iPhone Daily News Digest

 

I don’t consider myself a newshound, but I do like to be in the know.  I keep an eye on Wiki trends, Twitter trends and get weather and breaking news updates by SMS.   

Anytime a story about the iPhone or BlackBerry comes out, I want to know.  Plus, there are artists, authors, and actors I’m a little ashamed to say I know more about than I probably should. 

RSS feeds are a good way to stay on top of those tidbits and I have three such apps that I rotate among depending on the features included in their latest updates.  But as good as RSS is, it’s a pain to have to mine through 1000+ articles to find that small handful of gems worth my time to read.  

That’s where NewsAlert can be a handy app to have.

If an RSS app is a scalpel, cutting away extraneous stories of little interest to you, then NewsAlert is a high-powered laser allowing you to hone in on what truly matters. With it, you can specify by keyword (choose up to 10 keywords with the initial purchase cost, with the option to buy more) the news issues and topics you want to read about.  Once a keyword is chosen, whenever a story with that keyword is released on the web, you’ll receive a notification. 

The degree of customization is impressive.  You can specify the news sources you don’t want to hear from, the times you want to receive push notifications as well as the total number you wish to receive in a day.  

The app is simple to set up, does what it’s designed to do and quickly became a valuable resource.  It allowed me to keep tabs on issues that don’t often break through the typical news cycle.  

NewsAlert is currently on sale for $.99, so if you’re even slightly interested, snap it up now before the price returns to $2.99.

iTunes Link – NewsAlert

Version 1.3

Tested on an iPod Touch 3.1.3

Vlingo 2.0 for iPhone [Free with in-app purchase - iTunes link] brings an all new, all prettier graphical user interface to the table, as well as Email and SMS Paste dictation — as an in-app purchase.

The new UI looks great and more importantly, works great. The icons are big and easy to hit and helpful tips are littered everywhere. You can tap to start recording and tap again to stop, or just hold down, talk, and release. For the various situations where you need to use voice instead of typing — like while driving (if it’s legal in your region!) — that kind of ease of use is priceless.

With the free app you get Maps, Search, Social (Facebook and Twitter), and Voice Dial. As mentioned, the Email and SMS Paste dictation are via in-app purchase. Note, it’s called SMS Paste because, unlike with Email, Apple won’t allow apps to send SMS so it just copies your text and launches the Messages apps. You have to paste the text and then hit send on your own. The Email and SMS Paste options are $6.99 separately or $9.99 if purchased together. Whether they’re worth or not depends entirely on how important voice email and SMS dictation are to you right now.

TiPb got our hands on the final version a couple of days early so we had a chance to try it out for a while already. All in all, Vlingo 2 works about as well as you’d expect a voice dictation app to work — usually quite well, with hilarious tragedy on occasion. It does learn, however, so if you enunciate well and keep at it, your results should improve.

I liked it enough to buy the App Store version on release along with the Email and SMS Paste bundle. It’s bleeding edge technology that should get better and more elegant in the future. And I’m a sucker for the the Star Trek-style apps.

Screen shots and video after the break! If you try it out, let us know what you think!

YouTube link

Vlingo 2.0 for iPhone Brings Voice to Email, SMS is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

Vlingo 2.0 for iPhone [Free with in-app purchase - iTunes link] brings an all new, all prettier graphical user interface to the table, as well as Email and SMS Paste dictation — as an in-app purchase.

The new UI looks great and more importantly, works great. The icons are big and easy to hit and helpful tips are littered everywhere. You can tap to start recording and tap again to stop, or just hold down, talk, and release. For the various situations where you need to use voice instead of typing — like while driving (if it’s legal in your region!) — that kind of ease of use is priceless.

With the free app you get Maps, Search, Social (Facebook and Twitter), and Voice Dial. As mentioned, the Email and SMS Paste dictation are via in-app purchase. Note, it’s called SMS Paste because, unlike with Email, Apple won’t allow apps to send SMS so it just copies your text and launches the Messages apps. You have to paste the text and then hit send on your own. The Email and SMS Paste options are $6.99 separately or $9.99 if purchased together. Whether they’re worth or not depends entirely on how important voice email and SMS dictation are to you right now.

TiPb got our hands on the final version a couple of days early so we had a chance to try it out for a while already. All in all, Vlingo 2 works about as well as you’d expect a voice dictation app to work — usually quite well, with hilarious tragedy on occasion. It does learn, however, so if you enunciate well and keep at it, your results should improve.

