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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We’ve written before about some of the creative ways Mac users act to protect their gear and to foil the nefarious intentions of would-be thieves. This week brings another, called MacTrak, from GadgetTrak, Inc., makers of the new anti-theft software for mobile devices.
MacTrak features location-awareness from Skyhook Wireless’ Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS) and integration with Flickr to capture the location and images of laptop thieves.
“Skyhook’s cutting-edge location technology allows our software to send the location of the device to the owner along with a photo of who is using the system, greatly increasing the chances of getting the stolen device back,” says Ken Westin, founder and CTO of GadgetTrak.
When a MacTrak-enabled laptop is stolen, the device owner can remotely activate tracking for their stolen system. Once the stolen device connects to the Internet, MacTrak determines the device location using WPS. It will also activate the Mac’s camera and photograph whoever is using the device. The image, location and network information are then uploaded to Flickr and an email is sent to the owner with the same information. Data will continue to be sent over time until tracking is disabled.
“Skyhook’s Wi-Fi Positioning can pinpoint the location of a stolen device within 20-30 meters even in dense urban areas or indoors, meeting the tough performance standards of security applications,” says Kate Imbach, director of marketing at Skyhook Wireless.
You can buy MacTrak directly from GadgetTrak.
Written by Lonnie Lazar on November 14th, 2008 with no comments.
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The Google Mobile team is expected to enhance its iPhone search product with a voice recognition add-on as soon as today, according to a report in the New York Times.
Having already reorganized the way it delivers the results of an iPhone search request earlier this week, the Mountain View, CA search engine company is taking another step toward perfecting the way it handles the challenges of entering and retrieving information with hand-held wireless devices.
“Solving those two problems in a world-class way is our goal,” says Vic Gundotra, a former Microsoft executive who now heads Google’s mobile businesses.
With teams of voice recognition engineers working in New York, London and Mountain View utilizing trillions of search queries Google users have made over the years, one aspect of the service relies on a statistical model of the way words are frequently strung together, according to Mike Cohen, a speech research who was co-founder of Nuance Communications before coming to Google.
The service also takes advantage of the iPhone’s accelerometer to put itself into “listen” mode when the phone is raised to a user’s ear, a design development contributed by a Google researcher in London.
Both Yahoo and Microsoft already offer voice services for cellphones. The Microsoft Tellme service returns information in specific categories like directions, maps and movies. Yahoo’s oneSearch with Voice is more flexible but does not appear to be as accurate as Google’s offering, according to the Times report.
The Google system is far from perfect, and it can return queries that appear as gibberish. Google executives declined to estimate how often the service gets it right, but they said they believed it was accurate enough to be useful to people who wanted to avoid tapping out their queries on the iPhone’s touch-screen keyboard.
As of this writing the add on was not yet available on the AppStore, but as Raj Reddy, an artificial intelligence researcher at Carnegie Mellon University says, “whatever they introduce now, it will greatly increase in accuracy in three or six months.”
Via New York Times
Written by Lonnie Lazar on November 14th, 2008 with no comments.
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The iPhone has a built-in weather app. So why would anyone pay $9.99 for another one? I was very hesitant at first to try MyWeather Mobile. After all $9.99 is on the high end of iPhone app prices. Although the built-in weather app does a good job of letting you know the current conditions and [...]
Written by Terry White on November 14th, 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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