Postbox public beta available
I recently wrote about Postbox, a new email client. It was then a private beta, but a public beta has now been released. Grab it now at postbox-inc.com.
Postbox brings innovative new features to easily find pictures and other files, but also how to get things done.
I still use Apple Mail and Gmail for daily email handling, but I will definitely try Postbox again now that a new version has been released.
Instapaper, or how to read stuff later
I recently came across a service on the great web called Instapaper. It solves the ancient internet problem of wanting to read long articles when one just haven’t got the time. Everyone has probably thought:
I’ll just save it and read it later…
It’s not easy to manage all these links and texts without any kind of system. This is where Instapaper comes in.
Instapaper is best used from a bookmarklet in your browser. It can be used both on a computer and a mobile platform such as an iPhone. It could look something like this:
It’s very easy to add a site to the reading list. Just navigate to the page, click on the Read Later bookmarklet and boom! To view the reading list and to actually read the articles, there is of course a website which looks something like the following. It has an archive for read items, and it has the ability to extract just the essential text from the websites.
I find the site best used as the Home Page of the browser. This way you see the reading list as a reminder everytime a new browser window is started.
If you have an iPhone, you will get a bonus! There is an app in the App Store which syncs with Instapaper on the web and makes it easy to manage and read items in the list.
The Instapaper iPhone app website has more information on how to use it.
[Instapaper] [iPhone App]
“Lips” playlist in Spotify
To rival the Singstar empire, Lips was recently released for Xbox 360. It’s a great game and it has lots of songs. More songs can be downloaded from the Xbox Market Place.
I added all default songs to a Spotify playlist so you can listen them all. This is for the Swedish release of the game, since the songs are sure to differ depending on the intended market. Enjoy!
Mac OS X 10.5.6 released
OS X 10.5.6 has now been released! Lots of things has been updated, and some highlights follow:
- Address Book
- Airport
- iChat
- Graphics
- MobileMe
- Time Machine
- Safari
- … and more!
Macrumors has the details on their forum.
Some people have been reporting problems with the update as usual. If in trouble, just get the Combo Update directly from Apple.
WordPress 2.7 released
WordPress 2.7 was recently released, and now even I have made the upgrade! If you follow my blog, you probably know that I just love WordPress (even with the bugs in Safari), and with the 2.7 upgrade it has gotten even better!
The whole admin backend is completely rewritten to among other things make it faster to navigate. The WordPress blog writes the following about the 2.7 version:
The first thing you’ll notice about 2.7 is its new interface. From the top down, we’ve listened to your feedback and thought deeply about the design and the result is a WordPress that’s just plain faster. Nearly every task you do on your blog will take fewer clicks and be faster in 2.7 than it did in a previous version.
Next you’ll begin to notice the new features subtly sprinkled through the new interface: the new dashboard that you can arrange with drag and drop to put the things most important to you on top, QuickPress, comment threading, paging, and the ability to reply to comments from your dashboard, the ability to install any plugin directly from WordPress.org with a single click, and sticky posts.
Upgrading to the newest release was easy as ever, since I track the Subversion tree. I just run the “svn switch” command, and presto — Subversion changes the release!
The following video shows more new features in the new admin interface, such as one-click WordPress upgrade and changeable interface.
So go ahead and download WordPress now!
iPhone app: Joost
Joost a internet based TV service, which has been available for Mac and Windows for a long time now. It has now come to the iPhone, bringing a wide variety of contents from many places around the world.
The interface itself is quite nice, with the standard Joost graphic and colors. There are five different buttons on the bottom:
- Joost picks
- Popular
- Browse
- Search
- More
Nothing strange going on here — in fact, it’s almost the same layout as the Youtube app which comes default with the iPhone. The fun begins in the Browse section, where you enter a list of categories and genres which lets you very narrowly define what you want to see at the moment.
The quality seems to be very nice, but different video streams seem to be encoded differently, so the results may vary quite a bit. This test was however done on Wifi, so the quality when using 3G is still to be determined.
The app itself seems to be fairly stable, and has only crashed once so far. I have to admit to not have used it extensively yet, but it seems quite solid. Something that needs work however, are the full-screen widgets — the ones that are shown when a video is playing. I’m not sure what they thought when designing that part.
