Grocery Shopping Made Easy - Grocery IQ

– Grocery iQ® is an intuitive shopping list that allows you to build new lists quickly with features like predictive search and barcode scanning.

– Customize the arrangement of categories within your list so you can check off items in an orderly fashion as you navigate the store.

Download for Free at Grocery IQ

Siri - the new way to get things done.

Siri is a personal assistant app that allows you to ask questions, the app sends data to a server where it is recognized. The query is then sent off to a series of search engines to find your answer, which is finally returned to the user.

If your busy or between meetings, social events, or working. Siri is your answer. They believe there’s a simpler way to get things done. Just like a real assistant, Siri understands what you say, accomplishes tasks for you and adapts to your preferences over time. Siri can help you find and plan things to do. You can ask Siri to find a romantic place for dinner, tell you what’s playing at a local jazz club or get tickets to a movie for Saturday night, you can ask for things like the best area pizza shop, the status of an arriving flight, or the weather in Seattle. The speech recognition in the app comes from Nuance, the company that developed Dragon Dictation and Dragon Search.

Last year, Apple bought Siri, rumor's today say that, "The use of Siri’s artificial intelligence and assistance technology is said to be deeply integrated into the OS for all the different services offered." That will be iOS 5, scheduled for released in the fall. Apple is trying to wean itself off Google services like search and maps and Siri would be a step in that direction. If you don't have it already and want to play with Siri you can get it free at the App Store. Prepare to be impressed.

Voice Brief - Great Text-To-Speech app

Voice Brief, is an iPhone app that will read to you. Your emails, RSS feeds, Twitter feed, Facebook feed, notes, weather, stocks, calendar and more. The voices are pleasant and work relatively smoothly, the voices are synthesized on your phone so when you're out and about it won't eat up your data plan like crazy.
It's quite easy to set up and you can customize how many messages you want it to read to you, it has a handy "skip" option if it begins reading an email or feed item you aren't interested in
Quick voice load - once you press play the voices load pretty quickly.

So, basically this is an application that reads-out feeds, news and more in two different accents; British and American, which you can choose between helping to reduce the information overload.

PDFpen - No more print, sign, scan, then email or Fax

How many times have you been asked just to print out a document and sign it and fax it back? Or what your fax number. No more with PDFpen, no more print, sign, scan, then email. It's  a simple application that helps you fill out and sign PDFs without printing anything. PDFpen is a PDF annotation tool from SmileOnMyMac, which allows you to edit, sign, fill out, and do just about anything else with PDF documents. 

NEED TO MAKE CORRECTIONS IN ORIGINAL PDF TEXT?

Just select the text you want to change and click "Correct Text" – PDFpen replaces the original text with an editable text box.

NEED TO SIGN A PDF CONTRACT?

Open it in PDFpen and scribble your signature with the mouse or drag in a scanned signature image. Scale it to sign on the dotted line. Return it via email. No fax machine required!

NEED TO EDIT A SCANNED ORIGINAL?

PDFpen can perform OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on your scanned document to make the text editable.

NEED TO REMOVE SENSITIVE INFORMATION FROM A PDF?

New in PDFpen 5! You can redact text in PDFpen. Remove a Social Security number or banking details easily. PDFpen removes the text in the PDFpen and replaces it with a black rectangle. You can even use search-and-redact to eliminate the text throughout a PDF document.

NEED TO MERGE PAGES FROM SEVERAL PDF FILES TOGETHER?

Open the files in PDFpen and drag the pages you need from each into a new document

NEED TO CUT A PDF DOCUMENT DOWN TO SIZE?

Open a copy in PDFpen, select the pages to remove, hit delete, and save. It's that easy.

NEED TO REPURPOSE PDF CONTENT?

Now you can search, select and copy the text of PDF documents.

"As a traveling physician, I'm often filling out new applications of all kinds. The ability to fire off the document using File -> Mail Document as soon as it's finished is a real godsend. I've been with you from the start and really like and use PDFpen." - Dr. Dale Mericle, Reno, NV

NEED TO APPLY A CUSTOM STAMP TO YOUR PDF DOCUMENTS?

