iPad By Davis: “Wonderful WWF Together App Adds New Jaguar Stories” plus 5 more

Wonderful WWF Together App Adds New Jaguar Stories
Apps of the Week: Napkin, Mextures, Glassboard, and more
Best Free iPad App of the Week: 2013 WNBA Center Court
Mobile Cloth
How to view mini calendars in the Calendars app for Mac
iOS 7 wants: An iMessage. Merged with FaceTime. That works. Everywhere.

Wonderful WWF Together App Adds New Jaguar Stories

Posted: 01 Jun 2013 10:07 AM PDT

WWF Together is one of the very best iPad apps I've ever laid eyes on. I can't think of too many other apps with such spectacular photos and certainly none with such amazing photos of some of the most beautiful animals on earth. It's immensely sad to realize that these are also all endangered species.

The app has recently added a couple of new 'species stories' on Sharks and the Jaguar. The photos of Jaguars are just incredible and really show what magnificent creatures they are.

Here's a few of the most notable features of WWF Together for iPad:

• In-depth, interactive stories of endangered animals, including giant pandas, tigers, elephants, marine turtles and polar bears.
• Playful interactive elements that incorporate iPad's unique features.
• Origami of each animal that folds up, creating an animated video you can share with your friends and family...

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Kingdom Rush HD - Joseph Keller

Kingdom Rush HD is a very well-done tower defense game where players endeavor to halt massive armies of fearsome creatures such as goblins, trolls, and giants. Picking from four base tower types, soldier, archer, mage, and artillery, players strategically place their defenses along the enemy's path, blasting away as waves of them move through the level. When towers hit the fourth upgrade level, players have two options, each with their own advantages and special abilities. Mix things up by choosing from several hero characters to place on the battlefield to become one-person wrecking crews against your enemies. Defeating monsters earns you gems, which you can use to buy a number of one-use advantages like extra money for towers, more health, and even an atomic bomb that clears a wave of enemies. While Kingdom Rush does have in-app purchases available, they are in no way necessary, allowing you to buy things that certainly help, but are not required to progress through the campaign. With ever-present humor, an engaging campaign, and massivley addictive gameplay, Kingdome Rush HD is well worth a look.

$2.99 - Download Now

Sugu - Simon Sage

Sugu is a really neat asynchronous multiplayer game where each side takes turns placing tiles that span six colors and six symbols. The goal is to create solid lines that are either all the same symbol or all the same color. Up to two tiles can be played at a time, and wily players will be able to contribute to a horizontal and a vertical line at once for big points. More points are awarded for placing the sixth tile in a line or for placing a tile on a multiplier square.

Sugu almost plays out as a cross between Scrabble and Sudoku, which is pretty interesting. The only downside is that it's only on iPhone for the time being.

Free - Download now

World War Z - Chris Parsons

A deadly pandemic is sweeping across the world and you must race against time to save your family and loved ones. A typical game plot, no doubt about it. But what sets World War Z off a bit from the all the other zombie like games out there is the level of detail put into the game. It's not just a 'shoot as many people as you can' game, it's in-depth with 28 levels incorporating challenging puzzles with the shoot em up style and pretty stellar graphics. Shut off the lights, play in the dark and fight for your survival!

$4.99 - Download Now

Napkin for Mac - Ally Kazmucha

I get tons of questions every week via email and Twitter about what I use to make screenshots extra fancy for how to's so here it is: Napkin for Mac. It's an extremely handy little program and I highly recommend it for anyone who needs to mark up virtually anything.

Using Napkin is super easy and a lot of commands are exactly what you'd expect. To insert an image, just drag and drop. That's all there is to it. To create a callout, simply draw a circle and drag the focus over what you'd like to emphasize. It's the best image annotation app I've ever used, point blank.

Napkin is a great tool for any teacher, professor, lecturer, or employee trainer that wants to make much richer directions and more customized presentations.

$39.99 - Download Now

TuneIn Radio - Richard Devine

TuneIn Radio has been around for as long as I can recall, but this past week saw a nice little update that makes it worth mentioning all over again. The new TuneIn Live for iPhone adds album art and show titles that changes every time something new starts, you can now add show reminders to the calendar on your device and share what you're listening to with Google+. Since that's basically where I live on the Internet that's a big addition for me.

Besides all this new stuff, TuneIn Radio is probably the best Internet radio app I've used on any platform. The catalog is so packed and diverse, it always comes up with something good to match my somewhat strange tastes. It comes to the rescue when a sports fix is required, or just when I want to listen to something new.

