Smoking Apples

Fav.tv – Browse TV shows the smarter way

by Ankur Gupta on September 21, 2011

The much awaited Fall season is finally here and it brings along with it plethora of great TV shows that we have been eagerly waiting for. I am still livid at the Emmy jury panel for not awarding ‘Community’ with an Emmy but that will not deter me from watching and wholeheartedly supporting the show. Community is one of the few TV shows that I follow but keeping track of them can become a serious headache. There is nothing more frustrating than missing out on the much awaited episode of your favorite TV show. Today we take a look at Fav.tv, an app that not only helps you keep track of your favorite TV shows but also blends in social features to enhance your TV viewing experience.

Fav.tv web app has been in closed beta since a couple of months but a few days back it opened its doors to everyone while throwing in a slick iOS app in the mix. The Fav.tv iOS app and the web service in general, are heavily inspired from Facebook in a good way. The iOS app has an interface quite similar to the Facebook app sans all the bugs and crashes. There are quite a few things that cannot be accomplished from the iOS app and for those you’re forced to use the web app. This is not necessarily a bad thing as the web app is equally well designed featuring some yummy pixels that make you wanna lick your screen.

At iOS app launch, you’re greeted with five red blocks that represent five different sections of the app and a search bar. The search bar lets you quickly search for TV shows and from the show information page you can follow a show or pin it to the front page for quick access. The episodes for a show are neatly listed in the ‘Episodes’ tab. The ‘Activity’ tab is where all the buzz about a show is hidden. In there, you’ll find updates from other users of the Fav.tv service specific to a TV show. Fav.tv has developed this smart algorithm that runs in the background that scans for words/phrases that might relate to a TV show when you post an update on the service and collates them in the ‘Activity’ tab. In case you were wondering, Fav.tv does let you post Facebook like statuses to the service. One can follow other users to get a feed of their updates and also take a sneak peek at the shows they’re currently interested in. Messages can be exchanged between users; a feature that seems a bit of an overkill for a web service that is in its nascent stages. Notifications have been implemented in an interesting fashion by allocating them a dedicated screen left of the main screen; something that Facebook should definitely take a cue from.

Once you have followed a bunch of shows, Fav.tv gets to work and finds the latest episodes aired and places them in the ‘Queue’ section. So if you have missed out on an episodes, this is place to dig them out. If you’ve already seen them, mark them as watched and leave a comment for the community to see. Sadly, Fav.tv does not tell you when an episode will air again, so you’re on your own on that front. But to make sure you do not miss out on any upcoming episodes, Fav.tv has a dedicated ‘What’s On’ section in the app. Tap that and select ‘My shows’ to see which of your shows are airing today. Of course you can select the ‘All shows’ option to see shows currently being aired. There is a neat calendar bar at the bottom using which you can browse the schedule for the whole month. The app also packs in some nifty animations that greatly enhance the overall app experience.

Reminders is another powerful feature of the service accessible through the web app that allows you to setup email/text message notifications to be sent before a TV show goes on air. Searching for friends using the iOS app isn’t possible but I hear the latest update fixes that. Profile editing using the iOS app is also limited. The web app is an excellent companion to the iOS app as it presents interesting scoops and tidbits from the TV industry. Fav.tv on the whole has made a great beginning but it lacks Twitter/Facebook integration hence making user discovery a tough task. One good thing about Fav.tv is that it did not adopt Foursquare like check-in model that a lot of apps in the same category have implemented. This reduces clutter in your activity feed and I feel posting comments about the show is a much better way to build up interaction with the community. In hindsight, the iOS and the web apps complement each other beautifully and you’ll end up using both on a daily basis. The best part is that neither the app or the service cost a dime making it a must-have app on your iOS device if you’re a TV fanatic like me. Go grab it now!

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Piolo — A Tiny Little Stand for your iPhone 4

by Preshit Deorukhkar

Piolo — A Tiny Little Stand for your iPhone 4

by Preshit Deorukhkar on August 22, 2011

In our last post about the Instagram Apps for the Mac, I sneaked in a little peek at The Piolo. There are already quite a few stands for the iPhone out there. I personally own the Glif and the Moviepeg. But when we received the delivery of this tiny little iPhone thing, I automatically set the former two aside and this became my primary iPhone stand.

