Touching Up XII: NemusSync, Moleskine, SpoofAPP, Apple’s World Domination…

Posted by Eric March on May 19, 2008 at 12:46 am

Time once again for another edition of the news roundup for people with short attention spa– ooh, a birdie! Right on my windowsill! Did I lock the front door? Nice hat. I– oh, yeah. Touching Up the 12th. Today, we’re going to make Crepe Suzette cover BiteSMS 1.11-1, Psyl 0.90b3, SpoofAPP 2.0, ruBooks, NemusSync 0.5.3, JCalc 1.0, CalcPaper 1.0, Moleskine’s many updates, the global spread of the iPhone in places Apple hasn’t yet sacked, and the weapons with which Apple may sack them. Mmm. Apple pie.

JCalc 1.0
I hate math. Never was good at it. It probably stems from that time in grade two when I got beaten up by a cosine after school. For the rest of you who don’t mind crunching a few numbers, JCalc offers a relatively no-frills scientific calculator that features all of the standard calculator features, but adds brackets, sines, cosines (the bastards), tangents, powers, rounding, and more, all on a four-line scrolling tape. Visually there’s nothing special here — it’s quite plain in its black-and-white monochrome, but it works well and does what it’s supposed to do. Also, there is a dalmatian on the splash screen. Dalmatians make math fun! You can grab this one on the MMi repo (http://modmyifone.com/installer.xml).
(via Apple iPhone School)

CalcPaper 1.0
Continuing with the algebraic theme, CalcPaper 1.0 is another calculator app whose primary selling point is its landscaped, side-by-side calculator-and-paper motif, which displays a running tally of your calculations, and even remembers up to the last 50 lines in the free version, and 1,000 in the registered version. It will even save your history when you quit. There are a number of nice options here to configure CalcPaper to your liking, and the application is fully skinnable, which make it look even cooler. As implied in the first run-on sentence, CalcPaper is not free, but you can register it for the miserly sum of $2.95 to unlock the thousand line history and eliminate the 10-second splash screen at startup. Apparently, this can be obtained on the iSpazio resource (http://repo.ispazio.net) but I couldn’t find it. Therefore, I’m going to borrow a few screenies from Apple iPhone School.
(via Apple iPhone School)

Moleskine Updated Again … and again … and again
Not that I’m complaining, mind you. Anyone who is that dedicated to their suite of apps that they provide such frequent updates is good people in my book. So let’s run down the latest list of changes in the last three versions. 0.44b1 moves the font slider bar up a bit to make it easier to access, adds an Export Notes feature (which get exported as text to ~/Library/moleskine/), and the title and description of folders have been moved a little further apart for aesthetic cleanliness. 0.45b1 adds an E-Mail Notes function, which lets you send a note to yourself via the Record button icon at the bottom. Finally, 0.45b2 groups the erstwhile E-Mail Notes function in with the Export feature, which is a more intuitive place to put it. On a related note, I just discovered where it got its name: Moleskine is a popular brand of notebook found in Italy. Makes sense, dunnit? As always, Moleskine is available on the Databinge repo (http://repo.databinge.com).
(via Apple iPhone School and Databinge)

NemusSync Brings the Google Love
So you like Google Calendar but it’s a bit less useful on your iPod Touch or iPhone if you don’t have access to it whenever you want. Fortunately, NemusSync is here to make it a lot more useful. This handy little app is designed to sync your Google Calendar with your iPhone/Touch calendar so you can keep all of your appointments and events with you wherever you go and synchronize them with Google Calendar, which in turn can be synced on your home computer. There is a bit of a caveat here for IntelliScreen users, however: Users have been reporting that with NemusSync installed, the Calendar portion of IntelliScreen fails to work, giving the error that the calendar is currently in use by Cal.app. The developer is aware of this problem and will hopefully be able to fix this problem in the next update. Meanwhile, you can grab it from NemusSync’s own repo (http://www.nemustech.com/iPhone/repos). (Screenshots from Apple iPhone School, because I don’t use Google Calendar.)
(via Apple iPhone School)

ruBooks Makes eBooks and Documents Better
I know, there are already a bunch of eBook readers out there. ruBooks though may have a bit of an edge over its competition, however. Aside from its smooth and unobtrusive UI, ruBooks has features such as auto-scrolling and the ability to use the iPhone’s volume buttons to flip pages — a feature that seems obvious when you think about it but seems to have been missing from other such apps. ruBooks also supports FB2, DOC, XLS, and PDF formats, full justification, language localization, adjustable background and foreground colours, and much more. You can grab it from author Colel’s own repo (http://colel.info/repo.xml).
(via Just Another iPhone Blog)

