It looks like a lot of apps were updated in the past week for the new iPad which was available for purchase starting last week Friday. Here’s information about some of the 59 app updates that became available for my iPhone or iPad in the past week.
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One of the handiest features in Safari mobile for the iPad (or iPhone or iPod touch) is the ability to double-tap on a column of text to make it zoom to fit the display width. It allows me to comfortably read text that is just a bit too small at its default size. It works great on every website except TechCrunch’s for some reason. You can see the problem in the screenshot above. Its banner and a few other web page areas are in focus. But, the title and text column are blurry.
Forty-four (44) apps installed one time or another on my iPhone or iPad were updated in the past week. Let’s take a quick look if anything interesting showed up in these updates.
I have an old(ish) Eye-Fi Home Video 4GB SDHC card that I got as part of a promotion to buy 200GB of Google Docs storage space in 2010. At the time, the transfer was through my Mac (or PC) to Eye-Fi’s service and then to Google Picasa. The process was slow and, it seemed, not 100% reliable. So, the card got put away after a week or two of disappointing tests.
However, Apple’s new iPhoto for iOS (released last week) is such an amazing tool on my iPad (it also works on an iPhone or iPod touch) that I wanted to get photos from a digital camera to my iPad without using SD card readers. My guess was that Eye-Fi’s free iOS app would not work with my old low-end card (the model is not even listed on Eye-Fi’s web site). However, to my surprise it worked fine after following the simple instructions provided by the app itself.
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Microsoft let Windows Mobile users know that the Windows Mobile Marketplace will shut down on May 9, 2012 and that Applications and games acquired from the Windows Mobile 6.x Marketplace service installed on your Windows Mobile 6.x phone will continue to work after the service is discontinued on May 9, 2012. However, additional downloads of these applications and games from the Windows Mobile 6.x Marketplace service will no longer be available. This may not be a huge issue for people who did not buy apps through the marketplace (I did not). But, it may be a problem for those who did and need to hard reset a Windows Mobile device to restore functionality. People who bought Windows Mobile phones in the fall of 2010 before Windows Phone was released will have a less than 2 year old phone that cannot restore some apps in the event of a loss or hard reset.
This situation also illustrates a problem with all of the single platform stores that have sprung up since Apple led the way with its ultra-successful iOS App Store, however. And, it makes one pause to wonder what will happen if Microsoft ever stops supporting the Windows 8 app store since WOA users cannot get apps outside of that venue.
The 1960s Lily Tomlin video above may be useful in attempting to understand Microsoft’s (and perhaps Google too) customer service attitude.
The most I’ve paid for an app is $9.99. I’m hard pressed to name an app I might consider buying that costs more than that. However, if you do, here’s an Android app that might be worth its relatively high $28.99 price:
Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (Google Play)
A version is also available for the iPhone and is being developed for Windows Phone.