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Posts Tagged ‘screenshot’

Last October, developer Loren Brichter set the App Store on fire with the sequel to his brilliant iPhone Twitter client, Tweetie. It looks like he’s about to do the same to the Mac.

Brichter sent out a series of teasing tweets today indicating that Tweetie Two is coming soon for the Mac. One, from his atebits account, reads:

Ready… ready?! News about Tweetie Tw… ROOOOOAAAAR!! NOOOO DON’T EAT M *BLAM BLAM*. *CHOMMMPP* Aaaaararrrrrgghhhhhh.

While clearly he’s about to say “News about Tweetie Two,” that in and of itself isn’t very useful. The more useful tweet comes from his personal Twitter account, where he links to a “leaked” screenshot, “Shhh, @atebits doesn’t know I’m leaking screenshots.” To which he replies to himself, “Damn you @lorenb!” Cute.

Better is the screenshot itself (below). While it doesn’t show much of anything beyond what seems to be a frame for Tweetie Two (which he humorously calls “Tweetie Too”), the fact that it’s far enough along to for him to feel comfortable leaking anything is a good sign.

Brichter released Tweetie for Mac last April, following the success of Tweetie (the first one) for the iPhone. It costs you $20 for the ad-free version, but it is well worth it if you’re addicted to Twitter want want a native, non-AIR app (though Echofon has a nice one as well).

So what else do we know about Tweetie Two for the Mac? Brichter actually set up a Formspring.me account where he has answered some questions himself. Notably, the pricing for Tweetie Two will be the same as the first one. Brichter basically spends all his time on the project. And he even designs it himself. Also, “The interface is going to be substantially different,” he writes.

Finally, when asked if he plans to develop for the upcoming iPad, Brichter has just two words, “Hell yeah.” Tweetie for iPad, anyone?

Doodle Jump for the iPhone is something like a developer’s fairy tale: two brothers set out to make a game using only the talents they’ve got at hand, and end up striking gold. They keep pushing out minor updates, and the game just keeps selling.

Tomorrow morning, Lima Sky will be announcing that Doodle Jump has just surpassed 3 million sales — a feat they claim is a first for any Indie development house. If it seems like we were just writing about Doodle Jump surpassing the 1 million download mark, it’s because we were; that last landmark only just came in mid-December of last year. Less than 3 months later, Lima Sky has managed to triple an already impressive haul.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

Do you remember the Bowlingual, the portable dog language translator that was released in Japan last year ? The basic concept behind the $250 device (which people living outside Japan can get here ) will soon be used for an iPhone app that translates what a dog “says” into human language and emoticons in real-time.

Read the original post:
Bowlingual: iPhone app translates what your dog barks, posts it to Twitter

Music discovery site thesixtyone unveiled a radical—and gorgeous—redesign a couple days ago. The redesign presents a single, lush full-screen photograph as each song plays, while smaller snapshots fade in and out screensaver-style. The controls are minimized to rollover menus on the upper right, an account-info strip along the lower left, and green arrows to skip to the next or previous songs. You are supposed to just select a type of playlist (top songs, hot, moods) and let it play. Thesixtyone adds Digg-like voting and gaming elements to surface the best indie music.

Users hate it. Or at least the vocal ones complaining about the change on the startup’s Facebook wall, organizing a boycott, and sending us tips. This backlash is predictable and always happens whenever a site goes through a radical change. But some of the complaints are valid. For instance, the biggest change is that you can no longer see the playlist of songs you are listening to or skip around willy-nilly. You can see the old design here or in the screenshot below. The old design was more conventional, but it was certainly easier to navigate.

I asked founder James Miao about the backlash, and he responds:

We’ve had an interesting history with change. The reality is that we’re doing some very experimental things and I feel it’s important to have the freedom to explore new directions. Nearly every change we’ve done since releasing in 2008 has been met with a very similar reaction.

He also notes that “we find that lists aren’t very effective for browsing music you don’t already recognize,” but agrees that it should be easier to navigate the site, and more changes are coming which will improve the experience.

There is another issue. Thesixtyone was able to build a small but loyal community of artists and music lovers. The biggest complaint is that many of the community features have been stripped out. Esteban, one “pissed off t61 user,” writes us:

Not sure if you guys cover this sort of thing, but there’s a lot of angry users over at thesixtyone over the big website overhaul. As you may or may not know, thesixtyone is a music discovery website where many indie artists could easily find listeners. The community aspect and fun features of the site were what drove users to be so passionate, when the redesign (most likely design whores) did away with the greatest features, and killed usability it left a big hole in all the hearts of the users and artists alike.