PDFpen is fully scriptable, so you can automate nearly anything you can do in the interface.

They offer a free trail at PDFpen.

Happy Birthday OS X

First released to the public on March 24, 2001, Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah was a huge conceptual leap forward for the Mac platform. Cheetah and Snow Leopard now, we had 10.1 Puma (September 2001), 10.2 Jaguar (August 2002), 10.3 Panther (October 2003), 10.4 Tiger (April 2005) and 10.5 Leopard (October 2007)and then Snow Leopard 10.6 was publicly unveiled on June 8, 2009. We don’t have much longer to wait until OS X 10.7 Lion arrives and brings a convergence of traditional desktop OS design and iOS design together into one of the best operating system in the last ten years.

New iMac's next Month

Apple’s refreshed iMacs should be hitting stores in late April or early May.  A new line of iMac all-in-one desktop computers should come with the Sandy Bridge processors and the new high-speed Thunderbolt port, but no major cosmetic changes. 


Thunderbolt is a new port for high-speed peripherals and displays. Dubbed “one connector to rule them all,” it’s a single 10Gbps cable that consolidates almost all existing ports, from FireWire to USB to miniDisplay to eSATA.


Maybe Apple will offer SSD's as a standard storage in the new iMac and maybe will see the prices drop a little.

WideMail Not Working - Mail Plugins not working?

Your WideMail not working after upgrading MacOS X to 10.6.7  In finder click GO, then click on "Go to Folder" and type ( ~/Library/Mail/Bundles ) (~ means your home folder). Open the Widemail.mailbundle folder, then the Contents folder. You should find a file called Info.plist – you will need to edit it with a text editor.


First locate the "SupportedPluginCompatibilityUUIDs" key. The add new string lines with the following UUID numbers: 1C58722D-AFBD-464E-81BB-0E05C108BE06  and  9049EF7D-5873-4F54-A447-51D722009310 Should look something like this:

If you were like me and launched Mail after the update then you most likely saw the message that said that your plugin for WideMail has been disabled. So look in the Bundles (Disabled) folder to find your Widemail.mailbundle, after you edit it,  save it back into Bundles folder. Close mail and relaunch, WideMail should back the way it was before you updated.

Real Disk offers Real Disk Mode

Real Disk by Macroplant offer's iPad, iTouch or iPhone Disk Mode is made easy with Phone Disk. Using your standard USB cable, this tiny program runs in the menu bar or system tray of your Mac or PC. When it finds an iPod Touch or iPhone it seamlessly mounts it to your file system so you can directly access its files using the finder in OS X. Phonedisk

iOS 4.3.1 Next Week

iOS 4.3.1 will be pushed out sometime within the next week or two and will address and fix the following issues:

Memory corruption when reading large files from USIM filesystem.
NTLM authentication in apps and on websites.
Springboard and 3rd party apps not recognizing the gyroscope on the iPad 2.
iPad 2 jailbreak vulnerability.
Nitro support in full-screen web clips.
Baseband updates for the 3GS and iPad.

Search - How to find everything fast on your iPhone

Need a phone number in a hurry? You can always click the address book, tap contacts and then type the name of the person your looking for, Or on the main Home screen, flick your finger to the right, then type what you’re looking for in the search field. Search looks through everything on your iPhone — app names, contacts, calendars, songs, email and text messages, notes, and more. From there, a single tap takes you where you want to go. Want to hear a song right now? With Search, everything on your iPhone is just a few taps away. 

Search the web.

You can search beyond iPhone to find what you need on the web and Wikipedia. On the Search screen, just type what you’re looking for and choose where you want to search. Safari automatically opens with a list of search results. 

Search the server.

In Mail, you can search through all your downloaded messages by sender, recipient, or subject. But if the information you’re looking for isn’t stored on your iPhone, you can continue your search on the server.* Search responds with all the results. In the Contacts app, you can also search for people in your corporate directory if you use Microsoft Exchange or LDAP.

