GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

The Mac App Store has launched, freshly stocked with over 1,000 OS X applications. The store comes as part of an OS X update, version 10.6.6, and is a standalone application rather than being yet another add-on to the already creaking and bloated iTunes.

The store works a lot like the iOS App Store we know already: You sign in with your Apple I.D and then you can shop. Buy a Mac app and the payment is charged to your registered credit card account, and the app downloads automatically and is placed in the applications folder, with a convenient shortcut placed in the dock (the icon actually leaps from the Store window and lands in the dock neat). This is clearly aimed at novice users who may never have actually downloaded and installed third-party software before, and the interface will be instantly familiar to anyone who has used the App Store in iTunes or on an iPad.

That said, there is plenty for power-users, too. Apple’s flagship photo-editing software, Aperture, is in the store for just $80. You can still buy it from the conventional Apple Store, but it’ll cost the usual $200. That’s quite a saving. The iWork office suite is in there, too, although it remains at the ‘09 version, the a new ‘11 update many were hoping for. The three iWork apps, Pages, Numbers and Keynote, cost $20 apiece, a saving on the usual $80 bundle price. If you already have these installed on your Mac, the App Store detects this and shows them as “installed”, just like on the iPad.

There are also free apps the slick new Twitter, for example, which is the long awaited v2.0 of Tweetie for Mac as well as some old favorites (Angry Birds is quite something on a 27-inch iMac screen).

There are no trials in the Mac App Store, and submissions are subject to strict rules, just like the iOS store. It appears that some of these can be waived, though. Twitter is clearly using custom, non standard user interface elements and it is featured on the front page. Apple is clearly playing somewhat by its own rules here, too. No trial versions are are allowed in the store, so developers have to host them on their own sites. Apple has abided, and the trial for the iWork suite is on the main Apple site

I predict that the store is going to be huge. It has the same kid-in-a-candy-store addictive qualities of the iPhone and iPad stores, along with a few features missing from the mobile versions. On the Mac, for example, all your purchases are listed under a tab in the top toolbar. Finally, here’s a tip: Up in the Apple menu, on the top left of your screen, you’ll see a new entry called “App Store.” This replaces the old “Mac OS X Software” which has quietly been retired.

Mac App Store [Apple]
Apples Mac App Store Opens for Business [Apple]

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A new Trojan horse aimed at Android devices has recently surfaced in China.

Named “Geinimi,” San Francisco firm Lookout Mobile Security says the Trojan is “the most sophisticated Android malware [the firm has] seen to date.”

“Geinimi is effectively being ‘grafted’ onto repackaged versions of legitimate applications,” most of which have been games, the firm says. The apps are then sold in Chinese third-party Android app markets. Affected apps will request permissions “over and above” those requested by the legitimate version of an app.

“Users should make sure that the program is asking for permissions appropriate to the app,” a spokesperson from Lookout told Wired. “If the program is asking for your IMEI or your location, and it has nothing to do with the app’s function, that’s a big red flag.”

IMEI is short for International Mobile Equipment Identity, the internationally-used, unique identity number used by many phones.

Lookout hasn’t yet established an intent for Geinimi, though the firm claims the Trojan is “the first Android malware in the wild that displays botnet-like capabilities.” The firm claims that it’s “botnet-like” because it hasn’t yet seen the command server communicate back to affected devices, a Lookout spokesperson told Wired.

The firm has evidence that Geinimi is being distributed only through third-party Chinese app markets. Lookout hasn’t seen any Geinimi-compromised apps in the official Google Android marketplace.

Lookout released an update to its own Android antivirus app, which it says will protect users against Geinimi.

Photo: alachia/Flickr

See Also:

• Android App No Malware, Says Google
• Malware Sneaks Into Android Market
• Trojan Malware Delivered by Sneakernet

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Photogene has long been one of the better photo editing apps for the iPad, but a new update version 2.0 turns it into arguably the best around. First I’ll run through the main features, and then tell you about the new stuff, which includes non-destructive editing, something only usually found in desktop software costing hundreds of dollars.

Like most iPad photo apps, you can apply a whole lot of tweaks familiar from desktop applications like Photoshop. Photogene lets you tweak the contrast, curves and levels, change saturation, white-balance, add sharpness, reduce noise and the like. It also has a effects section (called “Enhance”) which contains various frames, blurs and vignettes, along with a whole pocketful of strange filters, speech bubbles and crops.

But what sets it apart is the UI. It doesn’t have a revolutionary layout, but it is dead easy and fast to use. The buttons are big enough to hit with fingers, transitions are slick and quick and you can do a lot of what you’d do in, say, Lightroom on a Mac or PC. A great example of the user friendliness is the curves tool, which puts the contrast-curve over the top of the picture so you can drag and add points right over the photo as you see it. It made me smile when I first saw it.

Finally, there is an embarrassment of export options: You get Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, vanilla FTP, copy-to-clipboard, email and plain ol’ local save.