Miao says that there were problems with the old community features. Specifically, some artists were abusing the system, trying to game the ratings or spamming users with mass messages. The new site is designed to create conversations between fans and artists around songs, and more features in this area are also going to be introduced in the future.

I personally like the new design and the way music just plays with minimal fuss. Many of the navigation and discovery issues can be solved simply by bringing back a playlist view as an option for when you want to dive deeper into the playlist or skip around.

Which design do you think is better?

Could IBM be prepping more of its own location-aware technology and devices? According to a recent patent filing, it looks like it. On Thursday, Big Blue filed for a patent for a “method and system for location-aware authorization.” The inventors appear to be IBM engineers based in Rome, Italy.

According to the filing, the technology would provide a method and technology to control access to a device based on the location of that device. IBM gave the example of a company that only wanted employees to use a particular device in the office or their home and believe that their technology would allow the employer to control where the particular device can be accessed.

Here’s an excerpt from the filing:

The invention provides a method and system for location-aware authorization such as for electronic devices (e.g., mobile electronic devices). One embodiment involves authorizing access to a standalone system such as a mobile device, by collecting user credentials on the device for authentication, obtaining location information (e.g., geographical position) for the device from a locating module such as a satellite navigation module attached to the device, accessing profile authorization information for authenticating the user based on the user credentials and device location information (localization), authorizing access to the device by the user if the profiled authorization settings match the credentials and the position of the device.

Talk about GPS-lockdown.  In an age of mobile workers and telecommuters, such a product might be more of a hindrance than a help for most organizations.  But I could see putting something like that on servers or machines with super-sensitive data that are not supposed to leave the premises.  The big question looms: what will Big Blue, which reported strong earnings for 2009 this past week, do with this technology?

Thanks for the tip Anand S.

As companies mature from fledgling startups into small and medium-sized businesses, it becomes harder to capture and analyze ideas coming from within an organization. Email and spreadsheets are the usual tools used to deal with internal collaboration, but these modes have no way of bringing the best ideas to the top: many times they are lost in the shuffle. Spigit, creators of an enterprise collaboration platform, has come out with a new SaaS product, WE by Spigit, aimed at addressing the collaboration problems small businesses face.

Often times when an enterprise software company moves downstream, they simply strip down many core functions of their enterprise product in order to make it affordable for SMB’s. WE by Spigit has additional features in their enterprise model, such as prediction and idea trading markets, but the main functions at the heart of their service remain unchanged.

When a company purchases WE by Spigit, they are able to create an “innovation community” where their employees (up to 500), are able to contribute and collaborate on projects immediately. Spigit employs constantly evolving algorithms in their system, which, when added to a thumbs up/down feedback system, creates a reputation value for a user. These values are useful because administrators will see topics and ideas which have the highest reputation rise to the top. Each community is hosted on Spigit’s servers.

Another feature is the inclusion of incentives and rewards in order to increase contribution from the communities. Users gain both points and virtual currency for the parts they play in the community; which can then be redeemed for real goods. Spigit hopes that by providing rewards, users will collaborate more, and thus more ideas from within companies can come to fruition.

BrightIdea offers services which are similar to those of Spigit, but they, like most other collaboration platforms, cater to larger enterprises.

WE by Spigit is pay-as-you-go. The product starts at $500 per month for 50 users, and reaches $2500 a month for 500 users. Spigit received $10M in funding from Warburg Pincus in October of 2009, bringing their total funding amount to $14M since their launch in 2007. They have been cash-flow positive for the past 10 months.

If Google Analytics just isn’t fast enough for you, there’s Chartbeat, a betaworks company which provides realtime analytics to Website owners. It gives Website publishers a second-by-second view of the number of visitors on their site, which pages are spiking in popularity, referring sites, as well as alerts on slow load times and server crashes. It is particularly useful for blogs.

Today, Six Apart’s blog hosting service, TypePad, is starting to promote chartbeat by making it available from its stats page. Website hosting service DreamHost is offering a deeper integration, showing a hover-over summary of current visitors and top referring sites on its dashboard page. Chartbeat also has an iPhone app which sends you push notifications every time your traffic spikes or your site is down.

TypePad and DreamHost users won’t get the realtime analytics for free, however. After a 30-day trial, Chartbeat will begin charging it’s regular $9.95/month fee. TypePad Pro accounts will get a 30 percent discount. Chartbeat is hoping a large enough sliver of users will get addicted to pay the monthly charge. In an age when Google Analytics has trained people to expect not to have to pay for analytics, that could be a tough sell.

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