If you own an iPhone, chances are you genuinely prefer the feature set of iOS to Android, but that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t appreciate having access to some of Android’s best features. This guide walks through setting up the best of both worlds.
If you don’t want to go all the way and install Android on your iOS device, you still have plenty of ways to bring the best features of Android to iOS. Jailbreaking will really let you go all the way, but it’s definitely not required. Whatever your situation, here are the many ways of making your iOS device look and act more like Android.
While customising your iOS home screen like Android isn’t really a viable option at the moment, you can do a lot to customise your iOS lock screen and even add widgets. While it may seem daunting at first, it’s actually really easy to do. Following ouriOS lock screen customisation tutorial, I was able to put one together in under 10 minutes. While you’re not going to have the simple flexibility of Android, you will have the ability to add practically anything you can imagine. The more CSS and JavaScript you know (or care to learn) the more you’ll be able to do, but you definitely don’t need any programming skills to make some pretty amazing alterations.
An Unobtrusive Notifications Bar
iOS does a lot of things very, very well, but if there were one place where it fails pretty miserably it’s how it handles notifications. No matter what kind of notification you get, be it SMS or an alarm clock, iOS gives you the same annoying blue dialogue box that interrupts whatever you’re doing. If you’re sick of notifications getting in your way, MobileNotifier is an excellent solution.
This is a jailbreak hack, so you’re out of luck if you’re sticking with a jailed device. If you need a reason to jailbreak, this is a good one.
MobileNotifier handles notifications similarly to the way Android does — by keeping them in an always-accessible drawer and by notifying you without interruption so you can continue doing what you’re doing. When you receive a text message, for example, a little bar will pop up top to let you know that you’ve received a notification. You can leave it up there for as long as you need and dismiss it (or act on it) whenever you want. To see all of your notifications (or to clear them), you just need to double tap the home button and you’ll see your notifications drawer (as well as multi-tasking mode). If you’d like to set up MobileNotifier (and you should), follow our instructions here.
Getting Google Apps
The official Google Mobile app is an obvious choice because it provides easy access to a pretty wide swath of Google’s features (including Google Goggles). You can also grab Google Latitude andGoogle Earth for iOS. If you want to start syncing your Google Docs, GoodReader is an excellent option (and absolutely worth the $US5 cost for all it can do). Finally, you may find you actually prefer Google’s mobile web apps over the native options, so be sure to load them up on your iOS device and bookmark them if you do. You can create a bookmark on your homescreen that acts just like an app, so it may really be a better alternative in some cases.
Enabling Google Sync
Apple’s never been particularly good at over-the-air sync, and they seem dedicated to keeping you tethered to iTunes for the rest of eternity. If you don’t like constantly syncing, paying for MobileMe, or just prefer to sync with Google in the first place, you can enable Google Sync on your iOS device to solve both of those problems.
Google Sync for iOS will let you push your contacts, calendars and mail to your iOS device and it’s really easy to set up. It’s almost identical to setting up MobileMe, except it uses the Microsoft Exchange protocol. Google Sync requires iOS 3.0 or higher, but iOS 4.0 or higher will let you add multiple Exchange accounts (so you’ll want to make sure you’ve upgraded if you need multiple Exchange accounts on your device). If you want to get Google Sync set up, Google has some step-by-step instructions to get you started. Once you have it up and running, you’ll have your Google data pushed and syncing over-the-air to your iOS device just like you would with Android.
Enabling the Wi-Fi Hotspot
Sure, if you’re running iOS 4.3 you can pay $US20 per month for a Wi-Fi hotspot on your phone, but if you jailbreak you can pay $US20 just once to get the same functionality. My-Wi is a $US20 application that you can purchase in the Cydia store and makes nearly every tethering option you can imagine a possibility on your device. All you have to do is search for it in the Cydia store, purchase it, and install it. From there you just launch the app, click the Wi-Fi symbol, and turn your hotspot on.
The Finishing Touches
As vain and trivial as it is, one of my favourite parts about the Gingerbread release of Android is theeffect you get when you turn off the phone. It looks like an old CRT television turning off, which is significantly more fun than the screen simply cutting to black. It’s strange to see Apple forgo the opportunity to smoothly animate between every state of iOS, but they’ve somehow neglected this one. Fortunately, if you jailbreak, you can install this effect very easily.
