MyCal 2010 & Feb wallpapers

Wow the 1st of February is here already – it’ll be Xmas again soon. But a new month means a couple of new Calendar Wallpapers for your iPhone or iPod touch.

As always, they are created with out MyCal app which allows you to superimpose a monthly calendar over the wallpaper image of your choice. We’ve just released a temporary update which includes February 2010 while we work on adding some new features. To be honest we were also waiting to see what Apple announced last week and hoping for some juicy new iPhone features we could incorporate but no such luck.

What do you think about a version of MyCal for the iPad? We could certainly fit a lot more info on there…

Anyway, you can read all about MyCal here or buy a copy here.

RandomPlay. Live at last!

With all the excitement of the iPad launch last night we nearly didn’t notice that RandomPlay has finally gone live!

RandomPlay - interactive visual playlists on your iPhone

RandomPlay creates unique interactive visual playlists on your iPhone or iPod touch. It looks deceptively simple but has some hidden depths (much like the members of Chilli X).

Upon launch you’ll see a random selection of 12 tracks from your music library laid out in a grid and the first song will start to play. When it finishes it will be replaced by another so you won’t have to keep refreshing your visual playlist.

RandomPlay is ideal for those times when you’re not sure what you want to listen to but want to have more control than just telling your iPod to shuffle all songs. It looks great and works well with speaker docks and hi-fi systems. The screen stays on so it’s easy to see not just what’s playing but also what’s coming up. Plus, it’s just great fun to play with!

Play/Pause – just tap the cover of the song that’s playing to pause it or tap another cover to play that track instead.

Delete tracks – double tap any song you don’t want to hear and it will be replaced by another.

Song info - the artist and song title of the currently playing track are displayed at the bottom of the screen. If you’re not sure exactly what songs are queued up to be played, you can tap and hold any cover to pop up a window displaying the info for that track.

Shake to Shuffle – if you don’t like the look of any of the tracks RandomPlay has chosen, just shake the device to replace all 12 with another random selection.

RandomPlay tries to look good, so will only choose tracks with cover artwork, and because we think it works best with music, RandomPlay will also try to filter out your podcasts and audiobooks.

Grab a copy now and let is know what you think!

Apple iPad in use

Here’s a great video from iLounge showing a pretty comprehensive walkthrough of the iPad’s features.

Apple iPad: iLounge.com’s Complete Interface Walkthrough (720p HD) from iLounge on Vimeo.

Hello iPad

Well, the agonising wait is over and the world finally knows what Steve Jobs had up his sleeve – a giant iPod touch!

As always with these over-hyped imaginary products the reality is a mixture of excitement and disappointment.

Disappointment because it doesn’t live up to the hype and do everything everybody claimed it might – hi-res cameras, video conferencing, replace my AppleTV, stream my iTunes collection from the cloud or make my coffee for me.

Excitement because it’s a giant iPod touch! We have to remember that Apple are making products for the mass market now, not just us fanboys. I’ve lost count of the number of ‘normal’ people I’ve shown off my iPhone too who’ve said ‘it’s really cool but the screen’s too small’. My wife, who is probably more typical of the target consumer than me, sits in bed in the morning looking at the web on her laptop because her iPhone’s screen is ‘too small’ while I squint away at my phone emailing links to myself so I can look at them later on a bigger screen.

Don’t get me wrong, mobile Safari is the best mobile browser out there – the only thing that holds it back is the size of the screen. It’s the same with video playback – great implementation but the screen’s too small to really enjoy it.

I think an enormous deciding factor in the design of the iPad has been keeping the price down. Apple didn’t want to repeat the mistake they made with the Cube a few years ago i.e. release something that looked incredibly cool but was overpriced for it’s target market and ultimately failed. Hence, no video cameras, no huge amounts of memory

Other negative comments that have been made concern the lack of multitasking but that’s not a hardware limitation. From what I can tell looking at videos of the device in action the new Apple A4 chip that powers the iPad looks pretty powerful. To my mind the iPad looks like it’s being constrained by the operating system. Rather than roll out OS 4.0 with full iPad support we’re having to make do with an incremental update to the OS that takes into account the higher screen resolution. Hence the home screen looks rather sparse with the huge gaps between those tiny little icons and only 4 apps in the dock. This looks very much like a temporary measure to me while they get OS 4.0 ready for a summer release and some new iPhone hardware.

There’s still a lot missing at the moment – where’s the Weather app? Where’s Stocks & Messaging? Sure, there’s a lot to moan about but equally there’s a lot to get excited about – as a screen based designer, I for one am looking forward to playing with all those extra 632,832 pixels! As you can see, we’ve already updated our previous mockups to reflect the real iPad – now we have to get coding!

Done 2.0 User Guide

In case you haven’t noticed we’ve updated the Done User Guide to cover all the new features added in version 2.0 of our iPhone To DO list app.

We’ve done it as a downloadable pdf this time rather than a web page. As well as being a comprehensive guide to all of Done’s features, it’s also packed full of tips, quotes and productivity advice.

So download it today if you already own a copy of Done or perhaps you’re thinking of buying it but wanted to get a really good feel for it first. Let us know what you think…

The Apple Tablet

Unless you’ve been living on another planet for the last month or so, you’ll know that Apple has a special press event planned for sometime later this month (the 26th or 27th).

