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Posts Tagged ‘Facebook’

Review: Lifelike Craig HD

30 Jul

Lifelike Craig HD – Craigslist for iPad and iPhone (Lifelike Apps, Inc. $1.99)

Another mobile client for using craigslist on your iPhone/iPad, Lifelike Craig is well designed and organized in a way that makes it easy to craigslist on your mobile devices. This app is a universal app and works virtually identical on both the iPhone and iPad with obvious differences in the UI to work with each individual device. This is definitely one of the better apps that I have seen for using craigslist. It is very well designed and provides very useful functionality for this type of use. This is a very good app with active developers that are working hard to improve it on a regular basis.

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Posted in Apps-iPad, Apps-iPhone, iDevices, iPad, iPhone, Technology

 

A Day in the Life of *MY* iPad

24 Feb

I have seen conflicting reports over the past 11 months relative to how people feel about their iPads. Ever since the release of the iPad April 2010, I have heard from people who LOVE it and people who HATE it. There are also plenty in between who bought their iPad only to realize that they never use it and it essentially became an expensive item to have hanging around the house. I myself bought an iPad from a man who bought it and no longer needed it. It was in perfect condition and even still in the box because he bought it and obviously found no place for it in his life.

This idea has often made me wonder why I can get so much use out of it and others find it so useless. I cannot help but think that many bought their iPads simply because it was the thing to do. But, as an Apple fan boy, I can always find a use for such a device so it baffles me that others cannot as well. Perhaps they regret their decision to buy it, or even resent Apple for the device, or maybe they are just looking for an excuse to hate it. No matter what the excuse, I have seen plenty of articles about why people hate their iPad and they just don’t stack up to those who LOVE their iPads. Of course that is easy to say coming from the guy on this side of the fence, but I also wasn’t one of those who jumped on the bandwagon, I waited to purchase my iPad until I could “justify” the purchase. I had to come up with a reason WHY I needed that iPad. Now, I see that it was truly one of the best purchases I made last year, not a day has gone by since I purchased it that I haven’t used my iPad. Literally, I use it day in and day out. I have many uses for it, one of which is maintaining this blog. I have found it easy to carry around with me, in a good case it stays safe and I can use it in many environments. If I am going to have a sit down meeting with someone, this makes for a great tool to show demos, write up notes or look things up on the internet. I use my iPad for news, videos, documents, communication and when I’m bored, games! I can also see the day when I am on a hunt for a new job, with all of my cover letters and resumes right on my iPad, the ability to print from my iPad, email my resume, and even show examples to potential employers.

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Posted in Apps-iPad, Apps-iPhone, iDevices, iPad, iPhone, iTunes, Technology

 

Review: Loopt (iPhone)

21 Feb

Loopt (Loopt Inc. FREE)

This app has been through a lot, as one of the first apps in the app store they started off with a promise to deliver something they could not and that cost them a lot of users. Now this app is finally there, with all the recently added features users can finally do what they’ve been promising for several years now. Unfortunately I think it is too late for most who tried once and saw no reason to continue. This app has gone from bad, to now a great way to look at social media. Loopt is not a universal app and unless you have built in GPS in your iPad there really is no point to using this on your iPad (as far as I can see).
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Posted in Apps-iPhone, iDevices, iPhone, Technology

 

Review: Face The Music (Universal App)

31 Dec

Face the Music for iPad/iPhone 3.x Update! (TouchMiPhone $0.99) Universal App

This is one of those fun apps that isn’t really a necessity nor is something that has a lot of value but it does serve a purpose: pissing off your friends with mundane and constant updates to Facebook and Twitter about your favorite music! Yes that’s right, this app will post (with your permission, not automatically) the current track you are listening to on your iPad or iPhone. Along with that you can add on additional details such as a link to the track’s album image, a link to the track on YouTube if available, as well as other details. Each post can be made to Facebook or Twitter or both by simply toggling the buttons. This is a universal app so you get it for all of your iDevices with just one purchase which maximizes your ability to piss off your friends. Let all your friends know, track by track, as you listen to songs.

This app does not work with third party music apps such as Pandora so if you are listening to music in Pandora you cannot go into this app and post about it. It will only post about music you are listening to through the iPod library. It is quite a simple idea and works just as easily: While listening to a track that you particularly like and want to let everyone in the world know about, go into Face The Music, view the pre-written message ready for posting and hit post. No longer will all your friends and family have to go without the knowledge of the songs you listen to the most! This is particularly great to let people know that you are listening to Christmas music in July which always seems to upset the same characters ;) . This app is really simple and easy to use although some of the features like “Search on Twt.fm” and “Search on Youtube” may not be the most intuitive. As a matter of fact I have yet to find a single song that I was listening to actually worked in a search on Twt.fm. Searching on Youtube just does a general dump of the results you’d get if you searched on Youtube.com for the same keywords which can of course result in hundreds of thousands of results.
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Posted in Apps-iPad, Apps-iPhone, iDevices, iPad, iPhone, Technology