To get the effect, simply search Cydia for TV Tube Sleep. You’ll need to first pay $US1 to purchase the tweak, but then you’ll be able to install it. Once installed, Cydia will ask to restart Springboard. Once Springboard has restarted, you should be able to see the effect any time your device’s screen shuts off.
This tip isn’t exactly a new feature, as it’s been around since day 1 of the iPhone, but it is a handy one that I get asked about quite a bit. If you have something on your iPhones screen that you want to take a picture of to send to someone, just click the Home and Power/Standby button at the same time and release quickly. If you did it correctly, you will hear a camera noise and your screen will flash white briefly.
This will place a screen resolution image into your camera roll that you can now email or upload. This comes in handy for bragging about that latest Doodle Jump or Peggle score, or showing off your current playlist or song choice to your Facebook or Twitter followers.
If you’ve ever tried to give someone directions to where you are in a strange city, you know that the task can be a daunting one. Even if it’s in your home town, telling someone else how to get where you are might not be easy if they’re unfamiliar with street names and such. Thankfully the Maps app that ships on your iPhone has the ability to grab your location and send it right to the person of your choice. Here’s how.
First, find you location in the Maps app. To do this, launch Maps and tap on the small arrow in the bottom left corner. This will pinpoint your location as indicated by the glowing blue dot in the center of the screen. This can take a minute or so so be patient. It’s also more accurate outdoors where there is GPS reception.
Once the dot shows up, tap on it to see your current address. Then tap on the blue arrow on the right to have it take you to the page which displays the address and some options for what to do with it.
To share the location, tap on the Share Location button at the bottom.
Then simply choose an email address or MMS number to send the location to and shoot it off. When the recipient gets the message they’ll be able to tap on a link to it and be shown the location in their Maps app. They can then use the app to get directions to your location.
If you’re experiencing slowdowns when downloading large files from iTunes or your Apple TV (or, in some cases, other places ’round the net, like YouTube), the problem may be your DNS. AppleInsider explains it best:
Network users are supposed to look up IP addresses from a nearby server, which itself queries and caches answers to name and address lookups from other DNS systems, distributing the workload across the network. CDNs like Akamai, which Apple works with to deliver iTunes downloads, use DNS lookup information to locate where users are, and then optimise content delivery via the nearest available server.
When millions of users all tap into the same DNS server addresses to resolve domain names, as Google DNS does by design, Akamai and other CDNs route content to those users along the same path, preventing the network from working optimally. This causes problems not only for Apple’s iTunes, but also any other media streaming or download service that uses a similar CDN strategy to distribute downloads.
So, while Google DNS or OpenDNS might have other benefits, they could be causing some pretty major slowdowns in other areas. I haven’t experienced this myself, since previously mentionedNamebench already discovered that my ISP’s DNS was faster than Google or OpenDNS anyways, but it may be something to look into if you’re using a third-party DNS server and you’re having problems (if you don’t use iTunes and aren’t noticing other slowdowns, you could be fine). Hit the link to read more. I’d also recommend reading AppleInsider’s piece on it, since it’s the most informative I’ve read on the subject so far. (Also bear in mind if you’re an iiNet user that using a third-party DNS will also likely eliminate the benefit of unmetered iTunes downloads which you otherwise enjoy.)
ViddyJam is a cool new web app we’ve been playing with tonight; we liked it so much, we thought we’d share it with you.
This app gets a starting point from you — an artist and a song — and extrapolates (using data from Last.fm) to serve a continuous stream of music videos from YouTube. It’s a lot like Pandora, which lets you create artist-inspired Internet radio channels and stream music based on those settings.
Just like Pandora, ViddyJam will occasionally serve you a video that’s less than fitting; but also like Pandora, you can skip the songs you don’t like — and you can keep skipping until you hit a song that fits your mood perfectly.
Better yet, ViddyJam can stream only music videos from your favorite artist. It can even stream a single song of your choosing, pulling from the many versions that may be available on YouTube. Finally, you can also choose to upload a playlist of your own. Just go into iTunes, export the playlist of your choosing and click to upload it to ViddyJam.
The app has a pretty interface that recedes gracefully as videos play and emerges when you need navigational or other controls. When videos are playing, all controls — even the YouTube player — disappear completely. You only see the various links and buttons when you mouse over the screen.
