Tell Your iPhone To Make You A Sandwich With Siri

Published on February 5, 2010 in Blog. 0 Comments

Siri Assistant is a new iPhone app/service that has a lot of people talking. I first heard Scoble get all excited about it a couple of weeks ago, and Adam Duvander was telling me about it last night. By the time I got home from the Ignite Portland 8 talk selection meeting last night, it was in the App Store, so I’ve been playing with it. It’s definitely worth grabbing (it’s free), and time will tell if it becomes truly useful, or just a very novel idea.

Siri combines a couple of cool features – speech to text by Nuance, the folks who power the awesome Dragon Dictation iPhone app – and a bunch of search and service APIs, like OpenTable. The result is an app you can tell things like “book me a table for two at an italian restaurant in Portland tomorrow night” and it will come back with a selection of restaurants and times that are available. Simply tap on the time, and your table is booked.

You can also look up movie times (“Where is Avatar playing tonight?“), call a taxi, ask for the weather in any city, or find out more about people (“Who is Josh Bancroft?“). The potential for some really cool/clever easter eggs is there, though I haven’t found any yet. This may just be wishful thinking.

Alas, there is one command that I’ve always wanted my iPhone to obey, and even the very cool Siri app falls short here:

Get Your Last Minute Apple Tablet Predictions In Now

Published on January 26, 2010 in Blog. 1 Comment

Update: I’ve scored my predictions below against reality, striking out ones I missed. Not to brag, but the only major items I missed were the keyboard dock (I didn’t think it would have one) and the name. Not too shabby! :-)

The hype is almost overwhelming now. Even for me. You’ve read up on what all the big thinkers have to say about an Apple Tablet device. If you’re like me, you’ve had endless conversations with friends and acquaintances about which rumors you think are true, and which ones aren’t.

You might as well formalize your predictions. I found this awesome PDF Prediction Score Card that David Weiss made, which you can print out, mark whether you think all the predictions are Correct or Incorrect, and then grade yourself after the announcement.

But printing stuff out on dead trees? Ugh. Isn’t there an app for that? Turns out there is. Weiss’ iPhone app Prediction just hit the App Store ($2.99, but worth it IMO) lets you make your own call on predictions for not only Apple’s event, but other upcoming tech stuff like MWC and Google I/O (all stuff I happen to be interested in). The interface is great, and auto-grading after an event takes place is much better than checking your own work on a paper list.

Prediction iPhone App

This time tomorrow, we’ll all know what the deal is. Time for the last few breathless hours of speculation.

This is almost bigger than Christmas for me. My nerves can hardly take it. :-)

For the record, here are my predictions (emailed/exported from the Prediction app). I’ll grade them after the event.

(stricken text means I got my prediction wrong):

Apple Tablet Supports Flash: Wrong

Tablet Has Textbook Content: Partially Correct

Tablet Dev API Based on Cocoa Touch: Correct

Tablet Size Between 10 and 11 Inches: Partially Correct

Tablet Plays Video Content: Correct

Tablet Has Docking Mechanism: Partially Correct

Indie Content for Tablet: Correct

Tablet Book, Newspaper and Magazine Content: Correct

Tablet Runs Existing iPhone Apps: Correct

Apple Tablet SDK Announced: Correct

Tablet Has Cell Phone Internet Capability: Correct

Apple Tablet Announced: Correct

Tablet Plays Music Content: Correct

Tablet OS Is a New OS: Correct

Tablet Has TV Content: Partially Correct

Tablet Has a Tactile Keyboard: Wrong

Tablet Apps Only from the App Store: Correct

Apple Tablet Has Hardware Keyboard Option: Wrong (it does, in fact, have a hardware keyboard dock, as well as Bluetooth keyboard support)

Tablet Has Built-In Camera: Correct

Tablet Ships in March 2010: Correct

Tablet named iPad: Wrong

Tablet Priced Around $1000: Partially Correct

Tablet named iBook: Wrong

Tablet named Apple iTablet: Wrong

iPhone OS 4.0 Announced: Correct (it was version 3.2, not 4.0)

T-Mobile Support for iPhone or Tablet: Wrong

Verizon Support for iPhone or Tablet: Wrong

New iLife and iWork Suites Released: Correct (only new iWork for iPad)

Bing on the iPhone: Wrong

Tablet named Apple tablet: Wrong

Paint App on Tablet: Partially Correct (the Brushes demo was awesome, but it’s 3rd party)

Tablet named Canvas: Correct (missed this one!)

