When you think about it, an iPhone-based rig that lets anyone carry a decent vocal effects rig around in their pocket sounds like a recipe for disaster. Just look at that gentleman in the promotional image above, for example: for all we know, he sounds like one of the week one American Idol rejects — but thanks to the miracles of modern technology and around $80 in spending cash, he fancies himself the next Clay Aiken. Ah, well, no use trying to stop this train. A new $20 app called VocaLive (there’s also a free version available) from IK Multimedia includes 12 real-time effects that can be chained up to three at a time, along with a recorder that can run up to four tracks for an extra fee. You can use the iPhone’s built-in mic or a handsfree if you like — but for “best” results, you can pre-order the company’s $59.99 iRig Mic that was announced back in January, which plugs into the phone’s headset jack and features a second connector for real-time monitoring. Either way, your friends and family are sure to quickly regret it.
Patently Apple recently uncovered a patent filed by Apple that describes methods for creating video ringtones for telephonic iOS devices like the iPhone. The technology is designed to allow users to automatically combine sound and video from various sources, including iTunes and iMovie, to create custom audio-visual alerts for incoming phone calls.
Patently Apple describes multiple ways the patent pending feature could automatically combine audio and video to create custom visuals for each incoming call.
In a simple example, visuals displayed on the device would react to associated audio much like a visualizer in iTunes. In another example, a layered composite could be assembled from multiple video or photographic sources. These layers could be independently animated based on different characteristics in the audio track, such as its mix of high and low frequencies.
The visuals would not be limited to 2D content. Apple’s system could offer visual effects in 3D space, including movement, appearance, shape and differing camera angles.
The patent also describes a means for callers to send the “seed” information about a particular song or video. These caller “signatures” could further alter the visual experience for the recipient or offer dynamic links to relevant content for the receiver to check out later. Aside from offering a unique new method for verifying the identity of incoming callers, Patently Apple suggests this technology could bring social networking concepts to ringtones by allowing users to share their latest favorite songs and videos with the people they are calling.
The general concept of an animated ringtone is not new. App developers like iFoneTec already offer video ringtone software for the iPhone and Android platforms. (Note: iFoneTec’s iPhone app appears to require a jailbroken device.) Existing video ringtone solutions appear limited to playing the same video clip every time a call comes in from a specified contact. Apple’s proposed new technology seems to offer a more dynamic and extremely customizable experience that can be configured to some extent by both the caller and the receiver.
Of course, Apple often files patents for technologies that never find their way into shipping products. It’s unknown whether or not we’ll ever see Apple’s dynamically animated ringtones on the iPhone. The technology described in the patent would certainly showcase the media capabilities of the iPhone and offer a variety of new opportunities for users to express themselves.
Apple’s patent, credited to Brian McKnight and Michael Neuman, was originally filed in the third quarter of 2010.
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For any web developer, making sure your workflow stays streamlined and efficient is essential. Even small projects can grow quickly in size and go through several iterations and stages of development. You want to have an editor that’s flexible but unobtrusive, source control that works, with lots of options, and tools to keep it all organized, just a few keystrokes away.
Last week, we took a look at some great Windows, Mac and Linux productivity applications that you may not have heard of. Now we’ll take a closer look at eight more applications for web developers. These tools have a variety of uses, but they all share one quality — they allow you to spend more time writing good code and less time dealing with project overhead.
Since we love efficiency so much, let’s dive right in.
If you’ve been in the industry for any length of time, chances are you’ve heard of Sublime Text. Sublime is a powerful and flexible code with a robust feature set and a powerful Python language-based plug-in system, so you can further add functionality to the application. The $59 price tag may seem a bit steep (Sublime is free to try for as long as you like), but this program delivers.
With Sublime Text 2 Alpha currently available in Windows, Linux and Mac OS, Sublime offers up tools such as Goto Anything‚ a fuzzy-find utility that lets you quickly search and navigate to any project file, multi-select capabilities for fast multi-column editing, project management and instant project switching. It also offers many other features you’d expect a great editor to have — line syntax highlighting, regexp find and replace, and code snippets libraries.
Looking for something a little different? Kate is the default text editor for the KDE shell, but it’s also available for Windows and Mac (and works just fine in other Linux window managers).
Free and open-source, Kate has a wide array of great features for code editing. Some of Kate’s features include regexp find and replace, syntax highlighting and code folding, support for multiple encoding types, block selection and auto-indentation. Kate also has customizable keyboard shortcuts and a scripting language to extend the editor via plug-ins.
Git has rapidly become one of the most used and most popular version control systems around. The basics of Git are easy to learn, but its more advanced features can get confusing fast, especially when not everyone on your team is a die-hard code monkey. Enter SmartGit.
