iOS App Picks 19 Oct 2011

In this episode of the iOS App Picks we demonstrate five applications in 30 seconds each. These apps will keep you entertained, allow you to view worldwide ski resort maps, and share contact information and files easily. To download these apps directly to your iPhone, just click on the title of the application and the iTunes software will automatically launch to the app in the App Store. If you have the free Google Search app installed on your iPhone just snap a picture of the QR-Code using Google Goggles or any other QR-Code scanner that will launch the App Store on youriPhone. 

Bump – A free application



Share files and contact information with other smartphones using Bump. This app is really easy to use, just select what you want to share and Bump the two devices together. If you are sharing between two iPhones you can share apps, music, and more.



Addicting Games – A free application



Addicting Games is exactly that, many Addicting Games. From Achoo to Zombie Burger this app will keep you entertained for hours. Get suggestions to other games you may like and view achievements.


RedLaser – A free application



Scan barcodes, qr-codes, and more with RedLaser. This app will help you save some cash during your next shopping spree. Just scan a barcode and RedLaser will search online and locally for the exact item you are looking for. Many physical retailers are now price matching online prices to help out their customers.



iTrailMaps – A lite and $4.99 full version



With the skiing and snowboard season coming up (in the northern hemisphere) it is a great time to start planning trips. View practically every ski resort map in the world with iTrailMaps. Check to make sure the resort will be either challenging or tame enough for your skill level. With the paid version you can view 3D maps that are much more detailed.



TuneWiki – A free application



TuneWiki is a great app for anyone that enjoys singing, karaoke, or for just trying to decipher what the artist is trying to convey in song. This app will automatically download the lyrics to your currently playing music and will scroll the lyrics along with where the song is. Add lyrics to the TuneWiki database to keep your music and others up to date. Find lyrics by searching or use the music identification tool for music playing around you.

Will Ice Cream Sandwich Run on Older Phones?

With yesterday's announcement of Android 4.0 IceCream Sandwich, one of the big questions in the back of everyone's mind is "Will it work on my phone?"

Great question... but the answer may be a little complex.

(To address the picture above: no, chances are Ice Cream Sandwich isn't going to run on your G1... but if you get it to work, please send us a videoproving otherwise!)

Like we've said in previous articles, Google's Gabe Cohen says Ice Cream Sandwich, the latest version of Android, "theoretically should work for any 2.3 device". That puts the ball squarely in the hands of phone makers and custom ROM developers. Whether or not they get a build together or not will probably be more a political decision than a technical one.

So, let's talk about technical capabilities.

The hardware Ice Cream Sandwich runs on compared to what Gingerbread runs on is a little different. How is ICS going to work on "older" hardware? To answer that, let's look at a couple of the more notable differences.

Hardware Graphics Acceleration

Not all phones that run Gingerbread include full Hardware Graphic Acceleration. That's okay, the newversion of the Android SDK takes care of all that, so developers that want their apps to to take advantage of the added acceleration in ICS simply need to target the new framework. Phones without the super-fancy hardware should still run the apps, just not as fast as they could have if they were using ICS's hardware accelerated code.

Buttonless User Interface

Android-powered smartphones have always had four buttons: home, menu, back, and search (albeit not always in that order). Sometimes the buttons were physical, sometimes capacitive, but always there, and always four.

With the Galaxy Nexus, gone are the physical buttons. Like Honeycomb-powered tablets, the "physical" buttons have been replaced with "virtual" buttons that can be lit up, turned off, changed, hidden, or even relocated to accommodate the orientation of the phone. (I remember when Apple learned the same lesson and changed the "dock" from a non-back-lit, stationary area of the touch-screen to a "floating" dock that was back-lit, able to be customized, and changed location when you rotated your Newton Messagepad 2000. But I digress.)

I suspect older phones will simply add the new "soft button bar" to the bottom of the display, above (or to the side of) the old "physical" buttons. The "old" buttons will continue to work just as they have in the past, they just might be a little redundant.

Zero Shutter-Lag Camera

One of the cool features of the Galaxy Nexus is the new camera app with "zero shutter-lag" -- you cantake pictures as fast as you can press the "shutter" button. Will your older phone be able to do that? Possibly. The camera is made up of two parts, the app itself, and the physical camera hardware. The appwill certainly be capable of snapping pictures as fast as you want. Whether or not the physical hardware will be able to keep up remains to be seen, and will likely vary from one smartphone to another.