I liked it enough to buy the App Store version on release along with the Email and SMS Paste bundle. It’s bleeding edge technology that should get better and more elegant in the future. And I’m a sucker for the the Star Trek-style apps.

Screen shots and video after the break! If you try it out, let us know what you think!

YouTube link

Vlingo 2.0 for iPhone Brings Voice to Email, SMS is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

Voice activated apps are becoming a very popular category for the iPhone with standouts like Dragon Dictate and Siri commanding space on many iPhone home screens. One of the first apps in this category, Vlingo, has undergone some improvements eliminating the multitasking required to import your dictated content from app to app.

The popularity of these types of apps are obvious. It’s a great way to increase your efficiency without having to navigate menus and buttons and also serves as a safer alternative to using your device while driving. Push a button. Say your command and the application handles the rest. Although speech recognition isn’t 100% perfect, the makers of the app do promise that the app learns your tendencies and corrects them over time. Like Dragon, you’re also prompted to an optional loading of your contacts to Vlingo’s servers to improve recognition.

With this latest offering, Vlingo has undergone some minor UI changes and now sports a big dictation button that you can press and hold or tap and speak to begin your commands. Using commands like “call”, “search,” “Facebook/Twitter update,”or “text/email,” you can perform web searches (Google, Yahoo or Bing), update your status on social networks or send messages to anyone.

Although the app is free, the messaging functions will constitute an in-app purchase costing you $6.99 for either SMS or Email or you can get both services for $9.99. The benefit of this feature is that the messaging is integrated into the app to facilitate transmitting the message, and helping to reduce further multitasking . Emails are easily sent in app while SMS is streamlined with one button copy and paste into your messaging app.

Depending on your need for a streamlined messaging experience, Vlingo does offer great value to the iPhone user when it comes to voice assisted applications. And at a cost of nothing, it’s worthy of a look and spot in that valuable iPhone home screen space.

Vlingo is available for free, now in the App Store.

Related Posts

• Dragon Launches A Powerful Voice-Powered Search App
• Rumor: Google As The iPhone’s Default Search Engine: $100 Million/Year
• Google Unveils Its New Mobile Interface
• Siri Assistant Turns Your iPhone Into A Digital Concierge
• Rumor: Bing To Become iPhone’s Default Search Engine

History is made one moment at a time, day by day.  And for every person born, there is a unique history surrounding their birthdate.  I believe that we are all curious to learn more about our birthdates.  We want to see how many other cool people were born the same day we were and whether anything notable happened that day.  Ruslan Morozov’s The Day I Was Born answers that question by unlocking and allowing us to remember that history.

Here’s how it works: the application requests a birthdate: day, month, and year.  Once it has that information, The Day I Was Born generates even more information associated with the supplied date of birth.

What kind of information?  How about Western Zodiac, Chinese Zodiac, Earth elements and stones associated with your birthdate?  Not enough, you say?  Add in numerological elements including life path and destiny, historical accounts of your birthdate across time, births and deaths, and any holidays coinciding with the supplied date.  That’s a lot of stuff, right?

I thought so.

The Day I Was Born also allows you to share the information with friend via SMS (iPhone users only), email, or Twitter. 

The Day I Was Born is an entertaining app, but once you’ve read through everything associated with your date of birth, it’s usefulness to you is probably going to be fairly limited.  But you can use it to look up your friends’ dates of birth, your boy- or girlfriend’s, as well as other family members’ info, too. 

It will keep you entertained for a while and probably tell you some things you may not have known about yourself and others.  It’ll definitely increase your awareness of history.  And if you’re into astrology or numerology, there’s a lot of stuff that you’ll probably appreciate knowing about yourself and others.

There’s not much I could suggest to add to this app, but I think it would be cool see or link to the front page of a major newspaper on a given birthdate.  I once went tooling around in my university library’s microfiche and -film section because I wanted the see the front page of the New York Times on my birthdate.  I do, however, recognize that the Times certainly wouldn’t be the best paper for everyone depending on their homeland.

iTunes Link- The Day I Was Born

Version 2.1

Tested on iPod Touch 3.1.3

Engadget has been getting tips from deep code divers who are exploring Apple’s latest iPhone 3.2 SDK for the iPad and what they’re finding includes code/hooks for iChat-style video Calling, file downloads from Mobile Safari, support for telephony like SMS and calls, and some prototype support for a “handwriting keyboard”. The video conferencing news is especially intriguing:

We’re told that there are hooks to accept and decline a video conference, flip a video feed (which suggests a front-facing camera) and — most importantly — run the video call in either full screen mode or in just a portion of the screen. That means you’ll be able to chat and do other things at the same time, which could mean there’s at least some type of multitasking going on here.

