In this week’s app roundup: pictures, turned panoramic; videos, made flickery; messages, killed by Facebook; cocktails, made and drank; NYC, re-affirmed as the best city; graffiti, virtualized; people, sculpted; penises, played with and much, much more. More »
Elements 2 adds a mess of options to the already great Markdown editor
You may remember Elements from last August, a time when new Dropbox-enabled text editors were popping up like mushrooms after a fall rain. Elements, from Second Gear software, distinguished itself by including a handy, popover scratchpad for taking notes, and with its Markdown-powered text editor. Now, Elements has been updated to version 2.
The new Elements, a universal app for iPad and iPhone, has a much-polished UI, but the main difference is getting things out of the app. It still syncs with an “Elements” folder in your Dropbox, but now there is a huge list of export options.
First, you can export you files as HTML or PDF to any Dropbox folder, not just the default “Elements” folder. You can also export to iTunes file sharing, to Evernote, to Facebook and to Tumblr.
The word, line and character counts remain, as does TextExpander Touch support and full-text search. There have been a few cosmetic tweaks, too. The icon is new, the whole app looks sleeker and more modern (there’s even a new default font — Museo Sans), and the Markdown preview has been cleaned up.
Markdown, if you’re not familiar with it, is a human-readable way to write HTML. You surround your words with symbols instead of ugly tags and when you run the text through the Markdown converter, these tags are added for you. Thus *bold* becomes <strong>bold</strong> (in HTML) and shows up in the final document as bold. (You don’t want to see the mess of code I had to write to make all those examples look right in the browser). It makes writing formatted text in a plain text editor very easy indeed.
And of course, you can always use Elements to write plain text, too.
Elements 2 is a free update for owners of v1.x, and costs a very reasonable $5 for new buyers.
Elements – Dropbox And Markdown Powered Text Editor [iTunes]
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When I was 15, I was wearing baggy jeans, chasing girls and listening to hip hop. If I was 15 today, I’d probably do the same things but with skinny jeans on. Not Nick D’Aloisio. He’s a 15-year-old kid who makes iPhone apps. And I made him cry. More »
Minesweeper, Sudoku now available for Windows Phone users, procrastinators originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Aug 2011 07:40:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Verizon’s made good on its promise to open an Application Innovation Center in San Francisco, and kindly invited us down to have a gander. It’s much like its sister facility in Boston, except it eschews the LTE focus for one on mobile-app innovation. Developers both big and small will be able to take advantage of several labs, where they’ll be privy to Verizon equipment and services “not available elsewhere,” all while being a stone’s throw from Big Red’s in-house engineers and developers. On hand was Qualcomm, whose MDPs garnished the test lab, and Chomp, whose app-search tech powered an impressive nine pane multi-touch App Wall — allowing one to find and explore apps, replete with informative videos and QR codes for each. Want to know more? Check the gallery, videos and PR after the break.
Myriam Joire contributed to this report.
Continue reading Verizon opens Application Innovation Center in San Francisco, we go eyes-on (video)
Verizon opens Application Innovation Center in San Francisco, we go eyes-on (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 10 Aug 2011 20:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Do you know why phone cameras are the best cameras to use? Because they’re always on you! Okay, aside from that, it’s because you get to add gnarly features (like taking panoramas) without having to buy a new phone. More »
Amazon releases web-based Kindle Cloud Reader app, optimized for iPads originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 10 Aug 2011 05:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink TechCrunch, Android Community | Kindle Cloud Reader | Email this | Comments
N900 owners have been able to press their Sixaxis controllers into service on their handsets for quite sometime, but Android tablets have been stubbornly stuck to a USB tether. That is, until now. Dancing Pixel Studios’ Sixaxis Controller app for Android does exactly what you expect — allows you wirelessly control games on your Google-powered device with a PS3 gamepad. It’s not the simplest setup on Earth. You’ll need to be rooted, and before you can pair it with your phone or tablet you’ll have to connect to a PC via USB and fire up the SixaxisPairTool. The app also doesn’t play nice with most HTC devices or newer Samsung ones. Thankfully, before you drop your hard-earned $1.67 on the app you can download the free Sixaxis Compatibility Checker. Don’t miss the video after the break, and hit up the source links to download both now and make pulling off a hadouken that much easier.
Continue reading Sixaxis Controller Android app makes firing off hadoukens easy as pie (video)
Sixaxis Controller Android app makes firing off hadoukens easy as pie (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Aug 2011 15:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink Joystiq | Sixaxis Controller (Android Market), Sixaxis Compatibility Checker (Android Market) | Email this | Comments
Thinking about getting an e-reader before you head back to school this fall? Barnes & Noble surely hopes so, and to sweeten the deal it’s offering 12 free classics along with study guides and apps if you register your freshly unboxed Nook before October 31st. That’s right folks, over $100 worth of e-books can be yours with the purchase of the new Nook, the Nook Color or even the first edition Nook. While it must be said that most of the available titles are out of copyright and so are already available for free download elsewhere (we’re looking at you, Gutenberg.org), you can at least select from a dozen Spark Notes of time-consuming reads such as War and Peace. So if you’re looking to take a break from all that Organic Chemistry mumbo jumbo, you can catch up on A Tale of Two Cities in your spare time.
Barnes & Noble offers back to school Nook deal, adds more to your reading list originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Aug 2011 05:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
HTC launched a new set of developer tools today that could lead to better apps for its Android phones.
The OpenSense software development kit, which is now live on HTC’s developer web site, lets developers design applications that will specifically interact with HTC’s custom version of Android, HTC Sense.
Sense is a custom graphical user interface created by HTC, built atop the Android platform. The Sense interface serves to differentiate HTC phones from devices made by Motorola, Samsung, LG and others. So instead of picking up an HTC device and seeing the same screen you would on many other Android phones, you get HTC’s particular flavor of Android.
Developers can use the tools to create apps that utilize different HTC-specific Android traits, like the stylus pen that comes with the Flyer tablet, or Android’s stereoscopic 3-D display.
The new OpenSense platform is a step in HTC’s progressing differentiation strategy. If HTC can lure more developers into creating apps that interact with Sense, that means more content available specifically for HTC devices — which, in turn, gives potential customers more reasons to purchase HTC-made products.
HTC is hosting the toolkit at its developer resources page, found here.
Image: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
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