Facial-Recognition Screen Unlocker

Again, we don't know for sure, but if your current phone has a front-facing camera, chances are that the new facial-recognition screen-unlocker will work on your phone, too.

Barometer and NFC

I'm running the same version of Android on my T-Mobile G2 (without NFC) as the Nexus S (the first Android-powered phone with NFC built-in). Android runs great, I just don't have any NFC capabilities because I don't have the NFC hardware.

Similarly, ICS should run fine on phones without barometers, they just won't be able to get any barometric pressure readings.

Screen Resolution

ICS is designed specifically for a 16:9, 1280x720 (or 9:16 720X1280, if you prefer) screen. No otherAndroid smartphones have that resolution.

However, not all Android's have the same resolution today, so Google probably thought through the issue of screen size, and the new user-interface elements will probably adapt to your screen's dimensions with little complication.

Everything Else

That should help answer some of your questions regarding the possible differences between ICS running on "old" versus "new" phones.

Did we cover your questions? Did we miss something? If you've got additional questions or want to add your own insight to the conversation, let your voice be heard in the comments below!

Netflix for Android Comes to Honeycomb, Canada, Latin America

After Netflix was updated to support all Froyo and Gingerbread devices, it felt like there wasn't much more to be done so far as extending the app'scompatibility. It had started out with a very short list of approved smartphones, but there have always been ways of running the app unofficially on additional phones, and the officially approved list has been steadily growing up to its current state. Today the app is taking things one step further, adding blanket support for Honeycomb tablets, as well as granting access to users in additional nations.

With this full Honeycomb support, you should be able to now install the app on any Android 3.x device. That's great news, because as much as we love our high-resolution smartphone screens, TVand movies ache to be seen on a display more like a tablet's size.

We've heard that Netflix subscribers in Canada have been able to access videos via the Android app for some time now, but it's apparently never been officially sanctioned, and has been known to spit out error messages complaining about the service not being available in that location. Those concerns are now in the past, with Netflix for Android now OKed for both Canada and Latin America.

Though Netflix doesn't mention it in its blog post announcing the new version, release notes describe the inclusion of closed captioning, as well as support for streams with alternate audio tracks. Netflix 1.5.0 isavailable for download in the Android Market now. 

Get Ice Cream Sandwich's Roboto Font On Your Android Today

It's easy to take fonts for granted, but a huge amount of effort goes into crafting them just-so. A well-designed font is just as readable large as it is small, and the eye should effortlessly be able to distinguish between characters. Maybe that's part of what keeps us from appreciating them - that a font that's doing its job well is one you won't have to pay attention to at all. Rather than let it become an unsung hero, Google's made a point to draw attention to the Roboto font it will be introducing in Ice Cream Sandwich. If you don't want to wait untilyour phone's running Android 4.0 to check out Roboto, the font is available for download now.

It's a little trickier than getting one of the Ice Cream Sandwich wallpapers on your phone, but with a bit of effort you can install Roboto as the default Android font. Obviously, first you'll need the fontfiles, downloadable over at the XDA-Developers forums. The easiest way to then set it as the system-wide font is with an app dedicated to such tasks. One that will work is Font Changer, but be aware that you'll need root access for it to make the needed changes. If you're using that app, you'll need to copy the Roboto files over to its folder on your SD card. Then simply run Font Changer, change the system font, and once your phone reboots you should (hopefully) be enjoying Roboto. 

What Can You Do With a Barometer on a Smartphone?

At last night's Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich announcement we were told that the new flagship phone, the Galaxy Nexus, would include a barometer, and that the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich SDK included all the bits needed for developers to tie into the new sensor.

What's a barometer?

Wikipedia describes a barometer as "a scientific instrument used in meteorology to measure atmospheric pressure." It measures the pressure exerted by the atmosphere above it. This measurement of pressure can be used to forecast short term changes in the weather and can be used to estimate altitude.

Smartphone Application: Weather Forecasting

HTC's Sense UI includes an iconic "clock and weather" widget prominently featured on the homescreen. Other app developers have created similar widgets, such as Beautiful Widgets, pictured below.

