WordPress 2 app for iPhone

The new version of WordPress for iPhone just arrived in the App Store (iTunes link). While the first version was already quite usable, this update brings a number of new features and usability enhancements to the WordPress experience on the iPhone. The new interface makes it easier to switch between comments, posts and pages. The comments interface now also displays Gravatars. Throughout the app, the WordPress team has tweaked the interface and it’s now easier to manage your blog from the iPhone.

Features

The new version also now automatically saves posts and restores them if the network connection is lost during the publishing process.

Just like the first version, WordPress for iPhone 2 is an open-source program.

It’s important to note that this new version will not appear as an update to the old version. Instead, users will have to install a new app, which can run side-by-side with the older version.

The new version, of course, still offers the same basic feature set as the earlier version. These include support for multiple blogs, photo uploads and post previews, as well as full support for tags, categories and password protected posts.

Blogging on the iPhone

There can be little doubt that the iPhone – or any mobile phone for that matter – isn’t the ideal platform for writing long, thoughtful blog posts. Maybe that’s why WordPress for iPhone 2 puts more emphasis on comment moderation than the first version.

For a quick blog post on the road, though, the app is perfectly adequate, especially if you just want to upload a few pictures. It’s not as easy to use as the more specialized PicPosterous or Pixelpipe but WordPress for iPhone 2 is a far more flexible application and WordPress has a different user in mind for this app.

Again, remember that it is not an update. It is free but you should search for wordpress 2.

Barnes and Noble going International

Want to be the head of Barnesandnoble.com’s international business? Because they’re definitely hiring a whole team, and they’re starting at the top.

Recruiting firm Russell Reynolds Associates is representing Barnes & Noble in a search for the “head of their international business,” according to a source who was contacted about the position. The job entails building the international business for BN.com from scratch, hiring the team and “building the infrastructure outside the U.S.” They prefer the executive live in New York, but Europe is ok, too. Global ecommerce experience is preferred.

Barnes & Noble is no Amazon, but it is a billion dollar company and they have an upcoming ebook reader that kicks the Kindle’s butt (it’s so easy to love unlaunched products, isn’t it?).

Twitter Lists

Twitter just released to everybody the ‘list’ feature.

In a nutshell what you can do with your lists is to cluster the people you follow (for instance) in topics.

In my cases at @tokao I see everybody, while @tokao/tech the twits about tech, and so on.

I think it is one of the best things twitter has done since the beginning.

Mac Mini Server

Recently Apple released some new products. Maybe to take some of cloud out of Windows 7. May be not.

There is this great iMac of more than 27″ for $1700 (less than the 30″ monitor…) a beautifully design multi-touch mouse and my favourite… a mac mini server!

I has no CD/DVD and runs Mac Snow Leopard Server. I could consider it as it has my basic requirement of two hard disk in raid. Then you could attach a drobo and voila, the perfect solution…

Spotify

Spotify is a new way to enjoy music. Simply download and install, before you know it you’ll be singing along to the genre, artist or song of your choice. With Spotify you are never far away from the song you want.

There are no restrictions in terms of what you can listen to or when. Forget about the hassle of waiting for files to download and fill up your hard drive before you get round to organising them. Spotify is instant, fun and simple.

Because music is social, Spotify allows you to share songs and playlists with friends, and even work together on collaborative playlists, Friday afternoon in the office might never be the same again! We’re music lovers like everyone else.

We want to connect millions of people with their favorite songs by creating a product that people love to use. We respect creativity and believe in fairly compensating artists for their work. We’ve cleared the rights to use the music you’ll listen to in Spotify.

You will need to have an invitation (token) to get access as it is still in beta. There 3 plans, free (supported by ads) and two premiums.

There is also a nice iPhone app. This link is for the features and this for the price plans.

The iPhone app is superior to the Pandora or last.fm ones.

The interface is like iTunes (which is a negative point if you want it web based like pandora).

Unlike either Last.fm or Pandora, Spotify actually lets you pick the exact music you listen to, which is a plus.

Of course, there is a catch. In return for being able to access any music you want,  you have to listen to occasional adverts, like radio ads with web links to the products. This for the free version. The  ‘Premium’ account (a tenner a month, or 99p for a day pass)  removes the ads entirely.

Find alternative to programs

Are you looking for an alternative to photoshop, word, or any other program?

Try alternativeto a great web where users vote for the best alternative programs.

