Flashlight – ExactMagic $0.99
Flashlight is a simple tool to turn your iPhone or iPod Touch into a simple flashlight to help you find your way in a dark room or to see what that thing on the floor of the movie theater is that you keep stepping on.
Ummm, I already use my Treo, and various other cell phones, as a flashlight to navigate in the dark “simply” by activating the screen.
Hold On! – IMAK Creations – Free
Compete to see how long you can hold the button! The timer shows your progress down to the millisecond and stores your personal all-time record. Develop your perseverance and improve your concentration skills to make you more productive!
SeattleBus – Deallus Software – $14.99
SeattleBuss provides real-time arrival and departure times for bus stops across the greater Seattle Metro area. In short, SeattleBus is intended to answer the question: “Where is the *!&^!*# bus?”
Is the Seattle transit system so bad that I need to spend $15 for realtime info?
Alarm Free – Masayuki Akamatsu – Free
Alarm is a self-defense/emergency alarm with a freefall detector.How is this used for self-defense? Again, just like Flashlight my Treo could be used for self-defense (do not try this with an iPhone, just keep an old Treo or Windows Mobile phone handy)
CowToss – Digital Thought Software – $0.99
Cow Tossing. Pull the cow down, release, and watch it fly!
This would never get old. Right.
Morse-It – Francis Bonnin – $0.99 Morse-It is an easy to use application that allows {you} to translate and interpret Morse code. Type some text and it will be automatically translated into some fullscreen flashing effect of the associated Morse code. Some sound will also play accordingly. Your “SOS” message will be seen quite far away!Not sure what to think about this one. It could come in handy if you’re shipwrecked, otherwise you better hope other people have this app so they can consult its “full Morse alphabet.”
Zen Garden – Peerium, Inc. – $0.99 Take a few moments and relax with your pocket Zen garden. Draw designs in the sand with a single finger. Or, use multiple fingers for a nice rake design. Shake your garden to smooth out the sand and start anew.
I’ve never gotten into the whole Zen garden thing. It did make me wonder if there were any Feng Shui apps, so I searched but there are none yet.
iAstronomica – Astistic Techworks – $19.99
iAstronomica is an astronomy program that generates sky charts at any time, from anywhere on Earth. The planetarium shows all the planets and stars visible to the naked eye, as well as meteor showers, the Milky Way, the ecliptic and the current moon phase.
What can I say? I had to include this one since I’m an amateur astronomer.
While I poke fun at many of the apps above, I have to give the developers credit. I couldn’t write an iPhone app… or could i?
Yesterday Drobo released a new model of their “robotic storage” which provides Firewire 800 connectivity, in addition to the USB ports of the original model.
I purchased the USB-based Drobo 12 days prior to the announcement of the new version. Had the Firewire version been available, I would have purchased it. I went to the Drobostore.com site and could not find a written policy for exchanges or returns. In fact, even the privacy policy comes up “not found.” So, they don’t have a return policy? I called customer service. The woman on the phone confirmed that they do not have any policies in place, took my information and said she would have to talk to someone and they’d get back to me. I followed up with an e-mail via their support form to make sure my request didn’t get lost. A little more digging around their website turned up a warranty policy that only covered non-functioning hardware.
I found out this morning, via email, that they will not exchange it.
Most retailers have either a 14-day or 30-day return/exchange policy. I find this to be poor customer service. Especially since they don’t have a written return policy online. What if Best Buy, Dell, Apple and others didn’t have a return policy? Not acceptable.
I don’t generally block people that follow me on Twitter, as long as they are individuals and not accounts set up for social causes (I’ll choose my causes, thank you). For the last week, I’ve been blocking between 1-3 followers per day, all spammers. Having just read the VentureBeat post ‘Twitter gets its sexy back. And by “sexy” I mean users.’ which talks about Twitter’s growth in June, I have to wonder if a good percentage of that is due to spammers. I’m followed by 70-some people and have been seeing these spammer accounts daily. I can personally block the spam accounts, but that doesn’t stop those accounts from following others. I’m sure most people are not aware that they can report spam accounts via twitter.com/help. I wasn’t. Reporting potential spammers is not simple, just like blocking multiple followers (a chore because you are taken back to your Twitter home page after each block). How many people are going to note the spammer’s account name, then go to the help page to report it? I think that Twitter needs to add a Potential Spammer button next to the account in the Followers list (and please, please, please don’t have that button take me back to the home page afterwards).
