Sample the Web

It looks like TweetDeck for iPhone has been yanked from the App Store

C.K. Sample III — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 01:42:46 +0000

I first noticed this two days ago when TweetDeck posted a blog post titled TweetDeck for iPhone: Now with added Awesome (that since has disappeared from their site) announcing that a new version of TweetDeck for iPhone had arrived. I went to download it and give it a whirl, but when I started to download it, I received a pop-up message on my iPhone telling me that the item I was trying to download was no longer on the App Store. After about 24 hours, it no longer showed up when I search for TweetDeck, and that’s the way it remains. I wonder what happened. TweetDeck, did you yank your own app or did Apple pull a fast one on you?

UPDATE: Derek points out in the comments below that TweetDeck says they pulled the app because it was crashing. How is that different from the first version? And why are both versions gone?

Fortunately, I saved the full TweetDeck post, which I’m posting after the break for any who are interested in what may or may not eventually return to the App Store:

“TweetDeck for iPhone – now with added Awesome

TweetDeck’s posterous 2 days ago
Good news everyone, the updated TweetDeck app for the iPhone is available now from the AppStore.

Here’s a rundown of some of the great new features we have for you in this release :

Facebook integration

You can now access your Facebook account as well as your Twitter account to ensure you always stay connected with your friends while mobile. Add Facebook columns, update your status, write on your walls, comment & like… all from within the app.

Video uploading

You can now share videos while on the move. The TweetDeck app allows you to send a videos to both Twitter and Facebook thanks to the built-in 12 Seconds functionality. You can take a video direct with the camera in your iPhone 3GS, or upload a video already stored on your phone. Just remember that any video uploaded will be truncated after 12 seconds to keep things simple.

Landscape compose mode

Need a bigger keyboard when composing your updates? Switch to the landscape keyboard and type away!

Trending Topics

Always be up to date with what’s hot in the Twitterverse with the new Twitter trends feature. You can now view the Twitter trending topics in the app and can quickly create a search column to track the tweets that are hitting the big time right now.

Tweets Nearby column

You will always know when your Twitter friends are close, thanks to the new Tweets Nearby column. Using the GPS in your iPhone you can view tweets from everyone within a configurable range of your current location.

Address Picker

You’ll never again have to struggle to type @replies correctly, thanks to the new address picker function. One touch will bring up a list of your most active friends. Touch the name of the friend you want to @reply to and their ID will be added to your tweet.

Save Draft

Need to make a phone call or check your email while composing an epic update? Just touch Cancel then Save to keep your message as a draft. Next time you return to the compose window your masterpiece will still be there waiting to be completed.

Open in Safari

Do you ever wish that you could open links direct in the iPhone Safari browser? Well now you can. Just open the link as normal then touch the Safari button to close TweetDeck and open the web page in you iPhone’s browser instead.

bit.ly account support

You can now add your bit.ly account details into the iPhone app just like you can in the desktop version. This allows you to ensure all links that you shorten through the iPhone TweetDeck are stored in your own bit.ly account.

These are just some of the highlights from a long list of update, new features and fixes that have been built into v1.1 of the iPhone app. You can check out the full changelog here.

v1.1 of TweetDeck for the iPhone is available in the AppStore here.

Uh, no it isn’t.

Review: Chess with Friends Premium

C.K. Sample III — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 15:29:41 +0000

Review: Chess with Friends Premium—$2.99
Chess with Friends Premium Released: October 22, 2009
Developer/Distributor: Newtoy, Inc.
Genre: Games
Chess with Friends Premium version 1.0 tested on a 16GB iPhone 3GS

I reviewed Chess with Friends alongside Words with Friends a while back. I love both apps. Words with Friends, the pay version, just got an update that included push notifications, and when I was looking around, I noticed that there is now a new Chess with Friends product, Chess with Friends Premium, that unlike the free Chess with Friends app, actually costs a little bit of money, has no ads, and has support for push notifications. I’ve enjoyed so many games of chess with other people on Chess with Friends, that I decided to go ahead and buy the premium version. It works exactly the same as Chess with Friends free, but no ads and push notifications, rather than email updates. However, it’s an app that I love and that has given me hours of fun for free, so I figure $2.99 for a year of ad-free gameplay and push notifications isn’t too much to give to support a group of devs building cool stuff like that.

Review Rating: YAY YAY YAY!

