iPhone Life - Best Apps, Top Tips, Great Gear

In episode 201, David and Donna unpack everything from Apple’s biggest announcement in years. Aside from the usual software features for the iPhone, Mac, iPad, and Apple Watch, Apple threw its hat in the ring with its first AR/VR headset, the Vision Pro, and released three new M2 Macs. Should you buy the new headset or wait? Is AR the future? Listen in and find out!

Apple has announced its long-awaited mixed reality headset at this year's World Wide Developers Conference. The headset, which is essentially a lightweight and specialized Mac that you strap to your face, represents Apple’s entry into the world of virtual and augmented reality, which, despite much potential, has remained a niche market dominated by gamers. Apple hopes to bring that world mainstream the same way that they made personal computers mainstream with the Mac, and smartphones with the introduction of the iPhone. Whether they will succeed remains to be seen, since the device will not reach audiences until 2024, and even then comes at a steep retail price of $3,499 that puts it out of reach of most. Nevertheless, the Vision Pro represents Apple’s first new product type since the launch of the Apple Watch in 2015, and many expect it could, like the iPhone and the Mac, change the world.

A few weeks ago I reviewed an amazingly cool 3D golf swing analysis app for iOS called SwingTIP. Afterward, I managed to get out on the links with a friend for the first time in a long time. Not surprisingly, my scoring was pretty abysmal, so I figured I needed some help. I found two apps you may want to check out, especially if you also have been away from the game for awhile. Tiger Woods: My Swing ($4.99) will show you the spectacularly perfect swing of the master himself along with Tiger's priceless golf insights and other exclusive content. 

I recently had the opportunity to speak via Skype with Iliya Yordanov, one of the founders of SilverWiz. The company is the maker of the well-regarded personal finance app, MoneyWiz, which competes with Quicken, Microsoft Money, and iBank to name a few. Yordanov is a four-time entrepreneur, and is currently focused on scaling SilverWiz.

MoneyWiz is the company's sole app, and it’s available for iPhone, iPad, and Mac OS. While pricey as far as iOS apps go, it's $4.99 price tag is nominal compared to Quicken and Microsoft. The app has hundreds of great reviews, all four and five stars. I asked Yordanov what his secret was!

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:

Pages