Eideard

LeafSnap lets you identify tree species on the spot.

It’s nice to see technology lessen the influence of geographical limitations on education. I see it in the young and diverse crop of grandmasters from all around the world. If you can get to an internet connection, you can reach the world of chess, and come in contact with the chess elite.

In other areas, too, you see this happening. Now comes an app that lets you identify trees just by snapping a pic and having the image analyzed on the spot. This is quite cool.

There seems to be a requirement that you be connected to the internet when you snap your pic. Available for iPhone and iPad. If you decide to download it and give it a spin, please let us know how it goes.

——————————-
From the Leafsnap website: “Leafsnap turns users into citizen scientists, automatically sharing images, species identifications, and geo-coded stamps of species locations with a community of scientists who will use the stream of data to map and monitor the ebb and flow of flora nationwide.”

It’s perhaps inevitable that as video gaming technology advances, some of us may start to long for the simpler nuts-and-bolts arcade games of our youth. Well, they never got much nuttier and boltier than pinball, and the new Pinball Magic “(app)cessory” allows you to transform your iPhone or iPod touch into a digital version of just such a machine – complete with its own functional iDevice-sized cabinet. Just fire it up, turn up the Buddy Holly, Jefferson Airplane or Joan Jett, then pretend you’re back in the days of broken curfews and wedgies.

The Pinball Magic cabinet has working side-mounted flipper buttons, a ball-launching plunger and a credit/select button. Its legs fold up for transport, while an oscillating top-mounted LED and animated backbox light display add to the tacky realism.

I’ll wait till they make an iPad model.

As video game giants like Sony and Microsoft touted their new gizmos at the Tokyo Game Show this week, industry executives had more than the coming holiday sales season on their minds.

Apple’s recent foray into video games — with the iPhone, the iPod Touch and its ever-expanding online App Store — is causing as much hand-wringing among old industry players as the global economic slump, which threatens to take the steam out of year-end shopping for the second consecutive year.

Among the questions voiced by video game executives: How can Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft keep consumers hooked on game-only consoles, like the Wii or even the PlayStation Portable, when Apple offers games on popular, everyday devices that double as cellphones and music players?

And how can game developers and the makers of big consoles persuade consumers to buy the latest shoot’em-ups for $30 or more, when Apple’s App store is full of games, created by developers around the world and approved by Apple, that cost as little as 99 cents — or even are free…?

The concerns highlight an accelerating shift away from hard-core games, which have traditionally driven console sales, to more casual ones played on cellphones. Of the 758 new game titles shown at the Tokyo Game Show, 168 were for cellphone platforms — more than twice as many as in the previous year.

Apple did not participate in the Tokyo Game Show, which ends Sunday. But the company introduced a beefed-up version of the iPod Touch this month, explicitly comparing it as a gaming platform with the Nintendo DS and Sony PlayStation Portable.

I don’t know from gaming; but, I know a tad about marketing and design. At this point in time, I’d rather own Apple shares than Sony.

If I were to tell you that Apple’s app economy was worth more than $2.4 billion a year, you would laugh hysterically, shake your head and walk out of the room, yes? Surf on over to some other web site? But here I am telling you exactly that!

According to mobile advertising startup AdMob, there are some $200 million worth of applications sold in Apple’s iPhone store every month, or about $2.4 billion a year.

Just to put that in context, Apple says about 1.5 billion apps have been downloaded from the App Store. In comparison, the Android marketplace brings in about $5 million a month or on a run rate to do $60 million in a year, AdMob says…

* Each month, Android and iPhone users download approximately 10 new apps, while iPod touch owners download an average of 18…

* Nearly 50 percent of iPhone users and 40 percent of iPod touch users buy at least one app every month vs. 19 percent of Android-based phone owners…

The biggest takeaway from this data: People are happy spending money on apps for their smartphones, especially after they’ve had a chance to try them for free.

I don’t post much Geek Industry Business reporting. Sites like Om’s already do a terrific job and have a ton of traffic.

Har!

The next iterations of the iPhone and iPod Touch are likely to have 802.11n wireless radios inside, offering lower power consumption, longer range and faster data rates. More importantly, it will mean that you can hook your handheld up to your n-enabled home network and not slow everything else down.

