Oct 22

Amazon Will Let Readers Lend Kindle Books This Year

Posted in: amazon, Android, apps, e-books, e-readers, ios, kindle, nook, Tablets and E-Readers, Today's Chili

Amazon has good news for Kindle owners that it wanted to share with them first. A post from the Kindle team on Amazon’s Kindle Community forum says that 14-day lending will come to the Kindle sometime this year.

There is a catch: “Each book can be lent once for a loan period of 14-days and the lender cannot read the book during the loan period.” If you’re familiar with Barnes & Noble’s lending feature on the Nook, this isn’t a surprise. “Additionally, not all e-books will be lendable – this is solely up to the publisher or rights holder, who determines which titles are enabled for lending.” Again, to borrow some jargon, this is a known issue.

Books will be lendable both to Kindle owners and users of Kindle apps, which is nice: even if you don’t have your own Kindle, you can borrow an e-book from someone who does.

The Kindle team also revealed that Kindle app users will soon also be able to read Kindle magazines and newspapers through the app. Periodicals had been a Kindle-only feature. Support for newspapers and magazines is coming to iOS “in the coming weeks” and Android and other app platforms “down the road.”

Since there’s so much news about Kindle’s e-reading competition lately, I guess Amazon just wanted to let Kindle users know that the company still loved them — and more importantly, that it’s going to keep giving them reasons to love the Kindle.

Coming Soon for Kindle [Amazon/Kindle Community Forums, via Kindle Review]

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Oct 22

Big Brother Apple and the Death of the Program [Video]

Posted in: Apple, apps, feature, ipad, iPhone, Mac, os x, Today's Chili, top

More than 25 years ago, a commercial warned us about the future of computers. Closed. Censored. Dark. A “garden of pure ideology.” How strange that that’s exactly what the future of Apple’s computers looks like today: the Mac App Store. More »

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Oct 22

“Shiny App Syndrome”: When Open Government Meets Closed Platforms

Posted in: Android, apps, iPhone, Phones, Today's Chili

It’s good for governments to find more ways to connect with their citizens, including the web. As the web goes mobile, open government should too. But governments shouldn’t develop apps for some mobile platforms and not others.

That’s Kevin Curry and Brownell Chalstrom’s problem with Texas.gov’s new iPhone app. The state of Texas recently overhauled its website for the desktop, but doesn’t have a mobile version. It also doesn’t have applications for Android, Blackberry or any other mobile platform.

This heated up discussion at the recent Govfresh Gov 2.0 conference in Manor, Texas. Curry, founder of the open government unconference City Camp, said that by limiting access to one platform and one device — and an expensive device, at that — Texas is empowering the already empowered, rather than broadening access for everyone.

Given the potential use cases and the sheer number of citizens whose only net-capable devices are mobile phones, mobile access to government data is definitely important. The trouble is when governments pick winners and losers, developing a presence on iPhone but not Android, or Facebook but not MySpace.

It’s not only the numbers of iPhone or Facebook users that attract governments. It’s the prestige. According to O’Reilly Radar’s government 2.0 reporter Alex Howard, “government technology shops, judging by their output, have become afflicted with a kind of ’shiny app syndrome,’ given that an app is a substantive accomplishment that can be trotted out for officials and the public.”

Brownell Chalstrom, a Manor Govfresh delegate, says that governments looking to develop for mobile should first look to create open websites using rich web standards like HTML5 and CSS3, and only then look to develop applications for platforms limited to users of an individual device or service. Open standards for open government, if you will.

“The goals that public officials pursue when they create new .gov websites or applications should be based upon civic good,” Howard writes. “If that civic good is to be rendered to a population increasingly connected to one another through smartphones, tablets and cellphones, truly open governments will employ methods that provide access to all citizens, not just the privileged few.”

“Shiny app syndrome” and Gov 2.0 [O’Reilly Radar]

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Oct 22

Survey: One Third of iPad Owners Have Never Downloaded an App

Posted in: apps, ipad, Tablets and E-Readers, Today's Chili

A new survey by the Nielsen Company shows that one third of iPad owners have never downloaded an application. In a section titled “A majority of iPad owners have already paid for content” fully 32% of iPad owners asked said that they “did not download an app.” This compares to 63% who had downloaded a paid app, and 5% who had only downloaded a free app.

The Nielsen survey polled “5,000 connected device owners who completed an online, self-administered survey,” but the actual number of iPad owners in this 5,000 isn’t specified, but one third seems an astonishingly high number, especially given that apps are so easy to buy, and you pretty much have to sign up to the iTunes Store just to get started with any iDevice.

Less surprising is the breakdown of paid downloads. Games are the top choice, with 62% of responders having bought one, closely followed by books (54%) and music (50%).

If these figures are actually meaningful (ie. if the self-selecting sample-group actually contains more than a few dozen iPad owners) then perhaps the app store isn’t the competitive advantage that Apple believes it to be. Perhaps all you really need in a store is Angry Birds and a copy of the Kama Sutra.