Free - Download Now

OnyX for Mac - Peter Cohen

OS X's UNIX underpinnings give users a tremendous amount of power, but navigating the command line interface using Terminal can be daunting even for experienced users. Enter Titanium Software's OnyX, a utility that unlocks functionality that you'd otherwise need to have a terminal window open to access. OnyX helps you clear dozens of cache files that can cause problems - everything from DNS and browser caches to system caches and log files. You can also use OnyX to read the complete contents of the manual pages of your Mac, so you know what each UNIX command does, what its parameters are and how to execute it. You can extensively configure parameters of system processes and the way key apps like Safari, Mail and iTunes work, and much more. And what's best of all, you can pay what you can afford (and what you think the utility is worth).

Donationware - Download now

Glassboard - Rene Ritchie

I've picked Glassboard before, and I'll pick it again. With WWDC 2013 just around the corner, Glassboard will be doing a lot of the conversation heavy lifting for me, as it does at many conferences. Sure, there's Twitter and iMessage, and Google Hangouts, and a host of other options, but Glassboard is private to begin with, and I can easily set up or join very specific rooms with very specific people. That makes a huge difference when a) I'm roaming on data and may not want to leave Hangouts or Skype running for everyone and anyone to ping me on, and b) I'm hella busy and need to triage who I'm talking to and where.

(We're also using it to share beta test notes on the next generation iMore app, a trick I picked up from some very smart people.)

It's a very specific app that fixes a very specific problem, and sometimes you really do need the right tool for the right job. It's also by Brent Simmons, and it's hard to go wrong with anything he writes.

Glassboard offers both a limited, free accounts, and premium accounts. I instantly paid for the latter.

Download now

Mextures - Leanna Lofte

Mextures is my new favorite photo editing app for iPhone. It includes over 70 different textures that you can mix and layer onto your photos do give them an artistic look. You can apply a different blending mode to each layer and even save your favorite combinations as formulas. I've used other apps that let you add textures, but never one as good as Mextures. If only it let you mask out sections of each layer, it would be perfect. I'll probably do a more detailed review of Mextures next week, so stay tuned!

$0.99 - Download now

Your choice?

Now that we've chosen our favorites for the week, we want to hear yours! Did you pick up a killer app, accessory, or game this week? Let us know in the comments below!

Best Free iPad App of the Week: 2013 WNBA Center Court

Posted: 01 Jun 2013 09:19 AM PDT

Great apps and a huge selection of great apps are a big part of what makes the iPad such an amazing device. There are excellent apps for just about any purpose you can think of – from serious productivity to pure entertainment. Better still, there are lots of great free apps for the iPad. Our Best Free iPad App of the Week posts highlight these apps.

This week's pick is 2013 WNBA Center Court, the official app of the WNBA. The WNBA season just tipped off recently and this is a great companion app for the league.

It offers video highlights of games and post-game interviews, latest WNBA news, and standings. If you have WNBA LIve Access you can watch live game. If you don't have that and want to get it, you can via In-App purchase for $14.99.

The main sections of the app are all available via a quick tap on a bottom nav bar; they are Games, Videos, News, and Standings. Featured...

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Launch the Calendars app on your Mac.
In the bottom left you'll see a month preview calendar. This is a mini calendar. To expand that view, position your cursor directly above the date and you'll get an anchor.
Drag upwards to expand the view to more months. I like the two month view but you can drag further up if you'd like to show even more months to jump to.

While mini calendars aren't a hidden feature or a knockout one, they do make it easier to quickly jump to things. I find them extremely useful when I'm nearing the end of the month and I need to see what I have planned for the following week. I no longer have to toggle between months in calendar view in order to do that. I'm glad Apple brought them back after their brief disappearance.

iOS 7 wants: An iMessage. Merged with FaceTime. That works. Everywhere.

Posted: 01 Jun 2013 06:54 AM PDT

iOS 7 wants: An iMessage. Merged with FaceTime. That works. Everywhere.

A plea for more unified, more functional, more reliable, more compatible, and more competitive messaging on iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

iMessage and FaceTime today do pretty much what they did years ago at launch. While it's hard to say they've been neglected, Apple hasn't prioritized them to the same degree their competition has been prioritizing Google Hangouts, FaceBook Messenger, or BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) of late. What features Apple has been adding have been centered more around notifications and the management thereof, which are important but secondary to core communications features. You can't be notified about something you can't do.

Not only that, iMessage will soon be the only remaining first-party single-platform messaging service in mobile. BBM comes to iOS and Android this summer, Google's new Hangouts app has already launched for iOS and Android, and Microsoft's Skype runs on pretty much anything (I can almost hear my toaster ringing now..). Third party messengers, like FaceBook, Twitter, WhatsApp, etc. likewise run the gamut of platforms, and connect users no matter where they are, or what type of device they're using. Many if not most of them also include integrated video and audio messaging, something Apple supports -- in video-only form -- in the separate, and similarly single-plaftorm, Facetime app.

