Hasta La Gadget!

Pretty much the only kind of paper books I still have are cookbooks. I have a ton, and most of them aren’t available in electronic form, plus I really like it when the food-stained pages fall open at favorite recipes. What I have no love for is the stack of hand-written recipes I have. They’re hard to find and easy to lose. If only there were some way to put them on my iPad?

BigOven, the iPhone, iPad and web-based recipe index, will now do the hard work for you. The service is called RecipeScan. You upload a photo of your hand-scrawled recipe (or even a page you have torn from a magazine) and — in two to five days — you’ll get it back in digital form. The worker is done by a team of human minions, so you should get back something fairly close to the original. Members get three free scans to try the service out and pro members get 25 credits. More credits can be bought for a dollar each.

To test it out, I put it head-to-head with another word-recognizing app, Evernote. Evernote’s handwriting recognition is done by machines, and I also have a paid account which bumps me up the queue. The recipe I used was one I hastily photographed from my mother’s notebook on a recent visit: Lancashire Hot Pot.

Speed

I dragged the photo into Evernote, synced with the server and set a timer for 30 minutes. When I checked back, the handwriting recognition had been done.

BigOven took just over an hour and a quarter, and I got a notification e-mail to let me know. This is likely to be slower if the service gets popular, hence the two to five day estimate.

Winner: Evernote, but not by much. If my account wasn’t paid, it would probably have been even.

Accuracy

Evernote was, as usual, uncannily accurate. Even with my mother’s handwriting it managed to pick out some hard-to-read words. It even recognaized the word “top”, which my mother had written without a cross on the “t”, making it look like “lop.” Evernote had trouble with word in all caps, but if I was searching for this recipe I would find it right away.

BigOven not only makes the recipe searchable, it also turns it into text and puts that text into the appropriate recipe fields. This — in theory — means you can swap between metric and American measures. However, the human translating my mother’s recipe didn’t know that “LB” means “pound”, ot that “PT” meant pint. Score even with Evernote.

The human also failed with some spellings — “braun” instead of “brown”, for example — and also went awry on the classifications, classing the dish as an appetizer. Anyone who has had my mother’s rib-sticking hot pot recipe will know that it’s a lot more than an appetizer.

Also, the recipe is marked as “American.” Lancashire isn’t very close to the U.S.

Winner: Evernote, but mostly because you still see your original scan, and human error is reduced.

Conclusion

I’d probably stick with Evernote, unless I was already a big user of BigOven. It’s free, automatic and you can also see the original picture you took of the paper, making mistakes impossible. Also, currently I can find no way to upload scans to BigOven direct from the iPad.

Big Oven’s RecipeScan works fine, but I also feel a little guilty using it, knowing that someone, somewhere is being paid pennies to do data entry on my behalf. And imagine if those poor souls are hungry. Reading about delicious dishes would be torture.

RecipeScan Frequently Asked Questions [BigOven]

Evernote product page [Evernote]

See Also:

• Evernote Peek, an App for Your Smart Cover
• Evernote Brings Proper File Syncing to iPhone
• Eye-Fi and Evernote Team-Up to Turn Cameras into Notebooks …

Apple CEO Steve Jobs demonstrates iOS 5, Mac OS X Lion and iCloud at WWDC 2011. Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com

Apple CEO Steve Jobs set off a bomb in Silicon Valley on Monday, and companies all over the world are still assessing the damage.

The new features in iOS 5, Mac OS X Lion and iCloud that Jobs introduced at the Worldwide Developers Conference affect a long list of companies big and small. Some are direct competitors of Apple, but many come from the legions of iOS developers whose apps have helped make the iPhone and iPad popular.

To start with the giants:

• The iOS 5 Notifications Center is a direct response to Google’s superior (for now) Android notifications system.
• The iOS 5 systemwide Twitter integration flips a middle finger at Microsoft’s Facebook-integrated Windows Phone 7 platform.
• Apple’s internet-based iMessage messaging client is a copycat of RIM’s BlackBerry messaging client, and it should inspire millions of iPhone customers to downgrade their text-messaging plans when iOS 5 lands this fall. That will put a dent in carrier profits.

(Let’s not even speculate about the death of SMS from iMessage.)

As for small startups:

• The “Read Later” functionality baked into the Safari browser for iOS 5 and Lion seems to render the popular Instapaper app unnecessary. Creator Marco Arment, however — at least for public consumption — is keeping up a brave front that he is “tentatively optimistic” that the new feature “will improve sales dramatically.”
• The upgraded Mail app included with OS X Lion (a $30 operating system upgrade) makes the $10 Sparrow mail app look like a raw deal.
• And iOS 5’s photo- and document-sharing features, combined with 5 gigabytes of free online storage offered through iCloud, may compel many Dropbox customers to cancel their subscriptions, or downgrade their storage options.

That’s just a few.