So what’s new? Quite a lot, as it turns out. The first thing you’ll see is a custom photo-browser. Instead of the iPad’s crappy built-in browser, you get a great full-screen browser with big thumbnails. All your regular albums, faces, events and places are here, just bigger and better, and this is where you do batch exports (now up to 8MP each). You can also view metadata, including GPS info. The only problem here is the font used for album titles: too bold and ugly.

Open a photo from here and you edit with all of the above, plus a new clone tool (which works exactly like the one in Lightroom), a heal tool (similar to clone, but cleverer).

But the real meat here is the lossless editing. Just like Lightroom and Photoshop, Photogene doesn’t change your original files. Import a RAW (or JPEG) from your camera and you can edit as much as you like without the original being touched – all the edits are stored in the app, and can be reset at any time, even in the far future. Edits are only “baked-in” when you export a picture. All your edits are reflected in the thumbnails, too, so they show up when browsing your catalog.

Like I said, this update adds some really big features, but take the app for a test drive. The interface has been tweaked so much that even if you tried it once and didn’t like it, you should give it another shot. It’s almost unbelievable that it packs so much in, weighs just 2MB and costs only $4.

Photogene for iPad [iTunes]

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Apple can’t stick to its own rules with the gigantic iOS App Store.

The company recently approved an iPhone camera app that carries a special feature: the ability to snap a photo with the physical volume button rather than tapping the touchscreen. Oddly enough, about four months ago Apple banned a top-selling iPhone app for including the same “volume-snap” functionality.

Apple in August rejected the photo app Camera+ when it included a volume-snap feature, because changing the behavior of the iPhone’s external hardware buttons was strictly prohibited.

“Your application cannot be added to the App Store because it uses iPhone volume buttons in a non-standard way, potentially resulting in user confusion,” Apple told Camera+ developer Tap Tap Tap in its August rejection letter. “Changing the behavior of iPhone external hardware buttons is a violation of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement.”

Following the rejection, Tap Tap Tap hid the volume-snap feature as an Easter egg inside the app and hinted that it could be enabled by visiting a URL in the Safari web browser. That led to Apple slamming the ban hammer. After four months in the penalty box, Camera+ returned last week with the volume-snap feature removed.

So it’s inconsistent that the app Quick Snap got the greenlight in the App Store, explicitly promoting the volume-snap feature that Apple strictly forbade (see screengrab above).

“Why choose the soft or full screen shutter when you can use VOLUME BUTTON as the hard shutter button on your iPhone?” Quick Snap’s iTunes description reads.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Hosting over 300,000 apps for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, Apple’s App Store has drawn criticism for some of its rules regulating the content and functionality allowed inside third-party apps. Apple only three months ago published guidelines listing reasons why apps get rejected from the App Store.

But with the case of Camera+, it’s evident that disclosing guidelines hasn’t solved one of the App Store’s major problems: App Store reviewers are not consistent with enforcing the rules, and therefore censorship still seems arbitrary. I’ve argued in the past that arbitrary censorship in the App Store is detrimental to creative freedom an issue poised to grow as Apple continues to expand as a major media publisher.

Brian is a Wired.com technology reporter focusing on Apple and Microsoft. He’s also writing a book about the always-connected mobile future called Always On (publishing April 2011 by Da Capo).
Follow @bxchen and @gadgetlab on Twitter.

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IPhone photographers get all the retro-licious fun. Apps like Hipstamatic and Instagram let you mess with your pristine digital pics and make them look as if they came from a low-quality plastic camera from communist-era Eastern Europe. Now videographers can join in the image-degrading hijinks, with 8mm Vintage Camera.

The app does exactly what you’d expect. It adds dusty, speckly artifacts to your footage, and you can shoot through a variety of virtual lenses (flickering frame, light leak and color fringing, for example) and capture the video onto one of several “films”. You can also add random jitter and movement to the movie, as if the projector was having trouble keeping the film fed neatly through its gate.

All the effects happen in real time, so you see on-screen exactly what you are recording. There are modern touches, too: you can light up the iPhone’s flash whilst recording, and the familiar touch-to-focus feature is in there. Exporting options are good, too. ITunes sharing is supported, as is email and saving to the camera roll, but you can also send movies straight up to YouTube.

Best of all, the app is just $2. Sure, my $800 Micro Four Thirds camera might shoot great-looking, hi0def video, but this looks like way more fun.

8mm Vintage Camera [iTunes via iPhoneography]

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Our favorite iPhone camera app just got a boatload of new features after its four-month exile from the App Store.

Previously pulled by Apple because it included an inoffensive hidden feature, Camera+ returned to the App Store on Tuesday night with new controls, more image-editing effects, improved performance and several other additions.

Most notably, there’s a new slider bar that allows you to adjust the intensity of each effect applied to a photo, giving you more control over the end result.

