Podies

The video above shows how Safari on the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S trounce the Windows Phone 7 browser without even breaking a sweat.

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If you've spent any significant amount of time online, then no doubt you've run across rage comics. Short, user created panel comic strips with a select group of memebased images such as Me Gusta, the Y U NO Guy, and Forever Alone. Finding these can be easy; walking away from them can be hard. So what's a derp or herp to do when on le iPhone? 

Rage Comics Pro ($1.99/Universal)

Pulling from Reddit, the single biggest source of rage online, developer Alberto Garcia Hierro's Rage Comics seeks to take the rage out of viewing these comics on your iPhone. Using merely mobile Safari to access the comics was a painful process of pinching to zoom, scrolling around, or looking at the tiny print and giving it the old Challenge Accepted face. No more.

A flick takes you everywhere

When you load the app you are presented with a menu style list of Featured comics. Tap a comic to open it then slide your finger across to navigate through the individual panels. Turn your iPhone on its side to get an even better view. Best of all, the app is a universal so you can enjoy your comics in even larger view on the iPad where the screen is given its daily dose.

A simple list and you're good

A button in the top of the screen for each comic allows you to view the whole comic in its entirety (sometimes panel cut offs bleed into others or a vertical read can be challenging). This option is most useful when reading on an iPad, while on the iPhone you're returned to how rage comics looked in the old pre-app days. This button also gives you the opportunity to save the image offline for later in your camera roll, to add it to your favorited comics, and to share the comic on Facebook, Twitter, or by email. 

Sharing and saving, like a boss

Across the bottom of the app run categorical navigation buttons. Featured, the home page of the app brings up a curated list of goodies, while Most Recent keeps up to the minute tabs on the latest rages. Top rated is a user specific group of comics voted on by the Redditors. Settings lets you opt to open in individual panels or as full comic (Oh God Why?).

Favorites allows you to save the comics you love best for reading later offline. And that's the only rub of the app. It loads up quickly when you start the app, but only because it's loading a thumbnail and a link. Each time you tap a comic, it has to use the link to go out to the internet and grab the goodness. So if you're traveling somewhere without 3G or you're rolling a WiFi only iOS device, the only thing available to you is your Favorites.

Box of Rage (Free/Universal)

Developer theM Dev avoids this trap with the free (with in app upgrade to allow saving) Box of Rage. Instead of requiring a constant internet connection, fire up Box of Rage when you do have web access, and the app downloads thousands of comics. Now these are available on your device for reading whenever you wish.

Make a meme, share a meme

The app opens on the home page which sports several buttons. Browse all takes you to the comics. Update downloads the latest ones. Favorites is your list of best comics you've read, while Reset will delete that list back to empty freshness. There are also buttons to see other apps by the developers and to submit any rage comics of your own creation by email to the developers for possible inclusion in the app.

Customer I am disappoint.

Tap browse all to be taken to the comics. You're automatically taken to the most recent. Flick your finger across the screen to navigate, or tap once in the center of the comic for all the navigation type buttons. And there are many buttons when you do that.

I see what you did there

A small boxed question mark randomly pulls a comic, a single arrow goes to the next or back one, a double arrow goes to the next by ten, and an arrow with a line goes to the end or beginning. On the top of the screen, a house takes you back to the home page, a thumbs up puts the comic in your favorites, a disc saves it to your camera roll, envelope mails it and there are two buttons for Twitter and Facebook respectively.

The biggest problem with the app is the comics themselves. You are presented with one full comic on your screen, exactly the Reddit problem you came to an app to escape. Worse still, double tapping on the comic doesn't expand it to a size consistent with your screen but instead blows the comic up until you have to pinch zoom it back down to even read one panel. 

Me Gusta

Both apps have one strength that the other lacks, but we find ourselves not too frequently disconnected from the internet (YMMV), so we give it up for Rage Comics. The breaking down of comics into their constituent panels is what makes the app so worthwhile. We're not big fans of pinching to zoom and scrolling around when we read and Rage Comics solves that problem for us with style. It's a smaller matter of coding for developer Hierro to throw in offline reading than for Box of Rage to give us an easier reading experience. Plus the app's layout was far easier to navigate and a much cleaner experience all around. 

 

Turns out that you don’t need to jailbreak or download an application to get a good laugh out of your friends, thanks to Apple ignorantly leaving in a few, otherwise “jailbreak-tweaks” accessible through mobile Safari. Jailbreak expert, Comex has been digging around and has found two hacks that could act

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There was so much news this week we don't even know where to start. Okay, that's not entirely true, but it was a super busy week. We had CES hitting on all cylinders all week and we covered that extensively, then there was the launching of the Mac App Store (and its nearly immediate hacking) which was rather exciting, and before the weekend was over we had pretty solid support for the iPhone at long last arriving at Verizon.