Foo Fighters concert on Facebook in less than 30 minutes — UPDATE

C.K. Sample III — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 01:36:26 +0000

I linked to this earlier in Twitter, but it looks like I can embed it right here for you to enjoy as well:

UPDATE: 10/31/2009—Concert is over but they’re replaying it over and over and the video auto-plays on load, so I placed it after the break. Also I recorded the audio of the show so I can listen to it on my iPhone. I used WireTap Studio to pipe the audio from Safari straight to an Apple Lossless QuickTime Movie, but that meant I couldn’t listen along on my computer as it was recording. However, I noticed a link to http://iphone.livestream.com, loaded that on my iPhone and was surprised to find that it worked GREAT. I tweeted it, surprised Scoble, and he retweeted it. This in turn meant that about a thousand other people retweeted it, interrupting the concert on my iPhone with Push notifications of Twitter mentions, so I had to go to Settings and turn off Notifications. That moment really made me wish that the iPhone had some sort of real multitasking built in.

I have to say though, that I’m really impressed with how far video streaming has come. Livestream was flawless embedded here and playing on my iPhone. I remember setting up Akami streaming for Fordham University back when I worked there and it was a bit of a headache for a relatively small audience. Also, I was surprised that the slightly buffered (the iPhone stream was behind the actual web stream by about 2 minutes) iPhone livestream actually auto-adjusted when I turned the phone from portrait to landscape. Super cool. Here’s some screenshots:

FOO FIGHTERS!!!

Review: Polyghost

C.K. Sample III — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:06:36 +0000

Review: Polyghost—Free
Genre: Lifestyle
Released: September 14th, 2009
Developer/Distibutor: Last Legion Games, LLC
Version 1.0 tested on a 16GB iPhone 3GS

Last Legion Games, LLC sent me a copy of Polyghost for the iPhone to review back before the app was free. However, now that Apple has allowed free apps to offer in-app purchases, the app has gone free, so you should check it out if this review sounds at all interesting to you.

Polyghost is a photo application that lets you insert 3-D posable “vinyl” characters into pictures you’ve taken with your iPhone or that you import to the application from your photo album. As such, it’s sort of a one trick pony app, but for what it does, it does it very well. You can size and position the posable 3-D characters within your pictures, and you can even adjust the lighting on the characters to match the lighting of the rest of the photograph. The one thing missing is a shadow tool to add a realistic shadow to the 3-D character to fit in fully with the picture. Nevertheless, it does a pretty good job, as you can see in the picture above featuring my friend Jay on his wedding day as well as in the gallery of photos below.

The only character included with the application is Tim Biskup’s Helper. Additional characters are purchasable via a built in store, so you can have an entire collection to use in your photographs. What’s cool about this is that each character was designed by an actual artist and comes with an informational card describing the artist and the origins of the character.

Also, there are features built in to share via Twitter and Facebook, but honestly, I’d rather simply save the pictures to my photo gallery and tweet them / upload them to Facebook / Flickr directly from there.

If this app were still a pay app, I probably wouldn’t give it a glowing review since you have to buy additional characters, but since it’s now free, there’s no reason not to try it out. It is fun.

Review Rating: YAY!

A full gallery of the app, as well as the original press release sent to me back when this app was released can be found after the break.

Press Release:

Polyghost is an interactive, social photo sharing app that allows you to insert wild, mischievous and cute 3D animated characters into your favorite iPhone pictures. Now, you can bring your photos to life with Polyghost and share them with friends and family via email, Facebook and Twitter. Each Polyghost character can be manipulated and positioned to accommodate your photos and a lighting feature allows you to set the mood. Collect, snap and share the goodness of Polyghost today!

The POLYGHOST adventure begins with Biskup’s “Helper” character included with the app purchase. From there, one’s collection is easily enhanced by browsing the POLYGHOST STOREFRONT to unearth new characters.

Flip, tumble, twist and turn your vinyl character in the “Polyghost Viewer”
Bring your vinyl character to life with the “Pose Editor”
Express the mood of your vinyl character by setting the color, intensity and direction with 3 separate lighting options via the “Light Tool”
Use the “Scene Maker” and your device’s digital camera to integrate your vinyl character into new photos, or to build a customized background using your device’s existing photo album
No matter what you do with your vinyl characters activate the “Polyghost Social” feature to share your creations with friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter

Too busy to blog

C.K. Sample III — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 01:31:46 +0000

Man, oh man, I’m still busy. This past weekend, my little brother got married in Nashville, TN. Very happy for him, but sort of surreal to think of my brother as a married man. It was good hanging with my parents on Sunday and seeing my family. They were all excited to see Kristin in her current pregnant state, and readily let us know that they support naming the kid C.K. IV. We’re still undecided.

I’ve been cranking away at Crowd Fusion documentation. I also am learning quite a bit about the platform and a bit about programming in general from the process. So far, I’ve built my own link blog and URL shortening service using Crowd Fusion. Details about it can be found here. I still have some more features I want to add, and I’ll probably tear everything down and re-architect it eventually, but I’m enjoying learning and tinkering with the platform. I even bought a book on PHP and a book on CSS for reading on my Kindle.