“It was like a forest fire cleaning out the brush,” said Phillip Ryu, principal at Tap Tap Tap, developer of the bestselling image-editing app Camera+ for iPhone. It’s worth noting, coincidentally, that Apple’s next iPhone update will also include a built-in photo editor, which competes with the likes of Camera+, too.

Now, here’s why iCloud, iOS 5 and Lion pack such a deadly punch against so many companies: Together, they strengthen Apple’s lock-in strategy with vertical integration. Many consider Apple to be the most vertically integrated company in the world: All Apple hardware and software are designed in-house, and Apple also runs its own digital content store, iTunes, along with the App Store and iBooks store.

The new feature set in iOS 5, iCloud and Lion tightens Apple’s vertical integration of its software ecosystem by amplifying its “lock-in” goal. The vast majority of the new iCloud tools introduced Monday are exclusively for Apple customers, designed to bridge the iOS and Mac operating systems to make the experience more seamless, convenient and irresistible than ever.

The idea behind this strategy is: If you’re an iPhone customer today, how can you resist buying a Mac or an iPad now, and why would you buy a Windows PC or an Android device? And if you’re already plugged into Apple’s “cloud” ecosystem, why use a cross-platform solution like Dropbox or Google Docs to store your media, when the Apple-only experience is bound to be more optimized for you?

Apple’s software news this week was designed to make people feel like crap if they aren’t already Apple customers. If you use Apple’s Pages word processor, your documents sync with Pages on the Mac, iPad and iPhone.

When you create a calendar event on your Mac, that event automatically appears on your iPhone calendar, too. You can also share the event with another Apple device.

If you snap a picture with your iPhone, the PhotoStream feature pushes the photo to iCloud and syncs with the photo folder on your Mac, Apple TV and iPad. (There’s a photo folder for Windows PCs that will work for this, too, but it looks considerably less polished than the Apple PhotoStream.)

And Apple’s lock-in strategy works like this, too: If a lot of your friends have iPhones or iPads and you have neither, you’d feel left out. With iOS 5, they’ll all be able to message each other for free with the iMessage app rather than the traditional rip-off SMS plan offered by Verizon and AT&T. So if you’re lured in, it’d be hard to give up an iPhone or iPad for a competing product, because you’d be leaving an entire network of iMessage chat contacts.

Google can only dream that its own “lock-in” were this tight. It’s halfway there: Google Docs, mail and calendar work well on Android devices. But Android still suffers from the recurring issue of hardware fragmentation. You can’t even be guaranteed to have the same version of Android on one Google-powered handset versus another, much less an Android Honeycomb tablet, nor can you be assured that the apps you’ve downloaded work the same on every Android device.

(Do I even need to bring up Google TV? Why even bother at this point.)

Apple said its big push Monday was “the cloud,” as in, snipping the cord and going truly wireless. But the real story was “lock-in.” Who would ever leave the Apple universe now? It’s up to Apple’s rivals now to find a solid opportunity here to compete with Steve Jobs’ widget.

See Also:

• Why Nobody Can Match the iPad’s Price
• 5 Reasons the Media Cover Apple So Much
• Behold, the Next Media Titans: Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon
• WWDC 2011 Highlights: Apple’s Mobile, PC Worlds Converge in iCloud
• Apple Snips the Cord on iTunes, Reveals iCloud Strategy
• Apple’s iCloud: Data in Forefront, Devices in Background

CyanogenMod developers received free Samsung Galaxy S II phones, the successors to its highly successful Galaxy S (pictured above). Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com

There’s no sure-fire way to silence software modders, so you might as well work with them. That seems to be the idea Samsung had with a group of phone hackers.

Four members of the CyanogenMod software team on Monday received Galaxy S II smartphones in the mail, direct from the company at no charge.

“All four of us involved in the porting process for the first Galaxy S received a new phone,” CyanogenMod team member Kolja Dummann told Wired.com in an interview. “After the [Galaxy S II] launched in Europe, we just asked about getting some of those phones. Samsung agreed.”

The phones came with one simple directive — get CyanogenMod working on the phone.

Essentially, CyanogenMod replaces the stock operating system on your Android phone with a customized build, letting you make tweaks and adjustments that you wouldn’t have otherwise been able to before. Customizations range from changing visual details — like slapping a sleek new uniform skins onto the user interface — to under-the-hood boosts like overclocking the phone’s CPU.

It’s uncommon for a device manufacturer to hand phones over to a community of developers like CyanogenMod. Companies like Motorola and HTC are known to ship devices with locked bootloaders, essentially restricting a user’s ability to customize his or her phone. While frustrating to budding modders, locking the phone down also prohibits a number of headaches on the carriers’ end — like the phone returns that come from users screwing up their devices in attempts to modify them.

“I’ve never heard of vendors giving phones to CyanogenMod or other community developers,” Dummann said. The CyanogenMod development team typically relies on donations from the developer community at large, or purchasing the devices themselves.

