Posts tagged with "iOS"

MacStories Product Review: Sonos S5 Wireless Music System

I can’t live without my music. Every day, I need to get my “fix” either through iTunes, Youtube (it’s good for rare live performances) or Spotify. I also scrobble the songs I listen to towards last.fm, although I’m no huge fan of the service as a social platform. I just keep an archive of my musical tastes in there. Still, as far as music is concerned, most of the times it’s not the system or the platform that really matters. It’s the quality. And for quality, you need good gear.

Over the years, I’ve always tried to save money and purchase great-quality earbuds to ensure high-fidelity playback while on the go. I’m still happy with my Sennheiser CX 300 bought years ago, but home stereo systems have been a dilemma for me, in spite of my obsession for top-notch hardware. I’ve changed setups too many times, jumped from speakers to stereos and all-in-one solutions without really sticking to one for more than 6 months. When music becomes an obsession, good gear is a necessity. Recently, the audio technologies implemented by Apple in iOS forced me to reconsider everything once again.

See, wireless streaming spoiled all the fun I had accomplished. First came audio via Bluetooth, then Airport Express stations and AirPlay. I changed devices: I went from a classic iPod to an iPod touch to iPhone + iPad. I subscribed to Spotify Premium to use the mobile app (with streaming and offline access), I became addicted to Apple’s own iPod app and third party replacements like My Artists, or external controllers like Coversutra, Bowtie and SongSwiper. Put simply: music became deeply integrated with iOS, and iOS grew at the same time to accomodate features like AirPlay. Music became connected.

So when I was offered the chance to review the Sonos S5, I immediately said “yes” and eagerly started waiting for the two review units to show up at my doorstep. The Sonos S5, for those unaware of this mythical gadget, is a wireless speaker internally powered by a series of amps that a) provides great sound quality and b) is truly connected with iOS, OS X and the Internet. The S5 offers the best of both worlds: local playback backed up by high-quality manufacturing and remote functionalities that allow users to “log into” the speaker and customize the entire experience. After the break, you’ll find my impressions of two months with two Sonos S5 units and a Sonos ZoneBridge connector. Read more

Multimedia JFK Biography Hits the iPhone and iPad

On the 20th of January 1961, John F Kennedy became the 35th President of the United States, now fifty years later there’s a new iPhone and iPad app that commemorates his life and achievements.

Historian and publisher Marc Schulman who developed the app whilst writing the text biography told Reuters “The paper book is limited, in that you can’t see all the supporting documents, videos and photographs.” The app, JFK Historymaker for iOS however is a rich multimedia experience full of videos, documents and includes the retrospective biography of the President.

The app comprises of many key sections including those documenting his family, him as a Congressional Candidate, the Space Program, Cuban Missile Crisis and his Assassination. Schulman emphasized that it enables the reader to do their own research so they don’t have to “rely just on my voice as the biographer.”

According to a November Gallup poll, JFK remains America’s most popular President with an 85% approval rating. Whether you approve of him and want to know more or you simply want to learn something about a pretty significant historical individual, JFK Historymaker undoubtedly seems like a treasure trove of information for the price of $4.99.

[Buy on iTunes]

[Via Reuters]

The Incident Gets Recreated In Real Life

Last week there was the real life Fruit Ninja, today another iOS game, The Incident has been emulated (or technically “sweded”) in real life and the video is just comical and begs to be watched. The Incident is of course the iOS game that makes you run and dodge objects falling from the sky.

The fans of The Incident that created this video were pretty ingenious in the way they put it together obviously avoiding actually dropping anvils from the sky, and the errrr “music” that accompanies it is just awesome. There really isn’t much else to say, just watch the video after the break!

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This Notification System Would Look Good on iOS 5 [Mockup]

One of the key areas users would like Apple to focus on for iOS 5 is the notification system. Currently, notifications on iOS are far from useful and unobtrusive: they get in the way too much, there’s no way to access a log of past notifications, if you’re playing a game and quickly dismiss a notification’s alert because you’re busy / concentrated, there’s no way to get that notification back. Many says notifications are the less Apple-like feature in iOS.

