iPod users have long gotten had to find tricky ways to get music off their iPod once it’s loaded on, turning to third-party programs like PodWorks and Senuti. While the latter former has had the ability to snatch your tunes from the slavering jaws of your iPhone since last fall, Senuti has lagged behind in this regard. Fortunately, the team behind the cleverly-named app (hint: redrum redrum!) have added iPhone- (and iPod touch-) compatibility to their latest beta version, 0.50.1.
You can grab Senuti for free, but donations are welcome if you find the program to be of use. I’ve been using Senuti for all my music-liberating needs for years, and have always found the program reliable and easy to use. Give it a try.
[via Lifehacker]
When you want to get the most out of your iPhone, there’s one app you turn to: iPhoneDrive. Er, wait. MegaPhone. Aw, bugger. PhoneView. Look: we don’t care much what it’s called; what we do care about is the fact that it lets us do things with our iPhone and our Mac that would be otherwise impossible.
Aside from a brand new name, the latest version of Ecamm’s iPhone utility has a few new tricks up its sleeves: you can now add and edit notes without having to reboot the phone after each individual change (nice!), you can search most data with an iTunes-style search box, and there’s full access to the iPhone’s contact list. They’ve also fixed a number of minor bugs and tweaked minor features, so now your exported photos will have the correct creation date, and file and folder modification dates will now be preserved.
All that for just under $20. If you’d like to try before you buy, you can grab a fully functional 7 day demo from their site.
Attention, mobile RSS junkies. Google’s released a new iPhone-specific version of its Google Reader feed reader. The new version which, unsurprisingly, is in beta, is supposed to bring many of the features available in desktop browsers: you can star items, share them with others, and mark them as unread, and navigate your subscriptions via folders. They also claim to have tuned it for better speed performance.
I’m not a regular Google Reader user, but I had at some pointed imported a bunch of my subscriptions into it, so I fired up the new version to see what the haps was (were?). At the moment, since it’s in beta, you’ll specifically need to point your iPhone to http://www.google.com/reader/i/ in order to check it out.
The speed on EDGE wasn’t super fast—something I might chalk that up to my volume of feeds/unread items—but it was certainly usable. If only it synced with NetNewsWire, I could imagine using it as for all my iPhone feed-reading needs.
Another week, another beta version of the iPhone SDK. We know—you can hardly contain your excitement. We were all aflutter over here, so we eagerly tore open the release notes to find out what we can expect in this latest and greatest iteration.
The fifth beta fixes bugs and adds support for the latest iPhone OS.
Woo. Oo. Well, that’s fair, I guess. They can’t all be blockbusters. But we demand beta 6 bring us support for the rainbow-powered and unicorn-sparkle-dust features that we know are buried deep inside the iPhone’s OS. We will accept no substitutes!
I, like plenty of other iPhone users, spend a lot of my time surfing the web. Besides my compulsive Twitter-checking/updating and Wikipedia fact-checking, it’s usually so I can get updated about what’s going on in the world. Now, the Associated Press has made that task even easier by launching an iPhone-targeted service called the Mobile News Network.
All you have to do is visit the above address and you’ll get up-to-the-minute global, national, and local news headlines in a handy, iPhone-friendly format. For local news headlines, you’ll have to enter your ZIP code, but for those who travel frequently, don’t worry: you can enter multiple ZIPs and switch between them if you want. Other categories include Sports, Business, Entertainment, and even the perpetually useful “Wacky News”—you can set which sections appears on your home screen in the settings.
The site also gives you feeds of photos and videos, displayed in iPhone-friendly formats. My only complaint is that, as streamlined as the site is, it’s still a bit heavy for your EDGE connection, taking a not insignificant amount of time to load (especially if you’re looking at media). Wi-Fi users should have better luck, though.
Will this change the way I read news on my iPhone? At the moment, I often surf to CNN if I’m looking for the latest in breaking news or Google News if I want a larger picture, so I don’t know, but I appreciate that AP acknowledging the iPhone interface, and hope that other news sources pick up on the trend.
Another week, another beta version of the iPhone SDK. I haven’t seen this many sequels since the Rocky franchise. So, what does Beta IV bring to the table (sadly, not an appearance by Dolph Lundgren)?
Most importantly, the iPhone Simulator (the app you can run on your Mac that makes it look like you’re running on an iPhone) now supports Open GL ES, allowing the Simulator to run 3D graphics that are the same as the iPhone’s. That’s good news especially for those designing games. New iPhone OS templates are also included.
