Macgasm

First thing I check when the family says “let’s go to a movie” – Fandango.

I’m not into standing in lines and waiting around in the cold. With Fandango, I see when and where a film is playing and I can quickly and easily purchase my tickets from my iPhone.

Well, now life has gotten even easier as Fandango just released their iPad app.

The Fandango app for iPad takes all the goodness of the iPhone app and brings with it some key user experience updates. Most notable are:

• “The Pulse,” a visual representation of the hottest ticket sellers, viewable in both list and map formats
• Movie reviews from professional critics and film fans alike, plus movie-related tweets, all on one large Multi Touch screen
• Map integration that knows your location and helps you find titles, theaters, showtimes and tickets
• Expanded video, photos, trailers, clips and exclusive interview features that take advantage of the iPad’s display

“It was important for us to create an app that was tailor-made for iPad, taking advantage of its large, high-resolution display and Multi Touch interface,” says Jessica Yi, head of product for Fandango. “We think film fans will enjoy browsing from their couch or the local coffee house for showtimes, fan reviews, exclusive clips, trailers, and tickets for True Grit, Little Fockers, Gulliver’s Travels, TRON: Legacy, Black Swan, The King’s Speech and many other movies throughout the holiday season.”

It seems that many do-it-yourselfers and incredibly smart designers are jumping on the bandwagon and designing stylish ways of wearing the new 6th generation iPod nano like a wristwatch.

I know we wrote about the Griffin solution only a week ago (see that story here). Regardless, there’s a new entrant into the Nano wristwatch game that deserves a long look.

Using their patented nanoclipz technology, iWatchz has just launched their site and the product line looks quite impressive.

The company’s first product line, the Q Collection, is available now in over 250 Apple stores nationwide or from the company’s website. Talk about perfect Black Friday timing!!

The silicone bands come in eight colors (black, red, white, grey, pink, blue, green and orange) and cost a very affordable price of $24.95.

“When we developed the nanoclipz system we had several goals in mind. The product had to be stylish, simple to use, affordable, and had to ensure the iPod nano would remain secure while still giving the user access to all the functionality of the device (earphone jack, buttons, and charge/sync port),” offers the company president. “We are very excited to bring this product to market in time for the holiday season and are well prepared to ensure users can get their hands on our product immediately.”

Great looking product, and huge congratulations on getting shelf space on Black Friday in Apple retail stores.

Photo Credit: iwatchz

Much of the theatrical world is abuzz right now as the 7th feature film about Harry Potter and his adventures just hit the big screen.

I’m not going to pretend to know the characters, the spells, or even the purpose of the saga, but my 8 and 6 year old kids definitely gave me a schooling last night as we went to see “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1.”

Hold tight everyone, there is an Apple technology angle coming, so keep reading…

The good folks at Screenlife, the creators of Scene It?, in my opinion, one of the coolest trivia games out right now, has just announced its new Scene It? Harry Potter app for iPhone and iPod touch as wells as an HD version for iPad. Brilliant timing, Screenlife!

Scene It? Harry Potter takes players on a journey with real movie clips, puzzles, mini-games and questions from the first six films from the Harry Potter series.

“We’re thrilled to add Harry Potter to our roster of Scene It? Apps,” said Steve Banfield, Senior Vice President of Production and Digital Strategy at Screenlife. “The Harry Potter license continues to grow in its overwhelming popularity, and is exactly the type of exciting license we seek when creating fun new games.”

The Scene It? Harry Potter app for iPhone and iPod touch features:

• 30 distinct quiz sets with 16 different trivia puzzle types and mini-games
• Numerous video and audio clips, and images pulled directly from the Harry Potter films
• Single-player mode and a head-to-head multiplayer mode that works over WiFi or Bluetooth (oooh, watch out Nintendo — the DS may have some worthy competition coming from Apple)

The Scene It? Harry Potter HD app for iPad includes all of the above features, plus:

• HD quality video clips, richer graphics and an upscaled user interface
• Dynamic motion backgrounds and animations
• Enhanced puzzles that utilize the iPad’s multi-touch interface
• Group play — up to four players may play at the same time

The Scene It? Harry Potter iPhone and iPod touch app is available for $1.99 on the App Store, and the HD iPad version is available for $4.99.

