Meal Snap app: Camera-powered calorie counting |
- Meal Snap app: Camera-powered calorie counting
- Watch ESPN programming on iOS-based devices
- AVG launches cloud-based storage service
- Bing's iPad app takes aim at Safari
- Google begins tablet version of Chrome OS
Meal Snap app: Camera-powered calorie counting Posted: 07 Apr 2011 12:18 PM PDT Want to lose weight? Forget fad diets: eat fewer calories. Ah, but easier said than done, right? Counting calories is not only a hassle, it's downright difficult for certain types of meals. Enter DailyBurn's Meal Snap ($2.99), an ingeniously clever--if not entirely perfect--app that takes a photo of the food on your plate, then delivers an estimated calorie count. Sounds pretty amazing, right? And it is, though there are limits to the app's accuracy. In my quick and informal tests, Meal Snap easily identified a small pile of strawberries, and correctly estimated the calories at 38-57. But it took a couple minutes for it to process and present the info. Next, I gathered an egg, an orange, a banana, and a small container of yogurt. This time I entered the food names in the caption field--an optional step--and Meal Snap returned its total calorie count in a matter of seconds. But the range was a bit broad: 269-404. The only thing it really had trouble with was a decidedly amorphous serving of lentils, which it incorrectly identified as peas and gravy. The app lets you categorize your snapshots as specific meals and/or snacks, and keeps a running tally of your daily total. Thus, it's not at all a bad way to count calories, though obviously it won't be 100 percent accurate. If you'd rather start your count before the food hits your plate, check out DailyBurn's FoodScanner app, which scans package bar codes. With a little more speed and accuracy, Meal Snap could join the pantheon of truly jaw-dropping apps (which includes the likes of Google Translate, Shazam, and Word Lens). As it stands, it's a handy (and still pretty jaw-dropping) tool for keeping your calories in check. Originally posted at iPhone Atlas |
Watch ESPN programming on iOS-based devices Posted: 07 Apr 2011 10:10 AM PDT (Credit: ESPN) ESPN is ensuring its viewers don't miss a single minute of the game. The network announced today that it has launched a new application in Apple's App Store, called WatchESPN. After downloading the free app, users can watch live programming from ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, and ESPN3.com 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The network was quick to point out that the app is available to iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch customers in time for major sporting events, including the "early rounds of the Masters, the NBA Playoffs, and the beginning of the Major League Baseball season." However, there is a catch. In order to access ESPN content from an iOS-based device, the person must be a Time Warner Cable, Bright House Networks, or Verizon FiOS TV subscriber who pays for ESPN channels. After downloading the app, users must input "cable subscriber credentials" in order to prove they are a customer of one of those companies, ESPN said. The network also noted that the app, which was actually made available in the App Store yesterday, isn't yet "optimized" for the iPad. It plans to start taking full advantage of Apple's tablet in May. The addition of WatchESPN to the App Store could be a boon for sports fans--or at least the ones with iOS devices. Aside from Dish's iPad app, which lets folks watch live programming with the help of the Sling adapter, ESPN content has only been available on Time Warner Cable's recently launched TWCable TV app. That app only offers access to ESPNews. ESPN said that it plans to make its app available to other platforms, including Android, "in the near future." Originally posted at The Digital Home |
AVG launches cloud-based storage service Posted: 07 Apr 2011 09:44 AM PDT Security firm AVG is doubling down on cloud storage. The company today announced LiveKive, a service that allows people to upload data to the cloud that can then be downloaded to other computers or Android- and iOS-based devices with the LiveKive mobile app. It works on both Windows and Mac. AVG is currently offering two packages: a $49.99 per year option that gives customers 25GB of online storage and a $79.99 a year plan with unlimited data. In either case, people can upload files, folder, and multimedia content. The service also supports automatic syncing for those who don't want to manually choose what should and should not be saved in the cloud. At first glance, AVG's LiveKive closely resembles Dropbox and Box.net. Both of those services allow people to sync content with the cloud and share files on other products, including mobile devices. Dropbox offers 2GB of backup for free and charges $10 per month and $20 per month for 50GB and 100GB, respectively. Box.net offers up to 5GB of storage at no cost to its "personal" users, but charges $15 per user per month for 500GB of Web storage. Originally posted at The Digital Home |
Bing's iPad app takes aim at Safari Posted: 07 Apr 2011 08:33 AM PDT
Microsoft today is releasing its first iPad application, a version of its Bing mobile application that's been specifically designed for tablet users. And make no mistake about it, Microsoft is trying its hardest to encourage people to use it over the built-in Safari browser when searching and exploring the Web. It's a bold claim, so let's take a look at some of the things that the Bing iPad app does to back up that claim. As you'd imagine, the app revolves around searching on Bing. No matter what you're doing in the app there's a search bar in the top--just like in Safari. The Bing app makes that bar considerably larger, as well as adding voice search powered by TellMe, and a jump list on the side with suggestions, related searches, search history, and a category filter to pick between Web searches, and news, video and image search.
