Tag Archives: app

Gear 4 PocketLoops {Tech Review}

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Technology Review.

Every fancied making your own music but can’t afford the technology? Gear 4’s PocketLoop may be the answer, I reviewed it to find out if you can make sweet music with an iPhone application and a small keyboard.

The PocketLoops is light and relatively small. It is really easy to use and you just pop your iPod touch or iPhone into the dock and download the free PocketLoops application from the App Store, and off you go.

It is very easy to use when you get the hang of it ,and you can make some really good music. When you get to the main screen you will see a 4 x 4 grid that has 16 spaces, four for each instrument, to record different parts of your song. The instruments can be changed just by tapping on them. There is a good selection of instruments including pianos, drum kits, synthesisers and some other bass and dubstep sounds. At the bottom are the remix, speed, stop all and volume buttons. Remixing is one of my favourites, you just turn the loops on or off to include them in your song.

You can also add effects like echo, chorus or distortion via the XY Filter Pad

It has a 25 key keyboard and it uses the battery from your iphone/pod. Luckily it has a low power consumption. It is very easy to record the loops, you just hit the keys on the keyboard. You can record up to 16 different loops.

The Gear 4 PocketLoops allows you to record high quality songs and remixes, it has a well designed keyboard and iOS application. At just under £50 it is well worth the money and tons of fun.

It comes with the following adaptors:

    iPhone 3G / 3GS adapter
    iPhone 4 / 4S adapter
    iPod Touch 3G
    iPod Touch 4G

Life of a Super Sports Blogger

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—Independent bloggers drive sports industry—Fortune 500 companies engage with the citizen journalists —

It’s the ultimate dream for many a football fan. Swapping the nine to five for a career spent posting on a blog about the sport you adore. No editorial limits, no suit, no boss. For Alan Spurgeon and his blog Footy-Boots.com, that dream is reality.

What started as a series of niche articles in 2006, Alan’s blog which focuses primarily on reviews of football apparel now reaches four million people worldwide, three hundred thousand of whom read his words on average every other day. It’s the sort of platform any of the major football brands would pay serious sums to control, but Footy-Boots.com remains independent, relying upon a small team of mostly volunteer staff and freely available publishing technology to engage the fans.

In a year which has seen every major sports brand jump on the social media bandwagon, Alan’s seen a shift in attitude when it comes to dealing with the marketing departments representing the kit he reviews—

“Our job is to review everything we can get hold of and when a product comes with an already established online fan-base that can explain the benefits in our terms, an invitation to meet the people who produce the product and a willingness to engage in feedback, there’s an obvious advantage. For years we struggled away ordering products as soon as we could get hold of them, crawling through the maze of PR departments to get comment or information and then taking the stuff to the field to run it through the paces before posting our opinion online. These days it’s a little different. Whilst we’re still just a couple of lads operating from their laptop, it’s not unusual for us to be invited to meet the people who produce the kit or to go down to the pitch to chat to the premiership players who are wearing it. The biggest names in the world like Nike, adidas and Puma have got used to the fact that if you want to sell your boots to a digital generation, it’s not just the print media and broadcasters you need to engage with celebrity endorsement, it’s the little guys like us. We need data and it’s in their interests to make sure we have it.”

Whilst the manufacturers are falling over themselves to accommodate the ‘super-bloggers’, some team brands have been better than others at adjusting to the social media era. Manchester United and Arsenal rule Facebook with 20million and 7million fans respectively. Arsenal in particular have embraced the digital revolution, recently hosting web chats for up to 2.5million international fans at a time. The players themselves are thrust into this world, somewhat dazed, to play their part. In May this year Rio Ferdinand posted on Twitter “Yesterday I’m signing a few autographs + a guy pulls out his phone + says ‘can you follow me’! A follow is the new autograph!”.