Moreover, while FaceTime is fairly reliable, the same can't be said for iMessage, which is missing, miss-ordering, miss-grouping, or otherwise messing up often enough to shatter faith in the service. All of this adds up to something I'd sorely like to see integrated, fixed, and perhaps even expanded in iOS 7:

Merge iMessage and FaceTime into a single app, or at the very least a transparent experience. Like BBM, Hangouts, and Skype, I'd love to be able to switch between text, audio, and video chat without having to switch back and forth between apps.
Add features to iMessage/FaceTime like persistent groups, the ability to block people, video conference calling, and maybe even screen sharing and VoIP. I don't think Apple needs all the features of BBM, especially the social ones, but parity with Skype and Hangouts would be nice.
Make iMessage "just work" better. Fix whatever causes messages to fail to appear, appear out of order, or switch to SMS/MMS without notification. Communications requires trust. iMessage needs that trust.
Consider taking iMessage cross-platform. It's not nearly as far-fetched as Apple licensing iOS or OS X, and it's broadly inline with the original stated intent for FaceTime.

These are all non-trivial requests.

Base feature parity with the competition would, of course, make iMessage/FaceTime competitive.

Merging the proprietary iMessage with the standards-based FaceTime would certainly be a huge challenge, but likely necessary to handle all the varied types of communication. Where sometimes separate apps for separate purposes makes more sense, other times a bigger-picture app enabled higher-level functionality. Both iMessage and FaceTime currently employ phone numbers as the connection mechanism on iPhone, and Apple IDs as the connection mechanism across iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Mac. So, to end users like us, the way we establish contact wouldn't change. It would just become unified.

Base feature parity with the competition would, of course, make iMessage/FaceTime competitive. From conference calling to blocking, there are obvious holes in Apple's current offering that seem like they'd have already been filled but for prioritization of (limited) resources. Now that messaging is becoming important again, perhaps it'll become more of a priority? Of the additional features, Voice over IP (VoIP) would be trickiest, as it threatens to expand carrier disintermediation even further. Google and BlackBerry have already done a lot to provide carrier-free communications, as has Microsoft with their Skype acquisition, but everything has always been more difficult for Apple given the uniformity and mainstream popularity of the iPhone.

Tim Cook probably isn't any more amused by missing or messed up iMessages than we are.

Fixing iMessages' reliability will also no doubt be a challenge. If it were simple or easy at any level, Apple would have done it already. (Tim Cook probably isn't any more amused by missing or messed up iMessages than we are.) Other vendors have shown that it's possible to have dependable messaging, however, so it's something Apple has to figure out.

Taking iMessage/FaceTime cross-platform is harder to see. Apple probably doesn't want to port iMessage to Android, much less Windows Phone or BlackBerry 10. While the FaceTime, which could be released as a standard and implemented by other people on those other platforms, iMessage is all Apple. They'd have to do the heavy lifting themselves, add a parallel, standards-based component for others to tie into, or open their currently closed technology. None of those seem likely, though allowing fall back to XMPP the way iMessage can already fall back to SMS/MMS for compatibility could interesting.

Like email, messaging should go wherever our friends are, or its usefulness is compromised.

And that's a pity, because as much as I love proprietary hardware and interfaces, and think strong opinions make for great experiences, I want my communications protocols to be open. What's on my phone can be all Apple, what connects me to my friends and the world I'd prefer to be standards-based and interchangeable. Like email, messaging should go wherever our friends are, or its usefulness is compromised.

(iMessage/FaceTime integration into future Apple TV products is an interesting idea as well, especially for connecting families via the living room and companies via the conference room, but we don't have future Apple TVs yet, and current ones can already put FaceTime on the big screen via AirPlay.)

iMessage and FaceTime vs. the competition today

iMessage was introduced in iOS 5 as a way to provide a BBM-like service for iPhone users, and neatly roshambo the carriers' right in their exorbitant SMS/MMS fees at the same time. Where Apple's iChat, the messaging service available at the time on the Mac, piggy-backed on AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) and Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), iMessage uses Apple's own Push Notification Services (PNS).

