iPhone Life - Best Apps, Top Tips, Great Gear

Apple has created a lot of hype around its new Apple Watches, dropping an extreme sports watch they're calling the Apple Watch Ultra alongside the Apple Watch Series 8 and Apple Watch SE (2nd generation) at the tech giant's September 7 "Far Out" event. The new Series 8 contains a few essential new features like fertility tracking and crash detection, while the Ultra increases durability, water resistance, depth pressure, and more.

In the 189th episode, David and Donna dig into everything Apple announced at its annual September event. Do you need all 48 megapixels in the iPhone 14 Pro’s camera? Is the rugged Apple Watch Ultra for you even if you’re not planning to hike Mount Everest? Do the AirPods Pro upgrades warrant the purchase? Listen and find out.

We can help you protect your online privacy!

(Sponsored Post) By Austin Durr on Thu, 11/16/2023

Did you know that U.S. consumers lost over $3.5 billion to online fraud in the first half of 2022? Password scammers and digital criminals will never stop trying to steal your personal information.

Did you know that, contrary to popular belief, iPhones are incredibly vulnerable to hackers and scammers? The same is true for Macs and iPads. Despite Apple's reputation for security and privacy, their devices are still very susceptible to cyber attacks and phishing scams.

If you're shopping and wonder whether the item you're considering could be more cheaply purchased via Amazon, a new app helps you do just that. Price Check by Amazon (free) lets you search for the product you have in mind in four different ways: you can say the name of the product, use the iPhone's camera to read the bar code, take a photo of the item, or enter the name of the product. The app uses the same voice recognition technology that powers the popular Dragon NaturallySpeaking. (iPhone 4 and 3GS only)

On November 26th you’ll be treated to a new distance running game in the form of Dino Rush, and I have to say that the game does a decent job of setting itself apart from similar games.  You play a little dinosaur that has a series of missions to complete, but it just so happens that you’re always hungry.  To keep your strength up you must consume all the fruit you can find, as well as avoid all the other nasty dinosaurs and things like quicksand and lava.  You’ll receive various power ups like a spiked helmet, fruit magnet and super-dinosaur suit that will help you in your quest (and are often imperative to your survival).

Over at inspirationfeed.com, Igor Ovsyannykov has collected 40 incredible iPhone wallpapers. Here are a few of them, all of them are 320x480 so you can right-click and download them. However, as Igor notes, they might not look as gorgeous on a 4th generation devices like Generation Touch or the iPhone 4 which have that 960x640 retina-display. To get the rest visit this link.

Heart Rate - Free is a newly released app that actually measures your heart rate using the iPhone 4 camera. (The app only works with iPhone 4.) You simply put your finger over the camera lens, and the app measures the minute changes in skin color caused by the ebb and flow of blood in your finger. They say that the app isn't intended for medical use (standard disclaimer) but that it provides an accurate measure of your pulse. This is one more app for my forthcoming article on the innovative uses of the camera.

Update: Apple has cancelled the Airprint feature from iOS4.2...:(

 

The web is now abuzz with the impending release of this long overdue update to the Ipad. Having been long accustomed to features such as multitasking and folders on my iPhone 4, the limitations of iOS 3.2 has become painfully obvious and unbearable. As I reflect upon the past few weeks, the following 4.2 random thoughts must be constantly nagging every geek and will no doubt dominate thousands of pantry room discussions in the next few days (what else???):  

 

Recently I’ve begun a quest in finding a new job; however nowadays there are so many resources at our disposal that it can be quite daunting in sorting them all out.  One surprising resource is the iPhone app.  If you ever noticed in Apple’s App commercials there is an app for almost everything in their store or as they would say “There’s an app for that.”  Yet, despite the fact that like many iPhone users, I use apps for many things; I never thought of using an app to find a job until I was in need of one.  So far the best app in my experience has been Monster.com’s job search app for the iPhone. 

As the app store grows, apps are being developed to fill all areas of our life. From astronomy to hunting there's now an app for that. This is the first of what i hope will be a regular column looking at apps for niche markets that may surprise you. This first blog will look at a niche market that's near to my heart-- Ultimate Frisbee.


Ultimate is the fastest growing sport in America. For those of you who have never heard of ultimate, here is a brief description from the USA ultimate website.

TextNow is currently available for free, and if you'd like to do free texting on your iPad or iPod touch, this app certainly deserves consideration. They actually give you a free phone number that others can use to send text messages to your iPad or iPod touch. It also can be used to send picture messages. It does have ads, but you can use in-app purchasing to upgrade to a version without apps ($5.99 per year). Here's a video demo.

The Ultimate PDF Reader Roundup

By Werner Ruotsalainen

(Note that a cleaned up and extended, easy-to-digest version of this article – without the lengthy section on the chart – will be published in the iPhone / iPad Buyer's Guide. Go buy it ;-) ).

The iPad offers an excellent way of reading PDF files. While you can do this right in Safari (with web based PDF's) or can freely download Apple's own iBooks, it may be still worth checking out how almost all (!) the currently available PDF reader solutions. Knowing what the alternative PDF readers are capable of is essential as reading online PDF's with Safari lacks any kind of features like in-document searching. In addition, iBooks lacks some essential features too.

I have anticipated this day for quite some time.  Twelve South, the makers of iconic products for the Mac and more recently the iPad, have finally released the BookBook case.  The BookBook has been available for Macbook's for some time and they are gorgeous real leather, black, brown and red works of art that you store your laptop in.  When closed, they look just like classic novels.

A bag with a bonus!

By Anonymous

Here’s a bag with a bonus! The Cocoon Innovations Messenger Sling bag not only protects and transports the iPad, but it also contains an extremely functional insert, the GRID-ITTM. The GRID-ITTM is designed to hold pens, a stylus, earphones, flash drives, notepads, business cards, charging cord, small electronics and other accessories. Customize it any way you like with the woven elastic grids that hold the accessories in place. The back of the GRID-ITTM even doubles as a mouse pad.

The iPad's onscreen keyboard approaches the dimensions of a full-size keyboard (in landscape orientation, at least), but the layout of the keys is not completely standard. One of the most maddening things about the default keyboard is that it lacks an apostrophe key. I'm used to the apostrophe's position on a standard keyboard—all the way to the right just before the Enter key. I keep reaching for it with my right "pinkie" finger and end up hitting the Return key instead. I can enter an apostrophe from the "symbols" keyboard, which is accessed by tapping on the ".?123" key.

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