The second major addition is Code Signing, which is now being enforced on iPhones and iPod touches. That means that unless you have a valid certificate issued by Apple as part of the developer program, your apps will no longer run on the iPhone or iPod touch—they will, however, still work in the iPhone Simulator on your Mac. Code Signing is a big part of the touted security of the iPhone OS; I wonder what effect it will have on the future of jailbreak apps if digital signatures are required for all applications. I suppose we’ll see in June.
Doug, a fellow resident of the greater Boston metropolitan area, wrote in to ask about the state of voice memos on the iPhone. You’ve long been able to buy an add-on for your iPod that attaches to the dock-connector port and lets you record messages that are then transferred to iTunes. But Doug was concerned that the iPhone doesn’t support seem to support these features.
Yes, there is no native support for recording on the iPhone, but there are some workarounds if this is a must have piece of functionality for you. Which way you go depends very much on whether you’re interested in jailbreaking your phone.
If you don’t mind going through the extra process of jailbreaking (which these days is really as simple as downloading an application and hitting a button), then you can use the Installer.app to download Erica Sadun’s Voice Notes application. Voice Notes is pretty simple: it lets you record using the iPhone built-in mic and play back with the iPhone’s speaker. However, it won’t let you sync your voice memos with iTunes, like the iPod accessories do—instead, you can choose to email the memos. You can also import your voicemail into Voice Notes, which can be quite useful if you want to access them on a computer.
On the other hand, if jailbreaking isn’t your cup of tea, then you might consider the free service Reqall. Once you’ve set up an account, all you do is dial a number on your phone to leave a message—Reqall will then transcribe your message into text, and allow you to retrieve it on the web, via IM, or on your phone. Plus, they’ve got a snazzy iPhone-specific web-based interface.
There’s always the chance that Apple will add this functionality to the iPhone, or that a third-party might make an app in June, but if you don’t want to wait in the meantime, then perhaps one of these solutions will tide you over until then.
I consume what an expert might call “way too much media,” but even I only have so much time. More often than not, I need to keep a list—a queue if you will—of all the books, movies, TV shows, music, video games, etc. that I want to check out. Sure, I could just keep a note in the iPhone Notes app, but sometimes typing the information in is just an exercise in frustration.
Besides, a picture = 1K words, right? Snapping a shot is easy, but it still means that you have to take the time to do the heavy lifting later. That’s where ViPR comes in. Designed by Evolution Robotics Inc., ViPR is a visual pattern recognition system: you can take a picture of an object like a book or movie, email it to the ViPR server, and have it send you back information about it, including links to iTunes (for music), YouTube (for video), and the web. The software even seems to be able to do its job if you take sloppy off-angle pictures, like me, snap an upside down shot, or have your hand covering part of the object.
The company’s also developing a native iPhone application, which they say is due out in June. I’m hoping for some robust list features so I can really keep track of all my extensive media habits. Hit the jump below for a demo video.
[via Gizmodo]
Continue reading "Picture this: ViPR recognizes books, music, DVDs"
Support for Voice over IP on the iPhone is one of those features people have been discussing since the iPhone’s announcement at Macworld 2007. Heck, I said as much in an interview at the time. While an official client will likely still have to wait until the App Store goes live in June, that hasn’t stopped programmers from creating VoIP clients that run on jailbroken iPhones.
Fring is one of the first native VoIP clients for the iPhone, boasting integration with popular VoIP and IM networks like Skype, MSN Messenger, GTalk, AIM, Yahoo! Messenger. While the application looks pretty smooth, and it’s easy enough to install, provided that you’ve already jailbroken your phone or are willing to do so, it’s still got more than its fair share of hitches, top among them little matters like performance and reliability.
MacUser contributor Cyrus Farivar gave me a call from his Fring-equipped iPhone this morning to test the program out. How does it fare in a real world environment? For my part, it was a lot like talking to astronauts on the space station: I would hear Cyrus coming through fine, but when I spoke to him, there were several seconds of delay before he would respond. On Cyrus’s end, it was even worse: he only got about half of what I was saying, and the sound was exceedingly choppy. Suffice to say that it wasn’t really feasible to have a normal conversation.
I gave the program a shop later, trying out the much-ballyhooed Skype support. While the program was able to retrieve my buddy list with no problem, attempts to dial out to landline numbers proved fruitless. I thought I heard ringing once, but I never got the other side to pick up. I wasn’t able to test it out with another Skype buddy, however, so that may prove somewhat better.
Since the program runs on the iPod touch as well, some are pointing to it as a way to turn your touch into an iPhone (you’ll need a microphone that plugs into the dock-connector port, however). I’d say that it’s not there yet, but there’s potential down the road. At the moment, however, iPhone users will get far better performance and reliability from sticking with AT&T (or your—ahem—other cell provider).
