review – Page 3 – Vinko’s Thoughts On…

September 10, 2009

Review: Hong Kong Weather on iPhone

HK Weather - Logo I had always praised the talents of Hong Kong iPhone development community. The iPhone application, Hong Kong Weather, from Conceptable is no exception.
You may say, don’t we already have enough weather application for the iPhone. Just going to the Weather section in the iTunes App Store you will find 20 pages of applications in the section. Plus what’s wrong with the default Weather application that came with the iPhone OS? Nothing really, if you live in North America.

The information in the default Weather application comes from Yahoo.com and is not that accurate when dealing with cities outside of North America. The advantage of the default Weather application is its ability to set up weather information for multiple cities, which is great for the frequent travelers. But for those who do not travel as much and live in Hong Kong for an extended period, the default Weather application is fairly basic and borderline useless.

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September 9, 2009

Review: iPhonics on iPhone

I don’t normally review educational software, especially those on the iPhone platform. I think it is mainly due to the demographics who use the devices on this platform.

I made an exception and took a look at the iPhone application, iPhonics, which teaches English phonetics. iPhonics - Home Screen

This application takes the approach of addressing a young audience for a fairly complex subject, the learning of English pronunciation. The entire application accomplish this by treating the lessons as games.The student chooses either to learn By Letter or By Game.

At first glance the games are a bit difficult to figure out without going through the extensive Tutorial section within the game. These tutorials are in English, so student are expected to be able to read English although may not be able to pronounce or comprehend English audio.

Each time an item is clicked on within the application, both a visual and audio feedback results. Fortunately, for the more experienced students the latter can be turned off in the Options screen within the application.

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September 1, 2009

Review: Strokes on iPhone

If you are a golfer and you own an iPhone or iPod Touch, then Bickbot‘s application, Strokes, is for you. It is a simple application that does what it’s designed for perfectly.

The Home screen is split into two sections. The top section shows the number of strokes for a given hole. The bottom section is where the user specify the par of the current hole, increment the stroke count for the current hole and to skip to the next or go back a hole.

One user-centric improvement in the latest version (1.5) is that pars of holes are not reset unless the user changes them manually one hole at a time. This is great for users who plays the same course over and over again. It would be nice if there is an option to save the pars and name it (ie. Golf course name) before overriding them.

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August 19, 2009

Review: Leisure Guide on iPhone

Nuthon IT Solutions Ltd. the maker of Toilet Rush created a new iPhone app, Leisure Guide, to assist iPhone users living in Hong Kong with their daily lives. Simply put, Leisure Guide is a Hong Kong only, Traditional Chinese, version of Yowza, plus more.

You can use this application to locate the closest gas station, ATMs, stores, bars, HK Jockey Club betting stations, bank branches, parking lots, beauty parlors, cafes and convenient stores. You can use the application to find special offers near your location, from a distance of 500m, 1km or 1.5km radius.

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August 12, 2009

Review: Color Oven on iPhone

I came across this designer tool called, “Color Oven” by Lima’s Web Design, they also have an OS X version of the application for USD2.99.

color-oven1

The purpose of this application is quite straight forward. You choose a color and the application will generate a set of complimentary colour schemes: monochromatic, complimentary, analogous, or triad, for you.

This application’s features are not unlike many of the web based colour scheme generators, like ColorSchemeDesigner.com. Web site like Colr.org will accept a photo from Flickr or uploaded from the user’s computer, to generate a complimentary colour scheme from it.

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July 21, 2009

Review: BindoGPS on iPhone

If you are a hiker, a runner or just anyone who likes to keep track of where you’ve been, then BindoGPS, is the application for you.

This is another Hong Kong built iPhone application from the growing iPhone development community here in Hong Kong. It is the newest among these applications: Darkroom (currently not compatible with iPhone firmware 3.0), Finger and HK Movie. The latter I will have an upcoming review.

BindoGPS is great when you want to record the track you took during your hike, or if you’re a runner you can use it to supplement your training; unfortunately, it does not yet allow the export of tracks in GPX or KML format. Although, BindoGPS.com has just added the ability to see the tracks you’ve recorded using the BindoGPS iPhone application on your iPhone.

BindoGPS’ ability to use either a photo from the iPhone’s photo albums or instantly capture it with the iPhone built in camera, as a waypoint is particularly useful if you want to record visual memory of your hike or conditions of a location during your run.

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July 14, 2009

Review: Hong Kong 720º on iPhone

Today Thomas B. (@thomashk) introduced me to an iPhone application, Hong Kong 720º, released by the Hong Kong Tourism Board (HKTB). It is designed to promote Hong Kong attractions while assisting visitors with locating famous tourist spots, and getting a virtual tour of the attractions before they arrive to help plan their visits to Hong Kong. Best of all this application is available in the iTunes App Store for free.

The application contains QuickTime VR tours of all the major tourist locations, including Google Map of the location, English and Chinese phrase for the tourist to show taxi drivers or others when they are lost, recommended travel directions, and photo gallery of the tourist attraction.

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July 8, 2009

Review: AutoStich on iPhone

I was introduced to this cool little iPhone application, AutoStich, that enables easy creation of panorama (pano) photos on the go.

Most pano maker applications on the Mac or on the iPhone (like PanoLab Pro) require the user to painstakingly aligns the different photos that make up the final pano image, including skewing any photos to adjust for the distortion (parallax), a side effect of not rotating the iPhone on the pano pivot point of the lens.

Amazingly, AutoStich does not require any assistance from the user, plus it is able to reorder the set of photos to their correct order, to ensure a smooth alignment of the final pano image.

At the price of FREE this little iPhone application is definitely worth more than its developer is asking for.

June 17, 2009

Review: TweetDeck for iPhone

I had been using Twitter for since 2006 and the iPhone since its initial release in 2007. Through out these times I had been searching for the ultimate Twitter client on the iPhone and on my Mac.

Before I can get into the review of TweetDeck for iPhone, I have to provide some context. To understand this I must first explain my personal requirements.

My requirements for a Twitter client are quite different from the average Twitter user, but they should be very similar to most people in my situation. I personally do not believe in gaining as many followers as possible for my personal Twitter account, but more the quality of the people (peeps) I follow. Of course, that’s another story for the company Twitter accounts I manage. As a result the timelines for the different Twitter accounts I manage are huge and the updates fly by very fast.

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