over and over again - and endless loop with a dark screen. By this time its 1 am, time to go to bed, so I just left it in the cradle. I had transferred my SIM to my Nokia so at least I had a working phone.
Got up the next morning and much to my surprise the iPhone was working perfectly! Put my SIM back in and I've been using it all day without a problem. What a relief! I have a 3G and I'm not eligible for a reasonably priced upgrade 'till December, so I would have had to use the Nokia until then. Last time I'll do that! I hope!
Which Paid Twitter Client Should You Buy?
I had my Twitter account (@tomstitzer) for well over a year before I actually did anything with it. It wasn't until a friend of mine joined that I decided maybe I should start posting stuff. Very quickly I found myself rather enjoying the Twitter experience and started searching for Twitter clients to use from my iPod Touch. I balked at paying for an app, and restricted my searching for free ones: http://tinyurl.com/m5sn8l. After more Twitter use though, I found myself wanting to do things, or looking for features that just weren't available in the free versions. Thus, I made the decision to pay for an app.
I tried several new apps, all of which have lite free versions. For the record, if you want people to buy your app, there's no better way I can think of to hook them, than to offer a lite version with ads or stripped functionality. Seriously, it gives you a good idea of the workflow you could use, the feel of the app itself, and whether or not you see yourself using it regularly.
The two I tried were TwitterFon Pro and SimplyTweet, though I also looked at Twitterific's paid version as well for what it added to the mix.
I ended up liking and hating bits and pieces of each one:
LIKES:
landscape support in TwitterFon and SimplyTweet
dark themes in SimplyTweet and Twitterific
the tweeting simplicity of Twitterfon's interface
Twitterific's groups
DISLIKES:
no landscape in the paid Twitterific (really? REALLY?)
too many clicks and browsing through to view/navigate links and pictures in SimplyTweet
Twitterfon's lack of a nice dark, night-time theme
In the end, I bought Twittelator. Wait what? Where'd that come from?
Well, in my search for the perfect paid app, I kept coming across Twittelator ($4.99). But as there wasn't a free version available to try out anymore, I kept passing it by. However, as my testing went on, I kept seeing feature after feature listed in Twittelator and started to realize that maybe this WAS the app I was looking for. I read review after review, pored over it's help file and features, and finally found what I was looking for and more.
Some of my favorite features:
Mute/Blocking- this just removes selected people from your timeline if they are annoying, posting a million links, or you just want a break from their comments. It doesn't stop you from following them and doesn't tell them you muted them. It is ... extremely useful.
Simple navigation of pics/links. Someone posts a picture? There's a thumbnail right in the timeline, click it and see the whole thing. A link? Click the paperclip and boom, link is opened. To get back to the timeline from either of those? Hit DONE and you're back (SimplyTweet was the worst offender of this, forcing you to click back, back, back multiple times to get back to the timeline. I did email the developer about this and he said he was exploring other nav methods but would probably stick with this one for now. Ok. Your choice).
Landscape. It is simply easier to type this way. I mean, really Twitterific. REALLY?
SubGroups. Similar to Twitterific's Groups and one I use all the time.
Themes. Finally, all these features and a nice dark colored theme.
Other things not so important to me but perhaps to you: Multiple accounts, search for nearby tweeters, video support, auto splitting of long tweets, auto posting to TwitLonger for mega long tweets, shrinking of tweets, tap to view avatars full size, trending topics, the public timeline and oh so many, incerdibly many more at http://www.stone.com/Twittelator/Twittelator_Pro_Features.html
Twittelator had just the basic requirements I wanted, plus an army of more features I haven't even begun to delve into. It's a twitter client for the geek in you, for the guy/girl who likes to fiddle and adjust and tweak. It's a client that makes things simple and easy but does so with an extra added dash of style that makes it all the more enjoyable than any of the other apps I tried.
One final note, while I was definitely put off by not having a feature-lite free version, the raves and features all convinced me that Twittelator was right for me. Thanks Stone Design, for feeding my Twitter addiction!
Does Apple want your iPhone to stay dumb?
On an unexpected turn of hand, Apple has asked Bjango to take off their most powerful feature in iStat app for iPhone: Free Memory function, which allow users to free used up memory stored in RAM of their iPhone. Here's a quote from Bjango's website:
iStat’s Free Memory function was removed at Apple’s request.
We are very committed to ensuring iStat is the best iPhone and iPod Touch monitoring tool. Free Memory has been removed, but a lot of other useful features will be added in its place.
For you who didn't know yet, iStat is an app that allows you to see your iPhone’s stats for battery, memory, disk space, WiFi and Cell IP addresses, uptime & load averages, plus view and email your iPhone’s Unique ID and MAC address.
With the main star is now being pulled off from the center stage, Bjango had to lower the price of iStat from the normal price $2.99 to $1.99, and added some minor new features to temporarily fill in the empty slot.
But even Bjango informs iStat users who wish to keep the Free Memory function alive to keep running the v1.0, or if users have already updated iStat to v1.1 then it's possible to re-install the first version again.
But by keep using the iStat v1.0 means you'll never again able to click on the "Update All" again...
Talk about being smart, or being stupid? Which one do you want; update the app and feel the warm fuzzy feeling in your chest that you have the up to date version, or keep the important feature and go through the endless time on updating every apps installed within your iPhone one by one?
Actually to think of it, there's a good reason why Apple do this; when a user free used memory then it's possible there's certain important service that needed to run is being turned off and causing the iPhone to crash unexpectedly.
For instance is what happened everytime I stopped apps in my Trēo™ 750v using the memory management feature in Windows Mobile, it sometimes freeze up and I had to do a soft reset to fix it. This got me to think of Apple's policy to restrict multi-tasking in iPhone, could this is an attempt from Apple to create a more stable platform than the other crash-prone mobile platforms?
But by doing so, Apple has disabled the ability for users to have VIP access behind the velvet curtain of iPhone system. Users can't take full control over their own iPhone, nor allowed to see what's happening behind the scene, behind that glossy screen and curvy body contour of their iPhone. "It's just work," that is Apple's slogan for every and each of its products, Apple wants its users to believe that everything work by magic or there are Oompa Loompas in there churning up the gears..., and that's pretty much what the iPhone users can get.
But then what is the use of owning one of the most cutting-edge and savviest smartphones in the market, if you can't make the most of its prowess through the features provided by the apps?
Perhaps that's the way Apple want your iPhone to be, to stay dumb for good...
Oh wait, or is it you're the one that Apple wants to stay dumb...?
Darn, it beats the hell out of me to think of it... ~LOL~
Are Android users more cheapskates compared to iPhone users?
Is this got something to do with the open spirit of like what the Linux users are having toward the open source platform: why pay for a dime if you can have it for free? Someone will finally made it and then release the app for no charge in the spirit of openness. After all the best things in life come for free. ;-p
But other than that, the survey indicates that Android and iPhone users are not that different and much alike. More than 1,000 Android, iPhone, and iPod Touch users were asked about their habits for downloading apps; the overall of participants said they spent roughly $9 a month for around five apps.
On average, Android users downloaded 8.1 apps per month, and iPhone users downloaded 7.6. Both users spend about the same amount of time: 80-90 minutes for browsing new apps.
Sources are from AdMob survey via PC World.
