Mobile to Mobile PayPal Payments – Like The Old Days

Late in 1999, we all heard about PayPal from a much publicized meeting in a restaurant where a investor beamed millions from one Palm to another via PayPal. We all rushed out and grabbed a copy so we could give our friends a dollar. Then it became a great way to collect money from your coworkers to cover their part of a lunch bill. Most everyone knows PayPal today as a way to pay for things online via their shopping carts and their ties (owned by) to eBay.

Recently, great news came out that the PayPal iPhone app has been updated with Bump technology. Bump being the contact exchange system where you and another iPhone owner launch the app and ‘bump’ your iPhone carrying hands together. The app is free so everyone knew it was a tech play to work the bugs out and become a standard others could use. Happy to see PayPal saw the potential!!

While your downloading the app from iTunes, I’m off to ‘bump’ my friends up for the cash they owe me.

Portable Bluetooth Speaker for the iPhone

I have tried a variety of iPhone docs to play my music out to speakers. While non have been ‘great’, a dock is a quick way to go from iPhone in the pocket to playing my music list. Until I added an Elago case… a very brightly colored thin case that adds the right amount of protection I need. Even as thin as it is, I can’t just drop the iPhone into the dock cradle. So, I moved to using a audio out cable to regular speakers. Not a bad solution until you are in a hurry and unplug the cable without turning the speakers off… pop pop hiss hiss.

A coworker invited me to her office last week to see her great new iPhone accessory. As we were walking down the hall, about two doors away, she took her iPhone out of her pocket to hit play. Then returned the iPhone to her pocket. Seconds later, before we got to the office, the music started to play. I was overjoyed to find she was showing off a Bluetooth speaker, that worked very well.
It was a Altec Lansing inMotion SoundBlade Bluetooth A2DP.

Being a very thin Bluetooth speaker, though the box says ‘SRS’, the audio does lack some of the deep full sound you would get from ‘full’ size speakers. But, after the first pairing of the iPhone to the SoundBlade, music starts quickly… wirelessly streaming from your iPhone. Needless to say, every other office down the hall was ordering their own.

The speaker comes with a power cord (with 5 different international adapters) and a carry bag. The controls are across the top: On/Off, Pairing, Previous, Pause/Play, Next and volume. On the back is two doors covering three AA batteries each (good for 24 hours or playing or hundreds of hours of standby), and a flip down stand/door which covers the power plug and aux audio in. Altec Lansing has included a microphone inside which allows the SoundBlade to be used as a speaker phone. Continue reading “Portable Bluetooth Speaker for the iPhone”

iPhone Apps Do As Much As They Should Do

As the iPhone developer’s platform mactures, applications are divided between not doing enough, doing everything you need and having way too many features? This hasn’t been a question in the last few years, especially with applications not being able to share data across each other. Now, there are enough options, a user has to decide what they are actually needing an application to do to be useful before making a purchase. An area like ‘Notes’ has options that are too limited to be truly useful all the way to ones that have so much detail that it takes too long to get anything simple done, like entering a quick reminder note.

Today, if you are looking to do basic ‘work’ on your iPhone, some time should be spent exploring the options in the area of your needs. Research will result in apps that do just what you need, within a few limitations, to get work done via your mobile device.

Case in point, The Logo Creator application. It offers functionality at the level you would expect from a handheld UI without over complicating while still having enough power to make it worth a person’s time to use.

Many clients do well with a rough drawing of ideas to get things started. Those can be meetings around a whiteboard or professional sketches with pen. There are the other clients that can’t get past the pen and need to see something ‘real’. Logo Creator is a pretty powerful drag-n-drop logo creation tool that has been around on the Mac desktop for years (they are currently shipping version 5.2).

Now, on the iPhone, there is a Logo Creator app that allows you to take your ideas and rough them out very quickly between meetings or while riding mass transit. There is no need to take out your notebook, logos can be put together and saved as images with your finger.

Continue reading “iPhone Apps Do As Much As They Should Do”

Magic in iPhone Picture Taking

Everyone who knows me, knows I love to take pictures with my iPhone and fiddle with them. There are so many great apps that allow a person to fine tune or alter parts of an image. Most are a variety of filters to lighten or darken or make the picture look old. A few alow to crop and resize. With a few exceptions, all of the options are for touching up a picture after it has been taken.

Some of my more fun iPhone altered images are posted up on Hash Tag Pics.

An image was posted to Facebook yesterday by a friend who is a professional photographer (Crystal Clear Media). He owns a spot in Texas and is well known for his Dallas based sports team pictures. What got everyone’s attention was his post that it was taken with his iPhone (screen shot here):

What you might notice is that the sky or ground should be darker or brighter depending on which one is focused on with the iPhone. You will get a washed out sky if you focus on the ground or a ground with no detail if you focus on the clouds.

Andrew mentioned he used Pro HDR to take the picture. An app that has you take two pictures to recognize the bright and dark areas then marry the two together without needing your help editing. Cool!

From the app creator:

Unlike fake HDR apps that merely take a single photo and reprocess it (without actually adding any new detail), Pro HDR massively extends the dynamic range of your camera and produces beautiful results that you have to see to believe. Plus, Pro HDR is the only real HDR app that processes your photos at full resolution for the ultimate quality. Now you can take stunning high-resolution photos of all those scenes that are just too contrasty to capture in a single picture.

Just as an example, I am looking to take a picture of my notebook where normally I would get a bright screen and a over dark keyboard.

Continue reading “Magic in iPhone Picture Taking”

iPhone In-App Charging

Apple has added the ability for an app to ‘upcharge’ inside of the application. The first thing everything thinks of is games, where you could buy levels as you move through the game.

Two apps that I have used the In-Application upcharge in a different way.

IDEO has an application called Method Cards – a electronic version of their deck of printed cards to help getting creative energies going on a project. IDEO’s application is downloaded for free, but contains only 8 of the full deck.

This gives the user a chance to play with the product for a while without installing a ‘lite’ free version then returning to the iTunes App store to buy the full version. In the case of the Method Cards app, all of the cards are installed but not viewable.

Continue reading “iPhone In-App Charging”