The last few posts here have been very tech-heavy and I feel I need to redress the balance a bit. For years I’ve been an avid Graphic Novel reader… okay, call them grown-up comics if you want to! I still find myself re-reading The Sandman every few months and I must have bought the series a decade ago. Other favourites include a Sandman-offshoot character, Lucifer, pictured above, and Preacher. And let’s not forget the fantastic Watchmen series.
I do have the actual books themselves but also have digital versions on both my iPhone and MacBook Pro using two similar comic viewers: ComicZeal on the iPhone and ComicBookLover on the Mac. Both applications have utilised the best features of the platforms they run on. If I want to have a single page-view on my Mac, I turn the laptop over on its side and ComicBookLover will present the perfect view, thanks to the built-in accelerometer. On my iPhone, ComicZeal will let me zoom in and drag along the panels to read the story. Highly satisfying.
There are plenty of Sudoku games in the App Store but this one is a real “Look at what my iPhone can do!” game. You can photograph a game from a newspaper and Sudoku Grab (iTunes link) will digitise the puzzle… and then solve it for you. It will also let you email it to anyone who has a copy of the game installed on their iPhone.
The developer even posted how his application does it’s magic. Even though I don’t usually play Sudoku, this is enormous fun! Click on the images for larger versions.
This is my Father’s Day gift from my wonderful wife and two lovely daughters.
Gillian upgraded her first generation iPhone to the 3GS, wrapped it up and the girls gave it to me this morning, along with a brilliant home-made card. She now has my one-year-old iPhone 3G along with my wonder and gratitude.
The new phone is very fast and the touch-to-focus camera is fantastic. When I read the specs on the 3GS I was a little bit underwhelmed but having it in my hand really made me appreciate what Apple have achieved: an extremely responsive device which can take great photos and videos, render web pages a lot faster than anything else in the mobile space, track your run with the built-in Nike+ capability, be controlled with voice commands, and a lot more. The innovations also extend to the charger design. Here’s the new charger on the left and the old one on the right:
And yes, I am incredibly lucky to have such a wonderful family.
Not long now. The keynote will be at 6pm tonight and the mac sites are glowing red with rumours.
What I’m really looking forward to, aside from the iPhone 3GS, is the 3.0 software update. I’d love to install it tonight!
Tick, tock, tick, tock.
Lots of people I know have been getting text messages or calls from O2 offering them upgrades on either their current or first generation iPhones. Naturally, there’s lots of speculation on the new version and June 8th (during Apple’s Wordwide Developer Conference, or WWDC) seems to be the likeliest release date.
And what will the new killer feature be? Video. Solid-state HD video cameras like the Flip Mino HD and Kodak’s Zi6 are selling well. I find myself looking at these and wondering if I should buy one and then I think: the next iPhone will have this built-in.
iPhone Video. You heard it here first.
Back in November I posted a quick review of one of my favorite iPhone apps, Weightbot. When the app was first released, the units of weight were either in kilos or pounds. I wanted an option for stones & pounds so I put in a request on the Tapbots support board, along with many other UK users. And they listened! A couple of point updates later, Weightbot had all three units.
I’m not 100% sure but I suspect this give the guys at Tapbots the idea for Convertbot. I bought the app just before our holiday in Bahrain to do quick currency conversions (even though there are free apps to do this). I wasn’t much surprised to see that the Bahraini Dinar wasn’t on the initial list of currencies. As before with Weightbot, I put in a request on the support site. As of version 1.1, the Bahraini Dinar is in the list!
Of course, Convertbot isn’t just a currency converter. It does length, mass, power, temperature, speed and lots more. The interface is very well thought out and nearly sublime. At £1.19 on the App Store, it’s well worth getting. Tapbots also have a free, stripped down version called Convertbot Mini.
Here’s a quick and handy tip if you want up-to-date exchange rates on the iPhone. The Stocks app lets you do that for free. All you have to do is add a new stock with both currencies three-letter codes like so:
GBPUSD=X
That’s it! You should get the current rate as well as a historical graph underneath.
It’s simple. Aircraft appear in an airspace wanting to be led to two landing strips or a helipad. All you have to do is draw a line to the appropriate strip and the jet/biplane/chopper will follow the approach vector and land.
Simple, right? Nope! Not if you have three 777-class planes, 737′s all over the place, 3 crop dusters and slow-ass choppers all over the screen! And it’s so much fun! Go and get Flight Control and forget any free time you have. Addictive, fun, frustrating and beautifully designed.
I watched the iPhone 3.0 SDK presentation and kept on hoping for that Arabic will be integrated or displayed correctly at the least. Nothing was explicitly announced but I was intrigued when Scott Forstall mentioned enhanced Language features. Well it looks like the 3.0 OS will be fully Arabic aware!
Today Apple sent out invites for a special iPhone event next Tuesday for a sneak peek of the iPhone 3.0 software. The Rumour Mill is going into meltdown with predictions, with Copy & Paste being the top wished-for feature.
It’s been an eventful month of Apple announcements so far: new iMacs, Mac Mini’s, Mac Pro’s and iPod Shuffle’s. Can they possibly (hopefully!) announce a new iPhone next week?
Conversationalists