They will help you find the right software for your computer or mobile phone. To do this they wanted to rethink the whole process of searching for apps. No more browsing through categories with long lists of crappy software.

Based on the users recommendations they list great alternatives to the applications you want to replace. By joining the site you can participate in the process of making these recommendations better.

NoNotes Makes Attending Class Optional

Quick Pitch: NoNotes.com is a transcription service for students. Students can record lectures while paying more attention in class, then upload their recording to be transcribed by NoNotes.

Genius Idea: Last week, you might’ve seen the story about the Georgetown student that’s looking to hire a personal assistant to help deal with the overwhelming life of … being a college student (I can’t wait to hear his plan for dealing with the real world).

In any event, NoNotes is a service for that type of individual. The company provides a transcription service aimed specifically at college students, allowing them to record lectures, upload them to a website, and then have written notes prepared for them.

The company uses the tagline “you do the learning, we’ll take the notes,” but you can imagine how this service might be used in practice. Jokes aside, there is something to be said for paying attention to the lecturer in class as opposed to furiously trying to keep up taking notes, and this is the need that NoNotes looks to satisfy.

Like a personal assistant though, NoNotes will cost you money. One hour of class time costs $11.75, with discounts if you buy hours in bulk. That might make it cost prohibitive for many college students, though you can imagine groups of friends chipping in and then drawing straws to see who attends and records a lecture. The company is looking to build its customer base in part by hiring reps at universities.

Google Maps Navigation Becomes Reality on the Android

When it comes to maps, Google has had nearly everything: great satellite imagery, huge coverage, and even some basic navigation features, but not what everyone that’s ever used a GPS device really wants: turn-by-turn navigation.

This changes today, as Google just released a beta version of Google Maps Navigation for Android 2.0. Here’s a quick overview of the features:

- Search in plain English – quickly search and navigate to places, businesses, landmarks
- Search by voice
- View of live traffic data over the Internet.
- Search along route – find locations near your current path
- Satellite view – you can view the same satellite imagery you’ve seen Google Maps, on your phone
- Street View – check out what the exact surroundings of a location look like

Google Maps Navigation does two very important things for Google: it makes it a competitor to established GPS firms like TomTom and Garmin, which should make this space a lot more interesting, and it suddenly makes Android – the only platform this app is currently available on – a lot more desirable. And – you guessed it – the first Android 2.0 phone to support this app is the upcoming Motorola Droid.

Check out a video overview of Google Maps Navigation and some screenshots below.

Mac transparent

(see rights/credits of photos at flickr)

GazoPa search similar images

GazoPa is a similar image search service on the web in open beta. Users can search images from the web based on user’s own photo, drawings, images found on the web and keywords. GazoPa enables users to search for a similar image from characteristics such as a color or a shape extracted from an image itself. There are abundant quantities of images on the web, however many of these simply cannot be described by keywords. Since GazoPa uses image features to search other similar images, a vast range of images can be retrieved from the web. GazoPa is a new visual search service that can navigate users to new territories on the web.

TaffyBox Combines BitTorrent Search And Web Download

TaffyBox is a BitTorrent service, but there’s a hook that makes it a really nice choice for the casual BitTorrent user – easy search combined with a Java applet BitTorrent client for downloading.

There are other services like BitLet that let you download torrents directly from your browser via a Java applet. But you need to already know the Torrent link (usually via a Torrent search engine) to start downloading it. With TaffyBox, you can search for the name of the show, song or whatever that you’re looking for, and click a button to start downloading immediately in your browser. Point and click downloads for those who find the usual BitTorrent clients complicated.

TaffyBox just ties search and download together, and the search results seem to come from BTJunkie, who also host the tracker.

Microsoft: Integrated Videos and Maps for Driving Directions

From Microsoft Research:

(a) Original spacing of panoramas. (b) Final spacing of video frames, after slowing down at landmarks/turns and speeding up between. (c) Straight ahead orientation. (d) Final orientation with look ahead. (e) Widening the view and freezing the landmark thumbnail. One frame of the route video. The field of view is automatically expanded to the left to emphasize the building landmark at this turn. The visual proxy is highlighted. Integrated video and mapping application. Abstract

While onboard navigation systems are gaining in importance, maps are still the medium of choice for laying out a route to a destination and for way finding. However, even with a map, one is almost always more comfortable navigating a route the second time due to the visual memory of the route. To make the first time navigating a route feel more familiar, we present a system that integrates a map with a video automatically constructed from panoramic imagery captured at close intervals along the route. The routing information is used to create a variable speed video depicting the route. During playback of the video, the frame and field of view are dynamically modulated to highlight salient features along the route and connect them back to the map. A user interface is demonstrated to allow exploration of the combined map, video, and textual driving directions. We discuss the construction of the hybrid map and video interface. Finally, we report the results of a study that provides evidence of the effectiveness of such a system for route following.

