Graham Spencer

1054 posts on MacStories since January 2011

Former MacStories contributor.
graham@macstories.net

Nuance Allowing Developers to Easily Add Speech Recognition to their Apps

If you’re an App developer you might be interested in Nuance’s (known for their speech recognition software) latest pursuit. Nuance is now enabling other developers to incorporate and take advantage of their speech recognition software and place it into third party apps, expanding any app’s functionality in a very cool way.

Nuance has previously teamed up with Ask.com to deliver their speech recognition technology to the Ask for iPhone app and have now opened up the Nuance Mobile Developer Program for all developers. By joining, Nuance says developers will gain access Dragon Mobile SDK with support for more than eight languages plus assorted support forums and documentation.

If you’re interested in using Dragon’s Mobile SDK to add speech recognition, head over here. Full announcement is posted after the break.

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Further Evidence of Camera in iPad 2 and Photo Booth and FaceTime Apps

After digging around the 4.3 Beta 2 of iOS for iPad, Mac Rumors has found fairly solid evidence that pretty much confirms not only a camera addition to the iPad but also the addition of a Camera app (obviously), FaceTime and Photo Booth apps.

An image (homeScreenOverlayFaceTime~ipad.png)  used by the iPad in the Setting’s app to preview the wallpaper was found by Mac Rumors to contain three extra icons that do not exist on the image contained in iOS 4.2, those additional icons were those for a FaceTime, Camera and Photo Booth app.

FaceTime and Photo Booth are also largely dependent on the presence of a front facing camera, whilst a Camera app would seem rather redundant without a rear facing camera and so it could be thus presumed that this latest discovery seems to confirm previous reports of both a front facing and rear facing camera on the iPad 2.

Mac Rumors also says they found filters for Photo Booth that included the effects of Thermal Camera, Mirror, X-Ray, Kaleidoscope, Light Tunnel, Squeeze, Twirl and Stretch.

[Via Mac Rumors]

Cydia Adds Ability to Easily View All Your Past Purchases

Cydia, the App Store equivalent for all those jailbreak required apps that Apple has or would deny, has just received a handy new feature that allows you to view in one place all the packages that you have purchased from the Cydia store.

Jay Freeman, creator of Cydia has been working hard in recent months to improving Cydia in many ways from decreasing the all to common “Reloading” times, improving the polish and adding new features. This new feature has been a fairly common suggestion not only for Cydia but the App Store too, which whilst present in the Mac App Store has yet to reach iOS App Store - something which those of us at Macstories are hopeful Apple will add in the near future.

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MegaReader Update Redefines What Multitasking Is

For those completely obsessed iPhone users who literally cannot take their eyes off the phone there is a new app made for you; MegaReader. In it’s latest update (version 2.1) it’s developers have added a feature that allows you to experience real life multitasking by reading and walking at the same time so that you never have to take your eyes off your iPhone again!

All it does is overlay the text on a live video feed of what’s in front of the phone and is similar to the Samsung Galaxy app that allows you to text and walk and the iPhone app Email ‘n Walk, which as the name suggests overlays an email client over the live video feed!

Click through to see MegaReader’s developers demonstrate the new feature to its full potential!

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The Problems with a High Resolution Display on the iPad 2

Over the past few weeks there has been quite a back and forth discussion on the possible inclusion of a Retina or high resolution display on the iPad 2. Facts seemed to solidify when Engadget ran an article suggesting the second-generation iPad would have a high resolution display, though they did not specify the exact resolution. But then John Gruber yesterday seemed to disagree with that suggestion citing cost issues, uncovered UI graphics of an iPad camera app that are not optimized for a high resolution display and his own sources.

So why has there been so much doubt and to and fro-ing over whether the iPad 2’s display is high resolution? Well put simply, because there are so many barriers that would have to be overcome and issues that Apple would have to resolve.  Click through to read the full article.

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Apple Enters $3.9 Billion Dollar Component Supply Deal

At Apple’s financial report yesterday there was an interesting revelation by Tim Cook that Apple had recently begun entering agreements with suppliers of key components. The agreement is presumed to be around $3.9 billion dollars and would secure the key strategic resources used in Apple’s products going into the future and there are suggestions it’s for high resolution displays.

As to what components are being secured, Cook didn’t elaborate but did say the deals were similar in nature to the flash memory deals of late 2005. That deal, and subsequent deals around flash memory secured supply for many of Apple’s portable devices including the iPhone and more recently the iPad.

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More Alleged iPad 2 Cases Appear, Hint at Mini DisplayPort

Rumors and leaks surrounding the forthcoming second generation iPad continue to spread like wildfire across the blogosphere with the latest coming from AppleInsider and MIC Gadget. Both received photos of iPad 2 cases that had openings that would suggest the addition of a rear facing camera, larger speaker, possible SD card slot and most intriguingly a small port at the top of the device that could be for a Mini DisplayPort receptacle.

The two tech blogs received photo’s of cases from China that whilst different had virtually identical port openings and further back up reports by Engadget that the second generation iPad would have an SD card slot and rear facing camera. The larger opening on cases around the speaker is also a recurring feature of such leaked iPad 2 cases and seems to be a likely improvement on the iPad 2.

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Bump Data Suggests 90% of iOS Devices Running 4.x

David Lieb, founder and CEO of iPhone app Bump yesterday posted some data on Quora to a question about what percentage of users of iOS devices were on 4.x, his answer revealed that 89.7% of Bump users were on the latest major iteration of iOS, 4.x.

Although Lieb didn’t note how big the sample size is, the latest known figure of Bump downloads was 15 million back from August last year. That’s a large sample size and one that includes users of iPhones, iPod Touch’s and iPads, a sample that would suggest the ~90% is a close approximation to the real percentage of iOS device users on the latest major iteration of iOS, version 4.

Ian Peters-Campbell of Loopt, another iOS app backed up Lieb’s data but said for his users take-up was even a little higher. Anyway you cut it such a high take up rate in about six months is impressive. It also highlights concerns over how fragmented Android is compared to iOS which back in December 2010 when Froyo (2.2) was the latest Android OS only had 43.4% take up, let alone Gingerbread (2.3) which as of today ReadWriteWeb says only has 0.4% take-up.

Lieb of Bump, posted a full breakdown of iterations and percentages of users, which is posted after the break. The key data is that 53% of users are on the very latest software update of 4.2.1.

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