From within the app, you can create favorites for later “jamming,” and you can review your history of jams. You can also buy songs on Amazon or iTunes.
One of the things we like best about the app is that it’s beautifully ad-free. In that sense, it seems less like a startup product and more like a hacker’s side project (the hacker in question being serial entrepreneur Ben Bryant, who decided to show ViddyJam to the Hacker News community tonight); given the fact that it’s streaming copyrighted content from other sources, it’s unlikely the creators will try to capitalize on it any time soon.
ViddyJam is simple and good-looking; it’s fun to run in the background or on a spare monitor; and it would probably be a hit at parties. Give it a spin and let us know what you think in the comments.
Around YouTube headquarters, there’s a stat that management likes to throw around to make it clear that the company isn’t resting on its laurels. No, it isn’t the fact the site is the world’s second largest search engine or that its users upload 35 hours of content per minute. It’s that the average user spends around 15 minutes per day on YouTube. That would be an impressive amount of engagement for just about anything else, but it pales in comparison to the five hours that people spend sitting in front of their TV sets watching cable (yes, seriously). And make no mistake: YouTube wants to take some of that time for itself.
Today, the site is taking an important step toward that goal as it improves its Leanback product with a key new feature: personalized channels. LeanBack, which launched in July and is integrated into Google TV, lets users hit ‘play’ and then sit back and watch an endless stream of YouTube content with no input required. In short, it’s YouTube TV. And now it’s personalized TV — something that no cable network out there can match.
Before now Leanback has had the concept of channels, but these were primarily built around social activity from your friends and videos curated by YouTube. Now the site is going to try to learn what you like and generate new personalized channels accordingly. These channels will show content that’s relevant both to the things you’ve told YouTube you like, and topics that YouTube thinks you’ll like (for example, if you build a channel around funny cat videos, it may start throwing some funny videos without cats into the mix).
The feature acts a bit like a Pandora for video. It learns about your preferences based on both your explicit actions (like hitting the ‘thumbs up’ button) and implicit signals, like which videos you’ve watched and how long you watched them for. You can also manually add new topics and keywords to adjust the kind of content YouTube will display.
It sounds great, but I suspect it’s going to be a long, slow process for YouTube to really get people used to the idea. Issue number one: YouTube Leanback is supposed to let people sit back and watch an endless stream of relevant content; if they’re doing that, I doubt they’re going to want to hit the ‘thumbs up’ or ‘down’ button unless it’s effortless (at this point no Google TV remote has a dedicated button). So YouTube will probably be relying primarily implicit signals for now.
But more important, Leanback is introducing users to an experience that is very different from YouTube itself. Yes, YouTube has long offered suggested videos, and has countless channels of content, but this notion of leaning back and just watching is something that will take some getting used to. That said, YouTube reports that Leanback users are consuming 30 minutes at a time — twice as much as they do using the normal site — so obviously it’s working for some people.
And it won’t take long until a lot more people are on Leanback. YouTube is already integrated into Google TV, and it has apps on other HTPCs as well. The company has also started searching for a Product Manager to lead its ‘YouTube on TV’ projects, whose responsibilities include managing relationships with both content and hardware partners. In other words, YouTube Leanback (or a related product) is going to be popping up in a lot of places over the next few years. And once it nails this notion of personalized video content, it’s going to be tough to go back to plain old TV.
Graeme Taylor shot out the window of a train at 210 frames per second, reversing the usual trick of shooting and slowing down a high-speed object from a stationary spot; rather, he shot a stationary spot from a high-speed object. The effect is something like a mundane bullet-time, where the world has stopped so that no one can do anything much of anything. It's mesmerizing.
As Jason Kottke writes, "Wonderful illustration of the concept of frames of reference."
Both glides were filmed by sticking a - relatively cheap - digital camera out of the window of a train as it arrived at a station. The 'trick' is the camera collects images at a rate of 210 per second - but the film is played back at 30 frames per second. So, every seven seconds of footage that you watch corresponds to 1 real second. At least at the start, one real second is plenty of time for someone to move into, then out of, the camera's field of view, but isn't enough time for them to really do much: hence, the frozen effect. It breaks down towards the end not because I'm doing something clever with the frame rates (captured or replayed), but simply because the train was stopping! Thus, as it decelerated, any given person would be in view for longer, and have more time to point an arm, take a few steps along the platform, or maybe even notice me at the window. Any such action captured is still slowed down seven-fold during playback, just as with my usual static captures.