 

Review: Prowl (iPhone)

27 Dec

Prowl: Growl Client (Zachary West $2.99)

If you are a mac user, you are likely familiar with Growl. It is a tool for providing HUD (heads up display) from any app. It is a very useful tool for keeping track of activity in the various applications running on your mac. Prowl for iPhone is very similar to growl (hence the name) providing a similar HUD for your iPhone. In this case it uses push notifications to provide you with the alerts. The app works allowing you, through various means, to send push notification messages to your iPhone. This is not a universal app but since it just uses the push notification system, the app itself works just fine for your iPad. And since the app redirects me (in most cases) to another app when a notification comes in, I hardly ever use the actual interface which makes this as close as I can come to being a universal app without it actually being one.

The app is configurable to allow the sender of the notification to also specific the related app so that when you slide to view, it opens in the correct app instead of within prowl. This is particularly handy for notifications of things like tweets or updates to Facebook. When you receive the notification you can go right into the correct app to respond to the event that triggered the notification.

This is definitely a very useful app. Through the developer’s website you can sign up to receive an API key which will allow you to integrate this app into any of your web apps. This includes a WordPress blog with the proper plugin, you can receive a push notification of every new comment that is posted to your blog. You can setup the app to launch you right into the WordPress app allowing you to go right in and moderate the comment. The app also works together with growl, allowing you to create a specific style of HUD that when selected to be used for certain applications or events (and even based on idle time delay) you’ll receive those HUDs as push notifications. Never again miss an important message or notification.

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Posted in Apps-iPhone, iDevices, iPhone, Technology

 

Review: BeejiveIM (iPad)

18 Dec

BeejiveIM for iPad (Beejive, Inc. $9.99)


I hesitate a little bit with this app, while I really like it and find it very much worth the cost, it is hard to recommend that you purchase an app with many other free or cheaper alternatives out there. Furthermore, this is not a universal app, so if you intend to use it on both the iPad and the iPhone you’ll need to purchase it for both. That being said, I have never once regretted purchasing this app. Not only have I not regretted it, but even after purchasing it for the iPhone, I went on to purchase it for my iPad. I definitely am happy that I purchased it for my iPad and now find my self rarely even using it on my iPhone.

The things that make the iPad great really make this a winning app, the iPhone version is very similar (looks different, but similar in features and functionality), but I find myself only using it on y iPhone when I am on the go and need to stay connected to IM. often times though when I am on the go, I don’t want to stay connected. My iPad on the other hand allows me to me use this IM app as if I were on any computer. And since typing on the iPad is fairly easy, it is very easy to communicate using this app. More than once while watching the game on a lazy Sunday afternoon or while I am relaxing in bed, I have engaged in a conversation with some one very easily and without getting out my laptop by simply using this app.

With the release of 4.2.1, this app is capable of multitasking although since beejiveIM really came out with one of the first implementations of push notification (that I saw), multitasking really isn’t necessary on this app. Prior to push notification, they solved the problem by sending an email notification of IMs to your Push email account. With push notification you can leave the app anytime without worrying about receiving your messages. As soon as one comes in you’ll receive the notification. With multitasking, you can go back into the app exact as you left it. Of course that is just one of the many small things that make this app great. There are many benefits that this app carries which cause me to choose it over the other IM apps so I’ll outline for you what I think are the most important characteristics of this app:

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Posted in Apps-iPad, iDevices, iPad, Technology

 

Review: Twittelator for iPad (iPad)

13 Dec

Twittelator for iPad – Twitter Client (Big Stone Phone $4.99)


I know you have heard a lot from me already about the Twittelator Apps. I get excited about apps that work well and in particular about apps that I get a lot of use out of. In this case, Twittelator has always been a useful app for me and has only gotten better over time. This is NOT a Universal App. This is the iPad only version of Twittelator. There is also an iPhone version available for purchase as well as a free iPhone version. I use both the iPhone and iPad versions of this app, but they are two very different apps in how they function as well as how they look. Be sure to take a look at each app to see if it is right for you. The same core features are (mostly) available in both, but functionality they are very different apps.

Twittelator Pro (the iPhone version) was what first got me interested in Twitter. I had a great time sitting there on my iPhone and tweeting away. It is fully functional and provides the most amount of features (as far as I can tell) out of all the Twitter apps. With the release of the iPad came Twittelator for iPad. It is still fairly new so features are being added a little bit at a time, but consequently this version is not yet as mature as the iPhone version which has had a lot more time to develop into the app that it is today. But little by little it is coming along. The big plus with Twittelator for the iPad is the extra screen space which allows the app to do a lot more and look a lot better.

