Shane Richmond

The Mac App Store is launching on January 6, 2011, Apple has confirmed. The screenshot on the Apple site makes it clear that Apple’s iLife and iWork suites will be for sale but what about apps that aren’t already available for the Mac? These are our pick of the iOS apps that would be ideal on the Mac.

iBooks
One of the flaws in Apple’s iBooks e-reader app is that books can only be bought from within the app, which means using your iOS device. Unlike the rest of the content Apple sells, books can’t be bought within iTunes. If you’re at your laptop and want to buy a book, or just check whether it’s available, that’s not very convenient. A Mac app would solve that problem. Some people might even use it to read books!

Twitter
Twitter’s official iPhone app used to be called… Read More

Kobo, the internet bookshop has added some very smart features to its reading app. Kobo Reading Life, as the update is called, adds several social features, such as sharing favourite passages with your Facebook friends, and lets readers ‘check in’ to characters and locations. Readers of Alice in Wonderland, for example, can tell their friends that they’ve met Alice:

I can’t say I’m especially bothered by that but if it gets more people reading books then that’s no bad thing.

There are ‘awards’ to be unlocked too, part of the ongoing process of “gamification”, which some people find very annoying indeed. I’m more irritated by ugly neologisms than unlockable badges, but each to their own. Again, if it encourages people to spend more time reading or to associate their reading with a sense of achievement, then that’s fine with me…. Read More

Twitter has added more than 100 million users this year. That’s a pretty extraordinary rate of growth for a company that just a year ago was thought to have peaked.

Dick Costolo, Twitter's CEO

The growth can be partly attributed to Twitter’s smart focus on mobile. The acquisition of Tweetie, for example, the iPhone app that has since been rebranded as simply Twitter, brought a great version of the Twitter experience to smartphones. Since then Twitter has rolled out apps for Android and BlackBerry users too and mobile use has exploded.

Another significant factor in Twitter’s success this year is its emphasis on Twitter as a passive experience. Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-founder, has spent most of the year explaining that “you don’t have to tweet to be a great Twitter user”.

It’s a message that’s beginning to get… Read More

The Pixies, the influential American rock band, have begun building an online gigography and uploading recordings of their shows that fans can download for $3.99 each. More than that, however, they’re asking fans to upload photos and video of the shows to create a real archive.

Richard Jones, the band’s manager, tells me: “We’ve got enough for at least two years of regular input of stuff. The band looked for old photographs, old setlists – we’ve got some really fantastic stuff coming up. As technology moves on, we hope to offer even greater things.”

Jones said the Pixies have recordings of every show since they reformed in 2004 and around 25 gigs from the 1980s and 1990s. The band played more than 300 shows between 1986 and 1992 so that’s a drop in the ocean but Jones hopes that fans will fill in the gaps.

“You… Read More

Yelp has this week become the latest company to offer rewards for users of its mobile app who ‘check in’ to places they are visiting, such as cafes and restaurants.

Yelp is a local reviews website and since January it’s been allowing users to check in at businesses they use. Now business owners can offer deals to people who check in regularly. For example, check in three times at your local cafe and perhaps they’ll offer you a free coffee.

This is something that other location-based networks have explored too. Foursquare has been encouraging businesses to offer deals to whoever becomes ‘mayor’ of their shop or cafe or whatever. But is it a gimmick or something that will genuinely encourage more interaction?

I’ve written before that I’m baffled by the appeal of Foursquare. Yelp’s plan makes slightly more sense to me. Yelp is a review… Read More

Six months ago I wrote about a High Court ruling that said football fixtures can be covered by copyright.

There's a match going on but when it's happening is a secret.

While it’s generally accepted that facts, such as where and when a football match is taking place, can’t be copyrighted, the law does make exceptions for certain databases. Making his ruling at the time, Mr Justice Floyd said:
“The process of preparing fixture lists involves very significant labor and skill in satisfying the multitude of often competing requirements of those involved. The work is not mere ’sweat of the brow’, by which I mean the application of rigid criteria to the processing of data. It is quite unlike the compiling of a telephone directory, in that at each stage there is scope for the application of judgment… Read More

A message from Apple Corps and EMI:

Do you remember the thrill of buying your first Beatles album on vinyl? How about buying it on cassette? Or how about the time you bought those albums on CD? All the same music but this time on a little shiny disc! And surely you can’t forget buying all those songs again, this time last year, on remastered CDs.

Well now you can buy all that music again on MP3, the digital music format that’s the talk of the 1990s. You’ll get the same songs but in a quality that’s not quite as good as the remastered CDs you bought last year. Still, though, there’s digital artwork too, not to mention those videos we stuck on the remastered CDs. Go on, buy some Beatles MP3s today.

Admit it, this is a pretty good offer. The problem with buying new music… Read More

This Christmas, instead of gathering around a board game after lunch or flopping on the sofa to watch The Great Escape, many families will be powering-up the video games console – at least, they will if Microsoft has its way.

Kinect, launched in the UK yesterday, makes it possible to play games on Microsoft’s Xbox 360 without using a controller. Instead, a camera tracks the player’s movements, allowing them to control the action with their body, using gestures and voice control. It takes the Xbox one step further than its rivals. The Nintendo Wii has had motion controller since it launched in 2006 and Sony released its own motion control system – PlayStation Move – for the PlayStation 3 a few months ago.

Neil Thompson, who runs Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices Division in the UK and Ireland, believes removing the controller is crucial to attracting… Read More

Asked recently about what Google would do if Facebook would not permit the search company to access its data, Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, said: “The best thing that would happen is for Facebook to open up its data. Failing that, there are other ways to get that information.”

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO, has more than 500 million users of his social network

He didn’t expand on that comment but at the end of last week Google made a change to its Gmail terms and conditions, banning companies from extracting Gmail user data unless they, in return, made their own data available to Google. Was that one of the “other ways” that Schmidt was referring to?

If so, it hasn’t been entirely successful. For some time Facebook has allowed users to import their Gmail contacts and find those people… Read More

A Chinese company will demonstrate a colour e-book reader tomorrow at a trade fair in Tokyo, the New York Times has reported.

A colour version of the Amazon Kindle is still some way off

As the New York Times points out, the new device, made by Hanvon, doesn’t display colour of the same quality as on an LCD screen and, like all E Ink displays, it can’t produce full-motion video.

However, E Ink requires less battery life than an LCD screen and is readable in direct sunlight, as Amazon’s recent adverts have noted. Though neither Amazon nor Sony plans to produce a colour e-reader yet, it seems likely that colour is the future for e-readers.

Steve Haber, president of Sony’s digital reading business division, told the New York Times: “On a list of things that people want… Read More