M.dot Is Probably The Easiest Way To Create A Mobile Website Using Your iPhone

Mobile users are said to account for more than 10% of internet’s daily traffic, and that figure is always on the rise these days thanks to the growing popularity of smartphones. When you look at the number of people who prefer browsing the web from their phones, the ratio of mobile-optimized sites appears woefully inadequate in comparison. Even some popular websites don’t have a mobile version, simply because of all the effort and time required to develop one. If you are running a small business, then chances are that you have a website but it is not optimized for mobile viewing. M.dot is a new iPhone app that lets you easily develop mobile websites or mobile-optimized versions of existing websites on the go, without any knowledge of web development whatsoever. Just enter all your information, select a template, and that’s it! The app isn’t just limited to the cosmetic aspect of site design, with options available for adding social media share buttons, a respectable photo editor for uploaded images, and a comprehensive word editor that can be used to create new posts for the blog section of your site, all packed into a great interface. It may very well be the best app of its kind on the App Store.

To get started, you can either sign up for a new account or get right to creating websites with a test account. You can later convert this test account into a permanent one. Creating a mobile site is as easy as following the app’s onscreen instructions and filling out the required fields. The first step is to choose a theme for your site. There are seven themes available for now, but they should prove to be enough to cater to the needs of most individuals and small businesses. Once you’re done choosing a theme, M.dot then asks you to enter your website’s name (or domain name) and set a logo for it.

M.dot initially lets you set your site up with a free sitename.mpresence.net domain name, but later on, you get the option to switch to a custom web address that you already own. That is, you can link your existing website with an m.sitename.com address that redirects mobile visitors to your M.dot site, effectively turning it into a mobile-optimized version of your original site. You can even set the original web address to redirect to the mobile website. This feature is free at the moment. Pricing will be sent to account holders via email later on.

The photo that you want to use as the logo can be captured using the camera, uploaded from your device’s local library, Flickr or from your existing website.

The Edit and customize screen in M.dot has a few predefined pages that will appear as separate sections of your website. You can manually add new pages, of course, but for a basic site, you might not need to. To make the website your own, visit each listed option and enter details in as many fields as you can. Sections like About Me, Gallery and Blog can be created and managed from here. There is a small toggle next to every icon to let you specify whether you want that field to appear on the site. To make changes to fields, hit the large icon next to the toggle.

Every area of the M.dot customization menu is slightly different from the others, depending upon its functionality. The Blog option brings up a text editor, while in Gallery, you can upload whole albums to your site. The About and About Me sections are where you can write introductions for yourself and your business or website.

To add a new blog post to a site from your iPhone, tap the thumbnail once and select New blog post. There is a separate menu for handling existing posts, while the rather simple Statistics menu shows the page views for your site in the past week and month.

To create another mobile website or make changes to the sites already developed using the app, simply return to the app’s homescreen.

Other than the text editor not supporting auto-capitalization, you will be hard-pressed to find anything wrong with the app. So, if you’ve been thinking about making a mobile-friendly version of your website for a long time, but haven’t been able to find the time to learn how to go about it, head to link below and grab theapp.

Download M.dot For iOS

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PlayMood For iPhone Uses The Camera To Detect Your Mood & Plays Matching Songs

Whenever you take out your iPod or launch a music player on your iPhone, Mac or PC, what is it that tells you to pick a particular song from the playlist? It’s your mood; what you feel like listening to is usually connected to what you’re feeling. Wouldn’t it be great if your music player could automatically judge what you’re feeling and pick appropriate songs to match your mood? PlayMood is an app for the iPhone and iPod touch that detects your mood using the front-facing camera and plays songs that match it. It can also be set to work in conjunction with PlayMood Remote, a desktop app available for both Mac OS X and Windows. The iPhone app allows you to manually mark songs in your library as either happy, neutral or sad. The desktop client simply uses your webcam to detect your mood, and remotely controls the iPhone app to play songs that you associated with it.