There are also some neat new filters like a Nostalgia filter for a more old-school look and a depth-of-field effect to give your photo an artsy touch. (See the photos above for examples.)

I’ve had some time to test the update, and the biggest improvement is speed. Camera+ now loads much faster than it used to, which is useful for capturing those serendipitous moments, and the time to process photos has decreased significantly.

The app’s maker Tap Tap Tap has a full post onall 53 new features.

It’s a free upgrade for those who already own the app. For new buyers, Camera+ is $1 in the App Store.

Download Link [iTunes]

Brian is a Wired.com technology reporter focusing on Apple and Microsoft. He’s also writing a book about the always-connected mobile future called Always On (publishing April 2011 by Da Capo).
Follow @bxchen and @gadgetlab on Twitter.

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Word Lens for the iPhone is, quite honestly, one of the most amazing things I have ever seen. Take a look at this, but put down any hot liquids first.

It’s an augmented-reality, OCR-capable translation app, but that’s a poor description. A better one would be “magic.” World Lens looks at any printed text through the iPhone’s camera, reads it, translates between Spanish and English. That’s pretty impressive already – it does it in real time – but it also matches the color, font and perspective of the text, and remaps it onto the image. It’s as if the world itself has been translated.

Impressed? You’re not the only one. John Gruber of Daring Fireball puts it best: “[It's] as though near-future time travelers started sending us apps instead of Terminators.”

If it works as well as it does in the video, Word Lens really is a taste of science-fiction, something like a visual version of the universal translator or the Babelfish. Only instead of being a convenient device to avoid movie subtitles, it’s a real, functioning tool.

Word Lens is free, and will do some fancy word-rearranging to show you how it works. The Spanish-English and English-Spanish dictionaries are in-app purchases, for $5 each, and the app runs offline – perfect for when you’re traveling. You can pick your coffee back up, now.

Word Lens download [iTunes]

Word Lens product page [Quest Visual]

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Syncing an iPhone to a computer stinks: You have to physically plug in the device via USB, and iTunes still takes forever to copy your files. Apple hasn’t delivered a cloud-based iTunes yet, but a new iPhone app at least offers a wireless syncing solution for photos.

With the app Cinq, you can snap photos and save them straight into a folder on your computer even when you’re outside. Here’s how it works:

• You download the Cinq app for Mac or Windows to create a server on your computer. Register to create an account.
• Then you download the Cinq app for iPhone and log in with your Cinq account.
• From here on, you can pop open Cinq and tap the camera icon to snap a photo, and it will save straight into your Cinq folder on the desktop.
• You can also choose photos stored in your iPhone’s photo library and save them into Cinq.

It’s a pretty nifty app, especially for iPhone shutterbugs who haven’t gotten in the habit of plugging in and syncing to iTunes and iPhoto on a regular basis.

I just have a minor complaint: When choosing stored photos from an iPhone album to send to Cinq, we can only select one photo at a time. It’d be much more efficient if we could select multiple photos, or even the entire camera roll, to wirelessly sync with our Cinq folder.

But hey Cinq is less than a week old, so hopefully future software updates will make this a really sweet app. It’s a free download in the iTunes App Store; there’s also a $2 version that’s ad-free.

Brian is a Wired.com technology reporter focusing on Apple and Microsoft. He’s also writing a book about the always-connected mobile future called Always On (publishing April 2011 by Da Capo).
Follow @bxchen and @gadgetlab on Twitter.

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The iPhone takes some great pictures, but when it comes to organizing and, well, doing anything else with those photos, it sucks. LateNiteSoft aims to patch at least one gaping hole with Lab, a detailed photo-viewer for iOS.

Lab tells you everything you want to know about a picture, and it does it with a gorgeous interface that makes it easy to use. Fire it up and you see all the photos in your library (album support is “coming soon”). Tap a photo and you get an almost full-screen view, along with the date the photo was snapped, how many megapixels the camera had, and the file size.

Hit the big “i” button and you get the juicier bits. The photo sits at the top of the screen, like a Polaroid on a clothesline, and the info is arrayed beneath. You get the time and date, the kind of camera, the size in pixels (along with the size info from the previous screen). If the photo has GPS coordinates embedded within, then its position is shown on a map, and below that is a histogram. Finally, exposure information sits at the bottom (ISO, -number and shutter-speed).

While this is obviously best used on an iPhone, it works equally well on an iPad. The interface is pixel-doubled (and looks fine for it) but the photos are displayed at their proper resolution. The app didn’t do a great job of pulling the metadata out of my photos, though, but that’s more a problem with other apps, and iOS itself, which strips the metadata from pictures: an iPhone 4 HDR, for example, sent full-size from a friend, doesn’t give up much. The sizes and histogram always work, though (the histogram is generated in-app from the photo itself, it seems), as does anything pulled in via the camera connection kit.

LateNiteSoft is also responsible for the great Sketches app for iPhone and iPad.

Lab costs just $1.