So what does it feel like being taken from your backroom office to the glorious highs of sports stardom? According to Alan, whose site is successful enough to “pay the bills”, some things will never change. “We are now considered de facto I guess in our niche, particularly for the Football Boot Awards we run every year where the public come to us to vote for the product of the year. That’s great and it’s astonishing of course to get to meet your heroes through your work as we have done when premiership players are lined up to take part in things like the awards sessions, but other things remain the same. We’ve not yet been able to get to some of the international product launches, not because of the cost, but because we’re a simple set up, a couple of guys and a few computers, we just wouldn’t be able to take the time for a long flight which would mean being offline for 9 or 12 or 24 hours. We miss out on that sort of stuff. We’re still geeks attached to our umbilical tech.” When asked if they would accept a private flight sponsored by a major sports brand, their reaction is typical of the new generation of citizen journalists— “No way, the fans of the blog would slaughter us. Our greatest asset is being unbiased. You can’t buy our opinion.”

Nobody at Footy-Boots.com has made a dot com million, but the site owners need an income. The key to success might be seen in the addition of sponsors and affiliates on the boy’s website which help to bring in stable financial support whilst they focus on reviewing kit and steering conversation in the forums. “We’re not salesmen, we never have been, never could be. We’re not good at going out there to find sponsors. I’m sure there are plenty of ways the site could make more money, but it’s never been about the money for us so we’re happy to just let a couple of sports shops link through the site as long as we get positive feedback about them. It’s a happy compromise between running a basic blog and being a commercial website.”

As someone who has tested every major boot released since 2006, Alan has a few pointers for those wanting to be on the Christmas list this year and next. “The best boot in the world is only good for one man. Reading our forums (especially the “ask geeks” channel), you know every player has their own strength, speed, accuracy, strength, ability and confidence to take risks on the pitch. No one cleat is going to fit them all. Just like social media has opened up a million different varieties of opinion, the manufacturers of the product are going to have to follow too. Bespoke might be the way to go. I’m sure the technology will exist to let players pick every aspect of their kit through an app very soon.” Which raises an interesting question- what will be the value of celebrity if and when every boot is customised not to the famous foot, but to every man or women on the pitch? There will be bigwigs in PR breathing a sigh of relief in some cases— we all know Football and Twitter don’t always a happy marriage make. Alan has a list of social media disasters on his site to tell that story.

So where next for Alan and his happy team of sports bloggers? “2011 was a great year, we saw some astonishing products hit the pitch and through our relationships with the brands, we felt like we were pretty much front row. We’ll continue to offer a space where your opinion matters and we’ll be bringing that to a climax with this year’s awards which launch online December 5th and we’re expecting tens of thousands of votes again.”

The one difference between this year and last for Footy-Boots.com, a 1765% rise in the number of visits originating from mobile phones. Let’s hope that Nike and co have their iPhone apps in order when voting kicks in.

WHAT DO HARPER BECKHAM, WILLIAM & KATE AND HARRY POTTER HAVE IN COMMON?

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Harper Seven Beckham may have been born into the most famous family in the World, but she now has a new claim to fame after becoming the subject of a list of brand new bingo calls, by Mecca Bingo.

Harper Beckham (number seven), joins Will and Kate (number eight) and Dumbledore (number four) in a brand new list of modern day calls suggested by Meccabingo.com customers, to celebrate Mecca’s 50th Birthday on Wednesday, 19th October.

Since first opening its doors in 1961, the gaming company has evolved to meet the demands of a modern and younger audience. The introduction of online bingo and Mecca’s iPhone and Android apps mean that gaming fanatics can now play their favourite games and win real cash prizes anywhere, at any time.

Whilst bingo calls are not actually used anymore, modernising the traditional calls to reflect today’s culture is a fun way to mark Mecca’s 50th Birthday in a one-off game.

Claire Osborne, head of bingo and games at Meccabingo.com, comments:

“The suggestions we had from our customers were really diverse – from the sublime to the ridiculous – but what we found most interesting was how they reflected modern times and in particular, celebrity culture. For example, it’s no surprise that seven has become ‘Harper Beckham’ given the iconic status the Beckham’s hold on mainstream culture.