Also, if you’re in Philly on Nov. 9th, you should come join me and the rest of the Crowd Fusion team for early access to the beta and a tour of Crowd Fusion. Sandwiches and beverages will be available.

What free time I’ve had has been spent divided between renovating my former office as our new baby room, drawing cartoon guys and various doodles on my iPhone, and playing games on the iPhone. I just bought Catan, have played it three times already, and am totally addicted.

I also grabbed SmartGo Pro, because I figured I should learn another type of strategic game beyond just chess.

One of these days soon, I’m actually going to wake up early enough or have some free time and energy to crank out the 7 or so iPhone Chess app reviews that I have backed up. Stay tuned.

Kindle for iPhone update adds ability to highlight, take notes, and back up to other Kindle devices via Whispersync

C.K. Sample III — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:39:29 +0000

Now we’re talking! Yesterday, I checked the App Store for any updates to my apps and found that Kindle for iPhone has been updated so that you can now take notes on books you are reading on the iPhone and have those notes sync wirelessly via Whispersync with any other Kindle devices associated with your account (like my Kindle 2). You can also just highlight text and have that work too. Very cool. I’ve included some screenshots below to show you what it looks like.

Sketchbook Mobile supports exporting PSD files with layers; why doesn’t Adobe have an iPhone app that does the same?

C.K. Sample III — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:42:39 +0000

If you happen to read this blog regularly, you know that I’m a big fan of doodling and drawing and that I’m a big fan of iPhone apps. One of my favorite iPhone apps to date merges these two things: Autodesk’s Sketchbook Mobile (review here). You can see a lot of the drawings I’ve done with the app in this Flickr set and as this Flickr pool indicates, I’m not the only fan of the app.

Yesterday, a free update came out for the app that adds several new features, including the ability to email a PSD file complete with layers to yourself or someone else. Which made me think, why are Adobe’s competitors offering amazing integration with their applications that Adobe themselves don’t offer on the iPhone platform?

Dear Adobe:

You just announced that you’re going to make Flash CS5 be a tool for developing iPhone apps, you just released the Photoshop.com iPhone app for free on the iPhone (which offers a pretty cool set of filters by the way), but why on earth aren’t you offering your own iPhone versions of your flagship apps (I’d imaging you could charge $5-10 a pop and sell a mountain of them) with this same sort of integration with your full apps that your competitors are offering?

It’s a clear no brainer.

Sure you have big development teams and the cost of these apps will be more than it will make sense for you to sell at this lower price by your estimations, but you have a good chance of making up that money in gross sales and by these mobile apps being a gateway to customers buying CS5. These apps would be good marketing in addition to good apps for users like me.

Make it happen.

Sincerely,

C.K. Sample III

Possible New Rochelle parking ticket scam or just plain incompetence?

C.K. Sample III — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 13:40:52 +0000

Okay. So this is ridiculous. Remember when I got this parking ticket that I blogged about previously, but the car was listed as a white VW and my car isn’t white, the ticket was issued on a street I’ve never been to let alone parked at, and the ticket was issued at a time in the morning when my wife was at work with the car down in the Bronx? Well, after that we received another ticket for the same white VW parked in the same vicinity in New Rochelle where neither of us have ever been and issued at a time when Kristin and I were at a wedding with the car no where near New Rochelle.

So, what I’ve been doing is calling New Rochelle’s City Court. I’ve called five different times so far. Each time, someone has said that they’ll take care of this issue, that it has to go before the judge, and that it will take about a week. Each time I note that I don’t have a copy of the actual tickets and that I want a copy so I can find out which police officer is issuing the ticket. Each time the person always takes my number and says that she will call me once it’s taken care of. To date, no one has called me back.

Instead, every couple of weeks, I receive another late payment notice on the tickets that aren’t mine. Each time I receive one, I call them again. Each time, I talk to a new person and I tell that new person who I talked to before and she says (they’ve all been female) that she’ll take care of it this time. Since I haven’t received a notice in well over a month now, I think Doris, the last person I spoke with, may have actually taken care of it.

However, check this out. I just got this comment on my old post:

“Hi,
I also received a parking ticket from New Rochelle. I live in Massachusetts and have not even been to New Rochelle. The date it was listed I was teaching in a school in Massachusetts. Have you had any luck getting it cleared?
—Emma

My suspicions

Here’s what I suspect may be happening (though I have no proof, whatsoever, so please take this as total conjecture):

Some lazy parking cop has a list of license plates.
This lazy parking cop goes and gets a long breakfast every morning (it’s why he/she is so fat and why he/she is incapable of being anything but a parking cop).
While this lazy parking cop is sitting eating his/her breakfast, he/she just randomly picks a few of the license plates on his/her list and writes out tickets to fill his/her quota.