Tablet named iSlate: Wrong

AT&T Exclusive Contract for iPhone Ends: Wrong

Tablet named iGuide: Wrong

Touch Screen Macs: Wrong

Apple Announces an iTunes Web App: Wrong

Panorama of the madness at Out of This World Pizza and Play

Published on January 23, 2010 in Blog. 1 Comment

This place is AWESOME. A giant warehouse full of big playthings, tables and couches for parents, pizza, ice cream, and even wifi. And they have gluten-free pizza.

It’s kind of out in the middle of nowhere, north of Highway 26 off Cornelius Pass Rd. And it’s a zoo on Saturday night. But highly recommended if you have small kids.

Photo is an Autostich panorama made if seven or so shots on my iPhone 3GS.

The Perplexus – Awesome Brain Toy

Published on January 14, 2010 in Blog. 0 Comments

I asked for (and got) a Perplexus puzzle sphere for Christmas. I had thought I’d bring it to work, as a companion to the Rubik’s 360 I keep on my desk (it’s a great conversation starter, and fun to play with while I’m on phone meetings – shh! :-) . But the Perplexus has become so popular with everyone at home (even 3yo Gabe, who does surprisingly well with it once you get him started) that I don’t dare take it to work for fear of angering Emma, Gabe and Rachel.

What is a Perplexus? It’s like one of those marble labyrinth toys, where you twist and turn to move a steel bearing along a path. Except it’s in 3D, and completely encased inside a 10 inch plastic sphere. The insides of it look like colorful plastic brain matter, and it’s lots of fun to play with. I first heard about it in Make magazine, where they did a story on its creator, Michael McGinnin, and the giant-sized “Superplexuses” he creates (I WANT one of those!). BoingBoing also wrote about it (again) recently.

Here’s a video of 6yo Emma playing with it and explaining it. Watch to the end to see her highly advanced technique. :-)

The Perplexus is available at ThinkGeek, and you can also now pick it up (a little cheaper) at Amazon.com (affiliate link). If you like brain exercise toys, you should definitely pick one up.

My Thoughts on the Fabled Apple “iSlate” Tablet

Published on January 5, 2010 in Blog. 2 Comments

I’m trying to avoid writing about rumors and hype these days. There is plenty of that to go around, and I don’t need to tell you where to find it. I don’t have any facts, only opinions, and there’s really one main idea that I want to share here, sprinkled among the following posts. Go read them now, or save them for later when your brain can chew on them. There’s a lot to think about. They’re all interrelated, so read them in order, and form your own conclusions. :-)

These posts represent the best thinking I’ve read recently about how an Apple tablet device could potentially change personal computing. Besides the baseline gadget lust that such a device certainly inspires, there’s a bigger potential here. Because of the way the iPhone has changed my computing life (and computing *IS* my life), the idea of a big leap in the model of how we use computers is appealing and exciting to me. And if anyone can do it, Apple can.

Bring it on, Steve. Pretty please? :-)

Update: A great article from Andy Ihnatko along the same lines. Long and worth the read.

Merry Christmas Chaos!

Published on December 25, 2009 in Blog. 1 Comment

Hope your house is in as much merry chaos as ours this morning. :-)

Merry Christmas and wishes for an awesome New Year from the Bancrofts! :-)

Free Speech to Text on iPhone – Dragon Dictation

Published on December 8, 2009 in Blog. 0 Comments

Hey everybody this is Josh. Today’s cool iPhone app pick is Dragon Dictation. It’s free in the App Store and it has text to speech dictation. I wrote this post almost entirely by talking to my iPhone. Very little editing was required – mostly punctuation, because I was lazy and didn’t speak it. You talk to the phone and it will send the words to be transcribed to a server and send it back to your phone, so it requires a net connection. It works very very quickly and very very well. Check it out to the app store. It’s definitely worth downloading and playing with, at the very least.

Take Better iPhone 3GS Photos with TrueHDR

Published on December 3, 2009 in Blog. 0 Comments

(This sounds like an ad, but it’s not. I have no affiliation with the makers of the TrueHDR iPhone app, other than as a satisfied and impressed user. :-)

If you’re a photography nerd, you know that HDR stands for High Dynamic Range – where you take multiple photos, some with the bright areas exposed correctly (which makes the darker areas underexposed, really dark and unviewable), and some with the dark areas exposed correctly (which makes the bright areas overexposed and “blown out” – usually pure white), then combine the multiple shots in software to get wider “dynamic” exposure range than you could otherwise. It’s a cool effect, and so far, I haven’t found a good way to do it on the iPhone.