At least one other person has tried this before: Trey Ratcliff captured a station in Japan this way over a year ago, describing the effect as "Stuck in motion". He also mixes in other slow motion footage and its inverse, time lapse photography, in this gorgeous video, Heartbeats of Time.
Graeme Taylor shot out the window of a train at 210 frames per second, reversing the usual trick of shooting and slowing down a high-speed object from a stationary spot; rather, he shot a stationary spot from a high-speed object. The effect is something like a mundane bullet-time, where the world has stopped so that no one can do anything much of anything. It's mesmerizing.
As Jason Kottke writes, "Wonderful illustration of the concept of frames of reference."
Both glides were filmed by sticking a - relatively cheap - digital camera out of the window of a train as it arrived at a station. The 'trick' is the camera collects images at a rate of 210 per second - but the film is played back at 30 frames per second. So, every seven seconds of footage that you watch corresponds to 1 real second. At least at the start, one real second is plenty of time for someone to move into, then out of, the camera's field of view, but isn't enough time for them to really do much: hence, the frozen effect. It breaks down towards the end not because I'm doing something clever with the frame rates (captured or replayed), but simply because the train was stopping! Thus, as it decelerated, any given person would be in view for longer, and have more time to point an arm, take a few steps along the platform, or maybe even notice me at the window. Any such action captured is still slowed down seven-fold during playback, just as with my usual static captures.
At least one other person has tried this before: Trey Ratcliff captured a station in Japan this way over a year ago, describing the effect as "Stuck in motion". He also mixes in other slow motion footage and its inverse, time lapse photography, in this gorgeous video, Heartbeats of Time.
There’s no doubt that plain old YouTube can be tons of fun, but when you get bored of watching clips the traditional way, there are a ton of sites that can help enhance the experience.
Whether you want to view a video with a far-away friend, compare two clips, or find more interesting ways of browsing and sharing, there are plenty of options out there. The web community is known for creating hacks that improve your surfing experience; now we’ve dug into some of those tools and hacks built around YouTube.
Have a look through our 10 choices and let us know of any other YouTube mashups, hacks, or similar sites and services you’ve used. I would love to hear about them in the comments below.
This site features a super-simple premise. TubeReply will play a YouTube video over and over again, until you stop it or go mad — whichever happens first. Just enter the URL of the clip you want repeated and the site will do the rest.
DragonTape allows you to remix YouTube videos into a seamless mixtape. Search for the clips you want, drag and drop to set up the play order and then share the playlist with friends via an auto-generated URL, or embed it with the code provided.
This “mashup helper” exists “because you have better things to do than work.” You can use it to compare two videos, or have fun mashing together two patently unsuitable videos. Simply enter the two URLs, decide on your VJ name, and you’re off and away. You can share your video pairing via a generated URL.
SynchTube allows you to watch synchronized YouTube videos with up to 50 other people with a chat window along the side so you can IM about what’s happening. Setting up a “room” is easy. Just enter the URL(s) of the videos you want to watch and then share the URL with your group. We can imagine tons of uses for this service, but the sweetest one has got to be setting up some videos to watch “together” with a far-away partner.
Enter your choice of keywords into this site and it will create an infinite playlist based on them. Get ready for a seamless viewing experience based on as many keywords as you can imagine.
You can link to a specific spot in a YouTube video by adding #t=MMmSSs (replace MM with minutes and SS with seconds) to the end of the URL, but Spilcd (and TubeChop below) take this concept a step further. Splicd lets you cut down a YouTube video by entering start time and finish time. You can then share your edited clip with a URL or embed it with the code supplied.
TubeChop shares exactly the same principle as Splicd. TubeChop, however, lets you make your edited selection by sliding a bar along a timeline. It’s worth an independent mention as some may prefer TubeChop’s visual editing process.
This unique little tool lets you create a “YouCube,” an interesting, if slightly offbeat way of sharing YouTube videos. Enter the six YouTube videos you want to appear on each side of the cube and it generates a spinning 3D cube of your videos that you can then name and share via a shortened URL.
