Wow, wow, wow… The Netflix for iPhone app is awesome!

Netflix released their app for iPhone and iPod Touch a little while ago. This is the app most people have been looking forward to since the announcement of iOS 4. The reason why people have been looking forward to it is because, like their app for the iPad, this allowed people to watch streaming movies and TV shows from their iPhone or iPod Touch.

3G Entertainment

Normally, though, you’d have limitations with such an amazing product. The main limitation I could see them doing is not allowing the Netflix app to work over 3G. And that would be ok, because there are plenty of situations where you’d want to have access to Netflix when you had wifi (such as visiting a friend house, at work, at a hotel, etc).

But Netflix DOES work over 3G! Woo-hoo! What magical negotiation wizard got that to pass with AT&T, we’ll never know… but bless him or her. Having Netflix over 3G is AMAZING!

I mean think about the possibilities with having access to TV and movies anytime, anywhere. And I ain’t talkin’ about buying (or stealing) movies and TV shows and transferring them to your iPhone’s media library. That all gets old and stale as soon as you watch it. Who’s gonna’ wanna’ watch the same TV show or movie over and over again?

But having access to the ENTIRE library of streaming content available through Netflix anytime, anywhere?? *drools* Yeah baby… So hot.

New Possibilities

This opens the door for a whole new world of possibilities for Netflix users (which I myself am one). I mean just like when Pandora came out with an app for the iPhone (before that, it was a virtual unknown) and allowed streaming Internet radio to be used anytime, anywhere, the same thing has now happened with streaming Internet TV and movies.

Think about the possibilities now… Just picture someone being told at their job “No, your needed for an evening budget meeting in an hour, so you won’t have time to drive home and back before the meeting. Head down to the conference room now and wait for everyone to arrive later.”. That sucks, but he / she can just load up the Netflix app and think to themselves “Haha, little do you know, but this isn’t torture, I’m gonna’ watch me some Reno 911.”.

Or how about a girlfriend or wife who’s dragged to a convention or event her man’s interested in (but she’s there because later they’ll be going out to eat or something). She didn’t even know she’d be attending, so rather than be pissed sitting there for two hours, she just pulls out her headphones and searches for something on Netflix to watch.

Ooo! Or how about standing in some godawful line somewhere, like the DMV! Or how about an amusement park line, even better. Now that’ll be some awesome ****. Everyone there will be “Ugg… so bored.”, playing on their crappy, inferior mobile phones, checking Facebook for the thirtieth time or some bull ****. While your laughing out loud to some crazy funny TV show, such as It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. Everyone around looking at you with envy each time you laugh or something. Like “Your not supposed to enjoy this line…”.

Netflix In Your Car

Oh yeah, and this is the best thing… For those of us that have both iPhones and a Netflix subscription, this now means that we have a means to stream TV shows and movies in our cars!

I mean, I remember reading articles years ago about how someday we (meaning the rich) will have cars connected to the Internet were we’ll have music, TV and movies “piped wirelessly” to enjoy.

Well we have that now, but it’s not some exclusivity reserved only for the rich. It’s not a service that’s “piped” into the car directly though, it’s sent directly to a device that we already pay for mobile Internet, and from a service (Netflix) we’re also already paying for.

Being able to easily and quickly search for new titles of shows or movies while on the road is so great. And any program you watch from your computer will resume via your iPhone and visa-versa.

First Impressions

The program works great. I have an iPhone 4, which is capable of displaying high definition content. Well, Netflix appears to be in HD over both wifi and 3G. That’s amazing.

The streaming video seems to be very responsive. It loads extremely quickly considering it’s high quality too. Seeking to a new position isn’t a problem either. It’s not like the crap we experience with YouTube, waiting forever for a video to load or horrible quality over 3G.

Playback over 3G seems great considering I’m able to get it to work even when I barely have cell signal in my apartment. The screen shot below is from a video (Reno 911!) playing over a very weak signal. You can see it looks great.