This news comes from detailed, painstaking and probably tiring study of the 3.0 iPhone firmware, revealing an iPod Touch resource file which shows a change from the current Broadcom BCM4325 wireless chip to the newer BCM4329. This chip also supports Bluetooth and FM radio, although expect this last to be disabled on Apple hardware.

Of course, if the Touch gets 802.11n, the iPhone will almost certainly get it too. This move would put all current Apple hardware on the n specification, a curious fact given the very recent upgrade to the Airport base-stations allowing simultaneous b/g and n networking.

I wish I could get the whole family up to “N” speed. I keep a 2nd router set-up subsidiary to my primary wireless network – just to handle the folks running “G” – even 1 laptop running “B” that shows up visiting once in a while.

That way my AppleTV and MacBook in the living room don’t get hobbled.

I think Apple’s new device will look more like a Kindle than a netbook

Some Asian news outlets are reporting rumors that suggest Apple is working on a touchscreen device. This larger format iPod touch has been rumored for a while, and it’s said to be a “netbook” type device. The question is: How likely is it that Apple will release a touchscreen, no-keyboard netbook? My best guess is that Apple is indeed working on a device similar to that being talked about in the blogs today.

Just as it redefined the MP3 player experience (with iPod) and reinvented the smartphone (with iPhone), Apple is going to pursue the netbook opportunity. But it won’t be with anything like the cheap, anorexic laptops being sold as netbooks today.

When Apple COO Time Cook was asked about netbooks during his conference call with analysts in February 2009, he said that the company was “watching the space,” but he dismissed the idea of offering a device that had “smaller screens, cramped keyboard.” In other words, if Apple does make a device that sits between an iPod touch/iPhone and a laptop, then it would mostly likely be a touchscreen device.

Some other clues that point toward the development of this device are found in the user interface on the recently released Safari 4.0 Beta. Charles Ying, who develops for WebKit, notes on his blog the similarities between Safari 4.0 and the iPhone Safari browser.

“I’m guessing that multi-touch user interactions are more positionally accurate due to direct user manipulation. That might explain some of the slight inconveniences Apple is making to pursue a unified multi-touch but full computing interface. I don’t know if Apple’s Netbook will run full Mac OS X, but I’m pretty sure that Safari 4’s user interface will at least be consistent.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Fully customizable, this app from SpoonJuice lets you turn your iPhone or iPod touch into that glowing bane-of-your-existence friend that you have always had by your side. You currently have three color choices for the digital face (red, green and blue) and an old-fashioned black-and-white flip-clock face, all of which will self-orient themselves to however you’re holding the device.

Night Stand also gives you the option of choosing other data you’d like to display—the day, the seconds, or a 24-hour time display. You can also run the mobile device’s iPod app in the background if you’re the sort of person who enjoys some tunes before bed.

Night Stand’s alarm system is full of options as well…From the alarm screen you’re able to set one alarm and choose from 10 alarm sounds, ranging from a cuckoo clock to a woman screaming.

If I had an iPhone – or an iPod Touch – I’d probably get this app just to drive my wife crazy.

Color me impressed: Google has released a custom Google Earth application for the iPhone/iPod Touch, and it’s stunning.

The Google Earth geographical software has been altered to make maximum use of the iPhone’s screen and functionality. You’re able to tilt the device to adjust your view when browsing mountainous terrain, use the ‘My Location’ feature to jump right to where you are in the blink of an eye, and use Google’s local search engine to look for information on cities, places and businesses. Google has also added additional layers to the application, namely Panoramio and Wikipedia, for geo-located high-quality photos and informative articles respectively.

As CNET points out, Google Earth for iPhone has a small Webkit-based browser to show the specific information users click on, and includes a link to the Safari browser Apple builds into the iPhone. When you click the address of a business using the local search engine, the iPhone will intercept the command and show it on the Google Maps application, enabling you to get directions instantly.

Product Manager for Google Earth Peter Birch has also announced that a similar application running on Android is high on the priority list for the future, but that there’s nothing to announce at this point.

Someday, I may get one of these critters. They are the portable platform of the future – something I realized going back to the Palm devices I used to own. Too bad Palm didn’t get it.