My take overall

After watching the latest film last night, I can completely see why people have been drawn into the Harry Potter franchise; there’s a lot of character building and a lot of depth to the storyline — good stuff overall.

For the true fan, those of you that have been wearing the round glasses and casting spells by yelling out Expecto patronum as you walk down the street, you’ll gladly pay for this app and find hours of entertainment from it.

If you’re unaware of what Expecto patronum means — then you’ll probably be frustrated as you won’t be able to answer many of the trivia questions and puzzles included with these apps.

Either way, Screenlife has definitely put their mark on another bit of entertainment that should be wildly successful for them.

If you’re a fan of television and you’re a techie, then you know about Slingbox and the SlingPlayer line of products.

In a nutshell — Slingbox allows you to view your home television from anywhere you have an internet connection.

That’s right. Fire up your browser. Launch an app on your mobile device. It doesn’t matter.

I’ve spent many hours streaming ESPN or CNN from home to my work desktop, and the image quality is amazing. In my humble opinion, SlingPlayer is the ONLY app to use for remote media viewing.

Mobile device owners have already had the luxury of the SlingPlayer app for a number of months now, but coming very shortly, there will be an official iPad app as well — so no more having to do the x2 image stretch to get a full screen pixelated picture.

From the Slingbox site:

We have been hard at work on an iPad version of SlingPlayer Mobile. When it becomes available it will be priced at $29.99, the same as all of our SlingPlayer Mobile applications. The new app will take full advantage of the iPad’s beautiful display.

Interested? Keep your eyes on the App Store, and Macgasm of course, since we’ll let you know as soon as the app is out.

You can also sign up for direct notification from Slingbox by clicking through the link here.

Note: Mobile devices supported by SlingPlayer are: iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Palm OS,  and Symbian.

I’ll be the first to admit it — I am a self-proclaimed news junkie and frequently find myself searching through the interweb for headline news and breaking stories many times in a given day. Maybe it’s because I’m a blogger, and that’s part of my job, but nonetheless, I enjoy staying aware of what’s going on in the world around me.

All that being said, I recently found a very cool iPad application that makes it extremely easy to stay on top of the current happenings in the world. iStreamer is an application built for the iPad that pulls data from various social and RSS streams and displays a running timeline of news, as it happens.

This is an app that is better seen as opposed to merely written about, so check out the video below created by the developers.

Now it all makes sense, right? Cool.

I only recently stumbled across this app. I actually use another application created by the iStreamer developers on one of the other technology blogs I write for. If you take a look at THE Tech Scoop and look down in the interaction bar that pops up at the bottom of the screen, you’ll note an option that says “Timeline.” That’s another product from the AllofMe development team that shows a very useful and visually appealing timeline of all the posts published on that site — it’s essentially a lite version of the iStreamer application.

If you have an iPad and you like news, I really think you’ll be impressed with this app. This 1.02 release has a lot of good stuff going for it, and when the calendar events, email alerts, and keyword searching functionality is integrated, this will definitely become a must have app.

The name Sylvester Cann may be destined its 15 minutes of fame.

Mr. Cann got President Barack Obama’s signature. That in itself is impressive and worth keeping in the ol’ scrapbook, but instead of pushing a piece of paper and a pen in front of the President, he presented him with his iPad. By the way, as a security precaution, the Secret Service prohibits spectators from bringing pens around the President anyway.

With that, at a Democratic support rally at the University of Washington for Senator Patty Murray, Sylvester Cann fired up his iPad and wrote a quick note using the Adobe Ideas app. The note said, “Mr. President, sign my iPad”

“I just wrote ‘Mr. president sign my iPad,’ and just something to show him very quickly, he could look down and understand and start signing,” Cann said. “I just ran my finger down it just to show him use your finger, just put your autograph on there, as soon as I did that he was on-board. He just took it from me and began signing his name.”

“I will put it up on the digital picture frame so I will always see I have the president’s signature,” Cann said.

Watch the whole thing unfold in this video now posted on Cann’s YouTube page. We’ve embedded the video at the end of the post.

Adobe Ideas

Now back to the app used. Interestingly enough, it’s from Adobe. Apple and Adobe aren’t actually seeing eye-to-eye these days.

