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