The Village Voice has just put out a clever iPhone app called Best Of. The app basically uses your location to help you find every place that was voted the "best of" something—be it restaurant or hot dog.More »
While Google Maps offers its own editing tools for drawing and annotating, they’re not particularly easy to use and the printing options are limited. Stepping in to solve this problem with its own, free solution is FIND, which this week launched Personalise Your Map.
This easy-to-use Web app lets you customise the colours of just about every element of a map and makes adding text boxes, arrows, lines and shapes much easier than the standard Google tools. If you’re mapping the UK, it takes advantage of open Ordnance Survey mapping data to allow you to add area boundaries, historic building locations, nature reserves and geological information.
You can choose between a standard Google Map, Google’s satellite view and OpenStreetMap data. Additionally, Ordnance Survey maps can be selected when you’re looking at the UK (this option worked when we tried the service earlier in the week but is currently showing as “temporarily unavailable”) Double-clicking on any element that you’ve added to your map opens up a box that lets you customise it with different colours and patterns.
Once your map is complete, the service lets you save it as a PDF for storing, sharing and printing – a useful feature that Google Maps lacks.
Sadly, there’s currently no way to save your map in a way that allows you to edit it further at a later date – you need to create and finish your map in one session. Still, if you need to create a custom map to share with others, FIND’s solution is well worth a try.
While the experience of using interactive digital cookbooks on the iPad is great, it does come with one drawback — your ingredients usually end up on the screen.
iCookbook has cleverly solved the issue of a messy, mucked up screen by including a voice control feature that gives users control over two thousand recipes handsfree.
The user interface is gorgeous and neatly sorts dishes in various categories such as themes, occasions, vegetarian and an ingredients section which helps users build a meal around the ingredients you have on hand in the kitchen.
In an effort to refine the searches, iCookbook offers users a way to use multiple filters that can all be activated at once, allowing users to narrow down recipes based on factors like ingredients, consumer brands, grilled food or the ethnicity of the dish. Using the meal building filters, cooks are given complete control over searches and could potentially save users a lot time.
Within a recipe, foodies can view high-quality images, add the dish to favourites, create notes, send the ingredients to a shopping list or share it with friends via Facebook or email. Making a conversion, finding ingredient substitutions and setting timers are also provided within the recipe tools.
While cooking up a storm with your hands full of goo, there’s a list of voice commands that assist users in navigating through the steps of the recipe. Voice commands can also display the status of cooking timers or open notes –all without ever touching the screen. And nicely, your favourite family recipes can be converted to digital form by inputting a dish directly within the app.
The idea of a voice control feature within a cooking app seems so obvious yet it’s not included in any of the iPad recipe apps I’ve seen. All in all, the large bank of recipes, meal builder feature, voice controls and the option to easily add ingredients to a shopping list earns iCookbook the title of a must-have app for the kitchen. iCookbook is available for $3.99 in the app store.Image: Featured
This won’t appeal to those of us without children, but you’ve gotta admit the animation of this Nursery Rhymes with StoryTime app is absolutely stunning. Provided the child has an iPad, iPhone 4 or 3GS, you can read aloud to them from anywhere there’s Wi-Fi available.More »
Smartphone users in the UK downloaded 105 million paid applications in 2010, driving download revenue to reach £280 million, according to a new report from research2guidance.
Over 860 million applications were downloaded last year, helping double smartphone penetration over the past two years. The UK now holds an 8% share of the global smartphone application downloads market.
The report suggests that smartphone app downloads still have a lot of room to grow, particularly as the UK still has a majority of feature phone owners, who do not interact with applications as actively as smartphone users. With smartphone manufacturers and mobile operators competing to offer the best deals on new devices, prices are being lowered and consumers are increasingly turning to smartphone devices for their next mobile phone.
Symbian handsets accounted for the majority of devices shipped in the UK over the past twelve months but owners of these handsets aren’t actively using mobile apps, despite the availability of marketplaces including the Ovi Store. Android users are more active but iOS device owners download more apps and generate more ad impressions.
Interestingly, young women helped drive smartphone adoption in 2010 – at the current growth rate, female smartphone adopters will match their male counterparts within a year.
