IDEAS

So Mr. Diego washed his iPhone in the washer. Left it in there overnight. And when realized, he placed it in a bag of rice for 3 days.

Low and behold, it works!

The first real challenger to the iPhone looks like it will be Droid. I haven’t read anything but great stuff coming from the people who have seen the über smart.

It has an iPhone look complete with touch screen, but it also has a slide out QWERTY keyboard (WIN)

The device is made by Motorola; powered by Google’s mobile operating system, Android; and it will be sold through Verizon, thus it will be on Verizon’s awesome network.

Droid will run the latest version of Android, which looks incredible (see The Boy Genius’s write-up).

If the hardware reports are true, then Droid will have the same processor core as the iPhone, making it far more powerful than previous Android phones (Engadget).

Google CEO Eric Schmidt is decrying Android’s imminent explosion in the marketplace, while analysts’ are talking about Android’s potential for market domination by 2012.

Verizon is also going all out with their marketing. In the lead up to the announcement of Droid, they have been bashing AT&T’s flimsy network with their cleaver, “There’s a map for that” ads.

Then their Droid announcement ad launched a flurry of attacks on the iPhone’s limitations.

“The Droid poses a different and more significant challenge to the iPhone than any other phone to date. The Palm Pre could have been that challenger, but it lacked the Verizon network, and users were unimpressed with the hardware. According to people who’ve handled the device, the Droid is the most sophisticated mobile device to hit the market to date from a hardware standpoint. When you combine that with the Verizon network, you’ve got something that is most definitely a challenger to the Jesus phone” (TechCrunch).

If Droid is everything that Motorola, Google, Verizon, and the tech writers are claiming it should be incredibly exciting (The claims are pretty much confirmed). Better still, Droid should be available within a few weeks.

Pay close attention to the oddly placed umlaut under the "r"

It’s clear to me that Droid means business because it has an unnecessary umlaut in its name.

~ syndicated by TheGeekWhisperer.com

Last week, Adobe released a Photoshop application for the iPhone. Not only is it one of the best photo editing application I’ve personally tried – it’s 100% FREE! With the touch-and-drag of your finger, you can edit and add numerous effects to photos that are on your iPhone or, if you have one, on your photoshop.com account. If you don’t have a photoshop.com account, you can sign up for 2GB of free space for photo storage and sharing. You do not need an account to use the application, but it still can be good to have.

Features include cropping, rotating, flipping; adjustable exposure, saturation and tint; filters for black & white, sketch, soft focus, vibrant, vignette, rainbow, a border… among others. You can also undo and redo your effects. Edit both portrait and landscape photos – the app will flip with how you hold your phone. Once you’re done editing, choose to save the photo to your phone or to your photoshop.com account.

It doesn’t hurt to try a free app!
Photoshop.com Mobile App for the iPhone
Download from iTunes

When I first received my iPhone last year, I was ignorant to the fact that it did not have Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS). I figured, just like every other modern phone, I’d be able to send picture messages to my friends. I was pretty disappointed when I found out the truth – the iPhone did not support MMS! WTF! I have internet, mail, GPS, games, music, apps for “just about” anything- but I can’t send a photo via a text message?? How could such an accessory-filled phone be so behind in times?

This almost changed in June when the iPhone 3.0 was released. Since then, the iPhone itself has been MMS-capable, but AT&T was still behind. The hold-up to actually being able to use the service is that AT&T still needed to upgrade their infrastructure to handle the increased MMS traffic that us iPhone users will burden their network with.

In early September, AT&T finally gave us an official date of September 25^th and promised that MMS will be enabled through a software upgrade.

And now – it is finally here and people around the US are slowly receiving their MMS capabilities. Be sure you have iPhone 3.1 installed, then you can proceed with installing the quick Carrier 5.5 update. Be patient – it’s been out for a little over an hour and there are people who still aren’t seeing the update. Your time will come!

To upgrade:

1. Connect your iPhone to your computer
2. Open iTunes (if it does not open automatically)
3. Make sure you already have iPhone 3.1 software – if you don’t, upgrade now!
4. Click Check for Update (if you do not have it checking automatically)
5. Upgrade the carrier version
6. Once this is complete, reset your iPhone
7. Have fun sending your friends photos (or like most of us, have fun with a feature that you had on your OLD phones…)

Learn how to use MMS: iPhone MMS Walk-through from the iPhone Blog

All I have to say is wow!  Pinaki showed me the Yelp on the other day, but this one seems to be wayyyyyyyyy better…. Check out at 1 minute 45 seconds in when he clicks on the Starbucks and turns the phone toward the ground, freaking AWESOME!!!  This might actually be the first app I ever pay for in the App store…. makes you go hmmmmmmmm….