The interface is fantastic. It works exactly how you’d expect. It’s so quick and easy to search for what you want and jump right into it.

Requested Feature

One feature I’d love to see is the ability to watch the video in portrait orientation.

Some of you are probably thinking “Why would you want that?”. The reason why is so that you can watch movies docked into a dock or similar device that doesn’t allow your iPhone to be in landscape orientation. Yes, I understand the video will be very small, but that’s a lot better than being sideways.

Conclusion

Overall, this is a ******’ great app. If Pandora is the best music app / service, then Netflix is the best video app / service.

Especially considering the Hulu Plus app isn’t even an option because it costs $10 a month for Hulu Plus, still shows commercials and won’t even run on 3G iPhones.

Netflix and Hulu are my two main forms of entertainment and because of not being able to do Hulu on my iPhone, this makes running Netflix on the Neocell 4 all that much better. With innovative thinking like this, is there any question as to how Netflix caused the downfall of Blockbuster?

Peace, JbB

Every once and a while, this message pops up in iBooks. “Failed to load book because the requested resource is missing.“. What’s this crap mean, and how do you fix it?

Well it means that something got screwy with iBooks. Most likely you had a book open running in the background, and iOS 4.0 needed the extra memory so it closed iBooks and then something screwed up.

The solution? It’s real simple. Load up the library, open another book, go back to the library and open the book that was refusing to open.

Problem solved.

Peace, JbB

I’ve got a new free app called Groupon. The app Groupon is an app for the web site groupon.com. I saw it because it was featured on iTunes.

What Groupon is, is a web site / service that apparently works with restaurants to offer certain promos and deals to users of the service. It’s marketing for the restaurants and savings for it’s users. It’s only available in about 50 cities, but if you live near one of the cities listed, give it a shot because a restaurant outside of one of those cities could be featured and may closer to you than you think. I happen to live in Tampa, which is listed. The app itself isn’t too remarkable, it’s just an iPhone version of their web site, so it’s the service that’s interesting, not actually the app.

Tonight I saw a deal for a restaurant I’ve never heard of called Poblano Mexican Grill and Bar. The deal was that you can buy a $25 gift card-style coupon (can only be used once) for $10. I thought, that’s a pretty good deal. Goin’ out and getting $25 worth of food and drink for only $10. Even if the selection isn’t the best, goin’ out, dinner for two for only $10, you can’t beat that. As I mentioned, I live in Tampa, fl. and this restaurant is located in Clearwater, Fl. So, even you don’t live in a city that’s listed for Groupon, it’s still worth checking out if you live near one of those cities.

The app. As far as I can tell, the Groupon web site is fully browse-able from Safari, so you don’t need the iPhone app. But the iPhone app does a good job. I was able to register and add my credit card information all from within the app, so it really was convenient using the app. I can’t give too much feedback on the Groupon service itself, as I just signed up and bought one thing tonight. But it seems pretty tight. Not to mention this is a better than than trying to surf eBay, looking for gift cards or coupons to restaurants being sold as a way to save some money, because most of the time a $25 gift card to, let’s say Applebees, sells for $22 or more, saving you less than $3. That ain’t no deal. so Groupon may be a good way to eat at some new places for cheap. (All y’all single fellas out there, this is a great way to take a chick out on a first or repeat date to somewhere nice without making yourself go broke. Little tip for ya.)

Peace, JbB

Man I’m sorta’ ticked about WordPress 2 for the iPhone. For one, it has a known problem for some users (a lot of of users!) that it doesn’t always save posts. What happens is when you have a post your working on, 25% of the time WordPress 2 won’t save what you’ve written. This was never a problem with WordPress “1″.

There’s no fix if you experience this issue. You get that? There-is-no-fix… The only way to get this issue fixed is for WordPress to update the app fixing the bug. Problem, from the release of WordPress 2 to today’s date, they’ve released app updates and none of them have fixed the bug or even addressed that it exists.

