Evil Sushi Squish on Fox New
Posted: November 4, 2011 Filed under: App Review, Apps Leave a comment »Our Evil Sushi Squish was on Austin Fox News Wednesday November 2, 2011. Fox News covered jobs of the future and apps are a part of that future.
Jobs of the Future : MyFoxAUSTIN.com
Calling all kitties to the iPad!
Posted: November 4, 2011 Filed under: App Review, Apps, SPCA, Tab and iPad Reviews Leave a comment »The Private Life of Steve Jobs
Posted: October 21, 2011 Filed under: Apps, Community, Tab and iPad Reviews, Technology Leave a comment »Steve Jobs’s biographer Walter Isaacson will be interviewed on Sunday night’s episode of 60 Minutes.
The interview will air on Oct. 23, the night before Isaacson’s Steve Jobs: A Biography hits bookshelves. Isaacson was given unprecedented access to Jobs and those who knew him. Jobs, who died earlier this month, reportedly told Isaacson that “nothing is off limits” when it came to chronicling his life.
In a special essay for Time subscribers, Isaacson shed some light on why the notoriously private Jobs was finally willing to open up about his life. “I wanted my kids to know me,” Jobs reportedly told Isaacson.
CBS announced the interview segment on its Facebook page. We expect the clip will be available in the official 60 Minutes iPad app shortly after it airs on TV.
Isaacson Discusses Jobs’s Decision to Put Off Surgery
CBS News released a preview of its upcoming Segment on Thursday. The clip includes Isaacson discussing Jobs’s decision to put-off surgery after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The surgery could have saved Jobs’s life. Isaacson says that despite the urgings of his wife and surgeons, Jobs opted to try alternative treatments first. It was a decision he would later regret.
- Nick
Visible Contact Halloween App
Posted: October 21, 2011 Filed under: Apps, Community, Kids' Apps Leave a comment »Here is a fun little animation with our Halloween charters. Everyone loves to dress up for Halloween and this app lets you enjoy many crazy combinations of costumes, along with traditional ones as well. Down load the app, and have some Halloween fun.
Fox News in our Studio
Posted: October 21, 2011 Filed under: App Review, Apps, Community Leave a comment »Today we had a special guest in our studio, the Fox News Team. Visible Contact has been developing web sites for the past 4 years ago. But last year we started developing apps. Our first app was developed as a countdown app for New Years Eve 2011. And on New Years Eve we had over 10,000 download. So from there we developed Evil Sushi Squish and haven’t look back since. Of course we will always work on web sites and other peoples apps but developing products for mobile devices is where the market is going and so are we.
Fox News is doing a story on jobs of the future. The interview will air November 1st.
iPad Has it’s First Real Challenger, Amazon Fire
Posted: October 10, 2011 Filed under: Apps, Tab and iPad Reviews | Tags: amazon appstore, amazon fire, iPad app review Leave a comment »How the Amazon Fire Compares to the iPad
Amazon’s new $200 Fire tablet could be the first device to make a significant impact on the iPad’s dominance of the market, thanks to innovative use of cloud services.
Let’s take a look at the reasons for this claim.
The Fire tablet is designed for shopping. Amazon is not only the biggest provider of cloud hosting in the world, but it is also the biggest online retailer. And it’s no secret that the Fire was designed from the ground up to make e-shopping as easy as possible –- specifically, shopping for content from Amazon. Users can buy e-books, movies, music, and apps through a convenient interface.
The iPad is similarly designed for easy shopping. Both devices are easier and friendlier to use than more utilitarian generic tablets. It’s like the difference between walking into a high-end store and your company’s office supply closet. The store’s sound system lulls you into a pleasant shopping stupor. The staff is friendly. The colors are the latest seasonal palette –- it even smells nice. The office supply closet –- not so much.
By pairing up its tablet with its popular e-commerce site, Amazon instantly makes its device comforting and familiar -– a major plus if Amazon is going after the same audience that buys e-readers. According to Nielsen, 65 percent of e-reader users are currently over 45 years of age, and 61 percent are women.
