Since upgrading to iOS 7, my iPhone 5’s battery life has suffered. So I decided to poke around to see what I could do to help ensure I get the most from each charge. Here are some of the things I’ve learned, which were culled from Maclife.com.
Mobile
Diss ‘n’ Gauges
I’m pleased to announce my first application is ready for sale on Google Play and Apple App Store. You can also see the information about Diss ‘n’ Gauges in my company’s portfolio.
Diss ‘n’ Gauges: Sometimes the best response is an app!
Diss ‘n’ Gauges: Multi-Pack combines all our individual meters into one great application. Are you looking for best and funniest way to start or end (disengage from) a conversation?
The Multi-Pack includes:
- BS Detector: Is your friend talking out of their butt? Inform them (and the rest of your party) that you’re not buying it.
- Dial Down the B!tch: Is your friend acting nasty or spiteful and it’s exceeding your tolerance level? Inform them (and the rest of your party) that they need to dial it down a bit.
- Give-a-Crap Meter: Is your friend droning on and on about something that you couldn’t care less about (say, Crossfit, for instance)? Inform them (and the rest of your party) of your disinterest in a fun way.
- Hottie Finder: Looking for a great way to strike up a conversation with that beautiful girl or guy across the bar? Let our Hottie Finder act as a divining rod to direct you to them!
- Gaydar: Often find yourself in a dance club, at a karaoke hall, or on a cruise ship with no way to hone-in on the guys around you?
- Fuel Gauge: Need some help deciding if you need one more or had one too many? Here’s a quick, clever way to reply to friends when they ask if you’re ready for another round.
All meters react to tapping on the screen. Tap once to trigger, tap a second time to reset. Diss ‘n’ Gauges is now available for iOS (iPhone, iPad) and Android phones and tablets.
Mobile Websites vs. Applications
There’s no denying that mobile phones have grown to become an increasing part of our lives. In fact, there’s a 42% likelihood that you’re reading this newsletter on your phone or tablet device, up 10% from last March. And in most cases, mobile applications would probably be overkill for your business or brand, where a beautifully designed, responsive newsletter (such as this one) will more than suffice. However, if you’re looking for something more than emails, here are some things for you to consider.
There’s a big difference between a mobile website and a mobile application. Before you can evaluate the benefits of either, it’s important to understand the key differences between the two. Both apps and mobile websites are accessed on a handheld devices such as smartphones (e.g. iPhone, Android and Blackberry) and tablets.
Twitter Photo Filters
A day after confirming it had lost the ability to display Instagram images, Twitter has rolled out its own library of retro filters for its Android and iPhone apps.
The eight filters are the usual suspects we’ve come to expect from mobile photo apps, including desaturated, black and white and high contrast. There are auto-adjust and cropping options, as well as a helpful grid view that lets you see what each filter will look like at once.
“The latest versions of Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Android introduce a few new ways to enhance the images you tweet,” said Twitter senior designer Coleen Baik in a blog post announcing the new features. She emphasized that images are important to Twitter users, and called photos “one of the most compelling forms of self-expression.”
The new filters were designed especially for Twitter by photo-editing service Aviary, which also handles edits for various partners such as Flickr and Twitpic. What the effects lack in originality, they will no doubt make up for in popularity. Filters are an easy alternative to tinkering with an image in a photo editor, and their retro aesthetic has helped Instagram get more than 150 million users.
Google Latitude Location History
When I was a little kid, I always imagined that, after we die, we’d have the opportunity to visit a pavilion in heaven that traced a line through all our travels on earth. Google Latitude’s Location History can now do this, for one-month periods. It tracks your phone’s GPS signal along with stops along the way. And while this may be a little invasive from a Big Brother standpoint, it’s also quite helpful to notify friends and family of your impending arrival and track a missing or stolen cell phone to it’s current location.
Above, you can see a recent road trip to Michigan with a brief overnight stop in Ohio. The frequency of the dot seems fairly random but factors in speed, signal strength and delays. My five-hour traffic jam outside the Poconos is clearly present by a cluster of rather impatient looking dots. You can also see a kopse of dots denoting my meandering through Kalamazoo, my final destination. Keep in mind this journey retraces into itself for both legs of the trip. In this view, it’s difficult to tell which dot is for the westward vs. the eastward leg. Maybe the next version of Google Latitude Location History will overlay time.
myPANTONE for the iPhone
I don’t have an iPhone. And if you know anything about me, you probably know that I would never really want one. I’m on my phone too much as it is and can’t imagine creating a situation where I’d want to be on it more. I’m happy with my HTC TouchPro (though I wish it had a longer battery life) and find 99.9% of the applications that I’ve seen on the iPhone to be worthless; along with the animations, bells & whistles of the phone itself.
However, that said, I really find the myPANTONE app to be incredible. Take a look at this list of features:
Get your color inspiration and create your color scheme from these PANTONE color system libraries:
- PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM® (coated, uncoated and matte)
- PANTONE Goe™ (coated and uncoated)
- PANTONE Pastels (coated and uncoated)
- PANTONE FASHION + HOME (paper and cotton)
- Includes sRGB, HTML and L*a*b* for all colors
You can capture and extract colors from photos and snap to the closest PANTONE Color:
- Images loaded on your iPhone
- Directly from images taken by your iPhone camera
Automatically generates harmonious color combinations
Cross-reference PANTONE colors to other PANTONE color libraries
Once you have created your color palettes you can then share them in a variety of ways:
- E-mail an HTML image of your palette
- E-mail color palettes that can be used in the Adobe® Creative Suite® (.ase files), QuarkXPress® and CorelDraw®
- Upload to the myPANTONE.com palette sharing web site
Other features include:
- Text and voice annotation of palettes
- Post notifications of new palettes to Twitter and Facebook
- GPS tagging of palettes
There’s a video tour by Glenn Fleischman on YouTube and Pantone.com. And I imagine each new version will allow designers to perform more useful and intuitive tasks. And I’m not just saying this because we built the Facebook app, either.
The only other application that I would consider to be as helpful, if my meager testing of it proved it even worked, would be the What The Font app by MyFonts.com. I don’t know if it’s the iPhone’s crappy camera or the application’s poor calibration—the application on their site also seems lacking as of late—but I couldn’t get it to suggest fonts even mildly similar to the one I was seeking.