1. The ability to hear messages from the phone and not speaker phone or headphones. Just for privacy concerns.
2. The ability to record greetings directly from the phone. If you don’t have access to a computer and you want to change or add a greeting, it would be a nice feature to have.
3. Pictures of your contacts. Either from your phone or if you could upload them to the site.
4. Ditch-Mail access (Toggle on or off). If you do not want to talk to someone you can send them directly to “ditchmail” from the phone. This would be awesome.
5. Push Notification (To let you know when you got a new message). You could easily enable sms notifications. However if you don’t wish to use your own text message account limit, push would be the ideal method.
The Youmail service Youmail link for those who do not know what it is, is a voicemail alternative for your cell phone or possibly your home phone. They provide rich features like customizable voice greetings for each of your contacts. It is a really cool service. They recently added an app to the iPhone app store. Soon as I received their email announcing it’s release I jumped on and downloaded it. Well…….. It works. But it’s lackluster on purpose. This is because its features and services are too similar to AT&T visual voicemail. Therefore when you get a voicemail no photo of the person will show. In addition to this when you play a voicemail it’s forced to play in speaker phone. What developer would do such a thing, haven’t they heard of privacy before. You can solve this by grabing some headphones but if you don’t have a pair with you expect your messages to be played aloud.
This is a major concern, if Youmail is to be taken seriously they need to address these matters soon. Also Apple needs to release the stranglehold on developers to create rich content for everyone to enjoy.
Parsing through the app store recently I went looking for good reliable VOIP/SIP applications. I have found my fair share of applications which allow you to use voip for making phone calls over wifi. But whether or not these applications were any good was questionable. Fring and icall to name a few are sort of good. But I had to turn outside of the app store to find something that truly satisfied me. Cydia has an application (not approved by apple) called siphon, probably a play on the words SIP and Phone. This app does everything you would want it to do with a few minor bugs.
If you wish to make free faxes over the internet hurry up and get it done. Vbuzzer extendes its free fax service via the web till March 31 2009. Below are some of the details which explains that you can still fax for free if you use their vbuzzer application.
I have owned a psp since it first came out and one thing about it has always been a gripe of mine. The fact that typing on it sucks big time. There hasn’t been much of an effort to correct how terrible typing on a psp can be. It’s frustratingly difficult and a pain. Then I started playing with writingpad a shape writing technology app for the iPhone where you can draw the word instead of typing it. If this can be maniputated or interpreted so words can be scrolled on instread of touched could be loads easier then clicking on a button a hundred times to get to the letter you want. Lord help you if you missed a letter then you have to start over to find the letter you just missed. But if you can just draw on a virtual keyboard then typing will in essence be much easier. Just an idea out there for any one ***cough Sony*** who would like to incorperate this technology in to their products.
Hey face it not everyone has the time to download nice album art for every single album you own. Its too time consuming to do such a thing (*cough*not that I have done such a thing). Well to save you some time how about you check out this nice little app called album art aggregator. What it does is collect data based from your ID3 tags to grab the correct album art. Once it downloads the art it places a jpg file in the same folder as the album. The name of the file could be changed so you can name it to something like folder.jpg. Which is what I prefer because it plays nice with Windows and XBMC so you can see all that pretty art. You can customize the program to fit how you organize your music. Some like to have all the albums in one folder others like to have artist and then album, so its up to you. So give it a shot it works very fast even for a large music collection. Windows only sorry link here oh and windows users might need the latest framework.
If you have been looking for a new instant messenger for the iphone then look no further then Agile Messenger. It is a new native chat program for the iphone. From looking at it you would think it was from the app store. But it is actually from and for the homebrew community. You can use this application if you have a jailbroken iphone. This thing is feature rich compared to some of the other crap we have been given. If you tried other web apps or the dreaded Apollo for the iphone this would be a refreshing change. Actually anything would be better then Apollo but im digressing from the point here. What I am saying is for you to give it a shot install it and i promise you this, you will not uninstall this. Unless something better comes around. But for free I honestly don’t think anything will.
When you launch the messenger you will be asked to enter your log on information for your various chat protocols. Once you set up you can change preferences like auto log on and your messenger status. If you have a stalker change your status to invisible and no one can see if your online until you message them. You can make a custom away message also if you would like to say something more personal. It also has a history logging function for when you like to bring up what people say back in their faces (not that i do that). How to access the entire chat I’m sure you would need to ftp into your iphone to actually grab the whole conversation. I’ll test that and report back on how to do that if you don’t already know how. But you can see from within the program some of the more recent chats you have had. Another feature that totally took me by surprise was that you can utilize the iphones camera to send pictures to the person your talking to. How cool is that. When you minimize the program to the iphone home screen you can see how many unread messages you have like how SMS app does. But stop delaying and go download it now from their home page here, or if you have installer.app already on your iphone do it that way and check the repositories.
Some details from their page. Agile Messenger is the worlds most feature rich and user friendly all-in-one MSN®, AIM®, Yahoo!®, ICQ® & GoogleTalk® instant messaging client for your iPhone!
Send instant text and picture messages to anyone on your MSN®, AIM®, Yahoo!®, ICQ® & GoogleTalk® contact list directly from your iPhone!
Save money on SMS: Agile Messenger sends all messages through your data-plan, there is no per message charge!
UPDATE
This application is actually official and can be downloaded from the app store for 9.99. I was wondering why I couldnt find it anymore in cydia thats because they moved on from the homebrew realm.
If your anything like me your probably running dangerously low on your text messages. So to avoid some overages on your phone bill why not try out gizmo5. Gizmo5 is like skype and is available for all platforms Mac, Windows, Linux yes Linux too. Gizmo5 is offering free sms messages from June 12th to June 26th so you should jump on this now to take advantage. If you currently have a left over balance of atleast 25 cents then you can send sms messages now. But if you don’t have a balance you should add some in order to take advantage of this. You can thank me later.
Well it looks like all good thing must come to an end burnaware free edition is no longer. This is what you are greeted to when you go to glorylogics homepage
“All the rights for the BurnAware project was sold to the BurnAware Technologies company.
BurnAware Free Edition is not available!
BurnAware Express, Home and Professional editions available at official website at www.burnaware.com”
Fret not we still have infrarecorder at least for now.
When itunes first introduced cover flow it dawned upon me that my music collection could use some serious help. I realized names to albums were completely wrong as well as the track names. itunes could not recognize it and therefore no pretty album art to scroll through. So I went on a hunt to clean up my music collection but could not find what I needed. Most of the programs that were any good I would have needed to spring a few bucks to pick it up. (more…)