These are prime shopping demographics, especially when it comes to books. And Amazon is the No. 1 destination for book shoppers. According to the Book Industry Study Group, 70 percent of e-book shoppers bought on Amazon in May 2011, while less than 10 percent bought books through the Apple store.
If these shoppers are inspired to buy Amazon’s Fire tablet over the iPad, they won’t just be buying e-books, either –- they’ll have access to Amazon’s entire catalog, both of digital media and of actual physical objects they can have shipped to their homes.
The Fire tablet -– like the iPad –- also makes shopping easier by offering free cloud storage for all purchased digital products. This is a bigger deal for the Fire, which only has 8GB of storage, while the iPad starts at 16GB and goes all the way up to 64GB.
The Fire tablet focuses on the consumer. The iPad is difficult enough to use to create or edit documents –- the on-screen keyboard can be awkward, and an external keyboard forces users to switch back and forth between typing and tapping on the screen.
The Fire tablet, with its smaller size –- seven inches diagonal, compared to the iPad’s 9.7 inches –- is even more difficult to use for writing anything longer than a short email or text message. But the small size makes it a third lighter than the iPad -– perfect for holding in one hand while reading books or magazines or surfing the Web.
Fire users are more likely to be consuming content from the cloud rather than creating it. This means that it’s unlikely that the Fire tablet will become popular in business environments as a laptop replacement or presentation device.
The Fire tablet is WiFi only. Fire users have to find WiFi hotspots in order to take advantage of the tablet’s Internet capabilities. That means that kids won’t be surfing the Web from the back seat of the family minivan –- and their parents won’t be checking their email or downloading new e-books while at the beach.
The alternative to WiFi is 3G –- which typically requires a data contract from a cellphone company like AT&T or Verizon. Amazon’s Kindle devices are available in both WiFi-only and WiFi plus 3G configurations, as is Apple’s iPad. The 3G-enabled tablets are fully functional everywhere -– well, everywhere with cell coverage. There’s a monthly fee for the 3G service on the iPad, but no monthly access fee for Amazon’s Kindle Touch 3G, Kindle Keyboard 3G, and Kindle DX.
Of course, those devices aren’t designed to download, say, full-length movies and TV shows –- both of which the Kindle Fire can handle.
Free iPad Video Apps
Posted: August 22, 2011 Filed under: Apps, Community, Tab and iPad Reviews, Technology Leave a comment »The 11 Best Free iPad Video Apps: Showyou, ABC Player And More
The Huffington Post Jason Gilbert
The ever-popular Apple iPad, with its wide, high-resolution screen, is a great device for watching video (better than the tiny iPhone, anyway); and yet the options for video discovery are surprisingly limited, given how tailor-made the iPad seems to be for media consumption of all kinds.
Sure, you’ve got YouTube for your standard viral video-viewing pleasure, iTunes for individual purchases and rentals, and Netflix and Hulu Plus for those with subscriptions. But what about for us freeloaders?
Here are eleven zero-dollar apps we found that can be quite useful both for finding new videos online and for watching them full-screen on your iPad, or hooked up to your wide-screen television at home. Just be sure you plan ahead: you’ll need an Internet connection to stream the clips, as the free apps don’t allow for downloads.
ABC wins the award for best iPad app among the television networks, mainly because it is the only one of the Big 4 networks that allows you to watch full episodes on your Apple tablet.
Sure, you have to wait through ads, but the fact that ABC is willing to let users stream full episodes of Secret Millionaire, Primetime and (personal favorite braindead show) Wipeout onto your iPad is a huge plus for the network and a good way to make fans.
Of course PBS has free shows! Joining ABC, PBS has an iPad app streaming full episodes of Masterpiece Theater, Austin City Limits and worldwide dad-favorite Antiques Roadshow.
Sure, you can only watch previews of PBS’s incredibly popular children shows (oh, what I wouldn’t give to be able to watch The Electric Company on my tablet), but if you’re an adult looking for some stimulating video content for your iPad, the PBS iPad app is an excellent place to turn.
The TED series–”riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world”–are also free to you on your iPad with an attractive interface on a white background, videos are searchable by category and length of time, and can also be saved to watch offline.