OR

Some near-sighted but vain parking cop doesn’t like to wear glasses because he/she thinks they make him/her look nerdy.
This near-sighted but vain parking cop therefore cannot see clearly and that’s why he/she is incapable of being anything but a parking cop.
He/she wanders through his/her beat and regularly gets license tags slightly wrong, issuing random incorrect late parking violation notices to people who never parked there.

In either case, New Rochelle, you seriously need to get your shit together. This is ridiculous and even if it is just incompetence, it sure as hell smells of corruption.

Dear people of New Rochelle:

Your parking enforcement is doing you, its people, a great disservice.

If you are a business owner in New Rochelle, you should be outraged by this. I refuse to shop or do any business in New Rochelle any more because of this, and I would imagine I’m not the only one.

If you are a New Rochelle resident, you should be outraged by this. I will never move into your town because of this, and I’m sure I’m not the only potential buyer of your property unwilling to move there because of things like this.

Busy

C.K. Sample III — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 16:53:44 +0000

Man, this has been a hectic week. Lots of good stuff, but still very busy. I moved all my home office stuff and the birds out into the living room last Sunday, making what was the dining room table my new desk in preparation for the arrival of our first child in early February. We’re taking what was my office, re-prioritizing all the things that need to be in there and moving everything else into storage. I just filled a box with all my college and graduate school papers and research.

Kristin is cutely-pregnant-belly pregnant now, but she’s also very tired of being pregnant at this stage, tired of people warning her how dramatically her life is going to change and hearing how falsely that rings when compared against all of our friends who have recent newborns and absolutely are loving the experience, and we’re also still discussing the name for the baby. We’re probably 99% certain now that we’re going to name the child after me, but neither of us like the name “Clinton” and there is a sort of mourning going on for the original name that we had picked out before we started talking about making him the 4th.

Work this week has been jumping and fun, as I’ve been helping flesh out and clarify the documentation for the beta release of Crowd Fusion, and I’ve been playing with a test installation on my Media Temple grid server account. In the process, I’m not only learning the ins-and-outs of the system at a whole new level, but I think I’m actually starting to understand some basics of programing, which is pretty neat. I’ve already figured out how to do design tweaks in my installation and am working on building my first plugin. I think by the time we finish documenting the entirety of all of Crowd Fusion’s ins and outs, I’m going to be an entry-level Crowd Fusion programmer. Once I get some more experience with it, I’ll probably eventually move this site over to Crowd Fusion, although, I’ll probably move Screaming Tongue first, as I’m currenty working on designing a webcomic plugin.

Speaking of webcomics, I have posted a few new comics and am drawing a doodle cartoon guy a day (at minimum) on SketchBook Mobile on my iPhone (reviewed here). Eventually, I should have a nice little universe of characters drawn up to choose from when writing a new comic. Then, I’ll start actually focusing on making them funny. Although, I am proud to say that I received my first “lol” ever in the comments on this GDGT comic.

If I get a chance later today, I hope to actually write a few of the iPhone app reviews that have been waiting in my queue for a while. We’ll see. In any case, I wrote this while taking a lunch break. Back to shuffling around files and boxes in the other room.

UPDATE: I neglected to mention that I’m selling my 1978ish Gibson The Paul guitar if anyone is interested. Details are on Flickr. Along with the following pictures:

In order to comply with the FTC’s ridiculous new policy…

C.K. Sample III — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 22:05:25 +0000

I‘ve added the following note to my about page:

A note on reviews: any actual physical products that I review on this blog have either been purchased by myself or were lent to me for the purposes of the review. In the rare instances where an actual product was sent to me for review without the manufacturer requesting the items’ return, I have given the product away to a reader. The one notable exception to this rule is with software reviewed, as the license or code used for the software often cannot be given away to another person. Unless I explicitly mention that I purchased the software reviewed in the review (which is often the case), please assume that all software reviews, especially iPhone / iPod touch apps reviewed on this blog, were of products that were sent to me to review or for which I received a free copy of the app to review. Yes, this includes the numerous app reviews where I pan the product. I normally delete these applications after the review or I buy my own copy if I like the application. The one exception is iPhone and iPod touch apps, which keep purchases on file, count the free codes as purchases on my account, and won’t allow me to purchase the application after the fact.

Basically, I don’t ever accept payment to review items. Some items, especially software, is only reviewable via a free copy or by me purchasing the item. I note what software I purchased in the reviews.

Here’s the new Federal Trade Commission ruling, and here’s all the talk about it.

*Note: The reason I call this new policy ridiculous is because it applies a blanket rule to a large group of people in a rather fuzzy way in my opinion. Anyone who gives an opinion on his/her blog on any product now has to worry about making sure it’s crystal clear at all times that there is no relationship between him/her and the manufacturer of the product or the advertising company that represents the manufacturer. Something about it has a sort of assumption of guilt until proven innocent and an assumption that the majority of bloggers have some such relationship. That’s lame.