Lab product page [iTunes]

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Djay, by Algoriddim, puts a pair of turntables and a mixer onto the multi-touch screen of the iPad. I have been playing with it for a day and it’s pretty awesome.

The iPad seems to be an obvious place for the app, which also exists on the Mac. Multi-touch makes adjusting sliders, choosing music and – of course – scratching seem like you’re using a real (if very small) DJ setup, and an iPad full of MP3s is a lot more portable than a box of records, or even CDs.

I’m no DJ – when I used to have a bar I banned myself from touching the music as I tended to empty the place with just one song – but Djay is dead easy to use. Pick a track for each deck, in either a popover or full-screen box, and hit play.

You can adjust tempo up and down, cross-fade between tracks and even pick up the needle and move it to skip forward or back. The physics are faithful to the real thing: kill the power on a turntable and it doesn’t just stop dead. Instead, you here the sound quickly slow to a halt.

And then the fancy, computer-only gimmicks begin. Tap “Sync” to auto-sync the tracks’ speeds (BPM), and tap the arrow next to the crossfader to auto-mix between them. You can pick the type of transition – backspin, brake, reverse and others – and you’ll sound like a pro. Which brings us on to scratching.

Scratching properly is hard. It’s equally hard to do well in Djay. If you put a finger on the record and wiggle it, you’ll get that scratchy sound, but it sounds terrible. Switch to two fingers, though, and scratching gets smart, and Djay “automatically applies the rhythmic pattern of the currently playing song to your scratches in real-time.” What that means is that you come on all DMC, again sounding like the pro you’re not.

There’s a whole lot more: when you open a track, for instance, the app analyzes it, shows you a waveform and works out the BPM. When you scratch (or just cue up a spot in the track), the waveform zooms in to help you get to the right spot. You can also set a cue-point and hit a button to skip back to it. You can even put a virtual piece of tape on the record to keep track of where you are.

Finally, it plays nice with iOS 4, with background audio (and auto-mixing!) and AirPlay support (this suffers from the usual two-second delay, making it impossible to use for actual mixing, although Bluetooth speakers fair better), and access to your full music library and playlists.

It’s a lot of fun, and kept me up to 2AM this morning. Like I said, I’m a hopeless selector, but real DJs should get a whole lot from the app, especially as you can split the output and send one signal to the speakers and another to a pair of headphones. This is done with a stereo-to-mono adapter in the jack-socket, giving two mono outputs. I tried putting a USB sound-adapter (via the camera connection kit) into the dock-connector and it works, but kills the headphone output. It seems the iPad will only use one at a time.

Djay costs $20. Combine this with something like the block-rocking, battery-powered SuperTooth speaker and you have yourself a pretty sweet portable party.

Djay for iPad [Algoriddim]

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A high school coach claims that a first-aid app on his iPhone helped him save a basketball player’s life.

Can’t say we haven’t heard this story before.

Xavier Jones, 17-year-old basketball player at Verne Lutheran High School, stumbled when attempting to receive a pass, and his heart stopped beating.

Eric Cooper, coach of the basketball team, said he had downloaded a $2 iPhone app Phone Aid last week to brush up on CPR. Thanks to the app’s refresher, he was able to successfully administer CPR to Jones to save his life, according to LA Times.

“It was really fresh and clear in my brain,” he said. “We are trained in CPR, but the iPhone app was a stabilizer for us.”

This story is extremely similar to that of Dan Woolley, who used an iPhone first-aid app to help him treat his wounds and ultimately survive the Haiti earthquake in January. Woolley gave Wired.com a closer look at the tech he used until a rescue team dug him out of the rubble. Incidents like these highlight the implications of having data seamlessly integrated into our everyday lives through apps and versatile devices we carry everywhere, such as the iPhone.

Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com

Brian is a Wired.com technology reporter focusing on Apple and Microsoft. He’s also writing a book about the always-connected mobile future called Always On (publishing April 2011 by Da Capo).
Follow @bxchen and @gadgetlab on Twitter.

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I’m not sure what’s my favorite part of this GPS-dongle for cars. Maybe its that it makes it impossible to misplace your car, or perhaps it is that fact that it’s called the AutoBot, clearly the most Transformer-tastic name for a car accessory ever.

Hooking into the car’s on-board diagnostic brain via an OBD-II-port, the AutoBot works with a partner-app in your Android phone or iPhone. From here you can get walking directions to the car, or tap into the diagnostics for in-depth info on what’s happening under the hood.

Even better, the dongle will also let you track a stolen car (or sound an alarm when your kids drive to the local make-out spot instead of going to music lessons), and will send your location to both family members and 911 should your airbags deploy. The AutoBot will be in stores early next year for “less than $300″.

There is one catch. The monthly service comes in exchange for spam. If you don’t pay to opt-out, you’ll get “offers” based on what it going on with your car. Ominously, “AutoBot knows when you need an oil change, tires rotated, and how many miles you’ve driven,” and will “share this information with our partners.” No thanks.