In the past, we have covered several alternative solutions to improve iOS’ notification system, like Notified. All these tweaks are available for jailbreakers in Cydia, and require a bit of manual hacking and configuration. The following mockup, realized by Youtube user hustn, shows a few ideas that we think might be a good fit for the next major update of iOS. Notifications that don’t get in the way but appear in a bar at the top, even multiple ones; possibility to tweak the settings with quiet times and display order; an additional section above the multitasking tray that shows the most recent notifications from all apps. It looks pretty good and interesting. As the creator explains:

This is a mockup of my current side project of designing an improved iPhone notification system. Unlike other attempts at improving the iPhone’s notification system, my approach is to use design direction from the current iPhone UI to create a seamless interface for the user.

This is purely theoretical. There is no code behind this; I’ve mocked this all up in Flash and Photoshop.

What do you think? The system looks a bit like the notifications seen in Palm’s webOS, and undoubtedly borrowing a few ideas from Palm wouldn’t be so bad for Apple. Especially considering that former Palm Senior UI Designer Rich Dellinger now works at Cupertino. [via Reddit]
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Sending Emails From @mac.com Accounts Will Soon Be Impossible

According to a recent thread on Apple’s Discussion boards and a support document on Apple’s website, users of @mac.com email addresses who upgraded to iOS 4.2 are no longer able to send email messages through a @mac.com account unless it was setup prior to updating to iOS 4.2. Alternatively, the @mac.com account details can be synced through iTunes on the desktop, but this won’t enable push for emails.

A user on Apple Discussions explains:

Because of this unannounced development, I had a sneaking suspicion that Apple may be planning to do the same in the future for sending email from @mac.com addresses via www.me.com and a desktop email client.

It appears my suspicion was true. Here are the relevant sections from a Chat Session I’ve just finished with a very nice MobileMe Support agent.

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Angry Birds Valentine’s Edition, Coming February 14

In December we reported Rovio was working on a new update to its incredibly successful series Angry Birds, a new Valentine’s-themed version that was rumored to be scheduled for a February release.

At the end of the video below, you can see the first exclusive footage of Angry Birds Valentine’s Edition (not an official name), which sports lots of hearts, pink-colored birds and clouds. It would be very romantic if the concept of the game wasn’t to kill pigs. I guess from Rovio’s standpoint, that makes sense though.

Still, prepare to see this game become #1 in the App Store. [Electricpig via 9to5mac] Read more

Flight Control Lands Nearly 4 Million Sales

Firemint, which recently acquired Infinite Interactive has posted on it’s blog some sales statistics of it’s popular Flight Control game that is currently featured in Apple’s Top Paid Apps of all time. As of the post it had sold 3,881,634 copies and has raked in $3.8 million dollars and that’s after Apple 30% take.

As demonstrated by the graph it released that is shown above (click for larger size) it’s pretty clear that Christmas and big feature updates really helped increase sales of the game. In particular the addition of Game Center support led to a peak of 120,000 sales, the largest peak since the release of the app. The new maps update and Retina display support were the other notable peaks.

Also notable is the sales by country, as the graph below the break shows, the US has the lion’s share followed by Great Britain, Australia and Germany.

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Skyfire Makes Another Million With iPad App

Remember Skyfire? The alternative browser for the iPhone that comes with a lot of extra functionalities, including the possibility to play Flash videos through remote proxy servers that transcode Flash content to iOS-optimized video. The iPhone app was insanely successful as it managed to pull in a million dollars in just three days in the App Store. The app has also been sitting on top of the iPhone charts for weeks now.

In case you didn’t notice, right ahead of Christmas the Skyfire team released an iPad version of the app, priced at $4.99. It was good timing and a clever move as the App Store was about to shut down for developers and apps that climbed the charts in those days gained thousands of downloads. Skyfire for iPad is no exception: three weeks into the App Store, another $1 million in the developers’ hands – although 30% will go to Apple. That’s around $700,000 in revenue so far, as MobileCrunch reports.

Skyfire for iPad is available here. It’s a cool browser, but I’m still not sure what’s the real need of Flash compatibility for videos on iOS devices. Apparently though, people bought it. And that should be enough for the developers. Read more