Wow. That's a tall order, but if anyone can bring it down to nice bite size morsels of weekly goodness, it's the dedicated Mac|Lifers who saw it all, just In Case You Missed It.

 

 

Features:

- Everything You Wanted to Know About the Mac App Store (But Were Afraid to Ask) - They said they were going to do it on schedule and we believed them. Here it is, faith rewarded as Apple brings that iOS you've come to love to your OS. So how do you get it? How do you get there? How do you access these sweet new apps? Never fear, we gotcha covered, as always.


- 7 Awesome Mac App Store Alternatives - Yeah, yeah, yeah, Mac App Store, Shmack Shmore. Whatever. You've been rocking jailbreak action, you've been off the beaten path before. You want some alternatives to Cupertino's fine little walled-off garden. Oh well, have we got some app stores for you. Games, productivity, Cydia? Yeah, all that and more.


- Mac|Life's CES 2011 FTW Award Winners -  But wait a second, we hear you shouting, you said there was more than just the Mac App Store. Indeed we did. Our beat reporting from the floor of the Consumer Electronic Show took in a lot of stuff, big, little, and everything in between. Did we find promising technology out there? You bet your bippy we did. Heck, we even gave these people awards, as you gathered from the headline.



How-Tos:


- How To Bring Touch Gestures to Your iPad Web Browsing - We have to admit, with the release of the Magic Trackpad we have been expecting Apple to bring more of those multitouch gestures to Mobile Safari. So far, not so much. Burt if multitouch is what really floats your boat, then you need look no further than Ingenious Creations’ Perfect Web Browser, which is only a smidge slower than Safari, but gives you so much more, if you just know how to stroke it right. Wait, that didn't sound right. You know what, just read the article, don't mind us.


- 4 Awesome Terminal Tricks to Tweak Your Desktop - Maybe you know Terminal like the back of your hand and maybe just the very idea of the command line makes you shiver with dread. Whichever the case, we've made it easy to get the most out of this simple little gizmo for all kinds of desktop  modding. So even if you aren't the sudo, we have copy and paste tips that'll put you in the driver's seat.



Reviews:


- myTexts Pro Review - Sometimes when we have to sit down and write a column, the thought of that big empty screen just waiting to be filled with words makes us want to jump out a window and hitch a ride on the nearest international bound freighter. But sometimes that blank page is just what you need, a distraction free space that blots out everything but the sun. And that's just what myTexts Pro gives you. Now get typing!

- Yum Recipe Organizer Review - With every other paper thing moving into digital editions, we expected cookbooks and cooking related apps to have seriously moved the ball down the field here. Imagine our surprise when Yum proved  decent but not great. Sure, we can upload our recipes and layout is clean and easy, but we need a bit more two-way in our iOS compatibility and a way to search for recipes we can dish up based just one what we have in the house. Maybe an update...



News:


Check out our rumor predictions for 2011's CES. How did we do?...one rumor that definitely turned out to be true: Microsoft did decide to throw down the gauntlet on Apple TV and apparently Redmond is getting into the TV game...especially after the runaway success that was the MS Surface 2.0 which sold like hotcakes at $7,600...and all this TV talk meant, of course, that Comcast had better get on the stick and -- what, wait, they did? oh, fine TV is almost as hot as the iPad, it seems....even everyone's least favorite carrier had a few nice new wrinkles to existing TV package set up which gave a few kisses to the iOS crowd...then they went and announced that their LTE/4G network would be kickin butt and takin names as of next year, and was there a wee little iPhone hint in there?....and does that next generation iPhone look anything like this model?...what about the next generation of Android OS? Does it look anything like this latest Honeycomb drawing we're trying not to eat around here...all we know is that it will definitely be running on the Motorola Xoom tablet, which was the big winner of the whole show according to surveys....

Then there were these guys, causing a ruckus at CES wherever they went, looking for free food and gadget giveaways...this duo also found us the wackiest gadgets they could find for iOS at CES...someone even gave one of them a gun! a gun!...then they crashed our Microsoft Keynote and went off for some length during our live mock; great having them around...another keynote we found not very impressive was the uninspired series of gadgets and such thrown out by the Sony people who just wanted to bury us in how much their stuff hurts to look at these days...we also tackled the Verizon keynote which was a little of a let down and a bit of a tease...but they redeemed everything with this gallery of galleries, chock full of the best of the best at CES 2011.

Image Gallery

While creating their latest app, Occipital stumbled onto a hidden gem in Mobile Safari: gyroscope support. The iPhone 4 and iPod Touch 4G running 4.2+ can both take advantage of this secret feature, which allows users to move their body to turn the content in the browser. Occipital’s 360 Panorama application can be used to photograph and upload a [...]