People have said online that you can hit “publish” as soon as you start your post as a workaround to this problem. That’s a stupid idea because that makes your post LIVE for people to read while your still writing it, typos and all. And also, you must be online at all times to save this way, which includes the same option of saving it as a public draft. You want to keep your posts saved as a local draft, and then publish once it’s finished. So this isn’t possible with this “saving bug”.

So now, I’m typing up my posts with the Evernote app and then copying and pasting the text into the WordPress app to post. I’ll have to switch to WordPress 1 or choose another blogging app. This sucks.

What kinda’ issues are the rest of you facing? When did this start happening and have you found any work around or… anything? If you another blogging app for WordPress, what do you think? I wanna’ hear from ya.

Peace, JbB

Wow, now THIS is nice… For the longest time, competing phone makers such as Palm or Google Android devices had been bragging about abilities such as being able to sync Facebook photos to your phone contacts and things like that. People refer to the iPhone not being able to do this as a “closed in environment devoid of any creativity” or some bull ***.

Well guess what Facebook just released today for their iPhone app? Yep, Facebook now can sync profile pictures of people your friends with on Facebook with your image contacts. It’s a really awesome feature.

Now see, I’m not in love with Facebook. But I love this because it seems like EVERYONE is on Facebook, so this works out perfect because people update their profile pictures constantly with their own photo… so now you’ve got photo updates for your contacts. It’s awesome. It updates existing photos also. But that’s an option you can disable if you want.

So over all, this is a crazy-great feature. I’m lovin’ it.

Peace, JbB

There’s a new app out for iPhones that actually let’s you speak to it and it’ll dictate what you say and translate it into text. It works by you speaking into your iPhone with the app open, then the app sends your audio recording out, servers somewhere in the cloud render what you’ve said, and then send it back to you as text. Of course, all text has to be copied from the Dragon app and into the app your using.

I was planning on using it to type (speak) this post fully, but it just doesn’t cut it. For one, I’m an extremely fast typer. It’s slower or me to “speak slowly” into my iPhone than it is to type. That wouldn’t be a problem though, I’d have more fun speaking into my iPhone than typing.

The problem is that there is a time limit (or error) on how long you can speak, like 20 to 30 seconds. It doesn’t tell you your out of time, it just stops recording any more audio. What’s worst, is that it gives a “timed out” error if you go past 20 to 30 seconds. If that weren’t bad enough, there’s no way to send the audio again that you just spoke.

Get the problem here? You have no way of knowing if your going to go over the “invisible” time limit. This causes an error, which makes you lose any speaking you just did. You pretty much have to keep speaking one sentence recordings, stop, let it render and start again. And you also have to check for errors. I don’t know if the app is designed to do this, or if it’s a bug.

Does this mean the app sucks? ‘Freak no! The app’s free and I think the process of throwing the rendering process off the device and into the cloud is a brilliant idea. In fact, although this app doesn’t cut it for me, I love it. I’m keeping this app on the Neocell and, after each update, I’m gonna’ open the app up to see if any of the issues have been fixed. Remember, after all, that this is the very first version of it.

Peace, JbB

I saw, featured in the app store, that a version 2.0 of the WordPress app came out.

Edit: Ok, I don’t know how well this speaks for the new version… but see the images above there? This new version of the WordPress 2.0 app messed up my post. It lost 90% of the post I wrote… just for no reason, so I’m having to jump on the Neocomp (my desktop) to write this post again.

A new version of WordPress came out, version 2.0, but the odd (messed up) thing is that it’s not an update from 1.x but a separate app. Meaning, if you have WordPress 1.x, you won’t get an update notification to upgrade to 2.0. You have to actually go out, find WordPress 2.0, install it, and then uninstall WordPress 1.0. Yes, you will have two different WordPress apps installed, 1.x and 2.0. I don’t know why they did it like this… but it’s ok, we outta’ be thankful they provide us with a completely free blogging system and completely free blogging app.

