Dubstep iPhone App Puts a bit of Wobble in your Day

Posted on Friday, October 21, 2011

Dubstep emerged from the two step, garage and dub scene in London about a decade ago. It has slowly gained popularity, but exploded into the mainstream last year. The key to many dubstep tracks is the distinctive bass wobble noise which is introduced on the drop and has been known to cause localised earthquakes when played through a decent sound system.

Wobble Base Station enables you to spit out dubstep wobble noises at will – in this sense it’s sure to eclipse the faithful fart generators that have amused teenage boys for years. The app includes 15 drum loops, eight different effects and four percussion sounds which you can modify with the (I’m not making this up) ‘Filth-scope’. If anything signifies the beginning of the end for this genre of music – it’s this app.

TFI Friday TimeWaster – YouTube’s Trending Videos

Posted on Friday, October 21, 2011

Some absolutely cracking clips in this week’s trending YouTube video collection. Highlight of the week is the incredible Qu8k homebrew rocket that soars to 122,000 feet and returns safely to earth. Low point is definitely the 10th video which features the most vomit-inducing manufactured group since Boyzone called it a day. If there’s someone you truly hate, be sure to forward on the clip of Heart2Heart.

Ripley’s Power Loader Comes a Step Closer to Fruition

Posted on Thursday, October 20, 2011

 [Via Devour]

Wunderkit brings recurring tasks, notes and collaboration to Wunderlist interface

Posted on Thursday, October 20, 2011

One of our favourite to-do apps is Wunderlist, a lovely looking program that’s available on Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android and online in a browser. However as great as Wunderlist is and as useful as it was to be able to sync to-do lists on all of our devices, it was also lacking in several key areas.

Well the good news is that the nice people at 6Wunderkinder have been working hard on a brand new version of the software called Wunderkit, which is now ready for beta testing. The software has moved on from simple to-dos and is now a full-blown task management suite. The core of the suite is still the faithful to-do, but now the concept has been expanded out.

Amongst the new features promised are sub-tasks (so you can break a larger task down into smaller chunks) and recurring tasks (the single missing feature that stopped me from using Wunderlist on a daily basis). The dev team have also created a workspaces concept that works like a project – you can have notes in there, follow people within a project and get an overview of progress in the new dashboard. There’s a full write-up over at 6Wunderkinder’s blog and a waiting list to get in on the (currently closed) beta.

Iris – Siri’s remedial cousin

Posted on Thursday, October 20, 2011

By all accounts, Siri is an amazing application and I can fully understand why owners of phones on other platforms would like something similar. As good as Siri is, Apple still put a Beta tag on it, because they cannot guarantee either 100% reliable voice recognition or 100% reliable parsing of instructions. Like many Google products, I suspect that Siri will remain in beta for the foreseeable future.

So how would you suppose a Siri knock-off, created in eight hours and utilising Google voice recognition software, would compare? Let me put it this way – any Android users hoping for a bit of one-upping on their iOS using chums are going to be very disappointed. Iris was created by staff at Dexetra, during a hack day. The name stands for “Intelligent Rival Imitator of Siri” or perhaps they just reversed the name Siri – it’s hard to tell. So what’s it like to use?

Well, Iris might have been a fun project for the coders at Dexetra and while nobody should expect miracles from a day’s hacking and some off-the-shelf code, Iris is good for little more than a proof of concept. The voice recognition they borrowed from Google isn’t very accurate and the responses from the software to the questions asked are often weird. I got the best results with simple fact-based questions. Here are some example questions and responses:

Me: Schedule a meeting at 11 o’clock on Monday at head office.
Iris: Which office?

Me: Are there any Italian restaurants in the area?
Iris: Fries.

Me: Will you marry me
Iris: Will You Marry Me? is the 1992 single by Paula Abdul

Me: Wingardium Leviosa
Iris: Avarda Kedavra

Me: Who’s better – boys or girls?
Iris: No-one.

Me: How many litres in five gallons?
Iris: 18.93litres

Me: Will it be sunny in Sydney this weekend?
Iris: Do you want tell good bye, please!

Me: Remind me to call the vet.
Iris: Hey, yea you, you there!

Me: I’m in the mood for Italian food in North Beach.
Iris: Who do you love?

Is Iris any good in the real world? No – not even a little bit. Is it an interesting technology demo? Definitely. Download it yourself, have a play, just don’t expect it to be organising your life like Apple’s synthetic secretary. You can download Iris (Alpha) now, from the Android market.

Five Star Wall – Week 3 – October 2011

Posted on Thursday, October 20, 2011

This week we’re channelling another era of music listening – the vinyl days. As a lapsed DJ I collected a vast amount of records over the years and can still vividly remember the joy of scrutinising the record sleeve while the album or 12″ was playing. Anyway – for sophisticated music lovers everywhere, here’s a wall by Tim Bonvallet. You can get it, here.

An Animated History of the iPhone

Posted on Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Now your Mac can tell when you’re paying attention

Posted on Wednesday, October 19, 2011

File this one under ‘left field’. Vitamin-R is a cool little task-management menu bar app that breaks tasks down into ‘time slices’ and enables you to reach your goal by steadily ticking off smaller sub-tasks. So far so normal. However Publicspace.net, the developers of Vitamin-R have just released and update to the app that includes experimental support for a brainwave detector.

The latest release of Vitamin-R (1.70) includes support for the MindWave EEG Sensor – a $99 wireless MindWave Brain Wave Sensor that measures “attention” and “meditation” levels. What this means is that the app can now detect ‘attention’ and ‘meditation’ levels, average them over a time slice and pre-select the appropriate focus level in the “rate your time slice” feature of the app. In other words, it’ll now if you’ve been paying attention. Thor help us if this ever makes its way into classrooms and board meetings.

Fanstastical 1.1 – the best menu bar calendar app for Mac just got better

Posted on Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Once you get into the habit of using it, Apple’s iCal calendar app is extremely useful. Even in its current Lion iteration however, it’s a vaguely unwieldy application that could do with some loving from Cupertino, which is probably why a whole sector of the app market has sprung up to get around its limitations.

Fantastical is a calendar app that lives in your menu bar, meaning it’s always at hand when you need it. It uses a natural language for event entry, so you can type something like, “Lunch at mum’s on Thursday at 12:30″ and it will figure out what you’re saying and create an event accordingly.

When you click on the app’s icon you see a monthly view, which you can cycle through and a list of forthcoming events beneath it – these are colour coded as per your calendar settings. You can enter a search term at the top of the window to refine your events list, viewing only those events with certain keywords in them. It’s all very slick.

So what’s new in version 1.1? You can now edit and/or delete events directly from within Fantastical – this is a feature that users were crying out for and I have little doubt that it will turn the app into one of those essentials that every Mac user should own. There’s also full iCloud support, strong improvements to the CalDav support and a raft of bug fixes. Fantastical 1.1 is $20 and is available now in the App Store.

Android Freebie of the Week – Taptu

Posted on Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Speaking for myself, I’ve always been a news junkie, but I’m prepared to accept that mobile Internet and powerful hand-held mobile devices has turned plenty of others into voracious consumers of information. The touchscreen interface lead to a reinvention of news apps that was pioneered by Pulse and Flipboard, but other apps have come along since and improved on the formula.

Taptu is like a hybrid of Pulse and an RSS feed reader. It enables you to categorise your news providers by topic and then see them all, whether newspaper, blog or magazine, in the one location. You can import your Google Reader feeds and seek out new ones you haven’t tried before. It also connects with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and scrape interesting content from them. It’s a terrific app, it’s free and you can get it here.