AutoBot product page [Mavizon Tech via The Giz]

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Poor PDFs. So dull and boring, and yet so essential. The same-everywhere document format is wonderful at what it does (boarding cards for online checkins, mostly), but has lost out in a popularity contest with the e-book. Hell, the PDF is not even well suited to the screen. Until now.

Out of the gazillion PDF apps for the iPad, the brand-new PDF Highlighter really stands out. It has almost all the features of other readers, but adds great some great design touches that will make you smile often as you use it.

Highlighter’s name hints at its gimmick: You can scrawl on top of a PDF’s pages, as well as highlight, underline and strikeout text and even add a sticky note which can be moved around later. The sketching function works great, giving smooth lines even for those with the shakes from a severe hangover, and you can of course adjust color and line-thickness.

I have been using this to tick boxes and fill-out answers on some worksheets I have to help me learn Catalan. It’s a lot more fun than paper.

To browse your highlights, sketches and notes, you hit a toolbar button and they all pop up as strips of paper over a darkened screen, OS X dashboard-style. Touching one takes you to its place in the document.

The other big feature is Dropbox support. You can open PDFs from Dropbox and save them back (you can also use iTunes’ clunky file transfer, or get things out with plain old email). Any saved PDF can be opened in a desktop PDF app with annotations intact.

These features are winners on their own, but the little details are what really make the app. Turn a page while zoomed in, for example, and the app respects the zoom level, but shifts up to the top of the next page, ready to read. Page navigation is classy, too, with a Pages-style loupe which shows thumbnail previews as you slide your finger across the navigation-bar at the bottom of the screen.

The display of the PDF can be jiggered with, too. You can invert the display for night-reading, tweak the contrast for tired eyes and even choose between eight shades of gray or beige for the page background. Links are clickable, and open in a small, popover browser instead of sending you off to Safari, and you can highlight a word and look it up in the same popover using Wikipedia.

Finally, there is full support for hierarchical tables of content (with clickable links) and search in both the library view (search by title) and when reading a PDF (search-as-you-type shows the results as torn paper-strips with the search-phrase highlighted inside a few lines of text for context).

The level of polish is very high, and its hard to see what could be added in a future release. The developer is OMZ Software, the same folks behind the NewsRack (formerly NewsStand) RSS reader for iPad and iPhone, itself a pretty slick app.

If you use PDFs in anything more than a cursory fashion, you should check out Highlighter. It’s just $5 in the App Store, or less than you spent this morning on that child’s milkshake from Starbucks that you somehow convinced yourself is a cup of “coffee”.

PDF Highlighter [OMZ]
PDF Highlighter [iTunes]

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Most of your friends are on Facebook, only the nerdiest of them are on Twitter and your professional colleagues are on LinkedIn. Stalking everybody by checking all these sites can be a colossal waste of time.

Enter the Friends app from Taptivate, who developed the beautiful Postman app I covered previously. Friends takes your contacts from different services Facebook, Twitter, MySpace (whoever’s on there anymore) and LinkedIn and shoves them all into one tidy list.

If I were to select my friend Phill from the list, for example, I’d be able to tap a tab to check his Twitter feed, a different tab to check his Facebook stream and another tab to dial his phone. Check out the video below to get a visual sense of what I mean.

Friends from Oliver Cameron on Vimeo.

Friends isn’t out yet in the App Store, but I had some hands-on time with an early build of the app. I enjoy the detail and simplicity of the design; I’m probably going to be using this app to quickly check on some people while riding the elevator or standing in line at a grocery store.

Taptivate expects to release Friends in a few weeks in the App Store. It will cost 2 bucks. Keep an eye out for this gem.

Product page [Taptivate]

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Switch on the pocket-sized Tizi, pull out the antenna and fire up the companion app on your iPad or iPhone. Congratulations. You are now watching live TV.

Elgato’s EyeTV already lets you watch TV on your iDevice, but you need a computer to be switched on, near an antenna and running server software to do it. The Tizi is a tiny, standalone box that does all this for you. It is battery powered, for use both at home and on the move, and gives 3.5-hours of use on one charge. You can also hook it to any USB power-source to charge and power it.

How does it work? The Tizi pulls in local DVB-T/DT signals, decodes them using its ARM 9 processor and then sends them to your iPhone or iPad via Wi-Fi (802.11b/g). Yes, you’ll have to tune your iPad to this Wi-Fi network, but you can still stay connected to the internet via 3G if you have it.

A channel-guide helps you find what to watch, and during ads you can switch away to other apps but keep the audio running in the background so you know when to tune back in.

This looks like a great product. I don’t watch much TV, but I could hang this in the living room, which has a clear view of the sky, and beam signals to anywhere I like in the apartment. Neat.

The Tizi is available now for $150, and the companion app is in the App Store for free.

Tizi product page [Tizi. Thanks, anonymous Equinux mailing-list people!]

