Top iPhone Resource

Barnes & Noble is one of my favorite book stores here in town. I just recently checked their iPhone app and I was very impressed.

B&N Bookstore is the name of the app in App Store should you search for it. Let’s see how this free iPhone App measures up beyond the basic functionality of searching for books, music & dvds.

In the first screen you’d see a bookcase where you can swipe to see book covers like in a carousal. Under that is the area where you see different sections like Recommendations, Bestsellers, New Realeases, Review & Studio. This is tagged as the Discover section and is like virtually strolling through the bookstore.

I was looking at the Bestsellers and you can see the online and list prices there. Nice.

One of the newest features is that now you can read book reviews right from your iPhone! Extra nice!

Now comes the cool factor for you iPhone owners. Let’s say you have a book in front of you that you want to check a price for.

Go to the ‘Search’ page and click on the green camera button. Take a picture of your book cover and the app will find your book from the millions of books in the store!

Amazon’s iPhone App has had this feature for a while but I was still impresses with how accurately and swifty it found this Drupal Book for me.

And the Stores page lets you quickly find a Barnes & Noble around you with a simple click of the familiar ‘Locate me’ button near the search box.

B&N Bookstore App is a must have for a book lover, IMHO. Plus, the the price can’t be more right - Free.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Hello there! Hope you found a nice app, or a cool hack or the latest iPhone news. Don't miss future updates, grab our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter and get free updates.

My favorite iPhone blogging app WordPress has updated to version 1.3. It gets complete OS 3.0 compatibility along with a bunch of bug fixes.

I couldn’t find a list of new features from the iPhone WordPress blog but you could get details by looking at the blog.

Also, you might see that the version is shown as 1.21.1 in the About section but be assured you have 1.3 if you see it.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Shriya and I use Gmail and Google Calendar extensively. iPhone’s native Calendar is nice but Google Calendar lets us access our events from our computers as well. Plus, I have tons of contacts already filled out in my Gmail that would be nice to have them in my iPhone.

With Google Calendar, you can also subscribe to other Calendar (CalDAV) compatible services like Remember the Milk, Anyvite, etc.

How to Sync Google Calendar with iPhone?

With this little tip, you can integrate Google Calendar right into your iPhone Calendar using Google Sync. I am going to assume you have upgraded to OS 3.0 and get to 2.2 later.

iPhone OS Version 3.0

1. Open Settings in iPhone
2. Open Mail, Contacts, Calendars
3. Tap on Add Account
4. Select Microsoft Exchange

   

5. In the Email field, enter your full Gmail address
6. You can leave the Domain field empty
7. In Username, enter your full email address
8. In Password, enter your Google password
9. Hit Next and enter m.google.com in Server field

   

10. Press Next
11. Select the Google Services you want to Sync - only Calendar & Contacts supported at the moment
12. Choose ‘Keep on my iPhone‘ to keep your existing contacts and events in your iPhone.
13. And you are done!

Gotchas

• Google Calendar and Contacts will automatically sync if you have Push (Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendars -> Fetch New Data) enabled. Push settings can also drain your battery faster so play with it and see how your battery holds up with various intervals.
• You can choose which of your Google Calendars to Sync by going to http://m.google.com/sync in Safari
• You can only create 1 Exchange ActiveSync account. So if you already use one for work you are out of luck. Thanks Apple!
• After the Sync is done, you chose to see All Calendars or just specific Calendars in iPhone

  

• With iPhone OS 2.2, you won’t see the screen where you can chose to Keep your existing Contacts in iPhone. You have to heed the warning that you will lose your iPhone data and hit Sync twice.

Hope you were able to set up your Google Calendar and Contacts in your iPhone with these instructions. Let me know if you have any questions and I’ll try to answer them.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Digits is one of those Apps that make you wonder why it wasn’t included in the iPhone OS natively.

Digits lets you quickly add a phone number to a contact. And that’s it. It lets you quickly type in a phone number with the big numbers as you seen in this screenshot. Then you enter a first name and last name and then you save it to your Contact.

Digits [iTunes] is an excellent buy!

Price: $0.99 -> Free

Popularity: 1% [?]

iPhone OS 3.0 has a lot of new features. But, I keep discovering little thoughts tweaks here and there. In fact, I had missed this one and came to know from Patrick of my favorite iPhone blog.

You are probably loving the copy, paste functionality much in OS 3.0. But, did you know instead of holding down the backspace button to delete characters, you can undo your whole typing in input fields by just shaking your iPhone.

This feature is definitely nifty but it would be super cool to have some sort of undo history function added to it. But, hey I welcome even this small but thoughtful add-on.

In fact, if you just copied and pasted a blob of text in the wrong place, just shake your iPhone to undo the whole paste.

Hi5 to Patrick for this tip!

Popularity: 3% [?]

After all the rumors that went around the blog world about the iPhone 3.0 OS, today it was great to find out most of them were indeed true.

Are you ready for the long list of features (over 100) that are coming in iPhone 3.0?

