sábado, 9 de febrero de 2013

iPad By Davis: “Yoga Studio for iPhone and iPad review” plus 12 more

iPad By Davis: “Yoga Studio for iPhone and iPad review” plus 12 more

Yoga Studio for iPhone and iPad review

Posted: 08 Feb 2013 06:16 PM PST

Yoga Studio for iPhone and iPad review

It's Fitness Month here at iMore and Mobile Nations and this week's focus is on exercise. We've already taken a look at the hardcore bootcamp app P90X, so this time we're going to take a look at an app for a gentler workout approach: Yoga Studio.

Yoga Studio has 30 ready-made yoga classes ranging from 15 to 60 minutes with beginner, intermediate, or expert yoga poses. You can filter the classes by ability, focus, or duration. Each class is not initially installed onto your device with your app so as to not take up a bunch of storage. Instead, you can pick and choose and download the ones you want.

After you download a class, you can go through each pose and learn exactly how to do them, view a photo, see a list of their benefits, how to modify them for more novice or advanced users, and things to be careful about (like if you have back or hip inflammation, for example).

In addition to just looking at the poses individually, you can watch a video that goes through the entire class. The instructor has a very calm voice and there is calming music in the background. As the instructor tells you what to do, a model demonstrates the poses on the video. Tapping the video will pause it and give you options to skip to the next pose, share with AirPlay, or finish watching.

The classes included with Yoga Studio are great, but if you'd rather create your own class with the exact combination of poses that you want, you can. You can start from a clean slate or customize an already existing class.

Yoga Studio also integrates with the built-in Calendar so that you can schedule in times to take your classes. When you get an alert from Calendar, you just simply click the link and Yoga Studio will launch and take you strait to your class.

The good

  • 30 ready-made classes with videos
  • Over 280 poses
  • Beginner, intermediate, and advanced poses and classes
  • 15, 30, and 60 minute classes
  • Detailed description for each pose
  • Create your own classes
  • Search for poses, including pose blocks of short, common sequences of poses
  • Schedule classes with Calendar
  • Play classes on your TV with Apple TV and AirPlay
  • Universal for iPhone and iPad

The bad

  • No complaints

The bottom line

Whether you're completely new to yoga or a seasoned expert, Yoga Studio is an excellent yoga class. It's packed with over 280 poses, 30 classes, and more. Yoga is an excellent workout for body and mind and Yoga Studio is a fantastic way to attend classes at a very low price. I highly recommend Yoga Studio and look forward to using it more regularly, myself.

Also, don't forget to enter all our Fitness Month contests! Lots of great prizes up for grabs!

Retention

Posted: 08 Feb 2013 05:04 PM PST

Retention

Roughly 10 months ago, Guy English likely ingested far too much Melange and presciently wrote a piece on the problems he saw facing Apple as they scaled through the post-iPhone era. Third among them was talent retention. From Kicking Bear:

If there's a problem for Apple it's that they've already invented the future. It's a done deal. The best and brightest engineers and product managers may move on to other ventures. Less likely to succeed, of course, but that's less of an issue for them given the rainfall of AAPL gains. We'll have to see what happens.

And this:

Ultimately, the retention of talent will be Apple's Achilles' heel.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball argues that English should have made that his first point. Gruber's comment was sparked by this tweet by Dan Frommer:

This is not at all a scientific study, but most of the Apple employees I follow on Twitter have quit within the last ~9 months. Huh.

Gruber added that it wasn't an exodus, and it's not. Former Apple employee Justin Reid explained it this way:

It was a village and became a city overnight. Village folk don't necessarily like living in cities.

When you've made the current big thing, when you've made the money that comes with being in at the beginning, and when the world around you has grown from something secret and small to something universe-dentingly famous, you might just find decide you pick up your bags and your fortunes and go off in search of the next adventure.

Likewise, Apple is hiring as well, and hiring some phenomenally talented people. They're also promoting and consolidating from within. More than an exodus, it represents a changing of the guard, and the influx of fresh talent and ideas, could also help Apple in their own search for what's next.