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Steve Jobs has successfully prevented Adobe Flash from getting on the iPhone for years, but a new iOS app promises to bring Flash video to the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch without upsetting the CEO.

Demonstrated below, Skyfire is a web browser that automatically transcodes Flash video into HTML5 so that it can be displayed on your iDevice (instead of the blue LEGO block symbolizing a lack of Flash support).

To our knowledge, Skyfire will be the first app of its kind to offer a roundabout method for watching Flash videos, when it goes live in the App Store this week.

Apple has prohibited Flash from running on iOS devices ever since the original iPhone launched in 2007. In an open letter published April, Jobs said that Flash was the No. 1 reason Macs crash, and he didn’t wish to reduce reliability on iOS products.In the same letter, Jobs vocalized his support for HTML5, a new web standard that does not rely on plug-ins.

“New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too),” Jobs said.

The Skyfire app only transcodes Flash videos into HTML5 not games. A Skyfire spokesman said the Skyfire app was developed with oversight and feedback from Apple.

“It adheres to every guideline put forth by Apple regarding HTML5 video playback for iOS,” the spokesman said. “Skyfire will allow consumers to play millions of Flash videos on Apple devices without the technical problems for which Jobs banned Flash.”

The app was submitted late August, and it will go live in the App Store on Thursday.

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Typing on small virtual keyboards can be hard. 8pen, like Swype, is an alternate text entry program that uses continuous gestures, but instead of navigating a QWERTY keyboard, you use a click-wheel-like spiral motion to select text. It’s out today for Android, with versions for iOS, Windows, remotes and even game controllers in the works.

The best analogy I can offer for 8pen’s interface, again, is the old iPod click wheel. The screen is divided into four quadrants with an X. You begin at the center. Moving into each quadrant selects one of eight characters. A clockwise or counterclockwise movement cuts that character list in half. Then, one, two, three, or four “clicks” through each sector selects the first, second, third, or fourth character. In practice, each gesture amounts to a partial circle.

There are also definable custom gestures for stock phrases or names. I think this is actually the most interesting part of the application.

8pen claims to solve two problems: first, the fact that QWERTY screens optimized for two hands can’t be used that way; and second, that our current software keyboards make it too difficult to type blind. (Take a moment and think about how often you look at a virtual keyboard and how often you look at a physical keyboard.)

How effective could 8pen be? Well, that depends in part on how easy it is to learn.

We know a little bit about how users learn how to use new interfaces. Users have an easier time translating skills from familiar technologies. The QWERTY keyboard, however cramped, is a familiar technology, which is why we use it even in cases where it’s suboptimal. 8pen claims its gestures are closer to handwriting. Add the click-wheel interface, and there is a technology base, however weak, that users can draw on.

Users also have a harder time learning new technologies when they know old, incompatible ones really well. If you’re comfortable using a QWERTY keyboard, and particularly a miniaturized hardware or software keyboard, the costs of switching to a new interface are too high.

It’s like switching to Windows 7 when you know XP inside and out: even if it’s objectively a superior system, you can get more done using the tool you know best. There has to be a crisis to force a move — sort of like how the hurdles and reputation of Windows Vista led a lot of users to take a long hard look at Mac OS X.

One problem I see with 8pen is the way it’s framed. First, smartphone typing may not use all of both hands, but it does use more than one finger, whether it’s two thumbs, a thumb and an index finger, or some combination of these. I find myself using at least my thumb, index and middle fingers on both hands most of the time. (I am a fast typist with very large hands.)

Taking these extra resources off-screen doesn’t seem likely to speed things up. It forces us to type with one finger, when one-finger typing is actually the problem.

Second, it’s hard to type blind on a smartphone because the text entry surface and the screen are on the same plane. On a laptop, desktop or clamshell, the screen and text surface are separated, with the screen on the vertical plane and text entry on the horizontal.

This is actually an advantage for the smartphone in some ways, because it brings the eye and hand together like in manuscript writing. It’s a problem because there isn’t a natural orientation for both reading and writing, so we usually wind up hunched over a diagonal screen.

This is my skeptical take. More optimistically, I think it’s promising that companies are experimenting with text entry on touchscreens. There are huge numbers of people venturing into touchscreen text entry who don’t have lots of experience with smartphone typing, or even as much hardware keyboard typing than those of us who bang away on computers all day.

Meanwhile, frequent text entry is venturing into more and more devices — television sets, electronic readers, remote controls. If someone can create a system that’s easy to learn, relatively intuitive and reliable, there is a huge opportunity for the company that gets it right.

The 8pen [the8pen.com]

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Amazon keeps rolling out software applications for nearly every device it doesn’t make itself. Next up is the new player in the smartphone market, Windows Phone 7. The forthcoming WP7 Kindle app has virtually the same function as other mobile Kindle apps, but will have Microsoft’s look and feel.