Could this be another example of the iPad being “unfinished“, or of Apple removing a camera at the last minute — like the iPod touch G3 — because they couldn’t get an implementation that was good enough in time for the big reveal?

Looks like there’s some good news (or good speculation at least) for iPhone owners as well, since the devices all share the same OS code base:

chpwn also tells us [...] both the new landscape orientation for the homescreen and keyboard support appear to be destined for the iPhone itself when 3.2 comes out.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

iPhone 3.2 SDK on iPad — iChat Video Calling, File Downloads, Telephony Support, Handwriting Keyboard… And Coming to iPhone?

Earlier today Google unveiled their new Google Voice WebApp for iPhone. Sure you can place calls, send text messages, get your voice mail, and access all of your account settings but TiPb was curious how it would stack up to the real-deal native app on Google’s own Android platform.

For the full scoop and screenshots, follow me after the break!

If you are a Google Voice user, the first thing you will want to do is add Google’s crafty little icons for each part of Google Voice directly to your iPhone Home Screen. Doing so gives you quick access to contacts, the dialer, the voicemail/SMS inbox, and create new SMS pages. Once you select the icon of your choice, Safari pulls up the iPhone optimized WebApp and you’re good to go. So, for example, tapping the Google Voice icon will bring you straight to the dialer just as you’d expect — fast and simple.

Next up we have contacts and that too is laid out very nicely. You get your top called or messaged contacts along with your complete contact list and a search button to search through your contacts. It is important to note you must have your contacts in your Gmail account to access them as this WebApp can not access the contacts stored on your phone.

Going into the inbox you will see not only your SMS messages but your voice mail as well. When you select a voice mail it shows a transcript of the message that was left for you (or I should say it tries it’s best to do so). You have three choices for voice mail — have a transcript sent to via email, via SMS, or open it directly in the WebApp.

So what we have here is a very good effort on Google’s part to work with their hands tied behind their back due to Apple rejecting the Google Voice App Store application. Is it as good as the native Android Google Voice app? Not even close.

At the end of the day even though it is a great WebApp, it’s still just a WebApp. It can’t access your local iPhone contacts, only your online Google Contacts. The bigger issue, however — and one even a native App Store Google Voice app would suffer from — is that’s it is not integrated into the OS the way it is on Android.

If it was, you could receive calls and SMS from your Google Voice number right on your iPhone. On Android, your Google Voice number can become your phone number. No WebApp, or iPhone app, can currently provide that level of integration and there’s no sign Apple has any interest in ever allowing one to.

So, on the bright side, the Google Voice WebApp is close to as good as an App Store app could be.

Below are some screen shots of the native Android Google Voice application.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

How Does Google Voice WebApp on iPhone Compare to Native Android App?

Google has released the long-awaited Google Voice WebApp for iPhone (and Palm webOS), something they said they’d be doing in the wake of their exclusion from the iTunes App Store.

Similar to Google’s other, marvelous WebApps like Gmail, it leverages the advanced web technologies built into iPhone Safari to provide an optimized UI through which make calls from your Google Voice number and send SMS. Or so we hear… TiPb HQ has been trying to try it, but it’s been “fail city” according to Dieter, with lots of network request errors. (At least on the iPhone, his Palm Pre is doing better).

“It’s a very pretty “Network Request Failed” pop up dialog box. Quite impressive,” he says. (See it after the jump.)

According to TechCrunch, however:

It is built on HTML5 with most of the functionality of the original iPhone app, except that it cannot access the local contact list in your iPhone’s address book. It lets you manage a separate Google Voice contact list which is kept in the cloud instead. Google Voice voice routes your calls through its servers and acts as a new hub through which you can manage calls and forward them to various phones. You can also manage your settings and various phone numbers. The HTML5 makes it very fast, allows for local caching of data, and supports the voice tags necessary to play the audio voicemails through the browser.

You can access it via http://m.google.com/voice. If you’re a Google Voice user, let us know how it works for you, and how it compares to a native app like GV Mobile for Jailbreak.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Google Unleashes Google Voice WebApp for iPhone

The Boy Scouts of America have a motto nearly every adult male knows by heart.  The motto?  Be prepared.  Although I was never more than a Cub Scout myself, I’ve always admired that motto and, whenever possible, tried to live my life according to it.

