| ShowYou's New Features Aim to Make It the Instapaper of Video The video-sharing app ShowYou is continuing to roll out improvements to its platform, with couple of new features today including the ability to view it on more screens - thanks to a new browser version of the app. The Web version is similar to the iPad and iPhone app. You can scroll through and view the videos that are in your social streams - shared by you and your Twitter followers, Facebook friends, YouTube network and so on.
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iOS 5 Running on iPhone 3GS With this week's introduction of iOS 5, Apple's next-generation mobile operating system, owners of older iPhones are curious as to whether or not their device will support all the new features. iOS 5 brings a number of exciting additions, including a revamped notification system, deep Twitter integration, an updated version of Safari with support for tabbed browsing and reading lists, a more advanced camera system, a Newsstand app for managing newspaper and magazine subscriptions, a free messaging service for iOS users similar to BlackBerry's BBM, and more. In total, Apple has added over 200 new features to the operating system, the company says. But will your phone run them?
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Apple Changes In-App Subscriptions Rule: Selling Outside App Store is OK In Apple's new App Store Review Guidelines out this week, it appears the company has backtracked on its earlier plans to strictly enforce how mobile application publishers can sell subscriptions. In the earlier set of guidelines released February, Apple required any applications selling content through subscriptions to also make that same content available within the app at the same price or less. Now, the guidelines state that app publishers can offer access to content purchased outside the app, with no requirement to offer the subscription through Apple's store.
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Graphicly Reboots Its Web App, as the Future of Comics Looks to HTML 5 I remember distinctly the moment during the official unveiling of the iPad last year that I knew I'd be buying Apple's new tablet device: it was during the demo of the comics app. I was sold. It seemed clear that this was the future of the genre. Now there are a number of different ways in which fans can buy and read comics online - on their iPads, on their mobile phones, and on the web - as much like the rest of the publishing industry, comic publishing is undergoing a digital revolution. One major nod to this upheaval was the announcement last week by DC Comics that it would be distributing digital versions of comics the same day that the print issues arrive on store shelves. But back to the iPad for a minute: while the future of comics is clearly digital, is it necessarily via a native app? And to that end the digital comics platform Graphicly says it's "doubled down on HTML5," revamping its Web interface to greatly improve the reading experience. Graphicly says that it's worked closely with Google's Chrome team to build a site that not only makes the most of HTML5 but that also uses Chrome's offline file API and in-app payments system.
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Crazy Mashup: All Things Really Do Come Back to Philosophy, on Wikipedia Mashup developer Jeffrey Winter was thinking about Wikipedia one day and specifically about a rumor that if you followed the first link on any Wikipedia entry that you'd eventually land on the page for Philosophy. So, nerd that he must surely be, he built a web interface to trace this phenomenon and visualize it. The end result is very cool. Called "All Roads Lead to 'Philosophy'," Winter's mashup tests what he believed to be a reasonable theory and it seems to test well. The fact is that Wikipedia is more regularly structured than one might think and as one commenter on Winter's post said, most Wikipedia articles begin by saying that the subject of the page is a subset of a larger concept. As you click through those larger and larger concepts, you will eventually hit the ultimate abstraction: philosophy! It's pretty cool, give it a try.
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The Social Web's Dumbest Ideas Back in the salad days of ecommerce, I worked for a website that sold cars. Sounds a little odd but it worked, though not well enough to best its competitors, one of whom absorbed it. As the only marcom guy there, I was approached often for the inevitable side-projects my co-workers were launching. One gentleman was leaving in order to start his own company and wanted to hire me to edit his web copy. To this day, I am proud that I was able to master my expression as I looked over his draft. His company was an online dry-cleaning service. Go ahead and re-read that last sentence. It was the dumbest idea I had ever heard and it remains my hallmark for dumb ideas to this day. Now we are in a new era, that of the Social Web. But just as we take our positive qualities with us through time - intellect, compassion, inventiveness - we also take our dumbness. Today I came across two ideas - one a process, the other a product - that shot me back in time to the moment I first read about online dry-cleaning. Both, horribly enough, are food-related; and both are profoundly dumb. Photo by Ed Schipul
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New Apps for iPhone & Android, May/June 2011 In this continuing series here on ReadWriteWeb, we round up some of our favorite new applications for smartphones each month, specifically for iPhone and Android devices. This spring edition includes some major new launches on Android, like Netflix and Google Music, as well as some incredible technology leaps on iPhone, like the app which identifies trees by their leaves! As a bonus for this month, we've added a section with notable app updates and another featuring new tablet apps.
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Evernote Re-engineers Studying By Flash Cards With Its New iPad App An elephant never forgets. And as Evernote's elephant logo suggests, the note-taking platform already sees itself as a tool for storage, yes, but also for enhancing memory. That couldn't be clearer with a newly release app today: Evernote Peek (iTunes link). The app makes rather ingenious use of the new iPad Smart Cover, creating a new way to make and study flash cards.
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Wikipedia Is "Making the Grade" With More & More Academics Although Wikipedia has long been viewed with suspicion by many educators, the Wikimedia Foundation has been working hard to forge alliances with academia, to build a better reputation, but also to elicit strong content contribution for the collaborative online encyclopedia. At the beginning of the school year, we wrote about Wikimedia's Public Policy Initiative, a pilot program that introduced students to editing Wikipedia pages as part of their public policy college coursework. As its the end of the school year now, the Wikimedia Foundation has just published some of the results from its first year of the initiative.
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Arab & European Historians Unite Online Over Birth of Modern Agriculture The impression most people in the West have of the Arabic world, and the wider Muslim world, is sometimes crazy, sometimes reasonable, but always provisional. It's unavoidable that people only have time, and mental space, to understand so much about a culture not their own. But in this case, there is an aspect of Arab history that even many Arabs don't know. They invented agriculture. To be more accurate, they moved farming from a folkway to a science; and they did it in Europe, or at least codified it there, in Al-Anadalus, Muslim Spain. Now, with the Filāḥa Texts Project, a group is using online collaboration to make these Andalucian writings on our common agricultural heritage accessible to everyone.
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