At its foundation, Adobe Ideas is a digital sketchbook allowing you to capture and explore your ideas. You can sketch design ideas and take advantage of the following integrated capabilities:

• Simple vector-based drawing tools
• Zoom control without jaggies or big pixels
• Variable sized brushes using multitouch control
• Vector eraser
• Separate drawing and photo layers
• 50-level undo

Adobe Ideas is a free app and is available for both the iPhone and the iPad. Click here for the iPhone version and here for the iPad version.

Video of the Obama Signing

Article Via Hewreck

To jailbreak or not to jailbreak — that is the question?

I, trying to be on the bleeding edge of technology, tend to take the risk of using early firmware, software revisions and hacks, before recommending them to readers and followers.

The latest iterations of iPhone unlocks to hit the streets are already causing much conversation amongst the iDevice community, and they haven’t even been out for a full 48 hours.

On Sunday, 10.10.10 at 10:10, the Chronic Dev Team was scheduled to release their jailbreak for iDevices, but out of the blue, George Hotz (GeoHot) preempted them with the release of his limera1n jailbreak.

Without going into a ton of back-end technical stuff, the limera1n jailbreak utilizes a separate exploit in Apple’s code than does greenpois0n. What that means is that, should Apple patch the limera1n hole, they may not get the greenpois0n vulnerability, allowing users to still jailbreak their devices (it gets hard to keep up with this stuff).

Both jailbreaks work with the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and the iPad; however, see below for the firmware revs each supports:

• limera1n – use for iOS 4.0, 4.0.1, and 4.0.2 devices
• greenpois0n – use for iOS 4.1 devices only

That being said, I have iOS 4.1 on my iPhone 4 and still tried limera1n yesterday, and NO, it did not work (I’m stubborn like that and still had to try).

With that failure behind me, I tried greenpois0n today. This is NOTHING like the PDF exploit that brought us the seamless jailbreak.me mobile Safari jailbreak. With greenpois0n you have to manually activate DFU mode and then witness the unsettling linux boot screen scroll across your iDevice.

After what seemed liked 30, but was only 5 minutes, you’re presented with a blank white screen (scary stuff!!), but then you’re device comes up with a loader app installed, allowing you to move forward and load and configure Cydia.

So, after all the sweating and heartburn, it took me no more than 10 minutes to jailbreak with greenpois0n.

Note: at present, these jailbreaks only have a Windows installer, so if you don’t have a Microsoft system sitting around, you’ll want to wait until the Mac version is released. There are reports out there that you can run the jailbreak through a Mac with a Windows virtual instance — that didn’t work for me. I’ve got a MacBook running VMWare Fusion and a Windows 7 partition and the jailbreak would not complete; it just hung in DFU mode (go figure).

In summary folks, do this at your own risk. True, the technology and testing behind taking advantage of the various exploits within Apple’s iDevice security is pretty solid; however, going through the steps on a device that you may rely on for much, if not all, of your mobile and social communication could cause a bit of anxiety.

That disclaimer in place, if you are still inclined to jump into the land o’ jailbreak, you can get limera1n here and greenpois0n here.

Update: a linux installer was just released for greenpois0n.

A new breed of iPad accessories is coming to reality, and not just your typical leather or nylon cases either.

We users of the iPad love our iDevice, but the lack of an actual keyboard is manifesting into a real issue — especially for us digital publishers that use the iPad to write our blog posts.

Coming soon, from the good folks at Kensington, is the new KeyFolio case that has a handy built-in Bluetooth QWERTY keypad.

Yes we’re turning the iPad into a makeshift netbook, but it’ll be pretty…and, instead of carrying around the Apple external Bluetooth keyboard, this will be a self-contained unit.

The KeyFolio will run on its own power supply and, according to Kensington, will power itself for months from a single charge. That I’ll have to see to believe.

One drawback — you can’t charge your iPad and KeyFolio with one connection since the KeyFolio has its own microUSB jack.

The Kensington KeyFolio is expected to hit retail stores in October and cost $100.

In my opinion, the team over at ClamCase better get it in gear or Kensington is going to steal all their potential business. Check here to see what ClamCase is proposing as a solution.

Photo Credit: DVice