There are lots of “HDR” apps in the App Store, but all the ones I’ve looked at, like “HDR for Free”, don’t actually do multiple exposure HDR – they just tinker with the exposure and saturation levels to produce an effect like HDR. They fake it, in other words. Then, over the weekend, I stumbled across an app recommended by TUAW called TrueHDR, that actually does HDR processing – you take multiple shots, one correctly exposed for the brightest area, one for the darkest, then it combines them. It was $1.99, so I sprung for it, and I’ve been quite impressed with the results.

Check out the shots above – I noticed the sky was really colorful this morning on my way to work, so I took the first two shots (light and dark), then merged them into a nice HDR image with TrueHDR. Pretty nifty, eh? I never would have been able to capture all that color in just one shot on the 3GS camera. I also used it to take the photo of the Monoprice $15 iPhone battery in my last post. Even though it was only on my desk, the photo came out looking better than a single shot would have, in my opinion.

Be aware that, because it requires the ability to take multiple shots of the same thing with different exposures, it will only work with the camera on the iPhone 3GS (where you can change the focus and exposure by touching a specific area), though it says it will work with photos from your photo library, if you wanted to load them from another source on an iPhone, 3G, or iPod touch. Also note that it does align the pictures if they’re not exactly the same (which is going to happen if you’re not using a tripod, and who uses a tripod with their iPhone?), which is a nice touch.

So, TrueHDR has earned a spot on the page of photography and imaging apps that I keep on my iPhone 3GS. Do you have any great photo apps, tips, or tricks to share? How do *you* do HDR on the iPhone. Let me know in the comments, on Twitter, etc. I’m always on the lookout for nifty new apps! :-)

Update: Here’s another (blurry) one I took on the way out of work last night:

Another TrueHDR iPhone 3GS Image

Monoprice iPhone Battery – Best $15 You Can Spend

Published on November 30, 2009 in Blog. 10 Comments

Monoprice.com (source of dirt cheap cables – seriously, don’t pay full price for cables. I have no affiliation with them, other than a happy customer) has had a $15 external 2200mAh iPhone/iPod battery for a while now. I’ve seen it, and kind of steered clear of it, because I was uncertain of the quality. But then I saw a couple of reviews (at TUAW and Minimal Mac) that were happy with it, so I took the plunge. I also picked up two iPod cables, two USB AC adapters, and 2 12V car USB adapters in the same order. The total price was about $23. :-)

The stuff arrived last week, just before the long Thanksgiving weekend, and I had a chance to use the battery pretty extensively, as I spent many an hour at my mother in law’s house playing games and doing other battery draining things on my iPhone 3GS. So what’s the verdict?

This thing is the best $15 you can spend if you own an iPhone. Period.

The battery capacity is 2200mAh, which is about twice the iPhone’s internal capacity, so you can charge it up (about) twice. You can also attach the battery and charge and use at the same time. The connection is the standard iPod/iPhone connector, so it will work with any device or charger that has one. It’s made of glossy, smooth plastic, sort of like the back of the iPhone 3G/3GS (though it’s thicker).

There are tons of other external battery options out there – the Mophie Juice Pack Air is a popular one, at 1200 mAh and $79. But this little cheapie from Monoprice has almost twice the battery capacity at less than a quarter of the price. Most of the time, I find myself in easy reach of a charging source for my iPhone (my desk, the car, etc.), but for the times when I’m not, this little guy is definitely coming with me in my bag or in a pocket. It’ll be a lifesaver for conferences, travel, and other all day events.

If you have an iPhone/iPod, and have ever wished your battery would last just a little bit longer, or are sick of carrying around a charging plug and cable all the time, just to keep your phone running, you should DEFINITELY get one of these. Highly recommended.

Happy Day! Tweetie 2.1 for iPhone is out, with Native Lists, Retweets, Geotagging, and gap detection.

Published on November 29, 2009 in Blog. 0 Comments

The post title almost says it all. I’ve been waiting for this update to hit the App Store ever since Twitter started deploying these new features widely. Now it’s here – go get it from the App Store (free update if you already have Tweetie 2 – the absolute best $2.99 you can spend otherwise).

Huge thanks to Loren “@atebits” Brichter for single handedly raising the bar for developers and users everywhere. You rock! :-)