“Adele’s popularity is prominent with the title of her début album representing 19. The Harry Potter phenomenon hasn’t escaped either, as the lovable Dumbledore becomes the number four. Of course the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge remain at the height of public consciousness with ‘Will and Kate’ at number eight.”

During the course of the Meccabingo.com Bingo Lingo campaign, a total of 14,835 votes were cast. A selection of the best feature below:

2 Sugars in my brew

4 Dumbledore

7 Harper Beckham

8 Will and Kate

15 Rugby team

17 Driver’s dream

19 Adele

65 Keep on working

69 Sexy time

The brand new calls will make a one-off appearance in selected Mecca Bingo clubs across the UK on Wednesday, 19th October, as part of their 50th Birthday celebrations.

NASA's iPad App Beams Science Straight to Users

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Software and media specialists at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., today released a new iPad app — the NASA Visualization Explorer — that allows users to easily interact with extraordinary images, video, and information about NASA’s latest Earth science research.

Cutting-edge visualization has long been a staple of NASA Earth science and in particular the Scientific Visualization Studio (SVS) at Goddard Space Flight Center. The iPad presented NASA a new and easily accessible way to put stunning and beautiful Earth science visualizations directly in people’s hands.

The app’s science features will include high-resolution movies and stills and short written stories to put all the pieces in context. Most of the movies are simply real satellite data, visualized. Other features will include interviews with scientists or imagery from supercomputer modeling efforts. The app includes social networking interfaces, including links to Facebook and Twitter, for easy sharing of stories.

The application is free to the public and available from the App Store via iTunes.

The app editorial team plans to develop two new science features per week. After publishing an initial batch of six features with the launch, new features will publish to the app on Tuesdays and Thursdays. In the future the app could include occasional stories about the Sun, the other planets in our Solar System, and exotic objects far out in the cosmos.

The Goddard team designed the application essentially as a mobile multimedia magazine. “Its one-of-a-kind content is geared to the general public, students, educators — “anyone interested in the natural world,” said Michael Starobin, a senior producer at Goddard Space Flight Center who spearheaded the app’s editorial direction. “The app will explore stories of climate change, Earth’s dynamic systems, plant life on land and in the oceans — all of the small and large stories captured in data by NASA satellites and then visualized.”

“Science should be accessible to everyone, and visualization reveals the meaning and value of the often intangible, but essential, data delivered by NASA’s research efforts,” Starobin said. “Data visualization makes information immediately visual and understandable when it otherwise might go unnoticed, and the app makes it easy to explore in an engaging, easy-to-consume, thoroughly modern style.”

“The NASA visualization app is the latest step in a rich tradition of content production and application development,” added Project Manager Helen-Nicole Kostis. “With its release, I’m inviting everyone on a journey of scientific knowledge and visual wonder.”

Work began on the NASA Visualization Explorer shortly after Apple released its electronic tablet in April 2010. “We just knew immediately that the iPad provided the perfect platform to showcase NASA science,” said Christopher Smith, the principal designer of the application’s user interface.

Administrators of Goddard’s Inclusive Innovation Program agreed. The pilot program, which Goddard management rolled out last year to support ideas that would advance non-science and non-engineering functions and services, awarded seed funding to the team to develop the concept. “Our evaluation process was rigorous,” said Goddard Chief Technologist Peter Hughes, who administered the program for the center. “This proposal stood out for its immediate utility and potential impact.”

With the one-year funding in hand, the three principal creators assembled a multidisciplinary team of experts from the center’s SVS, one of the nation’s premiere data visualization labs, and the center’s Television and Multimedia Department, which has earned a reputation as one of the federal government’s best media-production departments. “Through our team’s unique talents, I believe we’ve created an application that is worthy of the NASA badge,” Starobin said.

“The heart of NASA data visualization beats at SVS,” Kostis added. “This is where science, data, and storytelling come together.”