It was inevitable that it would come to this, but ultimately we all knew this was the direction Google was headed with their book project. Not simply scanning and indexing various libraries holdings, but moving toward e-readership was always in the cards for the search giant. And with their announcement today, Google moves into direct bookstore competition with Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Sony, and more.

 

Having learned from their predecessors, Google's new book offering features multiple platform reading and wireless syncing of position. Start a book on your laptop, continue on your phone, pick up where you left off on your tablet. Anywhere you have internet access you can read, while books downloaded to your Google Books (iTunes link) app can be read offline. But how do the locations stack up for Apple users?

 

Google Books in the browser

The strengths and weaknesses of Google Books' site depends on how you view it:

• On a full-fledged computer, the various page layouts for finding books can still be a bit muddled.
• For reading, the site redesign is beautiful, presenting either a double page spread or a single page, depending on how wide your browser window is set to, and navigation is a breeze.
• The site works reasonably well on the iPad, though there the navigation buttons seemed unresponsive.
• iPhone users will want to steer clear. Google Books on the iPhone's mobile Safari is no great shakes, either giving you a desktop version that requires immense amounts of pinching and zooming or its previous mobile-search-oriented screen that makes it difficult to get to your account. Books also seem impossible to actually view there without an immense effort.

 

Google Books Apps

Google Books app makes reading far more pleasurable and syncing easier, though again its clear that the folks at Google have really got their eyes fixed on the iPad rather than the smaller form factor of the iPhone.

 

 

Google Books first page on iPad

Pages are laid out with decent margins on the iPad, while the iPhone felt cramped and forced. Also in the iPad version, there was the option for to turn on or off the 3D style page turning, while the iPhone was restricted to a quick slide to the next page. 

Google Books first page on iPhone, Night Theme

 

Settings

There seemed to be some standard features, though some expected features were lacking:

• In neither iOS version were there advanced formatting features to allow for tweaks in indenting or margin size, though you could adjust the line spacing for a bit more pleasurable viewing (especially on the iPhone).
• In both versions, there are day and night themes, seven built in fonts, the option to switch between flowing text and scanned pages of certain titles, and a few other formatting tweaks.
• A neat addition allows you to hold your finger on a line of text and a magnifying pane will show you the print much larger.
• At this point, however, there does not appear to be a way to add bookmarks or to get words defined as in many other e-readers.
• Interestingly, page numbers were tied to physical pages, not digital ones, thus letting you read several page 14s until you reach page 14-15, then page 15 begins. (This will be appealing to the textbook market.)
• Most surprising about the Google Books app is that there is no ability to read in landscape mode on either the iPhone or the iPad. While the option is clearly on Google's mind based on their own site, such a feature didn't somehow make it into the app.

 

Titles

 

Security research specialist Nitesh Dhanjani has demonstrated how mobile Safari's ability to hide a web page's URL can be used to trick users. Specifically, his proof-of-concept site shows a "fake" URL filed once the real one has been hidden, preventing users from realizing that they're not looking at the site they intended to see.

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Security research specialist Nitesh Dhanjani has demonstrated how mobile Safari's ability to hide a web page's URL can be used to trick users. Specifically, his proof-of-concept site shows a "fake" URL filed once the real one has been hidden, preventing users from realizing that they're not looking at the site they intended to see.

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iOS device users gained access to some pretty awesome perks yesterday when iOS 4.2 became available for download. iPad owners were finally rewarded by Apple for their patience with AirPlay, Wireless Printing and of course, multitasking. If you're an iPhone user, you may have noticed a few new perks as well. However, it would appear that Apple also threw in a whole bag of awesome that they've kept on the down low.

As part of the testing of Safari and JavaScript he'd been doing for an upcoming project, mobile web development guru Maximilano Fritman found that Apple has baked a few new tricks into Mobile Safari, including accelerometer and gyroscope support, updated HTML 5 form support, the ability to support new JavaScript data types and enhanced SVG/Canvas support. What does it all mean? In simple english, how iOS device users interact with the internet is about to get a whole lot closer to what they experience when browsing the web from their computers. Better still, thanks to the accelerometer and gyroscope built in to late model iOS devices, you'll be able to interact with mobile Safari simply by changing your device's orientation.

That's pretty sweet.

 

Follow this article's author, Seamus Bellamy on Twitter

Since the dawn of time, traveling professionals have sought easier ways to present on the go. Pico projectors! Netbooks! Converting presentations to video to show them on iPhones! Then there was Keynote on the iPad, and it was good. Not great, however: presenters with libraries of PPT content have had to convert them over, and keeping your decks up to date with the latest and greatest from the sales department is a drag. Wouldn't it be better and easier if there was a nice cloud-based solution that played well with Mobile Safari?

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