Month: February 2010

As I walked to work this morning I noticed the first early buds on the trees. And you know what this means? Time to get out in the garden again and get everything ready for the spring spectacle. To avoid some of the disasters I had last year, I decided that I would add a new weapon to my arsenal of gardening tools – my iPhone. There are plenty of apps available that will help you make your garden looking blooming marvelous. Here’s a selection of some of my favorites. (Note, you’ll need iTunes in order to open the links).

Keep an eye on the sky with WeatherBug

The weather can be your plants’ biggest friend or its worst enemy. A more comprehensive forecast tool than The Weather Channel or Accuweather.com is WeatherBug. Pulling data from your nearest weather station, it displays temperature (current plus highest and lowest of the day), wind speed and direction, wind chill and rainfall. It even goes into stuff like the dew point, pressure and humidity. A seven-day forecast is also available. Free

Work out what to plant with Garden Plants Database

Choosing the right plants and flowers for your garden can be a daunting prospect. Garden Plants Database makes it easy to figure out what you want before you even set out for the garden center. The bumper database contains more than 1,000 common plant names and their descriptions. Each entry includes a photo, along with information such as height, spread, colors, and bloom time. $0.99

Know your trees with Botany Buddy

It’s quite expensive, but if you’re looking to expand your knowledge of trees and shrubs, Botany Buddy is the perfect app. It features an impressive search tool that lets you identify a tree you don’t know, or find the right plant to go in your garden. The database boasts 1,300 native and ornamental species, giving you helpful info about size, habits, exposure, seeds, flowers, and more. $9.99

Find out how much soil you need with PotVolume

If you’re potting this spring, PotVolume will help you make sure you use the right amount of soil every time. The app is very simple to use. You simply enter the height of your pot, along with its width at the top and bottom. Then, PotVolume calculates the volume in cubic inches and quarts. You can then use these figures to work out how much potting soil to use for that particular pot. $0.99

Catalog your harvests with Homegrown

Ideal for those who grown fruit and vegetables, Homegrown lets you keep a record of everything you pick. once you’ve added the details of all the fruit-bearing plants in your garden, you’re able to quickly input the number of fruits or veggies that you pick on a given date. You can set the start of the season for each plant, then view your personal harvest data for the entire season on one graph. $0.99

Get the hottest tips with Gardening News and Updates

For the latest in what’s going down in the gardening world, install Gardening News and Updates on your iPhone. This reader loads the latest tips and tricks from a host of popular gardening blogs. The app comes with some neat features, suchas the ability to read blogs offline, to check for new blog posts when you launch, and to search all the blogs using one particular keyword. $0.99

Get practical help with iGarden USA

Americans are nuts about gardening, and iGarden USA provides hands-on help to anyone looking to feed their green-fingered habit. It contains a wealth of helpful features, such as recommending planting dates for your particular location, lots of data on vegetables, herbs and fruits, plus a guide to identifying particular garden pests. You can even add your own seeds, including planting dates and photos. $4.99

Figure out how much concrete you need with Concrete Calc

If your gardening ambitions extend to constructing paths, patios or terraces then Concrete Calc could come in very handy. The app calculates how many cubic yards of concrete are needed for any given job. You simply type in the length, width and thickness, then hit the Calculate button and you’ll be given the specifications you need. There’s also a Waste Overage option in the input fields if you need it. $0.99

Plan a BBQ with Weber’s On the Grill

Once you’ve got your garden looking great, why not invite your friends round for a barbecue in it? Weber’s On the Grill is a fantastic resource for planning a BBQ, featuring 250 classic recipe, along with 40 recipes for rubs. Besides the recipes, you can record ingredients that you need in an itemized shopping list, watch instructional grilling videos, and browse more than 100 barbecuing tips. There’s even a built-in timer for cooking meat to perfection. $4.99

Take a time out and play a gardening game

After all that hard graft you deserve a bit of time to yourself to relax. So sit down, pull out your iPhone and play one of the many fun garden-themed games that are available for the device. My favorite is the gripping (and terrifying) Plants Vs Zombies, in which you must cultivate killer plants to take down the undead. Others include the sedate mowing game, Sunday Lawn, and the potting puzzler, GreenFingers.

We’ve all marveled at how we can drive up our street on the web or on a phone using Google Street View. But what if you could take a look around the inside of buildings as well as the outside? According to Nokia, this new window on the world may not be that far away.

Following this week’s announcement that Nokia’s Ovi Maps app has garnered more than three million downloads, we caught up with Christof Hellmis, Vice President, Product Location, Services at the Mobile World Congress, who revealed Ovi’s plans for mapping the World – both outdoors and indoors.

Hellmis pointed out that since Nokia bought mapping company Naviteq in 2008, the company has ramped up its efforts to give Ovi users a more immersive experience. Having since introduced 3D and augmented reality features into Ovi, Hellmis is ready for the next stage of mobile navigation.

