Category: Apple

Type2Phone Turns any Mac Into a Bluetooth Keyboard

⌘ Permalink

As pointed out by Erica Sadun at TUAW, Type2Phone is a neat little Mac app that allows users to type on their iPhone from their Mac.

While this seems a bit silly, I know that I type much faster on my computer than on my iPhone, and stopping my work to answer a text message can be annoying. This app promises much smoother interaction with iOS.

To set the app up, the iPhone and Mac have to be paired over Bluetooth, which I found a little buggy. I blame Lion for that, but once I got the pairing up and going, the app worked as advertised. I got a text message, swiped to reply, tabbed to Type2Phone on my iMac and replied. Until iMessage makes it to the desktop, this is a neat little way to make texting less intrusive while working at a computer.

Continue reading ⇢

What’s on my Home Screen

⌘ Permalink

IMG 0402

Row 1

The top row is pretty close to stock. Messages, Calendar and Photos are all in their default positions. Camera+ took over for the system’s camera app a long time ago. I like the filters and sharing options, but most importantly, it is faster than iOS’ app, at least on my 4.

Row 2

  • Music is pretty self-explanatory. I’ve got iTunes Match turned on.
  • Instacast is fantastic. Syncing with iTunes to update podcasts seems super old-fashioned after using this app. I listen to a bunch of shows while driving around, and this app is a game-changer.
  • PlainText is a universal Dropbox text editor. I gave up Simplenote earlier this year to simplify my setup, and PlainText made that possible. (On the desktop, I access my Dropbox-based files via nvALT.
  • I’m somewhat of a weather nerd. I love radars, dew points and storm warnings. After lots of testing, I settled on My-Cast as my iPhone weather app of choice.

Rows 3

  • My life is inside OmniFocus. I’m not even kidding.
  • While it is $3 more than the free, first-party Twitter client, Tweetbot is worth the money. It’s got really smart push notification, a great design and a healthy dose of personality. I wish they guys would make an iPad version.
  • Reeder is the Google Reader client not only for the iPhone, but the iPad and Mac, too. It’s not without good reason — Reeder is fast, ties into sharing services and has a great icon.
  • While I use Instapaper more on my iPad than on my phone, it might be my favorite iOS app. I send tons of stuff to the service, and I love having it ready to read if I have a moment.

Row 4

I keep this row empty. It makes my phone less overwhelming to look at, and it gives me a nice place to slide over to the others screens.

Continue reading ⇢

On iCloud Growth Opportunities

⌘ Permalink

With iTunes Match’s release yesterday, Apple has moved one step closer to its promise of “PC-Free” operation of iOS devices.

iOS 5’s wireless features currently include:

  • Contact and calendar syncing
  • Software updates
  • Importing photos from the Camera Roll via Photo Stream
  • Download music from the iTunes Store, or your own library
  • iPhone backups

By my count, these things still require syncing with iTunes:

  • Syncing/updating iPhoto Events back to an iOS device
  • Syncing new ringtones and alerts that aren’t purchased on the device
  • Importing videos (Photo Stream just does photos)
  • Syncing podcasts1

Imagine a world where any iPhoto event could become its own Photo Stream, or videos would be added to the application OTA.

Continue reading ⇢

Weird Mac Startup and Crash Sounds

⌘ Permalink

While we’re all familiar with the sound Macs make as they power on, there have been some unusual ones in the past. My favorite is probably the Power Mac 6100 death chime, which sounds like a car crash.1

You can download the complete collection of 19 unusual Mac tones here.

Update: From 512 Pixels reader Bryan S:

If you change all of those tones’ extensions to .m4r instead of .m4a you can add them into iTunes and sync them over to an iPhone.

Continue reading ⇢

Mike Chambers, Flash and Adobe PR

⌘ Permalink

The other day, I linked to a blog post by Adobe’s Mike Chambers, in which he let loose concerning the company’s recent announcement about killing off mobile Flash.

I’ve been thinking about Chambers’ blog post all weekend for several reasons.

After listing off his history with Flash, Chambers re-caps the company’s announcements. After that, he writes:

It is this last point which received the most attention, caused the most confusion, and essentially overshadowed all of the other information. Given the very public recent history of the Flash Player on devices this was understandable. However, it is clear that we did not do a good job of communicating why we are are making this shift in strategy. I know how frustrating this has been for the Flash community, and for that I want to apologize. Our goal was to be very clear about WHAT we were doing, but in doing so, we didn’t pay enough attention to explaining WHY we were doing it.

Continue reading ⇢

Guns Ablazin’

⌘ Permalink

Mike Chambers, a lead product manager for Flash, via Engadget:

This one should be pretty apparent, but given the fragmentation of the mobile market, and the fact that one of the leading mobile platforms (Apple’s iOS) was not going to allow the Flash Player in the browser, the Flash Player was not on track to reach anywhere near the ubiquity of the Flash Player on desktops… Just to be very clear on this. No matter what we did, the Flash Player was not going to be available on Apple’s iOS anytime in the foreseeable future.

Continue reading ⇢