One of the easiest ways to be prepared in life is to own a Swiss Army knife.  There’s just something about a Swiss Army knife and its many uses that I find comforting.  An iPhone or iPod Touch with its many various applications is a kind of technological Swiss Army knife capable of performing a number of different functions.

But is there a multi-function knife for the iPhone or iPod Touch?  Actually, there is, and it would have to be Ryan Bertrand’s App Crate.  This one app houses 33 different applications, any one of which you could find in the App Store listed at a price similar to or much higher than the current sale price of this one.  Think about that: over $30 worth (if not much, much more) of applications available to you for less than a dollar.

I know what you’re thinking: what exactly would I be getting for .99 cents? 

Facebook and Twitter updaters, Notes, Voice Memo, Fake Call, Fake SMS, RSS Reader, Flashlight, FullScreen Private Web Browser, Battery, Multi-function Camera, Battery, Random Number Generator, Bubble Level, Light Strobe, Tip Calculator, Password Generator, Altimeter, Metronome, BMI Calculator, Emoji Enabler, Task Timer, Parking Spot Locator, Periodic Elements Listing, and 8 other applications.  Granted, a few of them will only work on the iPhone and not the iPod Touch (e.g, Camera, Walk-N-Text, Teslameter, etc.), but even taking those  into account, I found myself very impressed with the extensiveness of offerings.

And at its current .99 cent price tag, App Crate is irresistible.  The applications worked well for me and I didn’t experience a single crash.  So if you’re in the market for the Swiss Army Knife of iTunes Apps, App Crate will definitely give you the most bang for your buck. 

 

AppCrate 

Version 1.1

Reviewed on iPod Touch 3.1.2

Every week a few of us from team TiPb, bloggers and forum crew alike, will bring you our current favorite, funnest, most useful App Store apps, WebApps, jailbreak apps, even the occasional accessory, web site, or desktop app if the mood strikes us. As long as they’re iPhone (or iPod touch) related, they’re fair game.

So who’s on deck this week and what are our picks? Find out after the break!

Chad’s Pick: FourSquare

I am really getting into the whole location-based check-in concept. There are several tools out there but my favorite right now is foursquare. The app and service is free, it scans Twitter, Facebook and your iPhone’s address book for friends. This makes finding friends that use foursquare easy. You have weekly leaderboards to compete with friends and a todo list of places to check out. Give foursquare a try! [Free - iTunes link]

Chris’ Pick: Ramp Champ

After all the buzz, I decided to download and try Ramp Champ, the skee ball style game. And I have to say it is a blast. Graphics are great, game play is smooth, background music is entertaining, and you even get tickets to trade in for prizes! This is a fun little game that.can be used as a quick diversion, or spending time to hone your skills. Add in the fact that you can use in-app purchases to add additional levels (or games) and we have ourselves a winner! [$1.99 - iTunes link]

Derrick’s Pick: Let’s Golf

Recently Let’s Golf was free and I decided to check it out. I don’t know why I didn’t buy it sooner. Let’s Golf is a fantastic golfing game for the iPhone. It’s a very well designed and I’d suggest it to anyone looking for play a few rounds on their iPhone. [$1.99 - iTunes link]

Matt’s Pick: Video Panorama

Video Panorama allows you to take a video with your iPhone or use a pre-recorded video. It then automatically selects frames from the video to be used in the panorama, stiches them together and then allows you to save the image to your library. A great way to quickly get panoramas! [$1.99 - iTunes link]

Rene’s Pick: Consume

Consume is another in a long list of simple, elegant apps from Bjango that shows how many voice minutes and how much data you’ve used on your iPhone. This may not matter to people on unlimited plans in the US, but those of us in other countries with tiered service, or those on pay-as-you-go plans (and reward cards) may just find it very welcome. Sure, some carriers SMS you when you get to 80% or 100% of your monthly limit, but being able to check any time, and as often as you like right from the comfort of your iPhone — priceless. [$1.99 - iTunes link]

Your Pick?

You’re part of team TiPb too, so what’s your pick? What app was your absolute fav last week? Let us — and everyone — know in the comments!

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

FourSquare, Ramp Champ, Let’s Golf, Video Panorama, Consume — TiPb Picks of the Week

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