When we launched our 3D maps platform we didn’t see it as a new chapter in the development of the product, but rather a new book with a clean, white first page. We saw the context of the service as moving to 3D from a flat map, and it was for this reason we acquired Navteq. The company has 100,000 dollars worth of equipment for laser-based point clocks, which can accurately capture images of streets and buildings. This is scalable upwards, so we will be able to get more and more detailed 3D images of buildings to include within Ovi Maps.

Now, the benefit of having such high standards of image capturing is that this (interior mapping) will be do-able if dealt with properly. Nokia has already done research into indoor mapping and we need to decide on the best way to make it scale. I can see a time when public places of interest, such as shopping malls will be mapped and available on Ovi. This would open up a new dimension in advertising, because vendors would be able to push messages to people as they walked past their store. Indoor mapping could also be useful for museums and general places of interest. Continue reading “Nokia set to add 3D indoor maps to Ovi”

I love traveling by train. There’s something special about this means of transport that makes it irresistibly charming for many people. And of the most famous and attractive train routes in the world is the Trans-Siberian, a Russian railway line that crosses two countries, 12 regions and 87 cities between Moscow and Vladivostok.

Taking the Trans-Siberian is an almost unreachable dream for many of us; it’s a long, expensive holiday trip that not everyone can afford. But luckily you can now use Google Maps to live an alternative Trans-Siberian experience. It’s nowhere near the real thing, but at least it lets you grasp the essence of this famous route.

The virtual journey between Moscow and Vladivostok is a joint project of Google and the Russian Railway company. It puts video, sound and images together to help you experience the Trans-Siberian without leaving your home. You’ll be able to trace the complete route on a map, watch videos of the whole way and even listen to a the perfect soundtrack for this trip, made up of Russian radio stations, the sound of train wheels and some Russian literature classics like Tolstoy or Gogol.

Moscow, the river Volga, the lower Urals, Lake Baikal, the immense Russian plains… This virtual Trans-Siberian includes all the important places and landmarks covered by the real train route. The only thing you won’t find is Russian shops to buy souvenirs!

In case you hadn’t noticed, the mobile phone industry is now awash with operating systems. It was just a couple of years ago when smartphones came in only four flavors: Palm, Blackberry, Windows Mobile and Symbian. Now you can add to this list the iPhone OS, Android, Bada and Maemo. It’s great to have choice, but can present headaches for consumers, operators, and, perhaps more importantly, developers. So, you may be wondering why Nokia was this week talking about its strategy of having three operating systems.

At the World Mobile Conference this week, the Finnish phone giant announced a new operating system, known as MeeGo. It’s a Linux-based platform that merges Nokia’s Maemo with Intel’s Moblin, and it’s designed to bring rich new user experiences to mobile computers, netbooks, tablets and the like. Nokia also produces devices running the ancient S40 platform, and the croaky S60 OS (soon to be replaced with the new Symbian 3 platform). But in a world of increasing fragmentation, is it really a good idea to be offering the bemused consumers and developers three flavors of Nokia?

We caught up with David Rivas, Vice President, Strategy and Business Development Software Platforms at Nokia to find out the thinking behind this strategy.

How and why did Nokia end up with three different mobile platforms?

If we were having this conversation two years ago you’d be asking why it’s not the reverse. From a tech perspective, the three segments are clear. S40 is a mature platform which is very comfortable for the market it’s aimed at, and it’s what I like to call the ‘value’ segment. Symbian, or S60 as it has been until now, is targeted at the ‘value portion’ smartphone market, and it drives capability to lower price points. Meego offers a showcase for the class of experience similar to how we use our laptops in everyday life.

The question we were asking ourselves was how can we take our software offering down the road? The top two things we’ve done recently is to buy the Symbian Foundation and make it open source, and to buy Trolltech, and with it its Qt development framework.

So, what was going wrong before?

In the context of Symbian it was the lack of user interface renewal that was the problem. S60 was written a long time ago and it needed new energy. Programmers don’t like S60 because it’s difficult to develop for. We’ve fixed this with Qt, which is the most capable cross-platform framework in the industry.

Symbian 3 is planned for the first half of the year and Qt will be part of the platform. Because Qt is loved by developers we can expect to see lots of apps for the new Symbian platforms, as well as a decrease in development for S60. It’s true that Symbian S60  had missed a few rounds of UI renewal and it’s time to bring it up to standard, which is what Symbian 3 does. We’ve tripled performance, added multitouch support and a nice UI with lots of cool 3D effects. Symbian 4, which will push for release at the end of this year or beginning of the next year will further improve upon the performance and guts of the user experience.

How worried are you about the coming of Android to the market?

The more operating systems that are introduced, the better it is for us. That’s because it sends a clear statement to developers: you have to be able to hit a broad range of devices with a broad range of interfaces. The value proposition is very clear. In fact, the OS phenomenon is more about making value propositions to developers than it is the user. The only thing a consumer cares about is how cute it is, if it fits their lifestyle, and now, if it has a bunch of apps.

