Ars Reviews iOS 4
Jacqui Cheng, over at Ars Technica, put together a great review of iOS4. Jacqui provides and overview of the new features in iOS4 and has some good points about where Apple fell a bit short. If you’re looking for a good guide to what’s new in iOS4, this is a good place to start.
Flickr Facebook Integration Disappointment
On Thursday, Flickr, the popular photo sharing site, announced a new Facebook integration feature. I’m a Flickr Pro user and love the service.
We’re always looking for new ways to make it easier for you to share your photos and videos with the people who matter to you. Today, we’re launching a new and improved way to share your Flickr photos with your friends and family on Facebook! Just connect your Flickr and Facebook accounts and we’ll automatically send an update to your Facebook feed every time you upload a public photo or video.
I was excited to take advantage of this feature because I assumed it would be better than the Facebook import feature, which has supported Flickr for years. Unfortunately, Flickr’s Facebook integration is about as basic as you can get. Every image you post to your Flickr photostream is posted as an individual Wall update to your Facebook account. Unfortunately - did I say unfortunately again? – for someone like me, that’s often uploading dozens of photos at a time to Flickr, this just don’t work very well – my Facebook wall was quickly transformed into a Flickr photostream.
You’d think that Flickr/Yahoo!, with the resources they have available. would be able to come up with a more full featured integration. There are dozens of Flickr Facebook applications out there written by individuals in their spare time that blow this out of the water. Like the title of this post says, Flickr’s Facebook integration is a disappointment. I’m really surprised Wired or ReadWriteWeb didn’t ding Flickr/Yahoo! a bit for this poor showing.
I think Flickr/Yahoo! spent more time writing the announcement blog post than their developers did working on the integration ; ) I wonder how many people hours Yahoo! spent pushing this through the bureaucracy.
Apple Accepting iOS 4 Apps for Approval
Apple is now accepting iOS 4 applications for review and approval. The idea here is to have a wide variety of applications that take advantage of the goodness available to developers in the iOS 4 SDK ready for the June 21st release of iOS 4. Formerly called iPhone OS, iOS 4 is the rebranding of the operating system that runs on the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. Version 4 introduces new features for developers and users that may require modifications to existing apps for full compatibility.
Apple claims there are over 1,500 new Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) available for developers. iOS 4 will be available to iPhone and iPod Touch owners for free on June 21st. iOS will not run on the original iPhone or 1st generation iPod Touch and will only run with limited features (no multitasking) on the iPhone 3G and 2nd generation iPod Touch.
New iPad Commercial
Apple did a great job with the new iPad commercial. It’s inspiring and it communicates one of the biggest benefits of the iPad without even saying it — freedom. Go Apple. Go.
Parrot iPhone Drones
The French company Parrot showed off their quadricopter at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. The Parrot quadricopter is controlled by an iPhone and when it’s in flight, the drone’s two cameras stream video live right to the iPhone. Check out the onstage demo. Wow, I’ve got to have one of these.
Next iPhone to Support 720p Video
iPhone OS 4 provides developers with full access to video capture data.
The iPhone 4 Beta SDK also indicates that a future iPhone will be able to capture video at higher resolutions than the current standard 640×480 (“VGA”) resolution. The following preset values suggest that a future iPhone will be able to capture at 720p (1280×720) resolution:
- AVCaptureSessionPreset640×480
- AVCaptureSessionPreset1280×720
The next iPhone has been pegged to use a 5 Megapixel camera, though the video capabilities of the hardware are unknown. The next iPhone revision has been also rumored to be dubbed the “iPhone HD” which would fit well with this new 720p video recording capability.
Apple is expected to introduce the new iPhone at the Worldwide Developer’s Conference which takes place between June 7-11th in San Francisco, CA.
Concentric Sky Launches MichaelMoore.com
Recently, I started working for a great company called Concentric Sky here in beautiful Eugene Oregon. At Concentric Sky, we build innovative web sites, iPhone applications, and a whole lot more.
Concentric Sky has a wealth of technologies at its disposal and we have a great team of developers with decades of combined development experience. A couple of the technologies we have a great deal of experience with are Python and Django.
Recently, we used Django to implement Michael Moore’s new website and we couldn’t be happier with the results. Concentric Sky developed the back-end code for this site in Python/Django with a custom administrative interface and social media aware Content Management System (CMS). The site is optimized for millions of hits per day and it has been humming along nicely since it was launched. You can read more about this project on the Concentric Sky blog.
We have a lot of interesting projects in the works and I look forward to sharing some of them here in the future. Stay tuned!
Email Center Pro – New Video Introduction Launched
I work with a great group of people at Palo Alto Software developing a collaborative email application called Email Center Pro. Today, we unveiled a new video that introduces the service – it’s featured on emailcenterpro.com. We love the video,it’s fantastic, we’ve watched it dozens of times – it does a great job of communicating the problem Email Center Pro solves. Take a look and tell me what you think.
Credit: Principals – Jason Gallic (Email Center Pro Marketing Manager) worked with Christian Martel Atelier Transfert Design to produce the movie.
History of the Internet
Do you want to brush up on the history of the Internet? IF(ANSWER=TRUE, “watch this”, “don’t”).
History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.
Apps, Apps, and more Apps
0 CommentsMonday • July 26, 2010 • by admin
Interesting infographic.