The app itself functions well for a Twitter app. I like how things are organized and how easy it is to navigate around. Additionally the developer is very responsive to issues with this app and is constantly making updates to fix it. The app was recently updated (ahead of the release of 4.2.1 for iPad) to bring multitasking, printing, Facebook integration and several other key features to the app. This developer is constantly on-top of what’s new and exciting in the twitterverse and that makes his app one of the top apps in the app store for Twitter and certainly my favorite. Using this app makes my twitter experience all that much more enjoyable, so much so that any other twitter clients I use can’t even come to close to comparing, they leave me disappointed in the end.

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Posted in Apps-iPad, iDevices, iPad, Technology

 

Review: Facebook (iPhone)

05 Dec

Facebook (Facebook FREE) iPhone Only


Ok, let’s face it, Facebook is an easy app to like. If you enjoy using Facebook via your web browser then I think you’ll find it nice and easy to use from your iPhone. Of course one of the biggest problems is this app is NOT a Universal App, as a matter of fact Facebook currently does NOT have an app for the iPad. Their excuse for this is that the iPad is not a mobile device and therefore, you can just use the website from your iPad. I will say though that it is actually fairly simple to use the website from my iPad with relatively few problems. But back to the iPhone app: This app hasn’t always been as well done as it is now, in fact it has taken quite a bit of time to get to where it is. However now that they have improved it, and add to that the fact that I am a Facebook addict and you get easily one of my Top Ten used apps!

With some of the recent improvements especially, most things (aside from custom Facebook apps) that you can do through the website, can be done through the iPhone app as well. Additionally you get other benefits such as push notifications (if you like to be bugged) and the ability to upload photos and videos right from your iPhone. These features haven’t always been apart of the app but now that they are it is suddenly a lot more use-able. In addition to these things, Facebook has recently launched their new Places feature which allows you to check-in yourself and your friends when you are at a specific location. Some of these locations even offer special deals to those who check-in from their location. They have also recently added in support for Groups. Now you may be wondering why I only give it 3 Stars? Well plain and simple, this app just does not merit 5! Yes it works and yes it does its job (most of the time) and yes I use it a lot. But there are apps and then there are GREAT apps, and this is NOT a GREAT app. There are many features that are just lacking or not fully built out. It feels to me like they really have not spent a lot of time working on this. Maybe it is more of a Facebook issue than just this app itself, but they really should be able to make this something great but have not.

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Posted in Apps-iPhone, iDevices, iPhone, Technology

 

Review: Twittelator Pro (iPhone)

28 Nov

Twittelator Pro – Twitter Client (Big Stone Phone $4.99)


This is NOT a universal app, but it is worth buying for both the iPhone and the iPad if you use twitter a lot. This review will be solely about the iPhone version with the iPad version being covered at a later date. The iPad version is available for $4.99 as well. If you are familiar with this app, it is not hard to see why it is worth buying for both devices. There is also a free version available, more than likely it is limited in some way although I am not sure exactly what the limitations are but it certainly will give you a chance to try out the app and decide for yourself. This app is definitely worth the purchase. Every time a new twitter app has been released for the iPhone, I have tried it out. Sometimes to see if I am missing anything by sticking to Twittelator Pro, and other times because those apps promise some great new feature. This includes of course the official Twitter app, when it was first released and since then, I have tried it out a few times. However every single time, I end up back with Twittelator Pro.

This app has had a lot of thought put into it ever since it first debuted back in 2008. It started off as a feature rich, but unpolished app (visually) and has grown into a very nice, very functional and very feature rich app. I use it quite regularly on both my iPad and iPhone.  A lot of the features in this app were developed and supported even before twitter released support for them. For example geo tagging tweets, or even lists are features that this app implemented in one way or another prior to twitter doing so. I have a long list of features for this app so I’ll get right into them now.

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Posted in Apps-iPhone, iDevices, iPhone, Technology

 

*MY* Top 10 iPhone Apps

16 Nov


It was by far a lot harder to choose my top ten iPhone apps than my top ten iPad apps. Not because they aren’t used or as useful or that I like them any less; but rather quite the contrary. The biggest problem I had was narrowing down the list and specifically weeding out ones that I really like but that have a limited use. Rest assured though, that I will at some point in a later post write more at length about the other apps as I think they are all news worthy in one way or another. For now I will be limiting the remainder of this post to the ten apps that I have chosen. I have not chosen any apps that are native to the iPhone despite how often I may use them.

One thing worth noting: ever since I started using my iPad I have started to move away from certain apps on my iPhone, and over to the iPad version of the same app. It is not that the iPhone isn’t worth mentioning, but simply that certain apps that would have made the list just 3 months ago, no longer do, simply because I use the iPad version now instead.  BeejiveIM is one of those apps.

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Posted in Apps-iPhone, iDevices, iPhone, Technology