Twitter team, please get a handle on this now.
Otherwise, the problem won’t be the Scoble’s of the world clogging the tubes. It’ll be the spammers.
One of the best video podcasts, by best I mean entertaining, online is CNET’s Buzz Report with Molly Wood. Each report features a segment with Brian Cooley, aptly named What the Hell? With the 3G iPhone right around the corner, I wanted to share this clip from the June 12, 2008 Buzz Report
Posted on the June 27th, 2008 under Business by Judy
My son bought a Samsung TV a couple years ago and did not buy the service plan. This year his TV stopped working and he took it in for repair. Two months later the repair shop calls to say that they will not be receiving the part from Samsung but Samsung agreed to replace the TV with a brand new 2008 model for only $400. Great! Awesome! The TV comes back from the repair shop and he has to contact them to arrange for payment and delivery. He has to pay with a credit card in his name, which he does not have. So he looks into getting a pre-paid card but then that wouldn’t have his name on it. So one more month later we call them together and they finally agree to let me write a check and send that to them. The check was written on 6/3 and mailed the same day. Since then he has called them a couple of times a week to arrange for the shipment and exchange of his TV. Each time they tell him the check has not cleared yet. So I check with my bank and they have not even deposited it yet! Supposedly they were going to deposit it this week but as of the night of 6/27 they still have not deposited the check. Why does it take a month to deposit a check? From the initial conversation with Samsung they said once the check clears it would take 14-21 days. Guess we should have asked how long will it take you to deposit the check so it CAN clear!!!!!!!!!!! I went from thinking that they had great customer service based on the $400 exchange price to thinking it’s TERRIBLE customer service for stringing him along for so damn long. Hope I NEVER have to deal with them again.
Adobe sent a representative, a software engineer, to the Midwest Astro-Imaging Conference which I organized and hosted last week. I was able to get him to share some details on a future version of Photoshop. I’m pretty excited after seeing this product demo of Photoshop for the iPhone, as I plan to get the 3G iPhone in July.
When the iPhone was announced last year I wanted one, but didn’t get one. Why? The price. Even the price cut two months later couldn’t sway me to get one. At that point the allure had worn off. Reports from the street were in and the iPhone was great, but not perfect. At that point I decided to wait for the second generation iPhone. So I waited… and wait… impatiently if you ask my family.
This week Steve Jobs announced the 3G iPhone. It’s a definite improvement from the first generation iPhone, but it’s still has it’s imperfections. Well, imperfections we need to guess based on reading between the line. You know, the things that Steve Jobs didn’t mention: copy and paste, video recording, etc.
One of the big announcements was the price cut to $199 for the 8 GB model and $299 for the 16 GB model. The stories quickly came out that the price savings will be erased by the addition $10 per month AT&T will charge for the unlimited data plan. Umm, okay but when someone purchased a first generation phone at the hire price, either the original price ($499/$599) price or the discounted price two month later, they still had to pay for an unlimited data plan, right? Sure that data plan cost $10 less per month, but they paid a lot more for the phone in the first place and still had to pay $60 a month. I’m not a mathematician but the new pricing doesn’t add up to the cost of using a first generation iPhone.
The 3G iPhone will have a lot going for it, such as 3G (not an issue for me here in farmland, see the 3G coverage map below where blue depicts 3G), GPS and iPhone apps. Plus the enterprise support, specifically Cisco VPN and Exchange, two technologies that I use at my day job. Hurray.
Is this enough to get me to finally buy one? Yep. I would have purchased one on June 9th if they were available. Even after the keynote hangover, followed by all the sobering bad news (such as the data plan price increase).
One last note: a shout out to GeekBrief.tv, Engadget and Gizmodo for their live coverage of the keynote. GeekBrief.tv was able to get a live audio feed of they keynote which they provided through their studio. Thanks!
We all have a difficult time getting back into the swing of things at work after a three-day holiday weekend. It looks like Twitter is just one of us as witnessed when you click on the Older link:
Is it tired after the long weekend? Or does it have a fear of getting old?