On the iPhone, iMessage intermingles seemlessly with SMS/MMS. Apple including both in the same app made for immediate, immense adoption. If you're sending a message to another Apple user, it simply goes over iMessage. If you're sending to someone on a non-Apple device, it reverts to SMS/MMS to maintain compatibility. However, it's not always elegant. Sometimes iMessage will fail and you'll have to resend, or optionally resend as SMS/MMS. Other times, iMessage will fail and your message will automatically be sent as SMS/MMS. Which, if you're in the midst of convering with someone, could mean instant, potentially rage-inducing texting charges. And you can't block people from iMessaging you when you want or need to.

iMessage and FaceTime on iOS

iMessage and FaceTime offer incredible integration with SMS/MMS and standard calling on the iPhone, but don't offer the unified experience or more robust feature sets of competing services.

In addition to text messages, iMessage provides delivered and optional read receipts, like BBM. It can also handle images, video, contacts, location, audio, and a few other types of files. While text, images, and videos can be added from within the iOS Messages app, the other forms of messages can only be attached from within apps specific to those file types, like Contacts, Maps, Voice Memo, etc. That's fine if you're in an app and want to share as a one-off, but irksome if you're engaged in a conversation and simply want to drop in an attachment as part of it.

Much to their credit, Apple did move iMessage to the Mac. Once you get used to messaging that works on mobile and desktop, it's tough to even consider using anything else. It's one of Skype's biggest advantages, even though their Mac and Windows client can be as horrible an experience as it is useful. Lack of a native Mac and Windows client is also one of the biggest drawbacks to BBM, and to Hangouts whose web experience has gotten more powerful but far less elegant as of late. Facebook is likewise locked to the browser (and bereft of a video calling option on mobile), and many other alternatives are still mobile-only.

BBM on the BlackBerry Q10

BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) is arguably best in class, with a range of personal and social communication features that are set to start going cross-platform this summer.

The Messages app on the Mac is more of an iChat/Messages hybrid -- or Frankenstein -- still supporting AIM, XMPP, and Yahoo! accounts as well. Those accounts retain some of the old iChat features as well, including integrated audio and video chat and screen sharing. Gone, however, are features like video conference calling, iChat theater file sharing, and the cute if gimmicky backdrops.

And, of course, none of those legacy iChat features work with iMessage -- for video chat with an Apple account, you have to launch FaceTime on OS X just like on iOS.

Skype on iOS

Skype, now owned by Microsoft, offers a robust range of features from basic messaging to full on VoIP and video conferencing.

FaceTime arrived with iOS 4 and, like iMessage, enjoys a huge advantage on the iPhone by being tied right into the default calling app, in this case Phone. That makes switching from a traditional cellular voice call to FaceTime incredibly easy (though switching back is not currently possible, easily or at all). FaceTime isn't based on a proprietary protocol like iMessage, but on standards-based ones like H.264, AAC, SIP, STUN, TURN, ICE, and RTP.

When it was announced, Steve Jobs said Apple would be, in return, offering the FaceTime implementation as a standard. That has not yet come to pass, though Apple has been sued for patent-infringement over elements of FaceTime, which may have necessitated a change in plans. Open or closed, FaceTime remains video-only, though you can escape to audio if you really want to. It has also remained relatively stagnant, unlocking 3G/LTE transmission, but not adding (back) any features like video conference calling, screen sharing, or file sharing either.

Skype on iOS

Facebook has recently added VoIP calls in the US and Canada, complementing its existing text service.

Contrast this to the admittedly much more mature, much more central-to-the-platform, BBM, which offers not only text, image, video, and the other standard attachment types, along with integrated video and audio chat, and screen-sharing, but also social components like shared galleries, calendars, and task lists, and even Twitter-like, one-to-many channels now. You can also easily block people from messaging you, which can be really important if your contact information gets in the wrong hands. And while BBM has suffered more than its fair share of outages, like any internet service, when it works, it works reliably enough to have put the "crack" in the "crackberry" experience.

Likewise, Skype and Hangouts are both currently offering more feature-rich, more integrated, and more reliable messaging services. (Though Google has entangled Hangouts in their larger social identity network.)

Hangouts on iOS

The newly expanded Google Hangouts offers persistent group chats to large scale group video calling as well.

The bottom line

On the iPhone, the phone, like the messaging, has always been just another app. However, communications is still one of the most important jobs the iPhone has, and one that makes the iPad and Mac far more useful as well. Apple doesn't need to be best-in-class when it comes to messaging -- though that might well be on their, likely very long, to-do list -- but it would greatly behoove them, and us, if they were to prioritize being more competitive.

Otherwise, alternatives go from niche to mainstream, and you end up de-facto outsourcing something that should be a core technology on any platform. (Which is likely why BlackBerry is porting BBM.)

I'd love to see Apple take a step in that direction with iOS 7. Then I can start asking for a unified messaging system, like webOS Synergy or the BlackBerry 10 Hub, for iOS 8...

iPad by Davis

domingo, 2 de junio de 2013