p0WnZ.com » Software

Tango app not ready to dance the tango

encript — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 01:37:13 +0000

The new Tango app for the iPhone and Android market has picked up a lot of attention for being able to do FaceTime quality chat across platforms. Once I heard about it I jumped on the chance to see whether or not it lived up to its name. Setting it up was quite easy, all i needed to input was my first name last name email address and phone number. Simple enough right? All that would need to happen next is that the next person who downloads the app would need to have me on their contacts list. Automagically I would pop up in their contacts and they would pop up in mine. But this is not the case. It does not work like this at all. There are hundreds of people who have yet to begin using the program because no one ever shows up in their contacts. How in the world are people suppose to make a call. I have had four of my friends, two of which have droid phones the other has an iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4. My droid friends don’t show up in my contacts but I show in theirs. So we tested it and made a few calls. One friend has the Sprint EVO4 and the quality was wonderful. It was clear and the audio was the only problem, it was a bit too low. I needed headphones to hear the conversation better. The other friend has a MyTouch 3G where we had a decent conversation. But I could not initiate the call because they did not show up on my list. Something as trivial as setup should not be such a catastrophe.

Some developers rush to get their apps out to the market that they don’t even fully test it fully. I mean the program only reads the first line from my contacts and skips the other numbers completely. If they have other numbers like home or office numbers they are not read. There also appears to be number formatting issue where it is not read at all if the format is different (xxx)xxx-xxx if there is a 1 in front or a +1 or another country formatting. I am also concerned with how this program accesses my contacts list for phone numbers? Is it uploading it or merely matching it. Why would they need a copy of my friends emails and phone numbers. It should only check to see if that number is on my phone and if it isn’t then it wont add it. Sounds like a simple if statement to me. What a terrible introduction to a product and if apple was in charge it would have just worked. I shouldn’t have to rename all my contacts on my phone to match just for one program it should go the other way around. Now when you are able to chat it does what its suppose to well and video calling over 3G and cross platform is enjoyable bridges the communities together. But good lord why doesn’t it work right.

Update:
It’s confirmed that removing the country code does affect how the contacts are matched. I’ve added and removed the 1 before the area code from a contact which directly reflected in the tango app. (xxx)xxx-xxxx this seems to work. But still does not pick up my droid friends.

5 Things that should be in the new Youmail app

encript — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:09:26 +0000

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.

Youmail iPhone app not perfect on purpose

encript — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:30:44 +0000

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.

Turn your iphone or ipod touch into a wifi phone with siphon

encript — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 01:12:31 +0000

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.

Such bugs are listed below.

Bugs
1. When you receive a phone call over the cellular network, siphon will close. So that means if you were on a wifi call you will rudely be disconnected.
2. Does not work in the background and understandably so it will murder your battery if it did. Using the program “backgrounder” works to solve this problem but I noticed that I do not stay logged in for long. Might be a memory allocation bug.
3. Bluetooth does not work with this app which kinda sucks if you planned on using a bluetooth headset for making or receiving phone calls.
4. After placing a call on hold and then trying to retrieve the call you are no longer able to hear the person. Might be better to just mute the call instead of placing them on hold.

Benefits.
1. Familiar iphone interface. It uses your favs and phonebook.
2. Wi-fi phones are not cheap but this saves you money on purchasing new hardware.
3. Wi-fi calls are cheap save tons of money by having friends call you when you get free incoming from companies such as Gizmo5.

Other than these bugs or issues siphon is unique application and provides you with all or more of the features of some of the pay apps in the app store. And also it gives you a chance to save money on your phone bill. Plus it works over 3G just don’t think about edge it’s just too slow. An added bonus is that the said application works not only on the iphone but on the ipod touch as well. You will just need to spring for the hardware mic from apple. I use Gizmo5 as my SIP/VOIP provider. Other than their unreliable technical support they have pretty much all their solutions available on their site and great prices. Also you get a real incoming DID number. Once you pay for it you get unlimited incoming. Its OK you get it for the whole year. Just don’t think of speaking to a person for help.

Hurry and get your free fax on

encript — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 22:06:45 +0000

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.

Vbuzzer extends free internet fax within US, Canada and China

Toronto, Canada – Vbuzzer today announced that Vbuzzer extends its offer of free faxing within US, Canada and China beyond March 31 2009. Vbuzzer users can continue to enjoy the free faxing by a few easy mouse clicks on Vbuzzer Messenger.

Sending faxes remains a useful mode of communicating for both business and consumer users. Many have found this inconvenient and a disconnected activity from their regular use of their computer for almos
t everything else they do in this digital world. Fax rates have been high while telephone costs are dropping dramatically especially because of VOIP services.
Vbuzzer continues to evolve is powerful communications platform which offers text messaging, high quality, inexpensive VOIP and now Free Fax. Not just old fashioned Fax but a unique internet fax solution. Instead of the traditional paper-based Fax Vbuzzer allows a totally digital, integrated and manageable tool. Most importantly for Vbuzzer users wo
rldwide when they need to send faxes to their friends, families, and business contacts in North America, they have a super tool for free

“We are very pleased to bring Vbuzzer’s high quality service to so many people for free, and it is an excellent showcase of our continued commitment to providing a powerful communications platform to our customers worldwide,” said Mr. Kamil Khan, Chairman of Softroute Corporation, “we will keep setting new standards for valuable and innovative products to internet
users
all over the world.”

The free promotional offer may expire upon 30 days prior notice.

About Vbuzzer and Softroute Corporation

Softroute launched its VBUZZER Messenger in 2005, millions have downloaded it since then. In addition to its instant messenger VBUZZER is a premier VoIP service provider that offers an innovative and effective way to communicate over the Internet. Softroute is a provider of integrated communication platform and is dedicated to developing software solutions that change the way
people communicate. VBUZZER, with its quality, functionality, low cost, and ease-of-use, allows people around the world to send messages, make toll quality calls, receive RSS feeds, and now Fax with each other over the Internet. The company is headquartered in Toronto, Canada. For more details please visit:

www.vbuzzer.com

Shape writer technology on portable gaming consoles

encript — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 17:55:28 +0000

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.

Make your music collection look pretty

encript — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 23:36:00 +0000

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.

Agile Messenger for iPhone review

encript — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 21:22:06 +0000

Agile Messenger Video from Encript on Vimeo.

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.

Gizmo5 offering free sms

encript — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 18:43:15 +0000

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.

Burnaware no longer has free edition

encript — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 19:09:26 +0000

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.