Search inside applications.

Searching on iPhone works in other apps too. Search text and names in MMS messages. Search names in Contacts. Search calendar events by subject, location, attendees, or notes. Search all text in Notes. Search for albums, artists, or songs in the iPod app.

iPhone 5 will feature NFC

Next-generation iPhone will include NFC (near-field-communication) technology with a “wave-to-pay” system.

Near Field Communication (NFC) technology makes life easier and more convenient for consumers around the world by making it simpler to make transactions, exchange digital content, and connect electronic devices with a touch.

A standards-based connectivity technology, NFC harmonizes today's diverse contactless technologies, enabling current and future solutions in areas such as:

Access control
Consumer electronics
Healthcare
Information collection and exchange
Loyalty and coupons
Payments
Transport
Developers can learn more about NFC in the section on interoperability.

Key Benefits of NFC
NFC provides a range of benefits to consumers and businesses, such as:

Intuitive: NFC interactions require no more than a simple touch
Versatile: NFC is ideally suited to the broadest range of industries, environments, and uses
Open and standards-based: The underlying layers of NFC technology follow universally implemented ISO, ECMA, and ETSI standards
Technology-enabling: NFC facilitates fast and simple setup of wireless technologies, such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, etc.)
Inherently secure: NFC transmissions are short range (from a touch to a few centimeters)
Interoperable: NFC works with existing contactless card technologies
Security-ready: NFC has built-in capabilities to support secure applications

Updated Google App

The Google Search app for iPhone and iPod touch devices is a free application that gives you easy access to Google Mobile products and lets you quickly search your device or the web for whatever info you need. You can get Google Search results just like on a computer by either tapping the search box and entering a query or tapping the microphone and speaking your query. When you start typing a search query the Google Search app will give the following types of suggested results based on what you've entered:

• My Location search option to see relevant business results near your current approximate location in Google Maps
• Contacts on your device
• Search history
• Websites

You also get easy access to any of the free Google Mobile products available for iPhone and iPod touch devices by tapping 'Apps' at the bottom of the homescreen. Select any product's icon to quickly open it.

AirPlay - Enabled Apps and How To Find Them!

AirPlay has been updated in iOS 4.3 which lets you wirelessly stream photos, video and music from an iOS device to your television via Apple TV, and AirPlay can now stream video from the Photos app, web sites and Air Play-enabled apps that are now listed in a brand new section on the App Store.

To find the list of Air Play - enabled apps takes a little work.  Open iTunes on your desktop, type Airplay in the search window in the top right hand corner and click return. The Power Search window will open next, if you scroll down the page you will find all of the current Apps for iPhone and iPad that are AirPlay enabled. If your using your iPhone or iPad click on the App Store app, click search and type AirPlay.

There were only eighteen apps listed when I posted, but I would expect that number to grow as more developers enhance their products with AirPlay technology.

SpeedTest for iPhone - Measure your Speed

Use it to measure speeds wherever you may be. If you using Skype, Truphone, Viber or Whistle this is the best app to test the local area WiFi to see why your calls keep dropping. In fact, Youtube videos aren't load fast enough, use SpeedTest for iOS. The utility lets you benchmark how fast data is being transferred over either Wireless or 3G. Within seconds can see if the hot spot your using will work for your next call or video. 

Makes full use of the global Speedtest.net testing infrastructure

Shows real-time download and upload graphs

Stores results both locally and on the Internet for sharing

Works over both WiFi and cellular networks

Peel - 100% pure entertainment - The future of TV

Peel invisibly controls your entire entertainment system: TV, cable or satellite box, Blu-ray player, AV receiver, Apple TV^®, Roku^™ and more. There's nothing to plug into your phone, and there's no hassle with network passwords. In three simple steps, you're controlling just about any home theater right from your iPhone or iPod touch.


Peel suggests Top Pick TV shows for you based on what you watch and like. Instead of a long, boring channel grid, Peel presents an easy-to-use mosaic of your favorite shows, filtered by type and genre in the order you like.