Original post here

• By Priya Ganapati
• August 25, 2009

“Remember the amazing augmented reality application demo for the iPhone that we saw back in July? It was called Nearest Subway, and it overlaid floating representations of nearby New York subway stations onto the live video coming in through the camera of the iPhone 3GS. These appeared to be hanging in space, pinned in place by the 3GS’ compass and GPS.

That application is now available to buy, for just $1. There have been a few changes — it’s now called Bionic Eye, for instance — but the jaw-dropping virtual signage is still there, and the subway stations have been joined by other points of interest, hotels, fast-food joints and, splendidly, Hooters.

Bionic Eye now works anywhere in the United States, not just New York, and you can buy add-ons for the subway systems of New York, Washington and Chicago from within the application. To use it, you just hold it up and look. As you scan the electronic window across the cityscape the app updates in real time and shows you where things are. Move the iPhone down to a horizontal position and the jiggling signs turn into a list. Touch one of the items and the display shows an arrow pointing you towards, say, a lunch of wings and tight-fitting T-shirts.

Magically, this all works offline, so you need neither a Wi-Fi or data connection (although the app will show you any Wi-Fi spots around you). Everything is contained within the tiny 2.9-MB download. You will need the 3GS for this, as it has the essential compass, but you can use it with older iPhones or iPod Touches and get the same points of interest plotted onto a Google Map — equally useful but less jazzy.

Outside the United States, the UK, France and Tokyo are supported. Available now.

Product page [iTunes]
Product page [Bionic Eye]“

Take a look for yourself. There’s a free version and a $2.99 version. It’s worth it for $2.99!

Here is the quick sketch that I did learning for about 30 min.

Fred Beecher from Evantage Consulting blogged about something that we’ve been trying to integrate through all of our UX designs for customers.

I’ve used the phrase, “We’re way past usability, we’re headed for delightability” to say that the system that we design must and by all means be usable, but we want to take a step forward and make them delightful. (I’m tired of using the word delightful BTW

Fred in his post: Playfulness, Usability, & Context: The Three Pillars of a Delightful User Experience, runs a small evaluation on 2 iPhone apps that support similar functions while the UX of one is more playful than the other.

His research shows…

“Fun isn’t always the new usable. There are situations in which usability is more important than playfulness and those in which it’s the other way around. The delight that playfulness contributes to an experience depends on the context surrounding that experience.”

And he’s devised 3 hypothesis:

1. Usability inspires more delight than playfulness does in situations in which tasks are clearly defined and use is infrequent.
2. Playfulness inspires more delight than usability does in situations in which the tasks are amorphous and use is frequent Playfulness also inspires more delight when there is a clear benefit to overcoming the learning curve inherent in playful interactions
3. The learnability of a playful system is inversely proportional to the level of interaction at which that playfulness occurs.

Looks like the entry point of thousands of new developers that won’t need to learn another language to program for the Iphone….sounds like an LW Iphone app is now underway

“MonoTouch drops .NET into Apple’s walled app garden

Novell has launched a new SDK for the iPhone that will allow developers to build native iPhone applications with .NET. It uses ahead-of-time compilation to avoid Apple’s rules against embedded runtimes.

Apple’s iPhone is known for its Byzantine application approval process and somewhat insular platform. Undeterred by these challenges, Novell has succeeded in bringing Mono, its open source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET framework, to the iconic device.

Novell announced Monday the official launch of MonoTouch, a new framework that allows application developers to build native iPhone software with C# and other .NET programming languages. It is designed to conform with the requirements stipulated by Apple for App Store eligibility. This will allow .NET developers to take advantage of their existing skills and potentially reuse some of their existing code when they build software for the iPhone.”

Read whole story here

This idea is absolutely amazing and will totally work.  Ordinary citizens can report unsightly graffiti and potholes in their town.  Talk about a great use of crowd sourcing, this is perfect.  Watch just the first minute of the video below, it looks so easy to use:

“Ever seen a nasty pot hole or a wall full of graffiti and wished you could report the problem on the go instead of writing a letter or email to your city bureaucracy? TechCrunch 50 startup CitySourced is launching an a slew of smartphone applications that let you file an issue to your city from your phone, aiming to crowdsource this information for cities.

It’s pretty simple. The app on your Blackberry, Android or iPhone lets you take a picture of the infraction. The app detects your location via GPS and once the image is loaded and approved, you are brought to the reporting screen. You can then identify what the problem is, add comments, and Tweet the problem out from your Twitter account.”

Whole story here

Love the Shift Happens series. Always combine 3 things I like to see on my computer: good design, cool transitions, and impactful statistics.

Read more about it here.