Source: Kicking Bear

Stuck between the Dropbox that was and the iCloud that isn't yet

Posted: 08 Feb 2013 03:08 PM PST

Stuck between the Dropbox that was and the iCloud that isn't yet

iCloud promised ubiquity, all our stuff, every where and every when we wanted it. Not sync, Apple very carefully, almost awkwardly explained it, but an idea that was and is just as simple. You create something, it gets stores on the iCloud, and pushed down to all of your iOS and OS X devices. Not a server-side truth store, and critically, not a file system either. Unlike Google, it didn't live in the browser, and unlike Dropbox or the iDisk that came before it, there were and are no folders or hierarchies to get lost in, no Finder or Explorer to trudge through. iCloud, as Apple positioned it, was and is something new and something potentially much, much better.

The problem is, it doesn't work yet.

The architecture is unnecessarily dependent on apps. If I create a document in Text Editor 1, not only do I have to remember the document I created but, if I want to access it again, I also have to remember the app I created it in. If I later switch to a much better Text Editor 2, my document doesn't switch with me. I have to either copy and paste every document from Text Editor 1 into Text Editor 2, or keep a list of which documents are where. That's a non-trivial amount of cognitive overhead. If at some point I move on to Text Editor 3, or delete (or switch devices and don't re-install) Text Editor 1, it gets even worse. I have to track my documents over multiple access points, and perhaps even re-install old apps just to get back to the documents locked inside. It's a mess.

Decoupled, documents that present themselves to any app that supports editing their type, and apps that simply pull any document whose type they supported, would be much simpler and better. A smart version of a document picker would remove the burden from users and let the system do all the heavy lifting. (I used to want Photos/image-picker-like access via a Files.app repository, but increasingly I think a flat online store with search better fits the future.)

Of course, even if you do manage to keep track of all your documents across all your apps, iCloud's store and push features still haven't proven reliable enough for primetime. Key values seem to work okay, but documents still sound like a bag of hurt, with many developers struggling to implement them, or giving up on them entirely and switching to another solution. And that's on top of the larger problem facing Apple's services -- they're not historical one of the company's strengths, and haven't historically received the attention and innovation that Apple's software and hardware have enjoyed.

While Google, Facebook, and Amazon can snap up developers and designers and push out better looking and working apps, it's hard to imagine a plucky startup Apple could buy -- much less a NeXT-style acquisition Apple can make -- to jumpstart their services talent and technology the way they did their local operating system over a decade and a half ago.

Best case, Apple has secretly been working on something as important to the next generation of their online services as WebObjects was to the last. Worst case, we're all in for a lot of pain as they struggle to figure it out.

And that's in stark contrast to something like Dropbox, which enjoys about as much popularity on iOS as can be afforded a third-party service.

I've used Dropbox for years. My entire OS X documents folder lives in Dropbox. It's the first thing I install whenever I set up a new Mac. It's the closest thing I've found, Google Drive and Microsoft SkyDrive be damned, to truly automagical sync. It has versioning, it has un-delete, it has selective sync, and it's saved my ass more times than I can count. It's also being improved on the API side, making it even easier for developers to integrate. (Dropbox, it turns out, has also been a bag of hurt for developers for years.)

But here's the thing -- for all Dropbox's automagical-ness, it's a relic of the past. It's a file system. It's a hierarchy. It's a folder sync. It's a bunch of encrypted data stored on Amazon's S3 network.

As much as iCloud is the right idea still not realized, Dropbox is the wrong thing done brilliantly well. And at the end of the day, that still amounts to the wrong thing.

Those of us used to, and clinging to, traditional file systems love it, and will continue to love it as it becomes marginalized into obsolescence, as the growing mainstream -- those who aren't power users but are increasingly empowered users, and who won't get it and shouldn't be subjected to it -- sweep past it and into newer, better things.

iCloud could be that better thing, if Apple can nail it. Big if. So could something else, including a new version of Dropbox. But nothing and no one is there yet. So, as iPhones and iPads and other appliances bring computing to a broader user base than ever before, the services that bind them remain stuck between the best-ever version of the past, and a still sputtering and stammering future.

Daddy Takes a Business Trip: iPad Storybook Hand Painted on an iPad

Posted: 08 Feb 2013 12:01 PM PST

Daddy Takes a Business Trip iPad App

Daddy Takes a Business Trip is a new iPad storybook app that was hand painted on an iPad.