New Features For Us

• Cut, copy & paste - Works for both text and photos. You can copy multiple photos to Main. Shake to undo/redo a paste.
• A2DP Stereo Bluetooth - pair iPhone to a stereo Bluetooth device
• MMS - forward and delete multiple messages
• Spotlight - search across all your content and apps that support Spotlight
• Search in Mail, Calendar & iPod - special search interfaces including searching in IMAP servers
• Tethering - built into iPhone OS 3.0 - careers will determine pricing
• Auto-login for WiFi hotspots
• Landscape Keyboard - in more apps like Mail, SMS & Notes
• New Calendar types - Gmail and Yahoo friendly CalDAV support
• Note syncing with iTunes in Mac and PC
• Autologin in Safari - remembers username/passwords
• Shake to shuffle - in iPod while listening to music to change tracks
• Parental control - adult content filters to movies, TV shows, apps plus websites and music.
• Enhanced App Store - app subscriptions, purchase additional content like travel guides to new cities, levels to games, etc.
• YouTube account support
• Form auto-fill
• New Stocks app - with news stories and landscape view

New Features for Developers

Developers get over a 1000 new APIs.

• Peer-to-peer connectivity over Bluetooth for gaming and info-swapping
• Ability to take payments within Apps to give access to paid content
• Allows call out to Google Maps
• Turn-by-turn GPS information on iPhone without needed 3G connectivity or Google
• Push notification - finally
• iPhone 3.0 apps can access VOIP via WiFi connectinb
• Audio recording, streaming video
• Access iPhone/iPod music library from other applications

Features that didn’t make it

• No background apps - we still have the jailbreak app Backgrounder (of course QuickPwn 3.0 will have to come out then)
• No better way to arrange and manage apps in your home screen - thank God for jailbreak apps like QuickGold & Categories.

It’s plainly an incredible iPhone OS release with over 100 new features and over 1000 new APIs for iPhone developers. With the imminent competition from Palm Pre in the coming months, Apple has answered back addressing a lot of the long overdue features such as copy/paste, push notification, MMS, etc.

iPhone OS 3.0 will be a free upgrade to iPhone 3G users. iPhone 2G users can also upgrade to 3.0 but won’t have some features like A2DP due to hardware limitations.

iPod Touch 2G users can also upgrade to iPhone 3.0 by paying $9.95. Also, the Bluetooth has been unlocked in iPod Touch in 3.0 firmware.

Apple has again proved that they can listen to their users and respond back, albeit in this instance a little late. If this is a little too late remains to be seen. But, I can’t wait to get my hands on iPhone OS 3.0 that’s set to come out this Summer of ‘09.

Popularity: 3% [?]

More Apps on iTunes AppStore are on sale. Another day, another sale.

• VFCaller - T9 Dialer (utilities) is now FREE (orig FREE)
  Free for a week - promotional offer.
• iFishing (games) is now on sale for $0.99 (orig $2.99)
• ShopNotes (utilities) is now FREE (orig $0.99)
  Allows you to add units to your shopping list like bottles, kg, etc.
• MasterBrain (games) is now FREE (orig $0.99)
• VoxBot (Entertainment) is now FREE (orig $1.99)
  Type text and it will read it out loud.
• Bankarama (finance) is on sale for $8.99 (orig $13.99)
  Keep tab on all your account balances
• MobileCan (productivity) is now on sale for $0.99 (orig $5.99)
  A query and database mgmt tool for PostgreSQL databases
• MagicTouch (photography) is on sale for $0.99 (orig $4.99)
  A iPhone/iPod Touch photo retouching app
• Yum Balloon (games) is now FREE
  Limited time free download

Go ahead and grab a few freebies while they last.

Anything that goes on sale for the rest of the day - you can catch it via our updates in Twitter. You can follow us at twitter.com/TopiPhone.

Or you can get free automatic updates with our RSS feed or even get notified by email.

Popularity: 1% [?]

One of the great things about the connectivity you get with iPhone is that you can get a lot of the online app you use in your computer to go. What other app could be essential than a Task Manager App that can help you be productive and help remember things no matter where you are.

Lifehacker has done a really cool post comparing different task managers for iPhone and iPod Touch in AppStore. And they have done a great job of picking a nice sampling out of the numerous one’s out there.

Just a quick rundown of the Task Manager Apps compared by Lifehacker here

• Remember the Milk - FREE ($25/year for PRO access)
• Zenbe Lists - FREE
• reQall - FREE
• To Do’s - FREE
• EasyTask Manager - FREE ($19.99/year for online access)

Our pick out of this list is Remember the Milk. It is one of THE best online task managers and we highly recommend the iPhone App as well as the original web version. You can read a large number of posts on RTM at Shankrila.com tagged GTD.

Let us know your favorite task manager if it’s not already on this list.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Remember the Milk has to be one of the best online task manager application out there. It offers so many cool features plus it extends it’s usability by offering integrating with iCal, Google Calendar, Gmail, etc. It’s even available as a RTM Google gadget in Gmail.

Remember the Milk Pro users enjoyed a iPhone friendly webapp so far but one thing that’s been long time coming was a native iPhone/iPod Touch app. But, make no mistake the webapp is no match to this powerful native iPhone app.

And its here. Here are the cool features you get with it

• Use RTM app completely offline and sync up when you have a data or WiFi connection
• Organize by Lists, Smart Lists, Tags or Location
• View tasks by due date, priority or task name
• Add, edit tasks with all the options you get in the web
• Swipe across a task to mark it complete
• Manage multiple tasks at once with the edit button
• See tasks nearby to where you are with the location feature
• Supports landscape mode for easy typing

RTM has finally delivered the much anticipated iPhone/iPod Touch app and it completely rocks! I love the ‘locatedWithin’ search feature plus the fact that it remembers which screen you were on when you closed the app.

Just remember, even though this app is free in AppStore, you need the PRO Remember the Milk account to use this app.

Download RTM iPhone App

[via & image credit - RTM Blog]

Popularity: 1% [?]