App Review: SnatchTest

isashach — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 13:26:09 +0000

What happens if you want to controll your computer from your couch, but your mouse doesn’t work that far away? Well if you have a iTouch or iPhone, there are many “Mouse”, or even “Keyboard” apps in the appstore, but all of them cost money. However, there is one app, SnatchTest, which is completely free! To controll your computer with it, all you have to do is install a super simple software onto your pc from the developers website, and connect your computer.
As a splash screen for this app you see the trackpad, which can be a little confusing because it is still not configured to work with your pc.

After the splash screen is gone, you don’t notice much chage, unless you have the app already configured, in which case you will be able to start controlling your pc/mac immediately. However, when first run, you must go to the settings (the red “i” icon at the bottom) to configure. If everything is working properly and the Snatch Server is running, you should see your computers’ name:

After selecting your computer, you will be prompted to input the password, if you chose to use on on the server, and then you’re good to go. However, I could not connect this software to my computer with a password, so I dissabled it.

However, I could not connect this software to my computer with a password, so I dissabled it – and I could instantly connect to my computer.

Now the “i” at the bottom will turn green, and you can use the trackpad just like you would use on any laptop. There are also some settings that you can change, such as the inertia (it is very annoying, so I disabled it), the speed and the position of the left button.

As you can see here, I am using my (still broken) iPhone to browse through the blog

App Pros
+Only free mouse app in appstore
+Simple to set up
+Quickly connects to laptop, even after loosing connection
+Very responsive, most of the time you feel that you are using a real mouse
+The software plays the “Device Connected/Disconnected” sound when the device connects/disconnects
+If everything works properly, you can controll your pc within 1 second of turning on the app!

App Cons
-It drops the connection after the device auto locks, if WiFi connection lost, it takes a while to connect.
-The password feuture didn’t work for me
-No scroll, right click and no keyboard (but after all, this is a free mouse app!)

Conclusion
Very nice app, I recomend it to anyone looking for a free mouse app. The simplicity was awesome, the app was fluid, fast and most importantly simple!

Appleblog APT repo

petike215 — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 15:17:06 +0000

Soon we will have a nice repository with the most necesary and usefull apps in it for the newbies.

Also we are planning to move to a self hosted .net or .com server where we would have a more nicer blog.

Tagged: blog, news

App review: WordPress

petike215 — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 11:49:42 +0000

Our blog runs on WordPress and if I want to write a post from my iPod touch what can I do? I can use the WordPress app from the AppStore developed by Automattic Inc. It is compatible with any self-hosted or other WordPress blogs. Our blog is hosted on WordPress.com and the app works great.

Starting the app you will see a very nice and simple splash screen.

When the app is started all comments from the blog are shown and they can be deleted or the unaproved one can get aproved. On the botom there are three tabs “Comments”, “Posts” and “Pages”.

Swithing to Posts all the posts and drafts are shown where you can edit them or create a new one by tapping the small icon on the top-right.

When editing or creating a post you can set the title, tags, categories and the post itself. On the botom there are five icons “Write” where you can write the post, “Comments” where you can see the comments received to the current post, “Photos” here you can put photos to the post from saved photos camera roll or by taking a new photo. “Preview” here you can preview the whole post with the theme is supported and finally “Settings” where you can set the publish date optionally a password and you can set on or off resizing the photos.

On the “Pages” tab on the main screen you can create, edit or delete pages of the blog just like in the “Posts” section.

I consider the WordPress app a very good and reliable app with a very good designed look.

iPhone/iPod Touch dock from LEGO bricks

petike215 — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 20:06:18 +0000

Surfing the internet I saw a few dock from LEGO bricks. I thought that I don’t have any LEGOs anymore but searching in my room I found some. After that I started building a dock, I worked for 1 hour and I finished it. Here are the results:

New Apple laptops in the first part of 2010?

petike215 — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 13:46:14 +0000

Intel confirmed that on 7th January it will present the new Arandale-codenamed processors, Core i3, Core i5 and the Core i7 all for mobile devices.

The company said that it started to ship the new products to the manufacturers. We can speculate that the MacBook Pro will have one of the new CPUs .

Need for Speed: Shift is out

petike215 — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 19:45:04 +0000

Yes, as you can see in the AppStore, the NFSS is out for iPod Touch and iPhone. You can buy it for 7,99€.

I think that it has a much better gameplay. You can set the controls in four different way: Rookie, Expert, Custom and Professional. In the custom submenu you can turn on or off the steering assist, the auto brake and the racing line. You can also swich the transmission to manual or auto. These settings are a big progres from the NFS: Undercover.

Some screenshots:

Apple, the Brand of the Decade

petike215 — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 16:13:26 +0000

AdweekMedia named Apple the brand of the decade. Adweek says that Apple received the title thank to Steve Jobs who named Apple “the embodiment of a living, breathing person.” In November Jobs was named “The CEO of the year” by the Forbes magazine.

From October 2001, Apple sold over 220 millions of iPods so Adweek named “Product of the Decade”. Two of Apple’s ads are represented on the list, with the “Get a Mac” ads winning “Campaign of the Decade” and “Silhouettes” winning “Out-of-Home Ad of the Decade.”

Source: AppleInsider

1011 apps deleted from AppStore

petike215 — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 15:01:14 +0000

More then 1000 apps (1% of AppStore) was deleted from the AppStore because of review scam. All the apps were from Molinker, a chinese developer.

SCW, a reader of iPhoneography blog, concluded that Molinker had been using its promo codes to write five star reviews. All reviews were short and disjointed style and the reviewers had just write reviews of Molinker apps.

An e-mail was sent to Phil Schiller:
“I would like to highly suggest to take a deep look into not only the ‘reviewers’ but I will almost bet that all of these users redeemed ‘Promo Codes’ for these apps in order to only access the US app store & publish these endless slew of fake postings. All to increase the developers ratings, status, sales & ultimately have a pay-off when potential customers see such high ratings & then just buy the apps.”

On sunday Schiller said that all the apps and reviews were removed from the AppStore.

What’s on Phil Schiller’s iPhone?

petike215 — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 13:26:01 +0000

If you want to know what apps are using Apple’s chief marketing exec, Phil Schiller on his iPhone you are in the best place.

Here is the list:

Shazam
CNN.app
Facebook
MLB.com at Bat
NBA Game Time
ESPN ScoreCenter
Eliminate
geoDefense
Best Camera

You can guess that he knows all of the news and sport scores.

I better would like to see Steve Jobs iPhone.

Poll: Which you think is the Apple product of year?

petike215 — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 19:42:06 +0000

Go to the current post!

As you can observe there is a new section on the sidebar of the blog: Poll.
In this section you will find the curent poll.
Until the end of this year the question is “Which you think is the Apple product of the year”. Please vote.

During these weeks there will be made several minor changes on the blog. A little christmas “feel”.