I have a 9 year old daughter and we've been enjoying storybook apps on the iPad for years now. So I'm always on the lookout for interesting new titles for us to enjoy. Although this book is aimed at a lower age group, the fact that it was illustrated entirely on an iPad was enough to get me interested in taking a look.

As many iPad titles of this sort do, the app lets you choose between having the story read to you, reading it yourself, or recording your own voiceover for it. The story itself has a simple and pleasant enough theme about a dad who travels a lot and really just wants to get back home to his kids.

I don't find the writing to be standout or particularly compelling – but it's a decent, quick read with some interactive elements on several of the pages to add interest for...

Read the whole entry... »

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What’s with Apple’s cash and Greenlight Capital’s complaining?

Posted: 08 Feb 2013 11:21 AM PST

What's with Apple's cash and Greenlight Capital's complaining?

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal ran a story about hedge fund titan David Einhorn, and his firm Greenlight Capital's view that Apple isn't distributing enough cash to shareholders. Einhorn says Apple is behaving with a "depression-era mentality" according to the story.

Greenlight issued a formal press release outlining its concerns. You can read that release over at Yahoo Finance. The short version of things? Apple has an annual general meeting of shareholders coming up on February 27th and one of the proposals that shareholders will vote on (called "Proposal 2") will, according to Greenlight, eliminate Apple's ability to issue preferred stock. Investing pros refer to these as "prefs", which I'll do here since it's way easier to type. Anyway, Greenlight is encouraging shareholders to vote against this proposal.

Instead, Greenlight wants Apple to issue high yielding perpetual prefs. The "perpetual" part of the name just means that the stock has no maturity date. Prefs are often considered to be a hybrid investment because while they are technically a form of stock (equity), they often have no voting rights and often have a fixed dividend (just like a bond coupon) and they usually have a maturity date, which means they behave more like bonds (debt). Perpetual prefs never mature, so they just collect dividends forever.

Greenlight says that prefs have favorable tax treatment. And since I'm no tax expert I did some digging into this. I can't figure out why Einhorn's crew is saying this. It's true that dividends get better tax treatment than bond coupon payments, but I found nothing to show why pref share dividends are better than common share dividends.

Apple PR also issued a statement debunking Greenlight's claims. Specifically, Greenlight's press release says that Apple is trying to pass a proposal that eliminates the ability to issue prefs. That's not true. According to Apple, they're just proposing to eliminate the board of director's ability to issue such instruments without shareholder approval. Apple says it can still issue prefs in the future, but they'll need shareholder approval.

In my books that's a good thing. That's a shareholder-friendly move.

Finally, I must confess I don't see the difference between Apple raising its common share dividend versus issuing new prefs to existing shareholders. In the end they are all just dividend payments, who why complicate the capital structure by issuing prefs at all? Keep it simple, stupid.

Recommended: Steven Aquino on iPad and iOS’ Impact on Those with Impairments

Posted: 08 Feb 2013 10:28 AM PST

iPad in Use with Special Needs Children

The Magazine has become one of my favorite regular reads on the iPad. I've read a number of great pieces on a wide range of topics in it over recent months. This week one particular article in Issue 9 drew me in and ended up being great read and a great feel-good piece as well.

The article is titled Re-Enabled – iOS's impact on those with impairments isn't just a marketing slide; it's profound, and was written by Steven Aquino.

The marketing slide reference is to a brief moment during last year's WWDC keynote event where Soctt Forstall highlighted the new Guided Access feature of iOS and showed a slide of a autistic boy using an iPad (shown above). Here's why Aquino is uniquely qualified to write about how this works in the real world:

That scenario plays out for me every day. I work with special-needs children, and I also have a severe visual impairment.

...

Read the whole entry... »

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Using the iPad mini as a phone

Posted: 08 Feb 2013 09:21 AM PST

Last week I left home and headed to the airport, on my way to Macworld|iWorld 2013. My flight was delayed thanks to freezing rain, so I sat at the airport in Montreal for a couple hours, finally made it to Toronto, and then got smacked with another 8 hour delay. With my iPhone 5 at 20% and dropping, thanks to the poor quality Rogers reception at Pearson, I reached for one of the several Lightning cables I'd packed for my trip... only to find not a single one. I'd left them all at home.