The Piolo is a tiny little stand specially designed for iPhone 4. It is manufactured out of Thermoplastic Elastomer (TPE) — essentially a mix of plastic and rubber and was designed by Andrew Bond, an Industrial Designer in Sheffied, UK. The stand is very tiny, just slightly longer than an average sized key. It measures 65mm x 17mm x 7mm and has a slot in which you insert your iPhone 4. There’s even a hole given for you to hang it into you keychain — which is very nifty when you’re out and about. It has a matte finish and seems very durable as well. When on a desk, it really compliments the iPhone 4.

I’ve been using the Piolo for a few months now and I really quite like it. I carry two on me — one in my keychain for when I’m traveling and feel the need to just lay down the phone to watch something and another one that has a permanent spot on my desk.

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Instagram Apps for Mac Put Under the Scanner

by Ankur Gupta

Instagram Apps for Mac Put Under the Scanner

by Ankur Gupta on August 20, 2011

Instagram’s popularity is something that remains a big mystery to me (and Aayush, too) considering it only allows iPhone users to upload photos. The service has taken off like a rocket and the onus of bringing it to other platofrms has been put on third-party developers. Instadesk was the first app to take the leap for the Mac platform, but apps like Carousel and Instaview have also made their way onto OS X. Let’s take a look at these three Instagram apps for Mac today and see how they fare.

Instadesk– Meritorious but Humdrum

Instadesk was the first Instagram app for the Mac after they released an API for third-party developers. Taking full advantage of the API, Instadesk brings the whole Instagram experience to the Mac (except photo uploads, which the API doesn’t allow yet).

Unlike the other two apps we’re reviewing, features a conventional & typical native Mac app look and UI. It more-or-less reminds me of LittleSnapper with its placing of different sources in the Sidebar. The sidebar on the left gives you quick access to your own Feed, the Popular feed, Tags and News. The photos are laid out nicely in a grid layout against a dark background. Clicking on a photo opens it up in its glorious full-size, and information about the photo is displayed in a sidebar on the right this time. Here, you can view the Comments/Likes a photo as received, as well as leave your own comment. Icons in the toolbar up top allow you to Like, Share, Download or Open the photo in the browser. You can browse through the different photos using the arrow icons or even your keyboard.

Instadesk also has a nifty slideshow feature that runs fullscreen and gives you a bunch of transition options to choose from. My desktop setup consists of a 15″ MacBook Pro connected to a 24″ Apple Cinema Display, and Instadesk allows me to run the slideshow in my secondary display while the primary display is left for other apps. You can even ‘Like’ a photo if you want and quickly get back to where you were, without interrupting the slideshow.

Overall, while Instadesk is a great app, it feels a little unpolished to me. Having tried the other two apps in the post as well, I’d personally much prefer the custom, streamlined look of those apps than this native, full-blown look. So while Instadesk is functionally great, the UI keeps me from recommending it to anyone. It is available on the Mac App Store for $1.99.

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Team Smoking Apples talks about OS X Lion

by Preshit Deorukhkar

Team Smoking Apples talks about OS X Lion

by Preshit Deorukhkar on August 4, 2011

It has now been two-weeks ago since Apple opened the cage doors and let out a roaring lion to the masses. We’re hopeful that we prepared you enough to get all set to install OS X Lion onto your Macs and welcome the bucket loads of new features that it brought along. Here at Smoking Apples, the team has spent the last several days immersed in curiosity and excitement exploring everything that Apple’s latest and great OS had to offer and have taken some time to outline our thoughts about OS X Lion.

Ankur Gupta:

When Apple released the Magic Trackpad back in July ’10, it made little sense to get one until Apple took the wraps off Lion at the ‘Back to Mac’ event in Oct ’10. While some might say Magic Mouse does the job just fine, it only offers a peak into the glorious world of Lion filled with multi-touch gestures, natural scrolling, iOS-type scrollbars and other neat tricks lifted straight from iOS. These are best enjoyed using a Trackpad and I cannot emphasize this fact enough.

I’ve had access to Lion on my iMac all along the releases of the Developer Previews and I have had a love-hate relationship with it. I’m not a big fan of the rubber-band scrolling. It is intrusive and slows down your productivity as content takes time to roll into position. iOS-style scrollbars or scrollers have also intruded into Lion. These monochrome narrow lozenges appear only when scrolling action is taking place and disappear few moments after it completes. Yes, they do save space but they are overlap the content and that annoys the <redacted> out of me. What’s worse is that there is no way to turn either of these effects off. Moreover, I struggled getting accustomed to natural scrolling; but the Magic Mouse isn’t the right device to take the plunge anyway, in my opinion.