Read more at - http://www.peel.com/peel-app.php

FLARES - a private location sharing app without having to join or use a social network.

FLARES is a private location sharing application for the iPhone. Tell someone where you are and how to get there with a tap of a button. Whether you're at a new bar, a house party, or on the side of the highway broken down, FLARES sends directions to the people who need them, instantly.

Flares was purposely designed to be as light-weight as possible. It's simple to use, there are no extraneous features, and it wont suck alot of power from your battery. We simply wanted to solve the problem of explaining complicated directions over the phone without having to join or use a social network. This way you're not sharing your whereabouts with the world, and there's no middle-man. http://flaresapp.com/

4.3 is here

Connect your iPhone to iTunes and hit devices - Click Update

4.3 to be released today?

A rumor that iOS 4.3 may debut today. This release date is earlier than the March 11 date suggested last week when the gold master version of the mobile operating system was released to developers.

Friday's March 11th Release of iOS 4.3 will be Impressive

Recent Javascript benchmarks on the new iPad 2 and iPhone 4 running iOS 4.3 and comparing them with a few Androids show some very impressive bumps in speed.

Where the iPhone 4 and iPad lagged behind both Android devices using iOS 4.2, the new iOS 4.3 with the new WebKit 2 browser engine in the devices dropped more than half of their rendering time.

The graph below of the iPad 2, with its more powerful processor, and perhaps helped by some additional RAM, is over 50% faster than the previous iPad. The
iPhone 4 is even more impressive.

Hotspot for FaceTime over 3G

Wi-Fi connectivity on the go, you know that it's basically like having a Wi-Fi router that you can carry with you anywhere. That means that anything that works on Wi-Fi -- including FaceTime video calling -- works over the 3G internet connection provided by the MiFi.

Beginning next Friday anybody with an iPhone running iOS 4.3 will have that Personal Hotspot capability running on their devices. Of course, your carrier will need to enable that capability and you'll probably need to sign up for a special Personal Hotspot data plan, but the Personal Hotspot functionality is now going to be built into your iPhone.

Voxer - Live Walkie Talkie

Voxer is a walkie-talkie for the 21st century, an iPhone app that lets you instantly talk across the internet and listen at the same time and leave voice messages if no one is on the other end and simultaneously chat with multiple people and toggle between text and voice to your heart's content. It's a real-time internet app in the extreme. Easier to find friends! To add new friends, tap on the Main Menu upper right, hit Friends - tap the + icon (or search bar) and enter your friends name. Select your friend and tap "Start Chat" User Voxer and iTunes, Pandora or any other audio app at the same time! The music will stop when you send or listen to a voice message and will continue after 10 seconds.

iPad 2 - Thinner - Lighter - Faster

Two cameras for FaceTime and HD video recording. The dual-core A5 chip. The same 10-hour battery life. All in a thinner, lighter design. Now iPad is even more amazing. It’s 33 percent thinner and up to 15 percent lighter, so it feels even more comfortable in your hands. And it makes surfing the web, checking email, watching movies, and reading books so natural.

Print your email, photos, web pages, and documents right from your iPad over Wi-Fi.8 There’s no software to download, no drivers to install, and no cables to connect. With just a few taps, you can go from viewing something on the iPad screen to holding a printed copy.

Video mirroring. What you do is what they see. Video mirroring is new for iPad and for every app, web page, presentation, video, movie, or photo you want to show a big audience. Just plug in the Apple Digital AV Adapter or Apple VGA Adapter and your HDTV or projector becomes a bigger version of your iPad.

Find Cheap Gas Prices

As fuel prices soar ever higher, you have more and more incentive to shop around and find the best deal before filling up. But not all Gas apps are the same, we tested three apps. Cheap Gas, GasBuddy and GasBag. What we found was that GasBag provides the fastest way to find the cheapest gas near you. The other two fell short when looking for the closes gas station. GasBuddy does show Costco or Safeway stations and thou both Cheap Gas and GasBuddy show stations in your area there was missing data more frequenly. GasBag's extra features like it's log book make the clear winner at the present time.