I may have been the only e-reading-focused reporter at the Windows Phone 7 debut event. I asked everyone I could find about e-reading applications for the device. “Just stay tuned,” I was told.

I still couldn’t believe there wasn’t one or more e-reading apps announced at the launch. It’s become an assumed part of app-capable smartphones and tablets in what has to be record time. Having an app for Kindle is like having an app for Facebook or the New York Times.

Think about it: just a year ago, there were only a few e-book apps, some by companies that are dwindling if not long gone. Now nearly every e-bookstore has a reading app on every screen you can carry.

Kindle joins just one other e-reading application that will be in the application Marketplace: Wattpad. Sometimes called “the YouTube of eBooks,” Wattpad is a service where users share their own original writing; half e-book commons, half social network.

Wattpad looks great — but it’s neither an e-bookstore nor an e-book reading application as we’ve come to recognize it from the Kindle, Nook, Kobo, iBooks, Stanza or MobiPocket smartphone apps (this list goes on and on).

The Kindle app for WP7 may not be ready when the phones are officially ready for sale. If history is any guide, this won’t be the last e-reader app announcement you’ll hear between now and then.

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A high-profile market research company radically revised its findings about how many iPad users download iPad apps.

Last week Nielsen published figures stating that 31 percent of iPad owners had never downloaded an app.

Now the company has revised its figures. The true number, Nielsen now says, is 9 percent.

In other words, the vast majority of iPad owners — more than 9 out of 10 — have downloaded an app. Games are the most popular category, followed by books and music, as shown in Nielsen’s revised graphic, shown here.

We reported on Nielsen’s claim and are now posting this update. We’re also updating our original post on the topic.

The original number was eye-catching and, if true, would have had significant implications for the viability of Apple’s app model, not only on the iPad and iPhone but on the soon-to-be-launched Mac App Store for OS X customers. The notion that one-third of tablet users were perfectly satisfied with the device’s web browser, e-mail client and other utilities was surprising, if not totally unbelievable.

We were taken in by the survey, but treated it with a dose of healthy skepticism:

If these figures are actually meaningful (ie. if the self-selecting sample-group actually contains more than a few dozen iPad owners) then perhaps the app store isnt the competitive advantage that Apple believes it to be.

Turns out that the App Store may be a competitive advantage, after all.

In reporting the news, we’re only as good as our sources. Nielsen is usually a credible provider of market research, and we made a mistake in reporting their numbers without examining them more closely.

For its part, Nielsen hasn’t explained how it managed to overstate the number of non-app-downloading customers by a factor of three. At least they’ve corrected their original post.

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Amazon has good news for Kindle owners that it wanted to share with them first. A post from the Kindle team on Amazon’s Kindle Community forum says that 14-day lending will come to the Kindle sometime this year.

There is a catch: “Each book can be lent once for a loan period of 14-days and the lender cannot read the book during the loan period.” If you’re familiar with Barnes & Noble’s lending feature on the Nook, this isn’t a surprise. “Additionally, not all e-books will be lendable – this is solely up to the publisher or rights holder, who determines which titles are enabled for lending.” Again, to borrow some jargon, this is a known issue.

Books will be lendable both to Kindle owners and users of Kindle apps, which is nice: even if you don’t have your own Kindle, you can borrow an e-book from someone who does.

The Kindle team also revealed that Kindle app users will soon also be able to read Kindle magazines and newspapers through the app. Periodicals had been a Kindle-only feature. Support for newspapers and magazines is coming to iOS “in the coming weeks” and Android and other app platforms “down the road.”

Since there’s so much news about Kindle’s e-reading competition lately, I guess Amazon just wanted to let Kindle users know that the company still loved them — and more importantly, that it’s going to keep giving them reasons to love the Kindle.

Coming Soon for Kindle [Amazon/Kindle Community Forums, via Kindle Review]

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It’s good for governments to find more ways to connect with their citizens, including the web. As the web goes mobile, open government should too. But governments shouldn’t develop apps for some mobile platforms and not others.

That’s Kevin Curry and Brownell Chalstrom’s problem with Texas.gov’s new iPhone app. The state of Texas recently overhauled its website for the desktop, but doesn’t have a mobile version. It also doesn’t have applications for Android, Blackberry or any other mobile platform.

This heated up discussion at the recent Govfresh Gov 2.0 conference in Manor, Texas. Curry, founder of the open government unconference City Camp, said that by limiting access to one platform and one device — and an expensive device, at that — Texas is empowering the already empowered, rather than broadening access for everyone.

Given the potential use cases and the sheer number of citizens whose only net-capable devices are mobile phones, mobile access to government data is definitely important. The trouble is when governments pick winners and losers, developing a presence on iPhone but not Android, or Facebook but not MySpace.

It’s not only the numbers of iPhone or Facebook users that attract governments. It’s the prestige. According to O’Reilly Radar’s government 2.0 reporter Alex Howard, “government technology shops, judging by their output, have become afflicted with a kind of ’shiny app syndrome,’ given that an app is a substantive accomplishment that can be trotted out for officials and the public.”

