Lightning Reviews are back with a flash (get it?). Today’s review: a review of Absolute Fitness ($14.99 in the App Store) by smileyboy. Smileyboy will receive a 25% off coupon to our iPhone Accessories Store. Want to win just such a coupon yourself? Find out how here. The folks at the store tell us that their selection of iPhone 3G cases is really ramping up now — just be sure to select what kind of iPhone you have in the upper-left to ensure compatibility.
One of my favorite things to do is to workout. I love staying in shape and using technology to do it. Before the iPhone, there were various Palm and WM apps that I would use. The process became very tedious. Sometimes the device would reset, the programs were incomplete at times and so on.
I stared using the iPhone and I went back to my notebook and a pencil at the gym, because there were no apps. That is until the 2.0 software and the AppStore came out. The first app I tried was Fit 1.0. I can’t even begin to explain how incomplete this app is. I began another search. I found Absolute Fitness.
David Friedman writes in to let us know he’s thrown his hat into the ‘This is how I think Apple should implement cut-and-paste’ ring. His idea is simple, intuitive, and doesn’t look to interfere with the current magnifying glass insertion point UI.
Here it is in a nutshell — when you have the magifying glass up, there’s a button you can press to toggle the various things you need for cut and paste — select, cut, copy, and paste. David recommends that the options shown would be contextual based on whether or not you have anything in your clipboard. When you’re in a text-entry field, that toggle button would appear in place of the space bar area at the bottom, while areas with text that lack text entry (like Safari) would need an unobtrusive button to appear when in the text-selection mode.
All in all, we like it.
No convoluted finger gymnastics
No trying to remember how many fingers you need to use for a given action
Compatible with the current UI. In fact, it’s consistent and keeps the current text-selection metaphor of the UI intact. It just adds to it.
Point your iPhone to http://translate.google.com to check out the new, iPhone-optimized version of the translation service from Google. Pretty slick, eh? It’s the full Google-translate, including all of the languages you’d find there.
Nice stuff, but there’s one issue: Roaming charges while abroad are steeper than the west face of K2. Google’s not fixing this by saving all of your translation searches right there on the page. Theoretically, you could punch in all your important phrases from your hotel’s WiFi (or from the comforts of home) and then as you travel about just be sure, double sure, that you don’t close that tab. Or visit any sites that might crash Safari.
Disappointing. Disgusting. Shocked. Offended. You pick the negative emotion and we’re pretty much feeling it right now. I mean, how could they, right? How could Virgin Mobile Canada stoop so low…
What? Oh, you thought we meant the blatantly misogynistic, awkwardly pandering, positively Neaderthal-eque pseudo-sexual advertising that rankles the puritanical roots of Americans but barely raises an eyebrow across the pond in Europe?
Yeah, if Fake Steve were still around, he’d be all over this. Might even suggest who to call for a little competitive escalation.
All we can say is for shame Virgin Mobile Canada. For. Shame…
It’s time for iPhone App Avalanche 4 and the avalanches are increasing in size and intensity as the App Store grows! There’s more new apps to showcase and plenty of free stuff as well. Pull up a chair, hook up your iPhone, and start downloading! Read on for App Avalanche 4!
Purportedly one of the eight [redacted] people who bought I Am Rich has gone all Paris with the video making, and decided to show the rest us more than maybe we needed to really know about the $999 proof that P.T. Barnum was right — again.
And no need to hurry on that hacked version either, b’okay?
MacBox, the developer of PhoneSaber, has given word that they’ve had to pull the app from iTunes after a request from THQ wireless. The chat: friendly. The news: THQ has the rights to Star Wars IP on mobiles. The result: MacBox had to pull the app.
That’s the bad news. Here’s the awesome news. THQ is going to work with MacBox to make PhoneSaber not only official, but better with actual ‘canon’ sound effects. MacBox is hoping the app will remain free, perhaps in a promotional capacity for the actual THQ game, The Force Unleashed.
Calvin and Hobbes ties with Bloom County as my all-time favorite strip cartoon. Two Xmas’ ago, my friends bought me the fancy collected edition and I spent a week pouring over it. Killer imagination. Killer.
And while notorious recluse and rights reserver Bill Watterson would probably unleash all kinds of fury at the Apple-based, real-world intruding, Silicon Valley send-up, Calvin and Jobs, for those who follow the tech industry, it’s unique combination of nostalgia and “inside baseball” humor is compelling.
There is no-unified IT plan vis-a-vis applications; each has their own set of servers, IT practices and release scenarios. Developers do testing, load testing and infrastructure planning, all of which is implemented by someone else. There’s no unified monitoring system. They use Oracle on Sun servers for the databases and everything has its own SAN storage. They do not use active Oracle RAC; it is all single-instance, on one box, with a secondary failover. Apparently they are putting web servers and app servers on the same machines, which causes performance problems.
John Gruber retorts, with the US’ #1 online music retailer firmly in his corner:
But the iTunes Store does gangbuster traffic and has a terrific track record for uptime. The message I read from yesterday’s reorg that put MobileMe under Eddy Cue (Apple’s VP for iTunes) is that MobileMe could and should be as responsive and reliable as the iTunes Store.
The crazy thing is, MobileMe should have been an iTunes-learned breeze for Apple in terms of meeting service levels, given their pedigree. But then iTunes uses WebObjects (which I believe is old school Java-based) and MobileMe uses SproutCore (which is all dressed up in Ajax-y 2.0 objectivity), and the pretty much disastrous July 11th launch, which took down both iTunes iPhone activation, and slammed the MobileMe servers into weeks of problems, show something clearly is different with the new kit on the block.
Hopefully Cue will bring some of the iTunes luster to MobileMe, but only time will tell. What do you think? Which blog wins this round?
The iPhone Blog merged with the Phone different site in May of 2008. Both sites were founded on a premise that comes one from one of Apple's old slogans: Think different. The iPhone Blog: for people who dare to phone different.