Watch some TEDTalks for free and maybe, just maybe, learn something or be inspired to change the world. Not a bad deal at a zero dollar price tag.
Showyou is a well-designed and well-conceived video app that utilizes all the best features of the iPad in its interface. Showyou gives you a user-friendly sliding grid of videos against a black background and the clips are sorted either by publisher (featuring collections by Reddit, The Colbert Report, CollegeHumor and a few dozen others) or by what your friends are sharing on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and other social networks.
In the “All” view, the “Publisher” and “Social Network” options are combined with the videos that are currently the most shared on the Internet. Your subscriptions are pushed to the top-left corner for easy, swipe-based scanning.
You can also search all videos on Showyou and the results are displayed in the app’s standard grid view.
Sony owns Crackle, a video streaming site, and the company recently built a Crackle iPad app that showcases Sony’s content. Though it’s a little buggy (as we found when tried out the app and as numerous other reviewers have noted), Crackle users can expect a nice selection of ad-supported television and movies from Sony Studios. Be forewarned, however, that most of the content is fairly old. While you won’t be getting, say, Breaking Bad, you do get some episodes News Radio, Seinfeld and The Tick, as well as movies like Pineapple Express, Beverly Hills Ninja and Stand by Me, among other 80s and 90s favorites.
If you don’t mind ads or a small selection that skews older, Crackle is a nice choice for free, professional content for the iPad.
Similar to Showyou, Squrl is a video aggregation app that offers collections of videos from Netflix, Hulu, YouTube and Vimeo sorted by topic. Think of it as an endlessly iterating selection of playlists on different themes: Movie trailers, politics, sports highlights, music videos, and everything else you would expect across the major video streaming platforms.
Though it does not have the beautiful interface of Showyou, Squrl does a nice job of cataloging your different options so you navigate to a particular category with just a few taps. Its search function can be a bit less intimidating than the image-only Showyou search as well.
Fanhattan is a fun way to find new on-demand and free content for the iPad. Split into “movies and “TV shows,” Fanhattan features an attractive sliding line of titles that gives price points on Netflix, Hulu and iTunes, and links up to Rotten Tomatoes reviews, cast information, recommendations and more.
Fanhattan is a good choice for those who are willing to shell out some cash to watch on their iPads, but so far its ability to find (or even search for) free content is somewhere between limited and non-existent. Hopefully the people behind Fanhattan will add the capability to showcase free movies and television when they next update the app, as it is sorely lacking as of now.
Plizy is another video aggregator, one that sorts videos by channels on a user-curated front page. You start out with a few pre-determined Plizy categories (all of which can be deleted) including “Plizy Buzz” (the most popular videos on Plizy), Google News, TED Talks, Vimeo Staff Picks, Bloomberg, NPR Music and the videos shared by your friends on Facebook and Twitter; from there you can add channels from about a dozen different categories including Animation, Comedy, Culture, Politics and more.
The interface is a little clunky, and the fact that there is no list view for videos is puzzling (once you click on a category, it auto-plays, rather than letting you scan through your options), but overall it’s a helpful app for finding and watching videos that you care about.
“Brought to you by Goldman Sachs” is probably not what you want to hear about a free video app, but guess what? The Goldman Sachs-sponsored video app SnagFilms is a really good app for viewing free documentaries on the iPad!
No, you won’t be able to watch “Inside Job,” but you are able to view several dozen both short and full-length documentaries full-screen on SnagFilms, including critical hits like “Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man,” “Winnebago Man,” and “Buena Vista Social Club.”
And while “The views and opinions expressed in these films do not necessarily reflect those of Goldman Sachs,” perhaps that’s a good thing: The documentaries on offer, though currently a bit light, are well-varied and interesting.
Twitter’s New Open-Source Tools
Posted: August 22, 2011 Filed under: Apps, Tab and iPad Reviews, Technology Leave a comment »Twitter launches Bootstrap, open-source tools for making web apps
The business and culture of our digital lives,
from the L.A. Times
Twitter on Friday released Bootstrap, an online toolkit for developers looking to build new web apps, or even clean up some of the code they already have.