Brownell Chalstrom, a Manor Govfresh delegate, says that governments looking to develop for mobile should first look to create open websites using rich web standards like HTML5 and CSS3, and only then look to develop applications for platforms limited to users of an individual device or service. Open standards for open government, if you will.

“The goals that public officials pursue when they create new .gov websites or applications should be based upon civic good,” Howard writes. “If that civic good is to be rendered to a population increasingly connected to one another through smartphones, tablets and cellphones, truly open governments will employ methods that provide access to all citizens, not just the privileged few.”

“Shiny app syndrome” and Gov 2.0 [O'Reilly Radar]

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A new survey by the Nielsen Company shows that one third of iPad owners have never downloaded an application. In a section titled “A majority of iPad owners have already paid for content” fully 32% of iPad owners asked said that they “did not download an app.” This compares to 63% who had downloaded a paid app, and 5% who had only downloaded a free app.

The Nielsen survey polled “5,000 connected device owners who completed an online, self-administered survey,” but the actual number of iPad owners in this 5,000 isn’t specified, but one third seems an astonishingly high number, especially given that apps are so easy to buy, and you pretty much have to sign up to the iTunes Store just to get started with any iDevice.

Less surprising is the breakdown of paid downloads. Games are the top choice, with 62% of responders having bought one, closely followed by books (54%) and music (50%).

If these figures are actually meaningful (ie. if the self-selecting sample-group actually contains more than a few dozen iPad owners) then perhaps the app store isn’t the competitive advantage that Apple believes it to be. Perhaps all you really need in a store is Angry Birds and a copy of the Kama Sutra.

Connected Devices: Does the iPad Change Everything? [Nielsen Company blog]

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While riding the Subway this week, New York resident Brittany Tucker spotted the band Atomic Tom pulling a musical stunt on the train, jamming out their song “Take Me Out” on their iPhones. Each band member used an iPhone app to play a different part (drums, guitar, keyboard, vocals), and the end result is quite an ear worm.

Imagine if you were on that train. I’d be thinking, “Only in New York. Awesome.”

We’ve seen a number of geeky performers create experiment noises with iOS apps, and Atomic Tom’s performance is one of the better ones. Tune in by playing the video above.

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Remote Palette is a very neat iApp for painting pictures. The twist, which will excite anyone who has ever painted real pictures with real paint, is that the app hooks together an iPad and an iPhone (or iPod Touch). The iPad is the canvas, and the iPhone is the palette.

The app is universal, so one $0.99 download works for both devices. On launch, you pair the iPad and iPhone via Bluetooth and you’re off. Swipe between pages on the iPhone to choose your colors, and splodge the paint onto the iPad’s canvas. The experience is incredibly intuitive. Somehow it really feels like you’re transferring real paint with your finger.

If you’re expecting a full-featured painting app like Brushes or Sketchbook Pro, you’re going to be disappointed. You’re limited to the pre-defined colors and just four brushes, which vary in thickness but not texture or transparency. The app is probably great for kids, though, and even has a few coloring-book style outlines that can be used.

This should be added to Brushes ASAP. I love that app, but with a color picker on a separate screen, and maybe pinching to adjust brush sizes, it would be killer. Pretty please, Steve Sprang, add this to your app.

Remote Palette product page [iTunes]

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

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The innocuously-named FileBrowser is an iPad app which lets you access files on your computer over the local network or the internet. This is a function shared by roughly one zillion other apps in the store. What makes FileBrowser different is that it can access network-attached storage (NAS), letting you stream video and music to your iPad from a Time Capsule or other network drive without switching on a computer.

The app will connect to Macs, Windows PCs and NAS devices via SMB sharing. There is some setup involved, but the app comes loaded with PDFs which walk you through step-by-step. I grabbed it so I could stream files from a hard-drive hooked up to my Time Capsule, a feature added in the latest version of the app. It was easy.

All you need to do is give FileBrowser the name of the Time Capsule (or Airport Extreme base station), along with your user name and password. That’s it. Over an 802.11n connection you can drill down into the internal and external drives as fast as if they were local storage, and clicking on a compatible video file will play it right there in the app, with the standard media-control buttons.

The trick is that the movie files need to be in the right format. If it would sync to the iPad via iTunes and play in the “Videos” app, then you’re good to go. This means you’ll have to convert movies before using this solution: If you want to stream and convert movies on the fly, you’ll still need a computer running something like the excellent Air Video.

However, if you have a movie-playing app like CineXPlayer installed, you can choose to open AVI and other movie formats with that instead. These don’t stream, though: FileBrowser downloads them first.

FileBrowser will also work with any file that iOS can recognize, and can hand those files off to other apps. It costs $3, which is $3 you’ll save in weeks by keeping your computer switched off.

FileBrowser app page [iTunes]

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

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