iPhone Life - Best Apps, Top Tips, Great Gear

As a formerly certified weather geek, I like to check out new weather apps. I'm usually drawn to ones with more advanced features, but occasionally I find a simple and elegant weather program I have to mention. YoWindow ($0.99) is one such app. It is not a fancy weather app, which can become cluttered with maps and trend graphs. Instead, it gives you a view of upcoming weather in a serene 2D scene you can animate (e.g. forecast conditions) as you swipe. The app also serves to relax you with realistic outside sights and sounds that match the conditions, and even indicate the season.

This post is intended for readers with advanced technical knowledge.

This article explains how you can mirror and show Web-based Flash videos on external displays connected to your iDevice. In order to answer the questions of several people at MacRumors (original thread), I've decided to thoroughly test the external monitor/Apple TV mirroring/playback capabilities of the currently available Flash browsers.

This post is intended for readers with advanced technical knowledge.

In this article, I will explain how to transfer videos to Apple’s built-in Videos app with a brand new version of the excellent, free, all-in-one iDevice transfer tool, iFunBox.

In the past, uploading videos to the Videos app has only been possible via the Movies tab in iTunes.

iTunes, which is Apple's only desktop tool for transferring videos/movies to the Videos app, has restrictions, which make it impossible to transfer the following types of videos to iDevices:

The new Otterbox Armor ($99.95) iPhone cases are arriving in stores Friday and with them a level of protection unprecedented in the world of rugged cases.

The Otterbox Armor series consists of possibly the toughest heavy-duty cases on the market. And of all the companies introducing waterproof cases this year, Otterbox is the only one I know of with offerings for the iPhone 4/4s series, capitalizing on the huge demand for the older iPhones.

From the ease of collecting often-broken colored pencils, to cleaning up after a room of young artists who seemingly bathed in tempera, art, unlike literature or history, creates rather messy educational challenges.  It is, however, extremely important for learners to engage in visceral exercises that bring the texture of media to hands, and its odor to nostrils.

The annual Macworld/iWorld trade show is underway in San Francisco, and Macworld magazine already has named its Best of Show winners. They include some gotta-see gadgets for the iPad and iPhone, such as an iPad robot, an iPad case that doubles as a speaker, and a 1TB external hard drive for the iPhone and iPad.

In my Video Metadata bible & Roundup, I've already mentioned Subler is capable of manually editing / adding video metadata. After having been asked (thread with numerous, advice-packed posts from me) about doing the same with Subler, I've decided to publish a writeup on doing the same automatically. After all, online video metadata libraries like themoviedb.org have excellent metadata for a lot of flicks.

In the update section of my previous article on advanced location and camera direction tagging of videos, I've already mentioned the built-in video recorder of Ubipix, currently, the only iOS application to record truly dynamic, almost (metadata is sampled every second) frame-level location and direction info, doesn't really have a decent video recorder.

Over at MacRumors (thread), I've been asked to compile a list of players that can vertically stretch a video so that it entirely fills the iPad's screen. During this, it does sacrifice the right aspect ratio and does distort the image. However, at least it doesn't cut off the sides.

Here's a 16:9 movie (my well-known resolution chart video available for download HERE) not filling in the (much taller) screen vertically in the built-in stock Videos app:

Back in the Windows Mobile / Symbian days, in 2007, I've already published a full roundup of then-current UPnP (desktop) server and mobile client apps (see THIS / THIS). Now, let's take a look at how it is done on the iDevice (iPad [Mini] / iPhone / iPod touch)!

As you may have guessed, the stock video player shipped with iOS, “Videos”, doesn't support accessing UPnP (also known as DLNA; in this article, I refer to it as “UPnP”) servers. That is, you'll need to use third-party apps on your iDevice. Fortunately, there are several of them.

1. What can you use UPnP for on iOS?

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