Connected Devices: Does the iPad Change Everything? [Nielsen Company blog]

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Oct 20

The Best Racing Game Apps [Appbattle]

Posted in: Android, apps, ios, iPhone, Today's Chili, top

When people argue that smartphones are on the level with Playstation or DS portable as gaming platforms, they’ll usually whip out a racing game. With good reason! iOS and Android’s racing games are actually some of their best, period. More »

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Oct 16

RIM promises to soothe BlackBerry app developers’ woes, says ‘we’re so there’

Posted in: app, apps, BlackBerry, developer, developers, RIM, Today's Chili
There’s no question that the BlackBerry App World hasn’t been quite the runaway success RIM hoped it would be, but the company is far from ready to throw in the towel, and it’s now promising some new measures to woo new developers and make the lives of current ones a bit easier. Some of those initiatives have already been rolled out — like new payment options — while others including a free analytics service will become available to developers in the coming weeks and months. As RIM’s head of application development, Alan Brenner, explains to The Wall Street Journal, RIM has been working for the past two years to make BlackBerrys more developer friendly, and he now says that “we’re so there.” They may not be quite as close as they think, however, as the WSJ also spoke to a number of developers who used words like “horrible” to describe the current state of things, while leading mobile game developer PopCap Games even went so far as to say that “RIM today is not really on our radar.”

RIM promises to soothe BlackBerry app developers’ woes, says ‘we’re so there’ originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 16 Oct 2010 04:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Oct 15

iPhone Band Rocks Out on NY Subway

Posted in: Apple, apps, iPhone, Music, Phones, Today's Chili

While riding the Subway this week, New York resident Brittany Tucker spotted the band Atomic Tom pulling a musical stunt on the train, jamming out their song “Take Me Out” on their iPhones. Each band member used an iPhone app to play a different part (drums, guitar, keyboard, vocals), and the end result is quite an ear worm.

Imagine if you were on that train. I’d be thinking, “Only in New York. Awesome.”

We’ve seen a number of geeky performers create experiment noises with iOS apps, and Atomic Tom’s performance is one of the better ones. Tune in by playing the video above.

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Oct 14

Remote Palette Uses iPhone to Pick Colors for iPad Paintings

Posted in: apps, bluetooth, ipad, Tablets and E-Readers, Today's Chili

Remote Palette is a very neat iApp for painting pictures. The twist, which will excite anyone who has ever painted real pictures with real paint, is that the app hooks together an iPad and an iPhone (or iPod Touch). The iPad is the canvas, and the iPhone is the palette.

The app is universal, so one $0.99 download works for both devices. On launch, you pair the iPad and iPhone via Bluetooth and you’re off. Swipe between pages on the iPhone to choose your colors, and splodge the paint onto the iPad’s canvas. The experience is incredibly intuitive. Somehow it really feels like you’re transferring real paint with your finger.

If you’re expecting a full-featured painting app like Brushes or Sketchbook Pro, you’re going to be disappointed. You’re limited to the pre-defined colors and just four brushes, which vary in thickness but not texture or transparency. The app is probably great for kids, though, and even has a few coloring-book style outlines that can be used.

This should be added to Brushes ASAP. I love that app, but with a color picker on a separate screen, and maybe pinching to adjust brush sizes, it would be killer. Pretty please, Steve Sprang, add this to your app.

Remote Palette product page [iTunes]

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Oct 13

The Best File Sharing Apps [Appbattle]

Posted in: AndroidApps, apps, IphoneApps, Today's Chili, top

One thing smartphones aren’t very good at? Sharing. They keep to themselves, hoard what they create, and bristle at the thought of accessing and sharing files like a normal computer. Thankfully, we have these apps. More »

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Oct 13

How To: Stream Video to iPad From Network Drive Without a Computer

Posted in: apps, ipad, Media Players, nas, streaming, Today's Chili, video

The innocuously-named FileBrowser is an iPad app which lets you access files on your computer over the local network or the internet. This is a function shared by roughly one zillion other apps in the store. What makes FileBrowser different is that it can access network-attached storage (NAS), letting you stream video and music to your iPad from a Time Capsule or other network drive without switching on a computer.

The app will connect to Macs, Windows PCs and NAS devices via SMB sharing. There is some setup involved, but the app comes loaded with PDFs which walk you through step-by-step. I grabbed it so I could stream files from a hard-drive hooked up to my Time Capsule, a feature added in the latest version of the app. It was easy.

All you need to do is give FileBrowser the name of the Time Capsule (or Airport Extreme base station), along with your user name and password. That’s it. Over an 802.11n connection you can drill down into the internal and external drives as fast as if they were local storage, and clicking on a compatible video file will play it right there in the app, with the standard media-control buttons.

The trick is that the movie files need to be in the right format. If it would sync to the iPad via iTunes and play in the “Videos” app, then you’re good to go. This means you’ll have to convert movies before using this solution: If you want to stream and convert movies on the fly, you’ll still need a computer running something like the excellent Air Video.

However, if you have a movie-playing app like CineXPlayer installed, you can choose to open AVI and other movie formats with that instead. These don’t stream, though: FileBrowser downloads them first.

FileBrowser will also work with any file that iOS can recognize, and can hand those files off to other apps. It costs $3, which is $3 you’ll save in weeks by keeping your computer switched off.

FileBrowser app page [iTunes]

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