The browse section currently contains the following items.
- Film
- All
- Action
- Animation
- Classics
- Clips and Trailers
- Comedy
- Documentary
- Drama
- Global
- Horror
- Independent
- Science-Fiction and Fantasy
- Shorts
- Music
- All
- Classical
- Country
- Dance and Electronic
- Hip hop and Rap
- Interviews and Profiles
- Jazz and Blues
- Latin
- Metal
- Pop
- RnB and Soul
- Rock and Indie
- World and Folk
- Shows
- All
- Action and Sports
- Animation
- Comedy
- Culture and Style
- Drama, Docs and Reality TV
- News and Gossip
- Science-fiction and Horror
- Sexy
- Tech and Gaming
There is definitely lots to choose from, but I haven’t looked through much of it yet, so the quality remains to be seen. It seems that no live streaming is available either, but hopefully it will come in later versions. If I recall correctly, live streaming of TV was one of the corner-stones in the whole Joost project. It’s a very interesting first version though, with a potential to be something big.
iPhone app: Tap Tap Revenge
It’s time for the first iPhone game to be featured here. The game is called Tap Tap Revenge and is a music game in the spirit of Guitar Hero. The graphics are great and with the recent update, the game has become far more stable and a lot faster.
The most welcome feature in the game is definitely the online play capability. In this mode, one can battle many players in three different difficulty modes. If you don’t have the song being played in the current room, it will be downloaded automatically. This works very well, as long as the song download isn’t interrupted.
You will definitely have lots of fun for hours with this game, it’s free and available in the App store! There is really no excuse for not trying this game.
iPhone app: Stanza
The time has come for an e-book reader to find its way to my iPhone. It’s called Stanza and has a built-in online library which contains lots of free books and magazines.
The main library can be sorted by titles, authors and subjects. It also remembers the latest opened books. When viewing a book list, they are shown in a list with the book cover.
The coolest feature with Stanza is the ability to directly download thousands of books from free online libraries. The libraries can be sorted in different ways and of course searched as well. The easiest way to find something interesting to read is perhaps the Most popular section which shows lots of well-known titles.
There is also an online section for news papers. It contains popular magazines such as Wired, the Wall Street Journal and Time Magazine. Using Stanza for reading news seems somewhat strange, since all articles are formatted like a traditional news paper, which makes it difficult to navigate around the contents properly.
So how about the most important view — to actually read the downloaded books? I found that the default view of black text on white background was too bright and uncomfortable for the eyes. After some tweaking, I found that black text on light gray was just the thing.
I read the book When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth by Cory Doctorow, and it was surprisingly easy to read on the small iPhone screen, as long as it is tilted to the side. Now there is no excuse at all to not be reading at least one book a month!
Oh, and Stanza a free download from the App Store.
iPhone app: Backgrounder
What if you have an iPhone application which you want to have running in the background when you switch to another program or even turn the phone “off”. With Backgrounder, it is now possible.
Backgrounder is a simple application which can be installed using the Cydia installer, which is available after you jailbreak your iPhone. Just search for backgrounder and install the application. When you start an application you wish to keep in the background, just press and hold the home button until a message pops up telling you that backgrounding has been enabled for the application.
When you want to leave the application, just click the home button as usual. This time however, the application will keep on running in the background and lets you do other things! To return to the running application, just tap it on the Springboard as you would be starting it from the beginning. Presto!
iPhone app: NemusSync
The first app to be featured here is NemusSync. It is an application used for two-way synchronization between the calendar in your iPhone and Google Calendar. It can be invoked manually by launching the application and tapping on Sync Calendars, but there is also a command-line client, which can be set to run at specific intervals for automatic sync.
The advanced menu makes it possible to only do a one-way sync if needed, as well as set the default calendar. There is usually no reason to muck around here if you don’t have special needs.
Adding an account is as easy as entering your Google account information and tapping on the Get Calendar List button. It will download all calendars associated with that account, and it is just a matter of selecting the ones you want. All selected calendars will be created locally as separate calendars in the iPhone, which makes it easy to distinguish between calendars, as well as adding events to specific calendars.
NemusSync requires that you unlock your iPhone! It is then available for installation from within the Cydia installer.
