eXtensions: AMITIAE

AMITIAE - Sunday 30 December 2012

New Year iOS App Updates: Line Camera, Postcards on the Run and Times of India

By Graham K. Rogers

iTunes

I check for updates regularly, but in the last few days, as most of the world has been celebrating Christmas or preparing for the New Year, the cupboards have been bare. I went through the motions on this Sunday morning, as the New Year countdown approaches and found three updates to apps ready for me.

Line Camera

The communications app, Line, has taken off somewhat in the last few months and is widely used by many people here. This weekend I have been chatting one on one with a Blackberry using friend and it is seamless: for that alone it scores highly.

The developer, NAVER Japan Corporation, have a number of related apps. One of these is Line camera which has just been updated to 3.1.1. This is an app for decorating photos - a number of filters and other features are provided - then sending them using Line. The 3.1.1 update reports that crashes have been fixed.

Postcard On The Run

This is an app that, as the title suggests, uses photographs from the iPhone camera or Library to design a postcard and, when sent to the developer, these are sent using the US Postal Service: snail mail from an iPhone. I reviewed Postcards On The Run last December and was quite happy with the app.

A similar service was offered a while back by Posterino on the Mac until Swiss Post stopped this. There is also a similar feature on the app ColorStrokes which also works well.

The 2.6.1 update to Postcards On The Run has added a delete video option and there are miscellaneous bug fixes for past projects and video.

Times of India

The vast Indian sub-continent and its huge population are served by a number of rather good newspapers and the print medium appears to be less in decline there than in other countries. A large number of Indians live outside the country and this may be one of the reasons for the success of the Times of India app for the iPad. There is also a version for the iPhone, but these are separate apps.

Another reason for the success is that this is a rather good execution of a newspaper in digital format. The text is not in the JPG or PDF format favoured by some online newspapers, and the way in which a sidebar links to - then displays - stories instantly, rather than the laboured rendering that other such apps force on the user, is refreshing. A good selection of images and some video downloads complete the fullness. Being India, there is a lot of interesting news as well, so the whole thing is rather vibrant.

The 1.6 update to the Times of India app takes this a little further with the addition of new sections. In addition, thee are technical improvements to the app: saved items are not deleted after an update; and there are miscellaneous bug fixes.

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs.

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