These widgets use your smartphone's geo-location information and your Internet connection to retrievelocal weather information (current, high, and low temperatures; and current conditions) for various weather data providers. Using the same information you can get the weather forecast for the next several days.

Augmenting those with real-time, local, barometric pressure readings may allow these types of apps to be even more reactive to changes in the weather.

Currently, I have Beautiful Widgets set to check on the weather every four hours. Checking more frequently can drain your battery and chew up your data. No, it's not much of either, but when added up, over time your data usage could go up (a problem for those not on "unlimited" plans) and your battery life could go down (a problem for all of us).

Imagine this scenario: you're sitting at your desk, perfectly content in your short-sleeved shirt, and want to run to lunch. You check your smartphone and the forecast says you'll have a storm front roll in sometime in the early evening, so you don't worry taking your coat or umbrella. You head out to lunch. Unfortunately, like me, you set your smartphone to update the weather forecast every four hours; it's been three hours since the last update. Since then, that cold-weather front has moved in faster than anticipated. You find yourself caught in a heavy rainstorm with blowing winds that wasn't supposed to arrive until your commute home.

With a barometer built into your phone, and an app which can read its data, your smartphone could have noticed the drop in barometric pressure and alerted you to the change. It could also have triggered a request to update forecast data, saving your battery and data usage by only updating when the weather changed.

If your phone had a barometer in it, and your weather app was programmed to use changed in barometric pressure to trigger an update, perhaps you could have avoided getting caught out in the rain.

Additionally, since a barometer isn't dependent upon a data connection, you could still get "weather change alerts" even when you weren't under a data umbrella. Such as...

Smartphone Application: Altitude

... when you're hiking.

My family and I like to go hiking in the foothills and mountains around us. Last week my son and I hiked several miles each day in unfamiliar territory. We were in a very remote area which was outside not only data coverage, but cellular voice coverage as well.

We used Google's My Tracks to chart our progress while hiking, and so we could see where we were in relation to where we started (in case we got lost). We didn't have any digital maps of the area (again, we had no data coverage), we could only see the line of where we'd walked, but that was useful enough.

On one of our hikes we were approaching 10,000-feet above sea level. The temperature drops pretty quickly when you're up that high, and weather can change quickly -- very quickly. We didn't know we were that high, at the time we thought we were only about 8,800-feet up... 1,200-feet makes a lot of difference.

Since we had the GPS on and recording our track, a quick glance at the data during one of our breaks showed us our true altitude, so we were a little more cautious and aware of the weather, but if we hadn't been recording our tracks we wouldn't have known, and we could have gotten caught in a bad situation.

Since many people turn off the GPS on their phone to conserve battery life (especially when they're not actively using it), someone in a similar situation might not have known, and that bad situation could have become a major problem!

A barometer is a passive sensor (rather than an "active" sensor, like GPS). An app could alert you to your altitude when you approach certain thresholds -- without sucking down your battery like GPS does. Perhaps apps like My Tracks could be updated to include an "altitude trigger" option, which could turn on the GPS to record your location at 50-foot increments of elevation change, saving your batter, but still recording a relatively accurate track.

Since you're wondering...

That day's hike could have gotten bad. We were only around three-miles from the trail-head, but we had climbed over a thousand-feet in elevation, and were still headed up the mountain. We didn't know at the time, but a storm-front was moving in, and the pressure was dropping -- fast. Since there was a mountain in the way, we couldn't see the impending storm-front closing in on us, and at that altitude, we were a lot more exposed than we thought we were.

If we'd have been at the top of the trail when the storm rolled in (or if there had been rain or snow with it), we could have been in trouble.

If one of us had had the Galaxy Nexus with an app running and set to sound an alert when the barometric pressure dropped, we'd have gotten off the mountain a lot faster than we did -- and all without needing any data coverage.

As luck would have it, we got to the bottom of the trail just as the leading edge of the storm was upon us. It brought wind and clouds and sent the temperature down ten-degrees Fahrenheit in a matter of minutes. With clouds blocking the sun and the wind picking up we started to get cold -- but we were safe.

What Else?

What else can you think of that a barometer could be used for on a smartphone? Let your imagination run wild and let us know what you think in the comments!