Of course, neither the iStore (airport electronics shop) nor the Best Buy vending machines had Lightning cables. I was stuck. I needed my iPhone for when I landed in San Francisco, so I had to conserve as much power as I could. But I also needed a phone to use while I was at the airport all day.

So I reached for my iPad mini.

Don't laugh. The 7.9 inch vs. 9.7 inch screen size difference might not seem like a lot, but when you're walking around an airport for hours, the ability to hold it a device in one hand with something even approaching a phone-like grip makes a huge difference. I could stand in line at customer service or at the food court or coffee shop while checking iMore, playing Letterpress, and sending and receiving iMessages just about as easily as I could with my iPhone. And when they changed gates on me four times, and changed them back again, and I had to haul ass through terminals and even between them, I could keep my iPad mini in my hand while I ran, something I could never do with a full sized iPad, not comfortably, not without the fear it'd fly out of my hand.

When I had to make calls, to make sure I could check into my hotel even after midnight, for example, I used Skype. No, I didn't rock the iPad mini on my shoulder like a 1980s beatbox, trying to line up the speaker and mic to my head. I used my in-ear headset, and it worked as well as it's always worked with the iPhone. I received calls the same way, though I wish Skype was easier on the battery, even in background. Next time I might just stick to FaceTime.

But then, I seldom use my iPhone as a phone anyway. Those things, the things I do on my iPhone all day, every day, while I'm out and about, the social networking, the iMessaging, the gaming, all worked just as well on the iPad mini as they do on the iPhone. And thanks to the beefy pockets on my Canadian winter jacket, the iPad mini was just as easy to carry around when I didn't want it in hand. Also, running iMore's Drupal 7-based CMS remotely is much easier via the iPad version of Safari than the iPhone version.

When I finally arrived at San Francisco airport, some 19 hours after I'd left home, my iPad mini and its beat of a battery was still at over 30%, and I was able to switch back to my iPhone and make all my arrangements while on my way to the city. (iPad roaming is $1 a MB, no way was I using it for a second in the U.S.). The next day I bought a couple extra Lightning connectors and an extra usb-to-Lightning adapter from the Apple Store, and I was good to go.

Using an iPhone as a phone is still a far more mobile, far more convenient solution than using an iPad mini. It's what I use 90% of the time I'm walking around my home town. But now, sometimes, when I want a more expansive, more IMAX iOS experience, I find myself reaching for my iPad mini, holding it one handed, going about my same business, and enjoying it tremendously.

John Gruber has said the iPad mini was the best computer ever made. I'm still enslaved by OpenVPN, Final Cut Pro X, Photoshop, and other software to my MacBook Pro. But even lacking Phone.app and a proper mouth and earpiece, the iPad mini might well be one of the best phones I've ever used.

And that makes the whole 5-inch iPhone line of speculation even more interesting...

LTE Is Rapid & Rapidly Becoming a Favorite Feature on My iPad mini

Posted: 08 Feb 2013 08:51 AM PST

LTE on iPad mini

I've had an iPhone with WiFi + Cellular capabilities since 2008, and several iPads with cellular over the years as well. My iPad 3 now has no regular data plan on it, since I'm much more likely to grab my iPad mini when I'm out and about and away from guaranteed home WiFi.

And I have to say now that cellular means LTE, it is becoming one of my favorite features on the iPad mini. 3G was always nice to have around for always-on connectivity, but I never found its speed anything to write home about. 4G and LTE is a completely different story – the speed is truly impressive. In fact, I find that in a number of public places LTE gives me much faster performance than the available free WiFi networks.

It's becoming my habit to turn off WiFi and choose LTE as my first option a lot of the time now – though I should mention that I'm using the iPad mini for almost entirely work...

Read the whole entry... »

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Moshi shows off Versacover for iPad mini at Macworld|iWorld 2013

Posted: 08 Feb 2013 08:45 AM PST

Unlike CES 2013, when you hit the show floor at Macworld|iWorld 2013, you didn't feel like iPhone and iPad cases were flying at you like the armory scene in the Matrix. The sanity was refreshing. It allowed us to better see and appreciate what was there, including gems like the Moshi Versacover, originally for the big boy iPad, and now newly remodeled for the iPad mini.