We are watching the Android rollout with great interest. It faces a lot of challenges right now regarding fragmentation. The industry should be asking Google what its motives are, and what will happen with Android in the future. Have any OEMs ever even seen a road map on Android from Google? I’m not sure they will have. When it comes to open source, Symbian is much more open.

There are a lot of questions that need to be answered but I find that the industry seems too preoccupied with the OS war. In actual fact, most consumers aren’t thinking about this. Instead of getting bogged down, we have to laser focus on the developer and offer them a platform that’s fun to developer for, offers a channel to market, and beautiful devices to run their apps on.

Apple’s App Store has had its share of scandals, and the latest started with developer Chillifresh having his app ‘Wobble iBoobs‘ removed, for featuring ‘overtly sexual content’ (according to Apple). The developer protests that’s not the case, but I think the name of the app gives it away, doesn’t it?

This isn’t the first time in my life I’ve heard complaints about free speech being censored where the only examples given are that of pornography. They are almost always bogus. It’s not a free speech issue – these kinds of images aren’t illegal, but organizations and companies are completely within their rights to decide whether they want to be associated with them or not.

If you don’t like their decision, you can go elsewhere. Neither is this a slippery slope towards more sinister censorship, nor is it saying that the only acceptable images of women (for it almost exclusively is women) are those of women in a burqa, as an article on Cult of Mac crassly suggested. I assume it’s just do do with not wanting sexual content in the App Store, and not being associated with content that objectifies women.

The App Store is Apple’s baby, and they can sell what they like in it. I can understand why they might think that having hundreds of apps like Wobble iBoobs and Swimsuit Calendars kind of ruins the cool aesthetic they try to have. The App Store is chock full of rubbish, and on top of the sexism inherent in these tacky apps, I’m happy to see them go just because they’re awful.

Maybe these soft porn-like apps weren’t hurting anyone, but there’s nothing admirable about them either. I think developers who make such lowest common denominator stuff don’t have too much to complain about, as it’s not like they were trying too hard to begin with.

Over the last 20 years, Photoshop has become an indispensable tool in media and advertising. From streamlining models to de-wrinkling celebrities, Adobe’s star product has transformed the way we think about photography. Image retouching is everywhere, so much so that it is hard to know how many fiddled, fixed and embellished photos pass before our eyes every day. In magazines, bars, on TV or just on the street, images are omnipresent, presenting their product in the best light possible, even if that does mean stretching the truth a little…

Continue reading “Photoshop, the image and us…”

Next week we’ll be publishing an exclusive in-depth video interview with Mathias Tönnesson, Vice President of Business Development at the “Spotify for movies” service Voddler. The half-hour interview covers everything from a look at Voddler’s basic business model and what has driven its success in Sweden to questions about content, quality and availability of the service that I’m sure many readers have.

It’s a fascinating insight behind the scenes of one of the hottest dotcoms around as well a tantalizing taster of the exciting things to come for those eager to try the service. For now though, here is sneak preview of what’s to look forward to in the interview:

For most internet startups such as Voddler, it can be very hard to attract investment. You’ve just announced another new 2.5 million Euro investment deal with Eqvitec. How have you been to attract such investment so far?

Tönnesson: I think it’s the quality of the product we are offering. I obviously can’t go into too much detail about the various partnerships we have but I think it’s the technique, that’s the important thing that attracts investment. The Voddler net streaming technology is a world unique product secured by over 30 patents of how you stablise video, how you put movies out over a P2P network, how the network takes slices of data from other users and puts it all together in DVD quality etc. Everything is secured by the 30 patents and that’s what brings attention to the final product because investors see it as a fantastic technical platform.

Do you think you will ever get to the stage where you are able to publish films on Voddler at the same time as they are released at the cinema?

Tönnesson: We hope. Of course, we need to work very very closely with our content owners. But for example, Avatar is the most downloaded film ever on Pirate Bay. And I think if you would allow a window of opportunity for viewers to watch it on Voddler at the same time as the American cinema release, I think you’d find thousands and thousands of Swedes watching it legally, and paying for it. And I think you would find a lot of people willing to pay to watch it – not just a few Euros but even as much as thirteen Euros for the opportunity to watch it in DVD quality, in a comfortable environment with Swedish subtitles. I think a lot of people would be willing to pay that. In that way, the distributors will be earning money that would other be lost to illegal downloading.

There’s Only One Level Too is a really inventive, surprising and funny platform puzzle game. Played in your browser, it’s deceptively simple. Move the elephant to the end of the level, opening the door by pressing the big red button – easy! But every time you do it, you’re asked to start again, but this time something will have changed… Maybe the physics, perhaps the controls. You’ll find out when you play!

There’s Only One Level Too isn’t too hard, but it’s always interesting and shows how much you can do with just a few platforms, simple controls and an elephant! Requires Flash.