Bootstrap is an open source set of files written in CSS (or Cascading Style Sheets, a programming language used to dictate how a website or web app looks and works) that covers some of the building blocks of most web apps, such as buttons, tables and forms, page templates, app navigation and even stylistic matters such as typography and color gradients.
The simple and small tools (at about only six kilobytes in size) released by Twitter, on the popular code sharing site GitHub, are the same basic tools used by Twitter developers for the social network’s own webpages and apps, Mark Otto, a designer at Twitter, said in a blog post.
Earlier on at Twitter, programmers were more focused on building the social network to meet users’ needs than building it with coding consistency, Otto said.
“Inconsistencies among the individual applications made it difficult to scale and maintain them,” he said. “Bootstrap began as an answer to these challenges.”
Now, the same tools Twitter users are open to the Web and anyone who wants to use them or make them better, or “fork” the tools and modify them to build something else, Otto said.
“Bootstrap works by providing a clean and uniform solution to the most common, everyday interface tasks developers come across,” he said. “We want to keep working on slimming down Bootstrap’s already tiny footprint while also increasing the breadth of what it covers. As always, we’d love your feedback and hope you find it useful. If you’d like to help make Bootstrap better, feel free to fork it, file issues and watch its progress over on GitHub.”
iPad 3 Cool New Features
Posted: August 22, 2011 Filed under: Apps, Tab and iPad Reviews, Technology Leave a comment »Apple iPad 3: Retina display and 5 more features we’d like to see
The Web was abuzz Friday with a rumor we’ve all been hearing for months — that the iPad 3, whenever it comes out, will be outfitted with Apple’s retina display.
Double the resolution, up to 2,048 by 1,536 from the iPad 1 and iPad 2′s 1,024 by 768 for a crisp 326 dpi (dots, or pixels, per inch) matching the density of the much-loved screen on the iPhone 4 — that’s the rumor and the latest to report that this is happening from unnamed sources oversees: the Wall Street Journal.
The journal says the retina-display-packing iPad 3 will hit stores early next year, while others have said such a device could launch this fall or winter. Either way, nothing is official as of yet — an Apple doesn’t comment on rumors. The Cupertino tech giant hasn’t yet said anything about the next iPad and the iPad 2 is enjoying huge sales.
But, with a growing swarm of tablet competitors running various versions of Google’s Android mobile OS (rest in peace HP TouchPad), the iPad 3 might have to be more than simply thinner, lighter, faster and equipped with a better screen.
In that vein, here are five unsolicited features that we’d like to see on the next iPad — or any tablet for that matter.
Thinner and lighter
This may seem obvious, but while the iPad 2 is svelte, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 is barely thinner and yup, even lighter. However, the Galaxy Tab 10.1 achieves this with the use of a plastic back that feels much flimsier in the hand than the iPad 2′s aluminum body. Apple has used plastic and glass to create thinner and lighter iPhones and this might be an option in the iPad 3. Another idea for Apple might be the use of something similar to the grippy, rubberized plastic feel of the Motorola Xoom.
Glare protector
Among the biggest knocks on the iPad is that its glossy screen reflects too much light and is therefore no fun to take outside and read by the pool or on the beach. (Yes, it’s a good problem to have.) But it’s a serious issue for Apple, which wants to become a major player in the electronic book market and compete with Amazon’s Kindle, the leading e-book reader. The Kindle has a matte-type screen that diffuses light rather than reflect it — so why shouldn’t the iPad have a glare-proof screen?
As Apple offers with its MacBook Pro laptops, an anti-glare screen and a glossy screen could be offered so consumers can choose what they want.
Haptic feedback
Apple seems to have become an accidental force in the mobile gaming industry. It’s iPhone and iPad have inspired developers to make hundreds (if not thousands) of affordable games with low barriers to entry. The iPad 2 offers impressive graphics performance and the iPad 3, which will assuredly make use of a faster processor, will see a bump here as well. But if Apple wants to make the iPad an ever better gaming machine, it needs to give gamers a rumbling iPad, one that vibrates and shakes in response to the video games played on screen in the same way that every home gaming console’s controllers do.
