Barman Hero FREE2PLAY for iOS - New update. Enjoy
full game for free

post from prMac on 30 January 2012 11:30:00 PM. © prMac

One Geek Army recently released the updated version of Barman Hero FREE2PLAY 1.3.1 for iPhone and iPad. Barman Hero is a classic arcade game that will appeal to uncomplicated gameplay lovers. The 1.3.1 version update makes this universal app free so there's no excuse now to avoid enjoying the frantic action of this game on your preferred device. Fill the mugs and slide drinks over the bar but watch out, make sure there is someone to pick them up!

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iPad propels Apple to top of PC market as growth
stalls without tablets

post from Apple on 30 January 2012 07:04:15 PM. © Apple

Apple is the king of the PC heap, as long as you consider the iPad among those devices. Research firm Canalys does, and its most recent look at client PC sales, focusing on the fourth calendar quarter of 2011, shows the PC market growing, but mostly as a result of strong iPad sales for the year.

With Apple’s more than 15 million iPads shipped during the quarter, the worldwide PC market grew 16 percent year over year. Not counting tablets, of which the iPad is easily the most successful, the PC market actually shrank by 0.4 percent worldwide when compared to the same period a year ago, according to the Canalys data.

Apple’s success both with the iPad and its Mac computers allowed it to take top honors for the quarter, knocking HP to second place overall. Canalys says the lack of a valid HP tablet competitor, now that the TouchPad is shelved, will mean that HP will continue to struggle against Apple’s success.

The iPad wasn’t the only tablet to do well during the quarter, however. Canalys says that the Amazon Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet also helped contribute to the success of tablets in the U.S. Amazon ranked as the second strongest tablet manufacturer worldwide, while Barnes & Noble took the fourth place spot.

All told, iPads accounted for 22 percent of all worldwide PC shipments in the fourth quarter of 2011, as measured by Canalys. It’ll be interesting to see what effect a new iPad launch in the coming months might have on the worldwide momentum of tablets, and the larger PC industry.

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ithout-tablets/

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SweetP Productions Releases ScreenSaver Start 1.0
for Mac OS X

post from prMac on 30 January 2012 06:47:00 PM. © prMac

SweetP Productions has announced ScreenSaver Start 1.0. ScreenSaver Start sits up in your menu bar allowing you to quickly start your screensaver by configuring a global hotkey. It can additionally be configured to start at login, always ready when you need it. ScreenSaver Start is a useful addition to any mac users productivity toolkit. Useful for keeping prying eyes away from sensitive information. With a quick tap on the keyboard, everything you are currently working on, is quickly hidden.

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Rave Reviews

post from Daring Fireball on 30 January 2012 05:04:31 PM. © Daring Fireball

MacDailyNews calls foul on Seeking Alpha writer Cameron Kaine’s claim, regarding Amazon as a rival to Apple, that “last November the company launched an assault on Apple?s tablet reign with the unveiling of its Kindle Fire to rave reviews.”

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pple-or-something/

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Forrester: 20 Percent of Global Info Workers Use
Apple Products for Work

post from Daring Fireball on 30 January 2012 05:04:31 PM. © Daring Fireball

Strong showing for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac in this new report from Forrester.

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The top gadgets at Macworld | iWorld 2012

post from Apple on 30 January 2012 03:04:15 PM. © Apple

Macworld | iWorld had some fantastic products. Ignoring anything that wasn’t actually shipping, since so many products never actually make it to market or do make it, but years behind schedule (Nighthawk anyone?), here are my top picks from the show.

Flygrip $29.95

I was amazed as to how quickly I fell in love with the Flygrip’s simplicity of design and elegance It’s a clip that sticks on the back of an existing iPhone case, or Flygrip’s custom case. While it adds some bulk to the back of the case, it actually isn’t annoying. Quite the opposite. Fully retracted, it allows you too hold your iPhone securely with your ring and forefinger, leaving the rest of your hand able to type. Being able to text and tweet easily on the go made me a believer out of me.

Not only does it make the iPhone easier to hold, but the Flygrip can also act as a kickstand for both portrait and landscape mode, which made catching up on email during lunch an absolute breeze. At $29.95, it’s affordable, and you don’t have to give up your existing case.

xPrintServer $149.95

Although Apple’s AirPrint only supports a limited set of printers, iOS products like Readdle’s Printer Pro and desktop products such as Ecamm’s Printopia have extended the iPad?s print capabilities. Lantronix has a desktop-and device-independent solution to make existing network printers available to any iOS device also on the network. The device supports up to 10 printers, and retails for $149.95. It’s a great option for small businesses that want to quickly and easily make their existing printers available to employee devices.