Pysl 0.90b3
For those that don’t know, the oddly-named Pysl is a call blacklisting app that lets you add numbers to its blacklist so that if they call, your phone won’t ring, and it won’t show up in your standard call history. This latest version seems to work a lot better than previous versions, and allows you to block both calls and SMS texts. It will save blocked calls and texts in its own blocked call history, though it also features a delete option that will simply send the whole works to the bit bucket, never to bother you. When a blocked call or text comes in, your phone won’t ring, and if the delete option is not enabled, Pysl will stick a white square in your status bar to notify you that a blocked call came in. (White square … block … get it?) There’s even a scheduler, so you can set a time (selectable on a day-by-day basis) interval when one or more numbers in a given blacklist will be blocked. Quite handy for those who have need of this sort of thing. You can grab it from the iClarified source (http://installer.iclarified.com)
(via Apple iPhone School)

SpoofAPP 2.0 Makes Stalking More Fun
You may recall over a month ago my whimsical article on SpoofAPP. If not, have a read so you know what this thing is all about and I don’t have to write another lame bit of snark and just get down to the update. The new version features a spiffed up interface and adds a new menu bar at the bottom with some new options. Pricing for minutes and SpoofCards remains the same, however, so make every second of fear count. You can grab SpoofAPP from BigBoss. (http://thebigboss.org/repo.xml)
(via Apple iPhone School)

BiteSMS 1.11-1…1…11….-1
BiteSMS 1.11-1 (or 15 in binary) is an text messager. That’s probably pretty obvious. What’s not so obvious is that it doesn’t use your carrier to send messages. Instead, it sends messages through an online service, so you can bypass your carrier’s text messaging rates, and instead pay BiteSMS’ rates. See, BiteSMS isn’t free. You have to buy text messaging credits at a rate of $0.10 per text message. I don’t know what the average cost of a text message is, but on Rogers, it’s $0.15 per SMS. Sounds pretty good considering BiteSMS will save me 33%. However I also get 175 free texts per month, and generally speaking, I don’t use that many in a month. I understand many others do though, so once you’ve burned through your monthly allotment, BiteSMS might be a useful alternative. Unless you get cheaper texting rates, in which case, not so much. If you think it’s for you however, you can grab it from the Ste Packaging repo (http://repo.smxy.org/iphone-apps/)
(via Apple iPhone School)

The iPhone Is Already Global
There’s much talk about about which markets Apple’s breaking into next, and that’s great. The more, the merrier. But the thing is, the iPhone is already in tons of markets Apple has yet to crack, and the numbers are not insignificant. According to AdMob’s mobile metrics, 25% of requests for ads from their network were from smartphones. If we extrapolate an earlier statistic indicating that over 70% of mobile browsing for the first quarter of 2008 was from the iPhone, then we can assume that somewhere in the neighborhood of 19% of all internet traffic that made ad requests to AdMob’s servers came from the the iPhone, which has put the iPhone into AdMob’s top 20 devices worldwide. While the majority of requests came from US IP addresses, there were a statistically significant number of iPhone users in Canada, Hong Kong, Mexico, The Netherlands, and Brazil, none of which can buy the iPhone locally. It’s probably pretty obvious that people all over the world want the iPhone and many of them bought one abroad without waiting for Apple to set foot inside their borders, but this is the first indication of just how widespread it is.
(via Macworld)

Apple’s Weapons of Mass Destruction
Betcha didn’t know Apple’s got ties with the US Department of Defense, didja? Apple’s purchase of chipmaker P.A. Semiconductor managed to snag them a little more than just a way to bring more chipmaking muscle under their wing. P.A. Semi also supplies chips for ten different US military systems worth more than $100M in contracts with the DoD over the next four years. Apple does plan on honoring those contracts now that they’ve taken the reins, most likely because Uncle Sam is a pretty persuasive fellow, especially when it comes to his militia.
(via Gizmodo)

And so we come to the end of another Touching Up. Next time I’ll take my Ritalin and bring you another assortment of– ooh, CSI is on…

Posted in Application Related, Hardware Related, News Related, Touching Up, iPhone Related