Although nobody knows for sure, the best bet is that they will be announcing some sort of new hardware – the much rumoured, long awaited MacTablet, iSlate, iPad, iGuide or whatever it’s going to be called. The web is awash with feverish speculation as to exactly what it will be called, what it will look like and what it will do. Which is all quite interesting because Apple, as per usual, are saying nothing on the subject. I’m never quite sure about this approach as it builds expectations up to unrealistic levels and then disappoints people when the final product doesn’t do everything that was promised by John Smith of Texas…

However, most people have been speculating on the hardware rather than the software, so we at Chilli X thought we’d join in the fun and imagine what we could do with all these extra pixels. So we’ve used some of our existing apps as a starting point and mocked up these images showing the type of app we’d like to build. Imagine a combination of PhotoFrame, DeskClock and PlaySafe – what do you think?

Predictions

At the moment nobody even knows what operating system it will run but here’s what we think. It won’t be running Snow Leopard – there’s no point putting the same operating system that people use to do high end rendering and print ready artwork on a small, less powerful device. If it was to run Snow Leopard then Apple would have to figure out a way of stopping you installing certain types of application and that’s just messy.

It won’t run the current iPhone operating system either, although it will run most existing iPhone apps in smaller windows (almost like OS X dashboard widgets). My guess is that they’ll use the event to announce iPhone OS 4.0 with lots of cool new features including support for larger screen sizes. It makes perfect sense – everyone loves the iPhone OS. Users because it’s slick, fun and easy to use and Apple because of all the money they make from the App Store – why would they want to use Snow Leopard and not be able to control what software goes on there (and get a cut of it).

If you believe the rumours the new device will revolutionise the way we interact with our media. We’ll be reading the morning paper on it bed, watching TV programmes, reading digital comic and ebooks. Personally I want it to be my ultimate remote control as well. Expectations are running pretty high for this one so I hope they get it right, although even if it’s nothing more than a giant iPod touch that would still be pretty cool! Let’s face it most of the iPod touch’s weakness would be fixed by a bigger screen. Yes, you can browse the web but it’s not ideal – I still find that I email myself links to look at on my real Mac with a big screen far too often. Yes, you can read digital comics but a panel at a time doesn’t quite do it for me either…

Disclaimer: although we’re Apple developers we have absolutely no prior knowledge and this whole article is based around speculation and fantasy and the images are just mockups.

Happy New Year!

We just thought we’d take this opportunity to wish you all a very Happy New Year! Let’s hope it’s a good one for all of you…

And let’s start it off with a couple of new calendar wallpapers for your iPhone or iPod touch. As per usual, these were made with MyCal, which we’ve just updated to cover January 2010. We’ll be updating again shortly to cover the rest of 2010 and add some new features.

Read all about it here or buy a copy here.

MyCal 2010 update problem – updated

test

Update: Panic over – everything seems to be working properly now and the updated app should be showing up om your phone and in iTunes perfectly normally – unless you tell us otherwise…

We’re not sure what’s going on here but there seems to be a problem with the latest update to MyCal. The update is live in the App Store but not showing up as an update on user’s phones or in iTunes…

A couple of users have reported that they’re going to download it and being asked to pay. It’s definitely intended to be a free upgrade – but as the iTunes Connect service (the method by which developers communicate with the store) is closed for Xmas, we can’t get in to check out what’s going on.

test

Best guess is that it’s a glitch in the go live process caused by the system shutting down for Xmas… Our advice would be to wait until it shows up as an update on your phone and grab it then. As soon as iTunes Connect is back up again we’ll see if we can get to the bottom of it…

Christmas Updates

By the time you read this two little App updates should have appeared in the AppStore.

First off is MyCal which is an interim update to keep it working into January 2010. It also fixes the bug that some users were experiencing where pictures they took with their phones were appearing upside down in MyCal. There’s a bigger, better version of MyCal coming early in the new year with new features and images, so watch out for it.

In case you don’t know MyCal, it’s a simple little App that allows you to add calendar information to your pictures to create beautiful wallpapers for your iPhone or iPod touch.

MyCal - January 2010

Then we’ve added a 2010 year view to DeskClock to keep it up to date. We’ve also fixed the issue where AM or PM were still showing up when you selected the 24 HR clock – so no more 20.30 PMs!

DeskClock's 2010 year view

They should both be available now – Merry Christmas everybody!

It’s about time AboutTime got a good review

AboutTime was always one of my favorites of our apps although, judging by the sales figures, not many people ‘got it’ (in every sense of the phrase!).

So it’s great to see a 5 star review for it. Thanks to the guys at Vous et Votre Mac for pointing out the review to us.

AboutTime - don't take time so seriously

If you’ve not come across it before, here’s how we describe it ourselves:

AboutTime tells you ‘about what time it is‘ featuring beautifully rendered typography on a light parchment background. AboutTime is bright during the day and dark at night so you’ll always know if it’s day or night. It makes an ideal (and unusual) bedside clock. As well as telling the time in a unique and unconventional way, you can flip the pages to reveal entertaining quotes and musings on the nature of time itself.

And here’s what VMMac had to say:

We’ve had quite a few users tell us that this is their favorite Chilli X app, so why not give it a try?