Each time you search, a tile swoops in from the right side of the screen, acting as a tab of its own. You can zoom, pan and navigate through these just like you would a tab in your browser, with the addition of a highlighting tool to hunt for words or phrases on Web pages that's easier to find and to toggle on and off than its Safari counterpart. These Bing results pages stack, so if you want to go back to a previous search, you can just slide your finger across the screen to jump to a different page. This type of UI is similar to Twitter's iPad app, but lets you stack together a bigger group of preview pages. As an unfortunate side effect, pages that have loaded get purged from the iPad's memory pretty quickly (at least on the first-generation iPad), so it's not nearly as seamless as having multiple open tabs on your desktop browser, or using a third-party iPad browser with tab support that does a better job saving page states to memory. Nonetheless, the system has been designed for you to tear through searches, then hop back and forth between the results and destination pages. These stay persistent from session to session, using your Bing history as a frame of reference, so that you can come back and go through past searches just by continuing to swipe backwards in time. Those in a hurry can also hop to a dedicated history section that lists all your past searches.
Where the line begins to blur, though, is that the app doubles as a content aggregator. Just like with the iPhone version, you can view weather, movie listings, and news, but the iPad app places these items as tiles at the bottom of the app's home screen. Clicking on any of them will fire up a specially formatted page for the iPad. You can also customize certain ones like finance and weather to use your favorite stock symbols, or location so they'll give you that info from their thumbnail. Considering the iPad doesn't ship with first-party apps for weather or stocks, this is a nice two-for-one. Adding to this is a dedicated news reader, which breaks down the top stories by category and gives you a thumbnail, headline, who published it and when it was published. You can tweak what sections are included in this reader, as well as where they appear. Once again, the swiping UI comes into play, so once you're done reading any of the articles you've clicked on, you can simply swipe it off the screen to find another story to read, or swipe in the other direction to bring it back. (Credit: Screenshot by Josh Lowensohn/CNET) To break out specific points of interest, there's the trends tab, which breaks down the day's trending search topics as a jumping off point for searches. This is exclusive to the iPad application, though Bing.com keeps a shortlist of trending topics on its front page that changes throughout the day. Each day in the trends section gets a grid of 10 thumbnails, and the app lets you go back for the past seven days to see what was trending. Depending on what kind of content it is, it will open up in a different type of Bing search results page. So if you click on something like a celebrity who's been in the news, you'll get taken to a page that tells you who they are, shows you what they look like, and serve up any related news stories about them. Whereas if you click on something like a music video, it will deliver you to a video player page (which it's worth noting was not working through the in-app browser when I gave the app a spin).