This isn’t impossible by any means. Many Android phones and tablets already feature haptic, or tactile, feedback when using keyboards and other functions. Of course, this would have to be a feature that could be turned off or on for those who do or don’t want to make use of the rumble.
Biometric security
The physical security of mobile devices is still rather limited. Users are able to protect their phones and tablets with a four-digit unlock code, but many don’t even bother, leaving their iPads and Androids vulnerable if they leave them in a coffee shop or taxi cab. So why not add another layer of security — like iris scanning? Companies like Hoyos Group make iris identification systems that scan 2,048 points in the eye’s most colorful layer — the software can even detect “liveness” so, you know, no one can use some dead guy’s eye to break into an iPad.
Wireless charging
Apple’s iOS 5 will enable iPad and iPhone owners to “cut the cord” and wirelessly sync songs, contacts, apps and plenty of other content whenever Apple mobile devices are near their Mac computer counterparts. And, with iOS 5, users will even be able to download operating system updates “over the air” without having to plug their i-device into a computer for the latest software. This can be taken a step further with wireless charging.
The technology is already proven. Many third-parties accessory makers offer wireless charging products for phones, tablets and even TV remotes. Hewlett-Packard had built wireless charging into its HP TouchPad as well. All TouchPad users had to do was lay their tablets into a charging dock and it would charge right up, no need to plug any cables into the device itself. Post-PC should be post cables and wires too.
Free Alternatives for Texting!
Posted: August 22, 2011 Filed under: Apps, Community, Tab and iPad Reviews, Technology Leave a comment »Free alternatives may cut into text messaging profits
August 21, 2011|By Salvador Rodriguez, Los Angeles Times
Apple’s upcoming iMessage service, Facebook’s new Messenger app and other no-cost options could diminish a revenue stream for the wireless industry that totaled about $21 billion last year
Chinn, 37, sends most of his text messages free of charge with Google Voice and a smartphone application. He also pays $5 a month for up to 200 messages on his AT&T mobile phone plan.
“With everything with the mobile carriers, I feel I’m getting nickeled and dimed,” said Chinn, of San Francisco. “I resent paying so much for text messaging, and I feel that it’s not a reasonable price to pay for something that costs the carriers next to nothing.”
It’s customers like Chinn who are worrying the big telecommunication companies. Text messaging has been a huge profit center for AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile, but that money could trickle away as free alternatives gain popularity.
Facebook Inc., for example, recently launched a smartphone app called Messenger that enables users to communicate with anyone who is a Facebook friend or has a cellphone number. And this fall, Apple Inc. will roll out iMessage, enabling the millions of iPhone and iPad owners to send messages to one another over the Internet at no cost.
In addition to free apps, the growing popularity of smartphones — which can handle both email and texting apps — are dimming text messaging’s future as a profit center.
“There is a change coming, and it will have a serious impact on messaging traffic in mature markets, starting with the U.S.,” said John White, a business development director at Portio Research. “We see iMessage and Facebook messaging as the biggest players [and] this will start to impact right away.”
Juniper Research has predicted that global revenue for text messaging will peak this year and begin to drift down. And in a recent report, UBS Investment Research warned that “customers could elect not to pay for texting as smartphones and third-party applications become pervasive.”
Text messaging’s popularity exploded around 2005, driven by teenagers and young adults who adopted the format as an easy way to communicate on the go, similar to the instant messaging function on their computers.
And text messaging is still a big business, accounting for an estimated $21 billion in U.S. revenue for telecom companies last year and an estimated $23 billion this year, according to the Consumer Federation of America.
But growth in message traffic slowed for the first time to single digits — 8.7% — in the last half of last year compared with the previous six months, according to U.S. wireless trade group CTIA.
Typically, wireless carriers have charged separately for text messaging, multimedia messaging and data plans, which provide Internet access. Though they have offered unlimited plans for each category, carriers have been pulling back recently, limiting particularly how much a customer can use the Internet.
