(I know we’ve covered Ocarina here before, but I’m a latecomer to it and I’m so blown away, I had to have a rant about it. Forgive the indulgence.)
It took me a few days to grok what’s so wonderful about Ocarina, the $0.99 app that’s been taking the App Store by storm in recent days.
It’s not just about playing music. It’s about sharing it. Globally.
I suspect I was like most newcomers to Ocarina, in that once I’d got it installed, I started trying to play it. The trickiest thing is making sure that you blow correctly into the microphone - blow gently, don’t whistle a tune, and make sure you hit the microphone square on. If your blowing misses, the music stops.
It took me longer to explore the other options Ocarina offers, but once I got into world view, I found myself grinning like an idiot.
For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, the world view shows Ocarina players all over the world as little glowing lights on a digital globe’s surface. The app takes you from player to player, their musical doodlings appearing as a stream of animated blue streaks and flying green circles, like something out of a 50s sci-fi movie. You hear what they’re playing.
So you can open up world view and leave it playing; have a thousand Ocarina players serenading you as you work, sleep, play, cook, chat. This is simply stunning work, and I challenge you to find anyone whose jaw doesn’t hit the floor in amazement when they first see it.
As you tour the globe’s Ocarina players, you can flag up the ones you like (some of them are very talented). Most webapps ask you to “fave” or “friend” the people you like, but inside Ocarina you get to tap a little heart-shaped icon. You don’t fave these people, you love them. Isn’t that fantastic?
The Ocarina forum is a treasure trove of great stuff. Want to learn how to play the Still Alive, the closing credits song from Portal? How about Breakfast in America? Or the Imperial March? My six-year-old is so going to go crazy about this.
I apologise if I sound a little carried away with excitement here - it’s because I’m very excited.
What makes me gush even more is that we’re still in the early days of the iPhone platform here. Yes, there is a lot of rubbish on the App Store and people everywhere (myself included) have had a good old moan about that. But buried amid the rubbish are some fabulous gems like this, things that inspire creativity and connectivity and a global perspective. And they’re available for just pennies.
The App Store has been with us for just over four months. What on earth will the collective genius of the iPhone developer community cook up for us in the next four months? The next four years?
Let’s say the iPhone platform is a theme park. Despite all we’ve seen in the last four months, we’ve not even arrived there yet. We’re still at home, looking at the brochure.
Written by Giles Turnbull on November 19th, 2008 with no comments.
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Google’s voice search application for the iPhone is nothing short of spectacular. After tantalizing would-be users with either a PR goof or a brilliant marketing ploy that resulted in a delayed release on the AppStore, the updated version of Google Mobile finally hit on Monday and I got it on to my phone last night.
It’s like the home screen says, “For voice search, just bring the phone to your ear and speak. Really, no buttons required!” The program offers to let you watch a video to learn more, but it’s about as easy as it gets to call up a search results page that gives you just what you’re looking for simply by speaking into the phone.
When I searched for “70 Harper” the program returned results for “cindy harper,” but when I amended the search to “70 harper street, san francisco” I got a Google map pinned exactly to the address I spoke into the phone. Speaking about the incredible performance of this free app with my colleague Leander Kahney this morning, he agreed Google has served up something pretty amazing, saying, “it even understands my weird English accent.”
Say what you will about Google having worn out its welcome, or being on the downside of its rise to Internet glory, this advance in mobile search technology is a huge leap forward in this reviewer’s opinion. The iPhone may not yet be a fully functioning Star Trek communicator, but Google’s voice search brings it closer than many thought we might get.
Written by Lonnie Lazar on November 18th, 2008 with no comments.
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Now, personally speaking, I find this very weird indeed. But some people might like the idea, so I thought it was worth mentioning.
You’re probably already aware of TextMate, which like most text editors eschews a lot of the user interface stuff you see in other apps. There’s a window, with text in it, and there are many many commands you can use, but there’s not much to see: there’s no toolbar.
SuperMate doesn’t add a toolbar, it’s more like adding a skin. It tinkers with TextMate’s panels and tabs and a few other things like the web preview window, and just Leopardizes them a little.
Personally, I think TextMate’s just fine as it is. But if you’d like to see it a bit more, um, purple, maybe this will be of interest.
Written by Giles Turnbull on November 17th, 2008 with no comments.
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Fans of comics’ “Golden Age” now have a great way to feed that jones on the iPhone and iPod Touch with Comic Zeal from Bitolithic.
The $1.99 app lets you download an unlimited number of classic comics from the 1930s and 1940s, a period that saw the arrival of the comic book as a mainstream art form, when the medium’s artistic vocabulary and creative conventions were defined by its first generation of writers, artists, and editors.
The app downloads full comics to store locally on your device for easy access offline, and takes full advantage of the iPhone platform’s pinch-zoom and fingertip scrolling so you can move around pages quickly and zoom in to detail as you wish. A recent update makes turning pages with the swipe gesture a breeze and counts as an excellent improvement to the original released version.
“I had been itching to do some development for the Mac but when we learned the iPhone and iPod contained most of OS X I knew I had to do SOMETHING on the device,” Melbourne-based developer Emiliano Molina told Cult of Mac. “During that time, a colleague let me borrow some of his most precious comic books. The most leisure time I had was on the train but I couldn’t risk damaging them,” he says, “eventually I realized that what I needed was a digital version of those comics on the iPod.”
The Comic Zeal library contains an eclectic mix of titles that have fallen out of copyright, such as Romantic Adventures, Strange Worlds, Racket Squad and a personal favorite of this reviewer, Eerie.
Molina is also developing what he calls the Comic Zeal Creator, which allows you to convert the CBR/CBZ files of comics you find on the internet into Comic Zeal’s CBI format, so you can upload your own favorites to the iPhone for storage and later access. The Creator remains in Beta and can be downloaded from the Bitolithic website.
Written by Lonnie Lazar on November 13th, 2008 with no comments.
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