As far as the app itself, not much has changed. They’ve fixed (I’ve confirmed) the picture order issue, where you would select from your iPhone pictures in order of “A,B,C” but they would be order on your post as “C,B,A”. The work around for it was to select your pictures in reverse on your iPhone, which the WordPress app would then reverse the order and you’d get the pictures ordered the way you wanted. But they’ve fixed that issue, so “A,B,C” will be ordered “A,B,C” (“as easy as 1, 2, 3…”).

It’s got a great new comment managing system, which is really nice. But other than that, there isn’t much that’s been changed as far as features go. They have fixed a lot of bugs and polished the over all improvement of the app… but the fact that the very first post from the app, a post about the app ironically, messed up and lost 90% of the text for my post kinda’ worries me… But let’s hope that was an isolated thing, ‘ight?

Peace, J

The free eBay app has gotten better. It was sorta’ pointless to use before, because eBay’s mobile site is very, very good. And the eBay app didn’t allow you to refine your search, such as lowest price first. So it’s pretty pointless trying to search for anything on there, let’s say an iPhone, ‘cuz you wouldn’t be able to find one through all the crap of accessories and other junk… Thousands of results and only a few hundred are actual iPhones. Yeah…

But now the app let’s you refine your searches. And, on top of that, the eBay app does something that the eBay mobile site doesn’t. It gives you a normal view of the description and images of the product. It doesn’t make the page wrap to your iPhone, so you have to scroll from side to side, but that’s ok because it’s very fast and smooth (at least on my 3GS).

I like the changes they did to the app. It also makes managing your eBay account a breeze. Keep it up eBay.

Peace, J

So here’s my take on the Boxee remote app. For those of you that don’t know, Boxee is an open source media center app. I’m fact, it’s THE media center app out there to use if you have a media center. I guess for those of you who don’t know what a media center is, a media center is a computer that is used to serve up media… and mostly all media centers are done through TVs, like mine. I snapped a pic of mine.

So Boxee is the most popular media center app. There’s the Windows application called “Media Center”, which is a media center program. And I happen to have the latest version of it with Windows 7 (still not released yet), and if your not getting cable, satilite, fios or digital tv into your house, then there’s no reason to use Windows’ Media Center, but instead, use Boxee and Hulu desktop (a seperate “media center” type program, used strickly for Hulu). All of my entertainment, my “tv”, comes from the net and I don’t pay for any TV services in my house.

So back to the point of the Boxee remote app. What this is, is a free app that turns your iPhone into a remote control for Boxee. It works via your wifi connection and requires ZERO setup. I’m for real, all you gotta’ do load up Boxee, load up the Boxee app (making sure your iPhone and PC / MAC is connected to your wifi). That’s all. It’s really simple.

The app itself is great. I LOVE the gesture mode. It functions really well. I don’t think iPhones should be used for something like a remote, but if you don’t have one and are usin’ Boxee, this app’s bad ass.

It’s really responsive and just plan works. If you have Boxee, even if you have a remote, I recommend getting it… it can also be a great way to mess with somebody who’s watchin’ something on Boxee. In fact, considering it works over wifi, you can actually control it from another room or from outside and mess with the person watchin’ it. It’s pretty funny, especially if you don’t tell them you have the app.

Peace, J

Well Stanza, the world’s best ebook reader program (and it’s free by the way), is now on my home screen. Having an icon on my home screen means you gotta’ be one of the absolute best apps out there… free, paid, stock, it don’t matter… the only way you can get on the Neocell’s home screen is if you’ve proven yourself worthy.

Well two things have happened… one, I’ve been using Stamza multiple times a day because I’m reading a bad ass ebook (included a screen shot of it) so Stanza’s usefulness had gone up, and because I don’t have cable TV and watch all my TV from Hulu, the free What’s On app has lost most of it’s usefulness. So Stanza replaced What’s On.

I suspect it’ll take a long time before another icon gets changed from my home screen.

Peace, J