Install the PlayMood app on your iPhone and it will load songs from your iTunes library. For each song, select a mood. Remember that regardless of whether you’re using the desktop client, songs will be played on your iPhone, so set the loop or shuffle settings here. Use the next/previous button on the player to move to and rate the next song. The button on the left of the media controls allows you to change the mood and the camera shutter-like button on the right lets you turn mood detection on/off on the iPhone. You can use either a camera connected to your Mac or PC to detect moods or you can use the iPhone camera. In both cases, your facial expressions tell the app how you’re feeling.  Tap the little cogwheel on the top right corner to access the app’s settings, or to connect it to your Mac or PC for remote control.

If you wish to connect the iOS app to your computer, launch the desktop client and make sure that both devices are on the same WiFi network. The desktop app will detect an incoming connection and display a security code for you to enter on your phone and authorize the connection.

Once connected, PlayMood adds an icon to the Menu Bar. Turn on Mood Detection from the Menu Bar icon and smile, pout, frown or grit your teeth at the Mac/PC camera. Alternatively, you can manually select a mood from the options in the Menu Bar as well or just smile in to your phone. Click the play button, and your iPhone will start playing songs that correspond to the current mood.

The concept of the app is excellent, but we did experience a few problems with the mood detection feature. It did not seem to read (or like) our happy face. Grin and smile as much as we did, the app detected and switched between Sad and neutral moods only. We tested the app on a couple of faces, even with a high resolution webcam (1080px). That said, the app is new, so we can pass this off as something the developers might still be working to improve. Lastly, we couldn’t download the Windows app from the link provided on the website. We’re sure it’s just a little mistake that will be fixed in little or no time.

The app is 100% free and is bound to interest Mac and Windows users alike.  Try the app out and let us know in the comments how well the mood detection feature worked for you.

Download PlayMood From Mac App Store

Download PlayMood From App Store

Visit PlayMood

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Add Time-Lapse, Independant Focus & Exposure, Aspect Ratio & More To Native iPhone Camera App

The stock Camera app in iOS is devoid of almost any extra features, and while there are plenty of third-party replacements available in the App Store, no app can beat the convenience of using the stock one, with its lock screen shortcut, smooth results and seamless integration with the camera roll. If you’ve always stuck with the stock Camera app, but still feel a bit envious of all the extraordinary features on offer in third-party apps, you don’t have to be torn between these choices any longer. What are some of the major features that you get with third-party camera replacement apps? These might include a countdown timer, independent exposure and focus selection, multiple kinds of grid overlays and the choice of selection a custom resolution for video recording. CameraTweak is a new Cydia release that adds all these features to the  iPhone and iPod touch Camera app. In addition to these options, the tweak offers a time-lapse feature, and lets you choose a frame rate for videos.

The great thing about CameraTweak is that the new options added to the stock app will not make it slower, and are placed in an unobtrusive manner. The tweak does not add any extra menus to the Settings app, as all the options it offers are configurable right from within the Camera app itself. By default, you will be shown the independent focus and exposure reticles, along with the White Balance button. If you want to move the focus and exposure reticles in tandem, tap and hold your finger over them, and drag them to any new position within the viewfinder. To move them separately, hit the small lock icon in the bottom-left corner.

So, where are all the awesome features we were talking about earlier? The extra features can be accessed by hitting the circular icon added next to the camera button in the bottom bar. For photos, this menu contains the following four options.

• Default Camera: The first button from left lets you revert back to default layout and settings.
• Time-Lapse: This option initiates a time-lapse photography session with a user-defined interval between each shot.
• Countdown Timer: To add delay before capturing a photo, hit this icon and choose a time period. You can switch between seconds and minutes using small icon below the delay value.
• Grid Overlays: CameraTweak offers four different grid layouts. It is possible to switch between these by swiping up or down on the tiny icon.

