Monthly Archives: October 2009
Giant iPhone wedding cake threatens to devour us all
Or maybe it was devoured first? Jerry Brito emailed a link to his wedding cake photos, made by the good folks at Charm City Cakes. It’s an astoundingly accurate rendering of an iPhone save one thing our own Dave Caolo spotted: four bars on AT&T? Wishful thinking, although in the context of a wedding cake, maybe it’s a good signal.
This is neither the first nor the last cake done as Apple gear, although it is certainly one of the best. But Charm City does nothing halfway, which you know if you’ve ever seen the show ‘Ace of Cakes’ on Food Network.
Congratulations to Jerry and his wife!Giant iPhone wedding cake threatens to devour us all originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Uh oh! Google releasing free turn by turn GPS app for Android
Just when you thought it was safe to buy a nav app for the iPhone, Google goes and announces a free app for Android, and says it’s going to be available for the iPhone if Apple will let it into the App Store.
The app, called Google Maps Navigation, will ship with phones running the Android OS 2.0 and includes search by voice, search for points of interest by voice while in route, satellite and street view, and support for a hardware dock for ‘certain devices.’
This won’t be great news for TomTom, Navigon, or any of the rest. Google says the app is U.S. only for now, and will be seen first on the Verizon Droid which will appear in November.
Talk about disruption! With the FCC watching it will be most interesting to see if Apple allows the app onto the iPhone and, whether yes or no, the effect on Android sales.
I can’t wait for all the fur to fly. You can watch a video of the app in action in this YouTube clip. Admit it. You want this!
Quick and easy podcasting with an iPhone 3GS, GarageBand, and Posterous
I love podcasting.
My first podcasts weren’t really podcasts, just recordings that I made and uploaded to a website in the late 90′s so that other people could listen to them. Unlike the podcasts we know and love today, there was no way to subscribe to all of the episodes that I recorded. When podcasting as we know it hit the world in 2004, I started hosting podcasts through one of my companies.
Get your social notifications on the cheap with Boxcar
Since the arrival of the Push Notifications feature in iPhone OS 3.0, all manner of apps have added support for it. Games, task management applications, you name it — they’re all more than happy to make your phone beep at you in the middle of the night and prompt your spouse to kindly insist that you silence that infernal device. Or so I’ve heard.
It seems like a no-brainer to me that this type of functionality would exist among the throngs of social networking applications. If the game where you flick the thing while the music is playing can tell me when I’ve got a new challenger from the Far East, why can’t my favorite Twitter client let me know when I’ve got a new direct message? Sadly, most of the apps in the store (as far as I know) haven’t implemented this functionality yet. I realize that it has some sporadic adoption, but certainly not the universal support that I personally expected.
Enter Boxcar [iTunes Link]. This little free app has existed in the store for months now and has received some very nice reviews, and for good reason. I’ve been a faithful user of this app for many moons and I find it pretty indispensable. Here’s how it works:
App Store Stories: One man’s app. Three corporations. Lyrics 2 against the world.
When Joris Kluivers (@kluivers on Twitter) set out to write his Lyrics app for iPhone, he never intended to personally take on Apple, Sony, and Gracenote. Kluivers, a student at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, was just trying to get his foot in the App Store door, not go toe-to-toe with three media behemoths. The story of how he ended up navigating through the corporate bulwarks to eventually successfully publish his latest release, Lyrics 2 (iTunes Link), with the blessings of all three companies, no less, makes quite the App Store saga.
Kluivers built the application around the LyricsWiki database. Featuring over 700,000 songs, the wiki provided easy access to a much-desired resource. It was exactly that access to a vast library of songs that caused the first of Kluiver’s corporate challenges. Apple insisted on censoring his lyrics.