Moving on, Lion has way more good stuff to counter all that I’ve outlined above and it begins with Mission Control. I’ve never been a pro-active user of Spaces but Mission Control has been a game changer for me. It has simplified Space and window management so much that is has forced me to accommodate Spaces in my workflow. Some of the other Lion features that have caught my fancy include Auto Save and Versioning. Cmd-S shortcut has lost its mojo with Auto Save feature that automatically creates a snapshot virtually every time you make a change to a document. Versions maintains the track record of all the changes that have been made and you can go back in time to restore a particular version of a document. What’s really impressive is that all this stuff takes place in the background without the folder getting cluttered with multiple copies of the same file.

A lot of apps have gotten substantial upgrades and Safari is my favorite among them. Full screen mode, integrated Downloads window and much better memory management are good enough to prevent me from embarking on the Chrome ship. The Reading List feature might interest a few but Instapaper users like me will dismiss it in a single glance. Mail has risen like a phoenix with a revamped look and dozens of new features but I prefer Sparrow Mail as it offers better Gmail integration. Being an ardent Fantastical user, the new iCal does not impress me either. Preview too has received several subtle changes and I absolutely love the refreshed look that it dons. Finally, Finder too has received some love from Apple and it ditches the archaic look to flaunt a monochrome sidebar. The ‘All My Files’ is a nice addition that aggregates files in a single place. There are always subtle changes that blow your mind away. One such thing is the transformation of multi-item selections into a neat compressed list-view representation from the earlier near invisible image of the source. Also, the new ‘Arrange By’ option that neatly sorts files into groups is more than handy. One quirk that remains in Finder is the completely random view-state that a folder is presented in. Finder behaves like a truant providing no clue what view to expect leaving you with no option but to manually set things right.

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Embellish your Music Library with Tagalicious

by Ankur Gupta

Embellish your Music Library with Tagalicious

by Ankur Gupta on August 1, 2011

Album Artwork got a whole new meaning when Apple debuted the Coverflow UI half a decade ago. It seemed like an awesome way to browse through your albums until you found out that half the songs in your iTunes library lacked album artwork or did not have the proper metadata. It is a struggle to dig up metadata/artwork and manually add it to individual songs. Tagalicious steps in here and makes it a pain free one-click process. It beautifies your library by fetching metadata, artwork and lyrics for your songs with a single click. If you get your songs from shady places, your iTunes library desperately needs a Tagalicious makeover.

Tagalicious features a three-column interface wherein the left-most column houses the library and the playlists, songs occupy the middle column while the existing and fetched metadata/artwork is displayed in the right-most column. One of the best features of Tagalicious is batch-lookup. Select a bunch of songs or your entire library for that matter and Tagalicious will scour the web for tags for the selected songs. Songs whose details have been grabbed, display a circular badge with three-dots. The badge shows a red exclamation mark for songs whose data could not be fetched. Once the new tags have been pulled from the web, you can mix and match between already existing metadata and the new one. So for instance, you can select the track name, artist, genre from the fetched metadata but retain the album name. That brings us to the question, why would you ever want to do that? Tagalicious uses intelligent algorithm to detect songs, pretty much similar to Shazam, but it’s not perfect. Songs sometimes make their way into multiple albums and this is where the conspiracy begins. I might have the whole album but Tagalicious cunningly detects one of the songs as part of another album. This brings us to the point about trusting Tagalicious judgement. I would say Tagalicious gets it accurate 95% of the time. There might be few cases like the one I mentioned above, but overall it does a fine job.

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Lion cooks up a sumptuous Indian meal

by Ankur Gupta

Lion cooks up a sumptuous Indian meal

by Ankur Gupta on July 28, 2011

Apple introduced 250+ new features in Lion but only a few of them hogged the limelight during the launch. It’s always fun to explore a new OS and go out on mini-adventure trips hunting for new features buried somewhere deep inside the dungeons of System Preferences and other dark places. And while doing that, you have those ‘Eureka’ moments reassuring you of your time well spent. In this post we’ll be looking at some of the features that are targeted towards Indian users. A bunch of Indian regional languages have made their way into Input Sources, there is built in support for the Rupee symbol but the best of them all is the addition to two Indian voices to the Text to Speech engine. Let’s look at each one of them in detail and how you can enjoy them on your Lion installation.

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