Prizm Stand $24.95

The Prizm series of iPhone and iPad stands from Hub Innovations is another simple, elegant product. The stand is made up of two metal pieces that come together to hold your iOS device in place while charging or just on display. Starting at $24.95, they come in a variety of colors and can be custom engraved.

I liked that these stands didn’t suffer from the feature bloat or bling overload of most other accessories at the show. This is the type of holder you’d use at home or at your business to frame your iPad with style and without stealing the focus of what’s on the iPad screen. In fact, the metal can be engraved with company information to help provide a custom branding solution. They were at hit with show-goers, so it stands to reason they’d succeed with customers and clients, too.

Wormhole Switch $39.95

One of the few non-iOS focused innovations at the show was the Wormhole Switch by j5create. This product uses an attached of USB connectors to not only control another computer’s keyboard and mouse, but also transport data between computers while avoiding the network entirely.

Even the fastest broadband networks can’t match raw USB speeds, and anyone who’s transferred a large file over a home network knows how much it slows things down. While other USB-direct connect options exist, this product makes it easy for even novices to set up, with software that loads directly from the device.

At a reasonable price of $39.95, the time you’ll save waiting for files to transfer is well worth the cost.

iKeep Charger $49.99

The iKeep Charger is a combination iPhone and micro USB charger conveniently connected to a retractable cord with a carabiner hook for clipping onto a bag, belt loop, etc. The AC plug folds invisibly into the unit, making it easy to quickly charge your iPhone or other devices while on the go without adding bulk. Unlike the iPhone’s stark black and white options, the iKeep Charger comes in eight different colors to match your outfits, or simply your personal taste.

There are my top picks from the show. What stood ou to you? Let us know in the comments.

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2012: The year websites optimize for tablets

post from Apple on 30 January 2012 03:04:15 PM. © Apple

You might not have heard about Mobify, but it’s helped 20,000 customers optimize their websites for mobile, and clients include Starbucks, Bonobos, Threadless and many others. The company said it had 167 million unique visitors visit Mobify-powered mobile websites last year, about 20 percent of all smartphone users.

That’s interesting by itself and falls in line with other reports about how much traffic is going mobile. But in talking with Mobify’s CEO Igor Faletski, one thing that stood out to me was that almost all of Mobify’s work has been to optimize sites for smartphones last year. Very few customers have thought to optimize their websites for tablets like the iPad. Instead they have relied on native apps or just a desktop version of their website. Compuware came to a similar conclusion when surveying 30 of the top retailers’ sites and finding that none were optimizing their sites for tablets.

Faletski said it’s somewhat understandable that many companies haven’t made their sites tablet friendly. Many feel they can get away with just a desktop version with perhaps a little tweaking to replace Flash elements with HTML5. It’s also not easy converting a big site for tablets. And he said that of the top 1,000 retailers, only one-third are still mobil-optimized at all. But he said retailers are starting to realize that the tablet is its own opportunity, unique from a smartphone or PC experience. And now he’s having a lot more discussions with customers about getting their sites to work well on tablets, something he believes will be big this year.

He said it makes sense because customers who optimize for mobile see greater returns. Faletski said customers who went mobile with Mobify saw their revenue double within 100 days. He said that’s new revenue that doesn’t cannibalize desktop traffic.

“On a mobile device, it’s pretty clear that a desktop site is not usable. But for tablets, a desktop site can work. But this year, a lot of people are now investing in the tablet experience to make it like a native app,” Faletski said.

Mobify uses HTML5, CSS and JavaScript to take an existing desktop site and optimize it for mobile users. He said the result is a very compelling alternative to a native app and it has the benefit of tapping into existing marketing dollars. He said a lot of traffic to sites comes from emails and social networks with people clicking on URLs. And with mobile searches growing as well, there are also more referrals to actual websites. With more and more of those actions taking place from mobile devices, it makes increasing sense to build out websites that shine on smartphones and tablets, he said.

Faletski said while native apps work well for games and entertainment, he said retailers are seeing more traffic flow toward the mobile web. And retailers with mobile-optimized sites are also seeing higher conversion rates from shoppers visiting from mobile devices.

We’ve talked about the rise of tablet shopping and what eBay calls couch commerce. The tablet is increasingly becoming the perfect shopping device. Adobe earlier this month reported that tablet users spend more than 50 percent more for each transaction at an online retailer site compared to smartphone users and 20 percent more than traditional computer users. Adobe also found that tablet users were three times more likely to buy something than smartphone users and nearly as likely to convert to a purchase as traditional computer users.