Music: Rodrigo y Gabriela

Kigali. and babies

Well well, here I am again, at many miles over the sea, well actually over the desert probably, in my way to Rwanda, Kigali to be precise.
Again, I was planning to go with my ducati to the airport, as I have done for the past few times. This time, though, the flight was at a more than reasonable hour, at 8.20am. Well, I was about to leave the house around 7am when I realized that the ouside temperature was –2. Dammed. I was already cold… and of course going to Kigali with hand luggage it makes no sense to be carrying the big motorbike jacket and trousers…

Nuria was awake so finally she drove me… :-)

Once in the plane they announced that in Brussels there was only one runway open for take offs and landings due to the wind. Well that means that we had to wait for nearly one hour in the plane in Geneva. Honestly we thought we were not going to be able to catch the connecting flight, we only hoped that the delays would apply to all flights, including the one going to Kigali.

That was the case, so here I am, in the first row of business class, after reading part of my ton of documents, had a great lunch and watched what was probably the last movie I had left to watch from this route. Now I was expanding my readings to some documents I have not printed but that I have on my Vaio.

I will be going back home on Saturday night. The flights this time were busy due to a One UN conference that it is taking place now in the Serena Hotel in Kigali.

Well, I don’t want to talk about job in my blog, just about my trips and my passions (technology, internet, social media, photography and so).

Photography it has been a while since I don’t add photos to my norai.net site. In fact it is a bit sad but when I come here, one of the most beautiful countries in Africa, I do not even take the camera… but believe me, the only thing I see is the Iris Guesthouse and the Ministry of Trade.

Well if I don’t want to talk about job then I can talk about other things:

I am going to be a father for the first time in December. Nuria and I are attending this courses in the Hospital to learn about the x day, and everything. Pretty interesting. Yesterday we did the breathing thing.

A couple of weeks ago after a lot of research looking for the perfect prawn we finally bought it. 

The choice was taking into consideration a set of issues:

1. All our friends, they started buying fancy kits, like the bugaboo, but after 6 months most of them ended buying one of this umbrella prawns, like the mclaren.
2. Size and weight are very important, as well as the fact that they can last as long as possible, preferably from 0 to 3 or 4 years.

The conclusion was bebeconfort mila, a 2009 model of this brand. An umbrella sort of prawn, which weights less than 7 kg, that you can fold with one hand and standing, and that is less than 1m so you can take it in the cabin of an airplane. Also where you can attach a maxi-cosi for the car (that we also bought) creatis.fix and eventually the other one that it is like a small bed for newborns (that I bought two days ago on ebay at a third of its price, second hand but used one month).

So now we have everything to take him around.

We also went to Ikea where we bought a lot of stuff.

Amazing Program Turns Sketches into Photo Montages

What if you could create a fairly convincing image montage in mere minutes, using an online tool that automatically does all the work for you? It sounds insane, but five students from Tsinghua University in China and the National University of Singapore have created a program that does just that.

PhotoSketch allows users to create photomontages from basic stick-figure sketches – you don’t even have to have any kind of artistic talent to convey your idea. As explained in the video below, the tool takes a simple sketch of the desired montage elements and pulls photographs that correspond to them from Google, Flickr and Yahoo.

Sketch2Photo: Internet Image Montage from Tao Chen on Vimeo.

The program then decides from a variety of matching results which ones work together the best and merges each disparate image element into a cohesive whole. It even matches them to the scene with the correct color tones and adds shadows as needed. The whole process takes about 15 minutes.

While PhotoSketch is remarkably easy to use, professional graphic designers needn’t worry about it replacing their skills anytime soon. The resulting image montages don’t exactly pass for real photographs, but could actually help designers and digital artists create quick concept images to present to clients, saving a considerable amount of time.

It doesn’t appear that the tool discriminates between copyrighted and Creative Commons images or compensates the creators of the original images in any way, which would create licensing issues unless the problem is addressed before the tool is made available to the public.  But, PhotoSketch does open up a whole new world of possibilities for the Photoshop-illiterate and professionals alike.

(from weburbanist)