Month: November 2010

This time of year always seems a bit early for me to be thinking about holiday shopping, but in just a few short weeks the infamous Black Friday will be upon us in the US. While some people look forward to the experience and jump into it with gusto, shopping for holiday gifts can be a stressful and overwhelming experience for many of us.

Thankfully, for those of us who prefer to pre-plan everything from our holiday shopping budgets to what gifts we actually expect to purchase, there’s an app for that. Quite a few, actually:

Santa’s Little Helper: As the name suggests, this app for the iPhone and iPod organizes your Christmas gifts several different ways. You can arrange your purchases by group, store, type of gift, and also by individual person. One of its more useful features is the individual gifts page that allows you to include the item’s name, the person to whom it’s intended to be given, and the gift’s status, such as where you bought it and whether it’s been wrapped.

Toys R Us – The Great Big Christmas Book: This fun and colorful app makes me wish the iPad had been around when I was a kid. The Great Big Christmas Book is a creative way to involve your children in holiday gift-giving. Toys are distinguished by categories, allowing your child to create a list toys they’d like to receive. The prices are only seen in the parents’ section, and the wish list can be sent to friends and family alike with ease.

EverNote: Although not technically a holiday-specific program, EverNote is hard to beat when it comes to capturing, storing, and syncing just about any information onto multiple devices. It’s a great organizational tool, particularly for holiday shopping, and works on PCs, Macs, and even your iPod and phone. Tags are also a highlight of the program, making it even easier to categorize different holiday purchases.

GiftBox: For those who aren’t quite as enthusiastic about apps, GiftBox is a great alternative. A free, web-based program, GiftBox allows you to create an account and not only keep track of your gift ideas for friends and family but also notes the gifts you’ve received from other people. In other words, you’ll never have to worry about misplacing your thank you list again. You can also even go one step further and use GiftBox to send thank you eCards.

It may seem like heresy to bookworms, but reading a book on your iPhone is actually quite a pleasant experience. If you’re not convinced, it’s easy to give it a go, and there are plenty of free books out there to try.

Of all the ebook readers available on the App Store, my favorite is Stanza. You can read my review here. I like Stanza as it’s free, full of features to make reading as comfortable as possible, and there are plenty of in-app ways to download books.

However, as well getting books directly from the app, you can also import any PDF or ePub files you have on your computer, making Stanza a really useful document reader too. Plug in your iPhone, and open iTunes.

Click the Apps tab at the top, and scroll down. Here there’s a File Sharing section, click Stanza, and drag any PDF or ePub files you want. After a short sync, you’ll be able to view the files from Stanza. Stanza automatically bookmarks your page, so you’ll never lose your place, it can look up words you don’t know and add annotations too. It may not smell like a book, but the advantages are clear!

Closed beta testing has today opened for the hotly anticipated Battlestar Galactica Online game. If you’re a fan of Battlestar Galactica and you also love massively multiplayer online gaming then it’s worth signing up to be a beta tester. Registration is open to a limited number of testers in Europe and the US, and you need to complete a profiling survey to see if you’ll be accepted.

Battlestar Galactica Online allows you to choose to play human or cylon, as you aim to take command of the Universe. The game combines elements of Space combat, exploration, mining and mission play. Assets from the popular sci-fi show have been used in the game, so fans should really feel like they are immersed in the Battlestar Galatica universe.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxMYDUgcBFE[/youtube]

Windows Phone 7 phones are today available in the US, as Microsoft begins its campaign to break up Android and iOS’s party. The HTC Surround and Samsung Focus are both available to buy through AT&T, while T-Mobile offers the HTC HD7 device.

Already, there’s a lot of Windows Phone 7 software around, including official offerings from Twitter and Facebook. The Marketplace is home to other popular favorites, including Shazam, Netflix, Tetris, and IMDb.

If you want a feel for what the new Windows Phone 7 operating system is like, then go check out our guide to using the Windows Phone 7 emulator, and watch our video demo.

Snow Leopard users will have to wait a little longer for the anticipated 10.6.5 update. 9To5 Mac reported a week ago that a public release was imminent but it seems Apple have put the update on hold.

A few days ago however, 9T05 Mac reported that the developer seeds (which usually precede OS X updates) were only issued a few days ago so the wait shouldn’t be too much longer:

According to the developer seeds that have been released, OS X 10.6.5 will address the following issues:

• Improve reliability with Microsoft Exchange servers

• Address performance of some image-processing operations in iPhoto and Aperture

• Address stability and performance of graphics applications and games

• Resolve a delay between print jobs

• Address a printing issue for some HP printers connected to an AirPort Extreme

• Resolve an issue when dragging contacts from Address Book to iCal

• Address an issue where dragging an item from a stack causes the Dock to not automatically hide

• Resolve an issue with Wikipedia information not displaying correctly in Dictionary

• Improve performance of MainStage on certain Mac systems

• Resolve spacing issues with OpenType fonts

• Improve reliability with some Bluetooth braille displays

• Resolve a VoiceOver issue when browsing some web sites with Safari 5”

The 10.6.5 update will be rolled out automatically to Snow Leopard users via Apple Software Update.

Today’s a great day for releases. If the excitement of Google Instant for mobile wasn’t enough, Android and Nokia users are now able to browse the web with Firefox 4 (Fennec). You’ll be pleased to hear that loads of your favorites are packed into this mobile device – Sync, Add-ons and the Awesome Bar all feature.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjnhSkuqods[/youtube]

There’s only one problem – even though this beta is available for Android and Nokia N900 (and there’s a long list of supported devices) my HTC Legend, for example, simply wasn’t able to cope. Apparently this is due to the fact that the Legend and other phones use ARMv6 processors, rather than the more standard ARMv7, but after taking a deep breath and disabling the security settings that prevent you from installing any non-Market sourced apps, I was pretty disappointed!

If your device doesn’t seem to be supported, pay attention to this information. The Mozilla blog says that your phone might be able to run one of the experimental ARMv6 nightly builds. I’m normally a careful girl, but after throwing caution to the wind and unchecking that security box, I may as well go the whole hog and get experimental – I’ll report back if I get it working!