The whole time this is going on, you're never jettisoned from the application or even given the option to open up some pages in Safari, as other apps have done. You can copy and e-mail Bing links, but if you want to bookmark them, or send them to a printer--as you can do in the iPad's browser--you're out of luck with the current version. By comparison, Google's search app on the iPad includes a link out to Safari, as well as letting you jump straight to URLs from its search bar without first having to venture to the search results page. All in all, Bing has made a graceful jump from the iPhone and iPod Touch to the iPad. What the Bing folks have managed to do with the additional screen real estate goes a long way toward making information gathering and entertaining oneself a seamless experience in a way that's familiar, but uniquely different from the desktop version of Bing. Is it a different enough one to make people choose it over the browser for ingesting content? With the lack of a way to peck in URLs, bookmark sites, or quickly jump to specific open pages, not entirely. But considering how close the much more capable search bar is at all times, and all the stories, photos and videos at your fingertips, these omissions are not a major problem. Bing's iPad app hits the App Store today and is being offered as a separate entity from its iPhone and iPod Touch sibling. Originally posted at News - Microsoft |
Google begins tablet version of Chrome OS Posted: 07 Apr 2011 04:00 AM PDT (Credit: Google) Details in Google's source code reveal that company programmers have begun building a tablet version of Chrome OS, its browser-based operating system. The work isn't a surprise, given that Google created mock-ups of a Chrome OS tablet more than a year ago. But it does indicate that a tablet incarnation of Google's Web-app operating system is a near-term priority, not just an idea. Google acknowledged the tablet version of Chrome OS but wouldn't discuss details such as when the project's first version will be done. "We are engaging in early open-source work for the tablet form factor, but we have nothing new to announce at this time," the company said in a statement. Chrome OS tablets, though, are not first on the list, the company said: "Chrome OS was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of form factors. We expect to see different partners build different kinds of devices based on Chrome OS, but for this initial release we are targeting the notebook form factor." Chrome OS has been evolving since Google announced it in 2009. Initially it was aimed at Netbooks, the small, low-end laptops. But the first incarnation of Chrome OS--a pilot release intended for developers and testers rather than ordinary customers--arrived in a more polished laptop package called the Cr-48. A tablet version of Chrome OS, though, raises a big question about Google's strategy, because the company's tablet version of the Android operating system, Honeycomb, is just now arriving on the market with Motorola's Xoom and other products designed to compete with the leader of the tablet market, Apple's iPad. (Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET) Signs of Chrome OS for tablets • The "user-agent string" text that browsers supply so Web servers can deliver the appropriate version of a Web site--for touch user interfaces. The string includes the term "CrOS Touch," not just CrOS as before. "This lets Web sites that are already customizing for tablet experiences easily adapt to support tablet ChromeOS devices," the programming change log notes. • A "virtual keyboard" with a number of keys--tab, delete, microphone, return, and shift, for example--drawn in SVG so they can be shown by a browser. Screen keyboards are, of course, a necessity with tablets. • A variety of moves to make the browser more touch-friendly, for example by increasing the space around items to make it easier to select them with a touch interface. • A revamped new-tab page (which people see when they open a new, blank tab) that's "optimized for touch." The current page shows an array of Web applications downloaded from the Chrome Web Store, but the modified version adds multiple screens of icons in the style of iOS devices. The orientation of the new-tab page, but not its size, will change when the device is rotated, according to the new-tab page's coding annotations. "Note that this means apps will be reflowed when rotated (like iPad)," the annotation said. The CSS code for the new-tab page also indicates that programmers would like to be able to move icons around the page, preferably with animation. (Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET) Pick a tablet, any tablet Clearly, the answer today is Android. It's at the forefront of Google's mobile strategy and is a commercial success, at least in phones. Tens of thousands of Android applications are available today, and even Google rivals such as Yahoo and Microsoft are offering software. Chrome OS, by comparison, is immature and conceptually a greater leap from prevailing software development patterns. That's because Chrome OS solely runs apps on the browser, not on its underlying Linux operating system embedded under the covers. Related links There are abundant Web sites and Web apps that Chrome OS users can use today, of course, and some, like Google's Gmail site optimized for Apple's iPad, are designed with a touch user interface already. But the tools for building advanced, interactive, high-performance Web apps today just don't match what's possible with apps that run natively on a mobile device or computer, and most people today aren't ready to live solely in the cloud. Timing also isn't on Chrome OS's side. The project had been set to launch in 2010, but has been delayed to midway through this year, though the Chrome Web Store used to bookmark and purchase Web apps is live. Google can let both tablet projects duke it out internally and in the market. Or, if Google co-founder Sergey Brin is to believed, Android and Chrome OS might merge into a single project. It's not a simple matter of some internal Darwinian process within Google to let the be best product survive, though. That's because there are external parties involved: hardware partners, developers, retailers, and customers. Each of these groups must be won over, persuaded that the new ecosystem is worth their investment of time and money. Google's modus operandi--release early and iterate often--is a lot harder to pull off when others are involved. Web applications and native Android applications are by no means mutually exclusive, but developers with finite resources can't be blamed for trying to figure out where to place their bets. Originally posted at Deep Tech |
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