Jennifer Kutz gave us a demo, including the numerous ways the foldable cover could be used to prop up the iPad for watching videos or typing. Instead of three vertical folds like Apple's Smart Cover, the Versacover has a series of folds on three angles, allowing for a variety of shapes to be formed. There's also a back to the case to protect the aluminum unibody of your iPad mini, and a magnet on the back so, when you fold the cover over, it actually stays in place, and doesn't flop around.

Now that's smart.

More: Moshi

Deal of the Day: 44% off BodyGuardz HD Anti-glare ScreenGuardz for iPhone 5

Posted: 08 Feb 2013 07:27 AM PST

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These invisible protectors are made of an ultra-slim polymer and shield your screen from abrasive elements such as keys and dirt, reducing annoying glare at the same time. It's the ideal accessory to go along with your iPhone 5 case, cover or protector.

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Follow Friday: Get your daily dose of iMore on Twitter, ADN, Facebook, or Google+!

Posted: 08 Feb 2013 07:11 AM PST

If you're new to the iPhone, iPad, or Apple, if you just discovered iMore, or if you've only begun signing up for Twitter, app.net (ADN), Facebook, or Google+, then you may not be aware of the wonderful confluence that brings them all together -- you can follow iMore right on your favorite social networks!

And as a bittersweet aside to those who have been following iMore for a while, our own Georgia has finally changed her Twitter handle from @GeorgiaTiPb to @Georgia_Prime. It's been just over a year since our site name changed from TiPb to iMore, so it made sense, but it was still a little sad to see that remnant fade away.

But that was then and this is now, and if you haven't followed iMore or your favorite writers yet, now's the time to do it. Don't forget to leave your Twitter, ADN, Google+, Instagram, and other links in the comments either, we'd love to know where to find you as well!

Apple sales in India estimated to be up 400% in 3 months

Posted: 08 Feb 2013 06:17 AM PST

Apple sales in India estimated to be up 400% in 3 months

Apple's sales in India are reportedly up 400% in 3 months according to IDC estimates. India is one of those emerging markets, alongside Russia and Brazil, that Apple is keeping a very close eye on. While China has been grabbing a lot of the headlines, conference call time, iOS 6 feature list, and even a new operating segment of late, India may not be that far behind. Akanksha Prasad & Indu Nandakumar, writing for The Times of India report:

"Apple is doing what it did in China three or four years ago. They studied the market, learned consumer needs and suddenly went aggressive," said Jayanth Kolla, founder and partner at Convergence Catalyst, a telecom research firm. "From having about 30 people here six months ago, Apple India is now about 150-people strong."

The iPhone 5 is a premium phone with a premium price tag, however. And while an iPhone 4 is free on-contract in the U.S., it's still $450 off-contract, which makes buying it outright a tough proposition in emerging markets. Rumors of a less expensive iPhone aside, Apple it sounds like Apple is using an installment-based payment system to make the current iPhone lineup more accessible.

As Apple continues its efforts in China, and ramps up India and other regions, it'll be interesting to see how their strategy evolves and grows.

Apple reported their Q1 2013 earnings late last month. Anyone in India have perspective on the potential iPhone and iPad market?

Source: The Times of India via Fortune

Talking HockeyApp with Thomas Dohmke at Macworld|iWorld 2013

Posted: 08 Feb 2013 05:44 AM PST

HockeyApp for iOS has nothing to do with the sport of hockey and everything to do with making developers' and beta testers' lives easier. Time was, in order to beta test an app, you had to tether to iTunes and manual transfer over the provisioning and app files, and you had to do it every time the beta updated -- which could be often. Then services like HockeyApp showed up, and they allowed for direct, on-device, over-the-air (OTA) installation and updates of both provisioning files and apps. Hockey will even alert you when updates are available. Moreover, for developers, HockeyApp provides crash reports, feedback, and analytics.

At Macworld|iWorld 2013 I had to a chance to talk with HockeyApp founder Thomas Dohmke about his service, which has also made life much easier for writers like me who cover apps and are often sent early review copies the same way.

Likewise, making the beta process better results in apps that get tested more often, and more fully, and thus, better final releases for everyone.

If you're a developer haven't yet looked at HockeyApp, check out the link below. If you have used HockeyApp, let me know how it's worked for you.

More: HockeyApp
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