Samsung’s gesture is one of many recent manufacturer moves to court the developer community. Last week, HTC announced it would no longer ship smartphones with locked bootloaders. Motorola has also flirted with the idea of future unlocked device releases, though the developer community remains skeptical.

Phone makers on other platforms are starting to follow suit as well. Earlier this year, Microsoft reportedly met with a group of Windows Phone 7 hackers to see how the company could better support “homebrew” apps (or third-party applications that don’t require Microsoft’s approval).

Of course, hackers and phone modification junkies make up a small contingent of total phone purchases on the market. Cyanogen’s estimated user base floats somewhere in the 500,000 range. According to Android product management director Hugo Barra, the company has activated over 100 million Android devices since the platform’s launch. So catering to the modding community isn’t a straightforward play for marketshare by the manufacturers.

It will help, however, to silence the vocal minority of users upset with receiving locked down phones. After Motorola’s Atrix was released with a locked bootloader, modders started an online campaign against the company’s locked-down policy, often bombarding Moto’s Facebook page with less-than-flattering comments.

If nothing else, Samsung’s actions may bolster support from the developer community who in turn can influence others to buy the company’s phones.

Samsung did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The plan seems to be working on at least one of the developers who received a free phone.

“You will not hear me bad-mouth Samsung again,” CyanogenMod team member Atinm tweeted on Monday.

Despite its oddly intercapped name CineXPlayer is a great DIVX movie player

iPad movie player CineXPlayer has just gotten a big update. Version 2.1 not only adds some features, it gives my go-to XVID movie app a much-needed lick of paint.

CineXPlayer lets you load up your iPad with all those movie files and TV shows you — ahem — acquired legally. It’ll play pretty much any format you throw at it (AC3 sound isn’t supported). Just drag the movie files into the app via iTunes and you’re good to go.

There are plenty of other apps that do this, but CineXPlayer stands out for its stability and its excellent support for subtitles. Drop an SRT file in and you can select it to playback over the movie. Font size is adjustable and the text rendering is clear and smooth. And if the subtitle file has the same name as the movie file, they get paired up automatically.

One thing CineXPlayer wasn’t was pretty. Movies appeared in an ugly, text-only list and when you hit the “help” button, you were treated to a super-cheesy video featuring either the developer or the developer’s friend. This was enough to get me to buy and try many prettier apps.

Now, though, CineXPlayer has an icon view (although the text labels are horrible) and proper help pages. It also has search, draggable subtitles and the thumbnails show a frame from where you are in the movie (the app remember your position for you).

It also has — via in-app purchase — live 3-D conversion. You can choose between two kinds: anaglyph (red and blue/green) or “grilli 3-D.” This cost an extra $2. I bought it, but can’t test how well it works due to a lack of 3-D specs.

Other in-app purchases let you password protect folders (porn!) or disable iTunes backup to keep your computer’s hard drive a little less full.

Finally, you can now sort the movies into folders from within the app, as well as rename and delete files.

In all a great update, which is free for existing owners, and just $3 if you don’t have it. Recommended.

CineXPlayer [iTunes]

See Also:

• Free App Plays AVI Movies on iPad
• Hands-On With VLC Movie Player for iPad

Real or fake, this screenshot certainly looks like it could be iOS 5

It wouldn’t be a proper Apple Keynote day without some last-minute rumors. This time we have an is-it-or-isn’t-it iOS 5 screenshot, as unearthed by MG Siegler. In it we see the hoped-for new notifications system, as well as a few more interesting tweaks.

Siegler’s sources tell him that this picture is the “right idea.” Fake or not, it certainly looks the part. At the top we see Twitter notifications built into the status bar. This is consistent with both the recent rumors of deep Twitter integration in iOS 5, along with Apple’s hiring of the Palm WebOS notifications designer Rich Dellinger a year ago.

What we also see is a a tweaked Camera app icon, and what is possibly an answer to Windows Phone 7 phone’s live tiles. The Weather app icon appears to be showing a live temperature. Either that or Apple has just swapped the icon to read 23º C instead of 73º F. Or it’s just a fake. [UPDATE: according to UK-based Gadget Lab reader 747Captain, changing the region of your iOS 4 device to a country that uses celsius also changes the Weather app icon to read “23º.” So we’re left with just the notification bar and the new Camera app icon.]

Either way, we’ll know the answer in six hours or so. It could be that a revamped home screen is going to be rather small news. I have a feeling that iOS 5 could be a bigger upgrade that the recent jump from iPad 1 to iPad 2.

Is This iOS 5? Dunno, But It’s Likely The Right Idea [TechCrunch]

See Also:

• Apple Prepares to Unleash OS Lion, iOS 5 at WWDC 2011
• Report: No iPhone 5 at Apple's Summer Conference
• Apple Announces iCloud, Steve Jobs WWDC Keynote