Rethinking My Apps and Home Screen

minimalmac:

This is a good example of one method to really think hard about the apps you are using, ones you could be using better, and ones you really don’t need to use at all.

Good read, and got me thinking.

Have now freed up 3gb off my iPhone. Dumping my ‘nice to have’ apple alternatives like Tempo and Mailbox, but have kept Forecast as I love the 7 day satellite animation.

Culled a number of games that were there for the kids, but they dont seem to play them anyway - of course I had to keep Minecraft PE for them tho!

screengeek:

SMART ACCESSORIES for SMARTPHONES

A doctor is needed on a plane to save a man from a heart attack. He whips out his smartphone and adds an accessory which turns his iPhone into an EKG which allows him to properly diagnose and save the man’s life. 

This video “notemation” highlights the true disruptive nature of the smartphone when combined with the new accessories coming out on the market. Other accessories discussed in this “notemation” include:

  1. Credit card swipers
  2. Perodmeters
  3. Plant watering 

My favourite quote: “This is democratizing what used to only be the domain of experts”

I highly recommend watching this 2.5 minute video!

Video originally from Frog Design

via nopixelpushing

(via futuretechreport)

Source: frogdesign.com

Amazon announce the availability of the AWS Console for iPhone! The app summarizes the status of your EC2 instances, CloudWatch alarms, total service charges, and AWS Service Health. You can view all of your EC2 instances, filter and search for a specific instance, view instance details, and stop or reboot an instance. You can also filter and search for CloudWatch alarms and view CloudWatch metrics to monitor the health of your resources. As with the web-based management console, sign-in is as simple as entering your AWS or IAM credentials. (via Amazon Web Services Blog: AWS Management Console for iPhone)
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Amazon announce the availability of the AWS Console for iPhone! The app summarizes the status of your EC2 instances, CloudWatch alarms, total service charges, and AWS Service Health. You can view all of your EC2 instances, filter and search for a specific instance, view instance details, and stop or reboot an instance. You can also filter and search for CloudWatch alarms and view CloudWatch metrics to monitor the health of your resources. As with the web-based management console, sign-in is as simple as entering your AWS or IAM credentials. (via Amazon Web Services Blog: AWS Management Console for iPhone)

Source: aws.typepad.com

SRI International, the Silicon Valley research institute that developed Siri, is once again dipping its toe into the virtual personal assistant pool. On Wednesday it revealed it has spun off a new company called Tempo AI, which is using SRI’s artificial intelligence technology to create a smart calendar app for the iPhone that can infer relevant information from a user’s address book, e-mail, and even daily habits. Tempo’s app is available free in the iTunes store (via Tempo AI - Tempo Smart Calendar)
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SRI International, the Silicon Valley research institute that developed Siri, is once again dipping its toe into the virtual personal assistant pool. On Wednesday it revealed it has spun off a new company called Tempo AI, which is using SRI’s artificial intelligence technology to create a smart calendar app for the iPhone that can infer relevant information from a user’s address book, e-mail, and even daily habits.

Tempo’s app is available free in the iTunes store

(via Tempo AI - Tempo Smart Calendar)

Source: tempo.ai

The Belkin WeMo Switch, lets you turn electronic devices on or off from anywhere inside—or outside—your home. The WeMo Switch uses your existing home Wi-Fi network to provide wireless control of TVs, lamps, stereos, and more. Simply download the free WeMo app, plug the switch into an outlet in your home, and plug any device into the switch. You’ll be able to turn that device on or off using your iPhone or iPad. You can even set schedules for your devices and control them remotely using a mobile Internet connection. You can also add additional switches to your home to control more devices. (via WeMo Switch | App Enabled Accessories | Mobile Accessories | Products | Belkin USA Site)
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The Belkin WeMo Switch, lets you turn electronic devices on or off from anywhere inside—or outside—your home. The WeMo Switch uses your existing home Wi-Fi network to provide wireless control of TVs, lamps, stereos, and more. Simply download the free WeMo app, plug the switch into an outlet in your home, and plug any device into the switch. You’ll be able to turn that device on or off using your iPhone or iPad. You can even set schedules for your devices and control them remotely using a mobile Internet connection. You can also add additional switches to your home to control more devices. (via WeMo Switch | App Enabled Accessories | Mobile Accessories | Products | Belkin USA Site)

(via bearfarming)

Source: belkin.com

taitems:

Great concept. Be sure to watch the video as the text just doesn’t do it justice!

simurai:

Flick Scrolling

You might wanna watch the video above, but in short: When scrolling content on a touch-screen, instead of letting momentum stop the scrolling, you can decide exactly where it should stop. It stops at the point where you flicked it.

It would be great for things like books, blogs, timelines or anywhere where you don’t fly over, but continuously wanna “move forward”. Kinda like paging but within and long scroll. Some apps have a page up/down feature, but I don’t really use it because it moves always the whole height and might cut off a picture or so. With this “flick scrolling” you can decide to where it should move to. The last paragraph or beginning of a picture.

Flick Scroll illustration

Why not just use pages or cards? Yes, that works sometimes, but not always, especially not when you have no control over the content. iA wrote a good post about it: Scroll or Card? With flick-scrolling you get the joy of “card flipping” without the cards.

Here the two demos from the video so you can try it out (only tested on iOS).

Book demo

Timeline demo

Warning: I’m not really a programmer so the demo is just a hack to demonstrate how it could work. Would need some improvements. And of course, performance would be better if it would be implemented natively.

One thing I’m not sure about.. there is the possibility that you intend to do a flick scroll but end up doing a normal scroll or vice versa. You can judge for yourself in the demos. Maybe the detection could be further optimized or here some other possibilities (Let me know if you can think of more).

  • Use a two-finger scroll. But then you can’t use just your thumb which makes it not that useful.
  • Split up the screen into two areas, for example left for normal scroll and right for flick-scroll.

Credits: Demos use the iScroll4 library and in the timeline demo, the “scrollToElement” feature is used, which is a pretty cool one.

Source: simurai