To download the app, go to:

http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/nasaviz/index.html

Apple unveils its magazine and newspaper Newsstand.

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iOS 5 is the next version of Apple’s operating system for iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches. At Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference on the 6th June 2011 they announced new features and functions that would become available in this forthcoming release.
Apple explained there are over 200 new features, they then went on to highlight and demonstrate some of the most important, including:

The notification center – changing intrusive push messages and SMS notifications into a subtle alert that doesn’t interrupt your workflow.
iMessage – Apple’s answer to BlackBerry Messenger, an iOS to iOS instant messenger application that lets you continue conversations as you move from device to device.
Reminders – A ‘to-do’ or tasks application, allowing you to set tasks and reminders. Most impressively, the app allows you to anchor them to certain GPS positions, (for example, a reminder to “buy milk” when you walk into your local supermarket).
Some of the other features included native Twitter integration, immediate camera access from the lock screen, a vastly improved Safari browser… but most importantly, the Apple Newsstand.

In the keynote presentation, they explained how magazine readers would be able to locate and purchase their newspaper and magazines from a central newsstand, see new issues from outside the app and have them save offline when they become available.

What they didn’t explain was how publishers can make this possible and how this new functionality can be enabled.

Shortly after the Keynote, they released the Beta version of iOS 5 to developers (at around 23:30 GMT) the staff at Stonewash DD&AG were immediately on the case to learn more about the newsstand to understand how our clients and other publishers might be able to take advantage of the new features made available by Apple.

WHAT IS THE NEWSSTAND?

The newsstand is a central place, where iOS users can access their magazines and newspapers. Unlike iBooks, where book publishers supply “.epub” or similar documents, Newsstand publishers will have to create an iOS application (or adapt their existing app). Think of it like a cross between the shelf seen in the iBooks application and applications folders on the home screen.

To make use of the new features, publishers must invoke the newly added “Newsstand Kit framework”. From what we have been able to understand, some simple settings will help an iPhone or iPad recognise that the app as a magazine or newspaper that belongs in the Newsstand. At this point, instead of placing an icon on the home screen (as other applications currently do) the application will be installed in the Newsstand, the cover of the latest edition will be used as the large-format icon, instead of the small, square icons we currently see in use.

“The outcome is that users will be able to access the latest copy of the magazine at their convenience and in most cases the issue will appear on your reader’s device, saved offline, without them having to action anything manually.”

Making your magazine function efficiently on the Newsstand will require your application and your web servers to interact with one another. When a new edition is available your server will need to send a push message to your reader’s device. This message lets their device know that there is a new issue available and instructs the application to begin downloading the files immediately, these new issue alerts are limited to one per day.

The outcome is that users will be able to access the latest copy of the magazine at their convenience and in most cases the issue will appear on your reader’s device, saved offline, without them having to action anything manually.

The latest cover will already be visible from the device’s home screen and the Newsstand “shelf”. A counter and update message will help notify the user that there is a new issue ready.

HOW CAN THIS HELP YOUR MAGAZINE?

There are a number of potential benefits for publishers who may or may not already be publishing their titles to the iOS platform.

Effects of the news from the WWDC conference (immediate) and the imminent release of iOS 5 this autumn include:

Peaked interest in iOS devices and the app store. Along side every Apple release we have seen a peak in application downloads. The ‘buzz’ and amount of media coverage that surrounds any new Apple product reminds current users all over the world to explore the app store, as well as generates a spike in users that are new to the iOS platform.
Peaked interest in newspapers and magazines on the iPad. The story of “Apple versus publishers” has been well covered and in a number of cases, totally misunderstood. This move by Apple will undoubtedly receive coverage from mainstream media, prompting users to search the App Store and the newly formed newsstand for “Magazines & Newspapers”.
Effects of the Newsstand once available on iOS devices include:

Although it has always been possible (and very simple) to notify users of new editions using Apple’s push messaging system, the newsstand allows users to see the latest cover directly from their home screen.
If a new issue is available to a user (for example, if their subscription is active or (we assume) if the issue is free) it is now possible to download this edition onto the user’s device without them having to action or agree to the download. When the user wants to read the new issue, it will already be saved to their device and won’t be subject to the 200-700mb download (and associated waiting time) that we are seeing in some magazines currently being released.
The “Newsstand Store” is dedicated to magazines and newspapers; publishers won’t be fighting for screen real estate against games, utilities and other applications. The increased visibility should increase the number of downloads.
IS THIS GOOD NEWS FOR PUBLISHERS?

We believe so. The fact that there are new functions and features in iOS 5 that are specifically designed to help make magazines and newspapers more functional, more attractive and easier to use show us that Apple have a genuine interest in making the iOS a useful platform for publishers.

Any apps previously released will continue to function in the same way as before, as far as we can see there are no negative changes or restrictions being put in place, just a suite of new features that benefit your applications.

HOW SOON SHOULD WE LOOK TO MAKE USE OF THESE NEW FEATURES?

As soon as possible, and for two main reasons.

Technology moves quickly, if you spent months and months deciding on whether you would like to make use of these new features, they may become outdated. Apple will undoubtedly continue to develop and improve their operating system and to avoid being behind the times you will need to move quickly.

Apple receives an unprecedented level of media exposure around product launches. iOS 5 – and the new iPhone that will almost certainly follow – will be no exception. A spike in traffic interest and activity in iOS applications has the ability to benefit your brand and its application.

We have worked with clients to help them launch applications and projects alongside the iPad, iPhone 4 and the iPad 2 and in all cases there was a noticeable spike in activity, downloads and revenue.

INTERESTING FACTS FROM THE KEYNOTE

There were some fascinating figures released by Apple in yesterday’s keynote speech. We have summarised them below:

Apple sold 25 million iPads in the first 14 months
Over 130 million books have been downloaded from the iBookstore
There are currently over 425,000 apps on the App Store
Over 90,000 of those apps have been specifically designed for the iPad
There have been over 14 billion app downloads from the App Store since it launched
Apple have paid over $2.5 billion dollars to app developers and publishers
Apple have over 225 million iTunes accounts, all with credit card information and 1-click purchasing enabled

Article from; www.stonewash.co
www.ddag.co.uk

GetJar Gets the Royal Treatment with The Royal Wedding App from ITN Productions

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World’s largest open app store to exclusively distribute The Royal Wedding app ahead of release into the Android market place

As the world waits in anticipation for the Royal Wedding of Prince William of Wales and Kate Middleton, ITN Productions has launched its Royal Wedding video app exclusively on GetJar, the world’s largest open app store. Visitors to GetJar can download the app a week in advance of its release into the Android Market Place.

Royal family enthusiasts can now follow William and Kate’s wedding preparations every step of the way by downloading the Royal Wedding app for Android and iPhone – completely free on GetJar for the next seven days, available at: http://www.getjar.com/mobile/71394/itn-royal-wedding-for-apple-ipad/?f=1

The app, developed to support ITN’s Royal Wedding Channel on YouTube, delivers up to date news and entertaining video content on all things royal in the run up to the big day on April 29th. With hours of video content packed into the app and more being added each day, the app provides a quick and entertaining way to keep up to date with the nation’s favourite couple.

Miguel Tatay, Head of Mobile at ITN Productions, said: “We wanted to reach the largest possible audience and make the app open and available to everyone. As the world’s largest open app store, GetJar was the obvious choice to launch and distribute The Royal Wedding app.”

Patrick Mork, CMO of GetJar commented: “We’re thrilled to be able to offer The Royal Wedding app exclusively on GetJar. The Royal wedding is the talk of the town and downloading this app will allow everyone to feel part of it. We expect this is going to be extremely popular and are delighted to be able to make this app free to consumers on GetJar”.