MixTube is a great, simple tool that lets you easily create and share music playlists from YouTube videos just by adding the URLs to a list. This tool is tidy and useful for songs that you can only find on YouTube, such as mashups, live performances, and other user-generated content.
YouFlow offers an alternative and more attractive way to browse videos on YouTube. Enter your key words and a selection of results will be displayed in a cover flow-style layout that you can scroll through. You can choose to play multiple videos right from the results, something that is much more difficult to do with YouTube’s queues and playlists.
If the majority of YouTube comments depress you, then: a) You’re not alone, and b) There’s a solution. This browser bookmarklet offers a plain white or plain black background to view vids on. Simply install and then hit the “quietube” button after you press play on any YouTube video for some peaceful, troll-free viewing.
TestTube is YouTube’s “ideas incubator,” akin to Gmail Labs, where YouTube engineers and developers “test out recipes and concoctions that aren’t quite fully baked.” You can play around with a comment search, HTML5, the lite version of YouTube (Feather), a caption editor, music discovery features and more.
The next time someone tells you that games consoles are for sweaty nerds in their parents’ basements, throw back the new MUBI service on the PS3 that launched today. It allows users to watch over 500 films from around the world through your console.
The service costs either $19.95 for a 30 day subscription or $6.25 for on demand feature films, with short films going for $1.75. There’s also free stuff, which means you have no excuse for not expanding your culture level while convincing your family your’re a geeky nerd type.
If you own an iPhone, chances are you genuinely prefer the feature set of iOS to Android, but that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t appreciate having access to some of Android’s best features. This guide walks through setting up the best of both worlds. 
While customising your iOS home screen like Android isn’t really a viable option at the moment, you can do a lot to customise your iOS lock screen and even add widgets. While it may seem daunting at first, it’s actually really easy to do. Following ouriOS lock screen customisation tutorial, I was able to put one together in under 10 minutes. While you’re not going to have the simple flexibility of Android, you will have the ability to add practically anything you can imagine. The more CSS and JavaScript you know (or care to learn) the more you’ll be able to do, but you definitely don’t need any programming skills to make some pretty amazing alterations.
iOS does a lot of things very, very well, but if there were one place where it fails pretty miserably it’s how it handles notifications. No matter what kind of notification you get, be it SMS or an alarm clock, iOS gives you the same annoying blue dialogue box that interrupts whatever you’re doing. If you’re sick of notifications getting in your way, MobileNotifier is an excellent solution.
This is a jailbreak hack, so you’re out of luck if you’re sticking with a jailed device. If you need a reason to jailbreak, this is a good one.
The official Google Mobile app is an obvious choice because it provides easy access to a pretty wide swath of Google’s features (including Google Goggles). You can also grab Google Latitude andGoogle Earth for iOS. If you want to start syncing your Google Docs, GoodReader is an excellent option (and absolutely worth the $US5 cost for all it can do). Finally, you may find you actually prefer Google’s mobile web apps over the native options, so be sure to load them up on your iOS device and bookmark them if you do. You can create a bookmark on your homescreen that acts just like an app, so it may really be a better alternative in some cases.
Apple’s never been particularly good at over-the-air sync, and they seem dedicated to keeping you tethered to iTunes for the rest of eternity. If you don’t like constantly syncing, paying for MobileMe, or just prefer to sync with Google in the first place, you can enable Google Sync on your iOS device to solve both of those problems.
Sure, if you’re running iOS 4.3 you can pay $US20 per month for a Wi-Fi hotspot on your phone, but if you jailbreak you can pay $US20 just once to get the same functionality. My-Wi is a $US20 application that you can purchase in the Cydia store and makes nearly every tethering option you can imagine a possibility on your device. All you have to do is search for it in the Cydia store, purchase it, and install it. From there you just launch the app, click the Wi-Fi symbol, and turn your hotspot on.
As vain and trivial as it is, one of my favourite parts about the Gingerbread release of Android is theeffect you get when you turn off the phone. It looks like an old CRT television turning off, which is significantly more fun than the screen simply cutting to black. It’s strange to see Apple forgo the opportunity to smoothly animate between every state of iOS, but they’ve somehow neglected this one. Fortunately, if you jailbreak, you can install this effect very easily.
