iPhone/iPod Touch OS 3.1: Just How Smart is the App Store Genius?

iPhone/iPod Touch OS 3.1: Just How Smart is the App Store Genius?

September 14, 2009 in How-To, Reviews by Bob Faulhaber

You might already be used to the Genius feature in iTunes to help you develop playlists or even find similar music, but now Apple has added Genius feature on the iPhone/iPod Touch to help you sift through the thousands of apps available. Like the Genius feature in iTunes, this will look at the apps installed and make recommendations to what else you might link.

Review: TextExpander Touch

Review: TextExpander Touch

September 8, 2009 in Reviews by Bob Faulhaber

One of the great time savers and productivity apps on the Mac is TextExpander. Using predefined shortcuts and abbreviations, TextExpander expands them into snippets or even full paragraphs. Now Smile On My Mac has brought that same functionality to the iPhone/iPod Touch with their app, called TextExpander Touch.

Review: MailSteward - Email Archiving and Management

Review: MailSteward – Email Archiving and Management

September 2, 2009 in Reviews by Bob Faulhaber

As we are inundated with more and more emails on a daily basis and in many cases there’s a need to archive and save certain or all email messages. Companies often need to retain emails to comply with legal requirements. MailSteward lets you archive and manage your email traffic and easily access the information using powerful search tools.

Review: Postbox - A Better Mac Email Client?

Review: Postbox – A Better Mac Email Client?

August 28, 2009 in Reviews by Bob Faulhaber

Why another mail client for the Macintosh? Doesn’t the Mac come with a pretty good mail client? We agree, but Postbox seems to take mail clients to another level.

Review: Twittelator Pro v3.1

Review: Twittelator Pro v3.1

August 24, 2009 in Reviews by Bob Faulhaber

Twittelator Pro v3.1 from Stone Design is probably one of most full-featured Twitter clients now available. If you used or looked at an older version in the past, Twittelator Pro v3.1 deserves another long hard look.

Review: Voila 2.0.1

Review: Voila 2.0.1

August 17, 2009 in Reviews by Bob Faulhaber

There are many ways to do screen capture on the Mac, ranging from OS X’s built-in functionality to utilities, such as Skitch. But, if you need a tool that allows you to capture, edit and organize screen captures then Voila from Global Delight is an application you should look at.

Review: Time Warp - Offsite Backup for Time Machine

Review: Time Warp – Offsite Backup for Time Machine

July 31, 2009 in Reviews by Bob Faulhaber

Do you use Time Machine? What about an off-site backup? Time Warp (currently in beta) from Jumping Bean Software is a simple to use backup solution that compliments Time Machine to backup your data off-site.

Snow Leopard Preview: QuickTime X

Snow Leopard Preview: QuickTime X

July 29, 2009 in Reviews by Bob Faulhaber

One of the exciting new upgrades in the upcoming release of Snow Leopard will be a vastly improved QuickTime player called QuickTime X. With not only a cleaner interface, but also improved performance and new features to make media viewing and even creation and editing much easier.

Review: Vocalia 2.0 - Voice Recognition for Your iPhone

Review: Vocalia 2.0 – Voice Recognition for Your iPhone

July 20, 2009 in Reviews by Bob Faulhaber

Would you like voice recognition on your iPhone, but don’t have the new iPhone 3GS? Vocalia 2.0 from Creaceed brings voice recognition to older generation iPhones, along with the second generation iPod Touch.

Vocalia is a speech recognition tool that allows users to simply say a contacts name and Vocalia will search through the contact list to find the name or names closest to the one spoken. Vocalia uses phonetics so you do not have to “train” the software with your voice or pronunciations.

When you start the application the first time, it will scan and phonetizize the contact list. When ready you will be presented with the purple Vocalia “eye”

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Simply pronounce the name of the contact and Vocalia will search its database and present the closest match. If there is one match, such as when we said “Home”, you will be presented with the contact information, allowing you to touch the number to initiate a call. If however, there are several matches when we just used the contact’s first name. “Jim”, Vocalia presented us with a list of possible matches.

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Vocalia does a very good job on sound pickup and voice recognition and your results will depend on background noise. We were to use the application with the iPhone sitting on our desk in a quiet office. Vocalia was easily able to recognize the contact’s name and present us with the correct contact information.

Another feature in the application is the ability to edit the phonetizations and even add nicknames to contact records.

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We also tested Vocalia’s iPod functions, which allows you to say an artist name and Vocalia will display information for that artist, allowing you to select All Songs, particular Albums or individual songs. iPod mode is initiated by selecting the iPod menu item and the Vocalia “eye” will be brown.

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Vocalia also allows you to import Safari bookmarks and use voice commands to open bookmarks in Safari.

We were very impressed with Vocalia’s voice recognition and ability to correctly identify contacts and artist names in iPod mode. As mentioned previously, background noise can affect accuracy, we had minor problems when testing outdoors with some wind noise, but indoors Vocalia performed flawlessly for us.

Vocalia 2.0 is available in the App Store for $3.99 and if you want to add voice recognition to your older generation iPhone or second generation iPod Touch, this will provide you with that ability.

App Store

Snow Leopard Preview: Finder - Icon Previews

Snow Leopard Preview: Finder – Icon Previews

July 13, 2009 in Reviews by Bob Faulhaber

One of the handy features that was released in Leopard was Quick Look, which provided a preview technology that displayed more descriptive thumbnails.

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