Increasingly, it looks like consumers that have access to both smartphones and tablets are using them in tandem, turning to the smartphone for quick research and price checks while the tablet is the preferred place to actually check out. Fab.com CEO Jason Goldberg told me that mobile users are twice as likely to buy products than computer visitors and that the iPad has purchase amounts that are an order of magnitude higher than on iPhone, Android and the web.

And with tablet sales growing quickly thanks to the iPad and new lower-cost competitors like the Amazon Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet, it makes even more sense for retailers to think about making their site tablet friendly. Faletski said that means making apps that perform more like native apps, with a UI designed for touch, with more bigger text and more space for touch accuracy. And he said look at streamlining some on-screen elements to simplify the presentation and compensate for less horsepower in many tablets.

We’re still realizing the ecommerce impact of tablets, which have really been around for less than two years. But increasingly, the world is going mobile and the data coming in shows that smartphones and tablets are providing a big boost to retailers. But it’s not the same effect between those devices, and retailers who figure out how to best leverage tablets will be in a better position to take advantage of the coming smartphone AND tablet boom.

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Office Update Delivers An Array of New Document
Editing Tools to iPhone

ByteSquared, mobile productivity app developers, announces the latest update to their highly praised mobile tool, Office. The most recent update of Office brings all the highly efficient and advanced features of Office HD's document editing tools to the iPhone. Forget lugging around a bulky iPad, users can now carry the power of a desktop word processor in the palm of their hand. This update includes a variety of layout tools that allow for truly extensive composition and editing of Word docs.

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Macworld | iWorld 2012 highlights for
general Apple users

While Weldon gave some of his perspectives on the Macworld | iWorld 2012 show, particularly from the prosumer and developer angles, my focus here is on those products average Apple users might be interested in, for both Mac and iOS.

The show focused primarily on the iOS ecosystem, with traditional Mac OS X software pushed into the background. Special attention was paid to applications and accessories to get sound and video into and out of your iOS device, not just on the exhibit floor, but throughout Moscone West. Still, there were other hidden gems for everyday users, too.

Most of the OS X software developers weren’t showing new products or improvements, but demoing what they already have. One notable exception that drew me in was the newly launched latest version of Fantastical by Flexibits, which works in conjunction with OS X calendar software (iCal, BusyCal, Outlook) to quickly enter calendar items with natural language directly from the menu bar, kind of a Siri for the desktop.

Once you ignore the gimmicky stuff like iPhone cases with integrated bottle openers, and lots of bling (sparkle screen protectors from Crimsoncase), most user-aimed products seemed to want to make iDevices easier to use in more places. Judging by the show’s offerings, users seem to want to hold their iPad with one hand (Newertech, Hub Innovations, Grablet and others), make it waterproof (Drycase and Drybags), and have better input devices.

Steve Jobs would have shed a tear seeing so many ways to avoid using iOS device touchscreens. Some standouts are multiples styluses from Lafeada in the shape and style of lipstick and eyeliner, as well as Adonit’s Jot Stylus that had a “target” zone via a precision disk instead of the typical imprecise rubber tip found in most styluses. My favorite, though, was the NuScribe combo pen and stylus from Newer Technology. I love not having to carry both a pen and stylus.

Not only do people want to take their iOS devices everywhere, but they want to be able to take desktop functionality along for the ride. Nivio has a soon-to-be released subscription-based service called nDesktop that allows you to remotely run Windows applications as well as rent traditional software such as the Microsoft Office Suite on both your iPad as well as your OS X device, sort of like a more feature-rich version of OnLive Desktop’s free iPad Windows virtualization app. Sanho’s CloudFTP device is an iOS-friendly portable NAS server that is in the final stage of production after a successful Kickstarter launch. These products help fill the gap between the portability of iOS devices and the flexibility of the desktop, making the decision between an iPad and MacBook Air even more difficult.

Among the products geared towards consumers at the show, the lines between tablet and desktop computing are blurring, and the changed branding of Macworld| iWorld this year reflects that.

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How Amazons KDP Select Saved David Kazzies Book

David Kazzie:

As I write this blog post, The Jackpot is No. 68 on Amazon’s Paid Bestseller list.
CUE FLASHBACK SOUND FROM LOST
One week ago, my book was dead in the water. And I mean dead. After a promising start last summer, sales crashed, completely, totally and spectacularly, despite wonderful reviews (from people who didn’t even know me!). From December 1 through January 24, I sold 21 copies on Amazon. One on BN.com. And that was it. Barely enough to fund a lunch date for me and my wife. The previous couple months hadn’t been much better. To be honest, I was trying to forget the book even existed as I worked on my new manuscript, my internal doomsayer wondering how badly I’d effed my career with a self-publishing disaster.

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