SmartGit provides a streamlined, powerful graphical interface for Git. Available for Windows, Linux and Mac, SmartGit (written in Java) makes browsing, cloning and committing to repositories easy, thanks to a familiar file browser interface and a graphical histories that easily diagram commits, branches and tags. SmartGit is free for non-commercial use, and commercial licenses start at $69, with bulk discounts available.
Anyone who’s ever worked with CSS knows how quickly a stylesheet can get out of hand. Keeping your CSS neat and well-organized isn’t always easy, and utilities like Sass aren’t always an option. For situations like this, CSSTidy comes to the rescue.
This free, open-source application for Windows processes, cleans and compresses your stylesheets. CSSTidy can strip out duplicate rules, remove whitespace and comments, correct misplaced semicolons, and convert rules to shorthand syntax, and more. A quick run through CSSTidy before going live makes sure your CSS files are neat and fast-loading.
Another great, free Windows application from the folks over at PortableApps, Toucan is backup, synchronization and encryption utility that will help you keep your private data secure and safe.
Make, restore, synchronize and encrypt all of your code and sensitive information (like all of those passwords) quickly and easily using Toucan’s simple GUI. Toucan offers more advanced features, as well, including rules that let you specify guidelines for file management, a command line interface and a powerful scripting system using the Lua programming language.
Sure, an FTP program may not sound very glamorous, but the $34 Transmit application for the Mac OS is the cream of the crop.
Transmit boasts a slick, intuitive interface with support for a number of protocols, including FTP, SSH and even Amazon S3. Other features include default permissions and auto-continue on error and a flexible UI that supports single or multi-panel layouts (with quick look and coverflow), which make Transmit’s remote file management seamless and simple.
The name alone makes this free application for Windows, Linux and Mac sound like more of a powerhouse work horse than just another pretty GUI, and that’s pretty much exactly what MySQL Workbench is — a no-nonsense GUI front-end for the MySQL database.
Complete with administration tools and powerful query building and table management utilities, Workbench (which comes straight from the MySQL developers), offers a robust desktop application for interfacing with, building, testing, optimizing and maintaining your MySQL database.
If you’re like most developers, chances are you collect code — those little bits of brilliance that crop up here and there, only to prove invaluable a couple of weeks down the road. At $39, the Snippets app for the Mac OS gives you some place to store all of those stray lines of delicious source code.
Snippets sits quietly in your menu bar and waits for you to come along and drop code into it. When you enter a new snippet, you’ll also have the ability to add labels (tags) for faster search and indexing. You’ll also be able to give each snippet a description. Clean, small and unobtrusive, Snippets stays out of the way until you need it and lets you quickly add, browse and search for just the right bit of code when you need it.
Conclusion
As a web developer, getting and staying organized is key. Good software helps you get work done faster and more efficiently, letting you focus on writing great code. We’ve gone over eight applications that go a long way in helping to achieve these goals — tools that let you edit, organize, back up and manage code across multiple platforms, but our list is by no means exhaustive. We’d love to hear about some of the great developer tools you can’t live without.
Series Supported by VMware Workstation
The Cross-Platform Apps Series is supported by VMware Workstation, the most reliable, secure way to run multiple operating systems at the same time. Winner of more than 50 industry awards, VMware Workstation transforms the way technical professionals develop, test, demo and deploy software. VMware Workstation is an integral component of any serious technical professional’s toolkit.
If you have an older version of Workstation, upgrade today to experience its new improved features. As a special bonus, you will receive a free copy of VMware ThinApp Starter Edition with the purchase of VMware Workstation. This offer expires on April 30th, 2011.
I feel the recent in-app-purchase issue where kids are charging hundreds or thousands of dollars in fees by buying game items in real-world money can best be expressed in animated video form. Luckily, the Taiwanese are happy to oblige.More »
Khronos Group today released the final specification for WebGL, a specification that brings OpenGL hardware-accelerated graphics to the web browser.
The organization has been working with Apple, Google, Mozilla and Opera to implement the specification in popular browsers, with the technology now available in developer builds.
With native support for WebGL in HTML5-compatible browsers, consumer-end plugins that achieve the same goal will become obsolete. While the technology marks a big step forward for those developing media for the web at large, it’s particularly significant for companies whose business is creating games for the browser.
The use of plugin support for 3D graphics in the browser has allowed developers to bring games to the web without WebGL. Convincing users to install third-party plugins and ensuring that the plugin performs well on all major platforms, however, has made it more difficult for companies to grow their user bases. Native support circumvents these issues entirely.Khronos Group
For any web developer, making sure your workflow stays streamlined and efficient is essential. Even small projects can grow quickly in size and go through several iterations and stages of development. You want to have an editor that’s flexible but unobtrusive, source control that works, with lots of options, and tools to keep it all organized, just a few keystrokes away.
