News, Reviews and more from Australia's Macintosh Authority
News, Reviews and more from Australia's Macintosh Authority
Microsoft launched Bing in 2009 in a bold but foolhardy effort to unsettle—if not actually unseat—Google’s domination of the search engine market. Microsoft, ever the scrappy underdog, unleashed a clever advertising campaign that prescribes Bing as a remedy for search overload. For the low, low price of $US100 million ($A110m) on marketing, Microsoft captured about 10 percent of the search audience in its first nine months. Not bad.
The casual consumer may be forgiven for browsing Apple’s App Store in a near constant state of bewilderment. With more than 100,000 applications for sale, many of which perform similar (at times identical) functions, it’s inevitable that some apps are going to have confusingly similar names.
Stan Miasnikov’s WritePad Pro is a powerful word processing and note-taking app for the iPhone and iPod touch that incorporates three separate apps: WritePad Affairs, WritePad Notes and WritePad Events. Oddly, the developer’s PhatNotes, a popular app for Windows-based PDAs that uses the WritePad text editor, is not yet available for the iPhone. But that’s more of an observation than a complaint. Fact is, apart from some quibbles and a few trade offs, WritePad Pro is a very fine personal organisational tool.
I can’t think of too many iPhone apps I can operate blind. And I’m not certain SoGeeky Software would approve of its app being used quite that way. After all, SoGeeky’s FlickTunes is designed so you can control the music on your iPhone or iPod touch without taking your eyes off the road, whether you’re driving, biking or jogging—in other words, with your eyes wide open.
OOO Gameprom, the makers of the popular Wild West Pinball, returns with another pinball adventure.
Yes, of course, you can use your iPhone like a Palm or a BlackBerry, upon which people have written whole political treatises and entire novels. You can create and share documents, too, including spreadsheets. An app such as Documents To Go will even let you work with Microsoft Word and will support Excel eventually.
All models (both Wi-Fi and 3G) of the iPad tablet will be available in Australia in late April, Apple Australia announced today. This is just a few weeks after the Wi-Fi ...
This morning Apple released a new version of its iPhone SDK for developers. iPhone SDK beta 2 includes Interface Builder, a component of Apple’s development tools that lets developers create the interface for their applications. That seems to be the only major change in the latest build, according to the SDK’s read me, which continues to list some known issues. Apple says “this second beta is known to be incompatible with installation folders other than the default /Developer.” Given the importance of UI on the Mac, Interface Builder is a pretty critical tool in the development process, and some developers had chosen to hold off on their efforts until the SDK was revised. Apple unveiled the iPhone SDK at a special event earlier this month, allowing developers to begin building applications for the iPhone and iPod touch. Several high-profile companies have already jumped onboard, demoing their applications at the event. Highlighting the demos was AOL with a native AIM client; other applications from Electronic Arts, Salesforce.com, and Apple were also shown.
