March 30, 2009

Recipes App – Version 1.1

Recipes App

Recipes App

Last night I submitted the next version of the Recipes App to the App Store.  Hopefully in a few days it will be available to download.  There are a number of improvements in this version including the ability to browse through ALL recipes (finally!), and a new option called My Recipes.  You can save any recipe and it will be available in My Recipes. In the current version of the app, some of the recipes dont display correctly and are cut off.  This has also been fixed in the new version.

You dont need to create an account or anything like that to make use of My Recipes.  It uses your iPhone’s device ID to remember which recipes you have saved, so the whole process is seamless to you.  If you have use the ‘I Like’ button in the current version of the App, then those recipes will be in your My Recipes list.

Skype on the iPhone

I downloaded Skype for the iPhone this morning and made a SkypeOut call (I phoned my bank’s helpdesk in NZ) to a) arrange for something, and b) to test the quality of the call.  I was pleasantly surprised that the quality of the call was very good.  My Internet connection here in Honduras is fairly poor, and there were a couple of jitters but in general the quality was as much as could be expected – or better – for an international phone call.  I was also pleasantly surprised to find that my bank in NZ has people working at 3am NZT!

If Skype can use the Apple Push Notification system to alert of incoming calls when Skype isnt open, this will be an amazing app.  I dont see why they shouldnt be able to either.  In version 3.0 of the iPhone OS – when push notifications finally arrive – the developers can specify an audio clip to be played when a notification arrives, perhaps even a vibration.  So if in the Skype app settings, I specify a certain ringtone from a list of available ringtones specified by Skype (im not sure if custom ringtones would work – actually, im not sure if the name of the audio file is sent through the push notification, or the actual audio file?), then those settings could be synced with Skype’s servers.  When a call comes in, the Skype servers would send the message to the Push Notification system along with my chosen ringtone.  How much data can be sent in the Push Notification’s?  Would it only pop up as a standard notification box on my phone?

March 26, 2009

The revolution will not be televised

Re post: “Announced last week in Nature Magazine, MIT Researchers have developed new lithium batteries that take less time to charge than it just took you to read this sentence.  Clocking in at 10 seconds or less, these new turbo-batteries also discharge energy quickly.  Imagine this:  You’re cell-phone dies, or your laptop.  Instead of waiting hours, you can be fully charged in seconds!” via SuperForest.

March 12, 2009

Recipes App update

So, I have finally had some time to update the Recipes App.  One of the main things that will be fixed in the 1.1 release will be to allow you to browse through all recipes without having to use the search.

The solution I came up with was splitting the categories into letters as well.  So, when you click on Crockpot for example, you will be taken to a screen that lists the alphabet A-Z (plus a 0-9 for recipes that begin with something other than a letter), and it will tell you how many recipes begin with each letter.  From there, you can drill down to the actual recipes that begin with that letter.  This allows a much shorter list of recipes to be scrolled through in each letter.  The iPhone doesnt play nice with hundreds (or in some categories, thousands) of recipes to be browsed.

I should have the update ready for App Store approval soon.