• That’s all for the camera section; now for the camcorder. The first button in the camcorder menu is the same (returns everything to default) but that’s where the similarity ends. The other three options are as follows.
  • Frame Rate: The horse-shaped icon brings up a HUD that can be used to change the frame rate of the video. You can go up to 60 fps. Use the ‘+’ and ‘-‘ buttons to change the rate and Set to verify your choice.
  • Resolution: Available resolutions include 1920 x 1080, 1280 x 720, 640 x 480 and 352 x 288. If these values confuse you, there are choices like Low and Medium resolution available as well.
  • Aspect Ratio: The three choices in this option are 4:3, 16:9 and 2:35:1. This feature can prove to be really useful if you plan on importing your videos later into a desktop video editor.
  CameraTweak is available in the BigBoss repo and costs $0.99, which is perfectly reasonable for something of this quality.
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View The Latest World News From The Mac Menu Bar & Notification Center With News Loop

You’ve probably got a favorite RSS feed reader on your Mac that you, for one reason or the other, prefer over others. Some of you might still read feeds in your browser using Google Reader or other online feed reader, subscribing to and keeping up with each feed of interest one by one. For those who aren’t interested in a particular niche not thoroughly covered by mainstream news sources usually prefer to skip the entire ordeal of looking for, subscribing to and manually checking each news source for updates. Such users have a bunch of solutions available for them in the market, one of which is News Loop for Mac, a free app that sits in the menu bar and displays updates from major news websites, such as Daily News, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, USA Today and Washington Post. You can, of course, choose which of these sources appear in the updates displayed by the app. You can even have the app keep you apprised of new updates through Notification Center alerts.

News Loop is an app for following news that literally needs no setting up; the feeds are already there and the news will be pulled automatically. You can click the News Loop icon in the menu bar (which resembles a Newspaper) and see the items listed in a pop up. From this same pop up, you can set the app to start at log in and uncheck any news resource you might not want to follow.

The app is very bare and basic; you can choose which news sources you don’t want to follow, but you cannot add ones or choose from a larger selection of sources. While the choice to add an RSS feed of your choice would no doubt turn News Loop into any other feed reader,  perhaps a regional filter that allows users to choose a news source for a particular region would be a reasonable addition.

Clicking a news item in the menu bar pop up opens the news item in your default browser, whereas, clicking a news item in the Notification Center does not. If this is a technical restraint then there is little to do about it, but if not, then hopefully, it is a bug that will be dealt with in upcoming updates. Should you miss a news item and have to view it from Notification Center, there isn’t a way to open the item at the source.

Get News Loop from Mac App Store

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Get The Android HTC Sense Lock Screen On Your iPhone With ICSLock Pro

While iOS can boast of being uncomplicated and almost lag-free, Android’s biggest strength lies in customization and cosmetic diversity. Android has several OEMs, each with its own visually unique version of the OS. While all OEMs put some signature UI elements in their firmware, HTC leads the pack in terms of uniqueness with the Sense UI. The ring-styled lock screen that was introduced in Sense 3.0 has grown so popular that it has been used in countless custom ROMs, and replicated by more than a few lock screen replacement apps. Now, you can enjoy the HTC Sense lock screen on iOS as well, that is, if you’re jailbroken. ICSLock Pro is a Cydia app that replaces the default lock screen slider with the Sense unlock ring and four user-defined lock screen app shortcuts.

As mentioned earlier, ICSLock Pro is a standalone Cydia app, and not a tweak. Once it is downloaded, and the SpringBoard is restarted, you should find a new icon on your home screen. The app is disabled by default, so you won’t see any change in the lock screen immediately after downloading it. The app has a few customization options that you might want to take a look at before enabling it. There are four styles for the unlock ring and four for the bubble that encircles the app shortcuts on the lock screen. Then you can disable or enable the dock, which is a curved area housing the unlock ring, and toggle Vibrate on Unlock. The options App 1 through 4 let you select any third-party or stock app for each of the four app shortcut slots (left to right).

Each time you hit the save button after making changes to ICSLock Pro settings, the device will respring. You can always revert back to defaults by tapping the button in the top-left corner of the app. For those who haven’t used the HTC Sense lock screen before, dragging the ring onto any shortcut will launch the associated app, while to unlock to the home screen, simply drag and release it anywhere above the shortcuts. Just so you know, ICSLock Pro does not disturb lock screen notifications in any way.

Note that although the app is named ICSLock Pro, the icon it adds to the SpringBoard is labeled HTCLock Pro, which makes Sense as it does not replicate the stock Ice Cream Sandwich lock screen. Nonetheless, if you’re a fan of HTC’s work with Android or simply like mixing things up on your jailbroken iDevice, you are sure to get full value for the $0.99 you spend on ICSLock Pro.

Via:addictivetips