mihnea miculescu

digital pr rants & a motley of tech blabber

Glastonbury Mobile App

In a time when almost every big brand out there has some sort of mobile app just for the sake of having one, Orange has come up with one that's actually extremely useful for anyone going to Glastonbury this year. I quite like seeing this festival communication frenzy among mobile operators - and Orange seems to be winning at this point. Remember the Vodafone charging truck announced about 2 weeks ago? Orange has charging tents, but which are available for everyone (not just its customers).

(download)
The app's features include:
  • Schedule and programmable ‘My Planner’ in association with the Guardian Guide allowing the user to customise their own line up for the weekend
  • Interactive map with one click ‘now and next’ listings for stages and ‘mood map’
  • News section featuring up to date content from Glastonbury Festival and The Guardian including direct updates from the festival over the weekend
  • Ability to share line-ups via Facebook before and during the festival

And it's available to everyone for free on the App Store, the Android Market and the Ovi Store. Check out a video of how it works right here.

 

WhatsApp: a true cross-platform IM app

Whatsapp

At last, long gone is the reign of single-platform instant messaging apps (see BBM, the more recent FaceTime, etc) - or dodgy/late mobile versions of the most popular IM apps (see Yahoo Messenger, Skype, etc) - or even bulky third-party apps that aggregate all of your IM services. For some reason, no one had managed to produce a fully-functional cross-platform mobile IM app - until now.

If you've ever received some seemingly spammy message from one of your friends saying something along the lines of "I've started using WhatsApp and it's great" - you shouldn't have deleted it. Because WhatsApp is actually the first one to actually work (in a very BBM-esque manner).

  • it works on every major mobile platform: Android, iOS, Symbian (for Nokia) and BlackBerry OS - I haven't heard of a Windows Phone 7 version yet but I'm sure it's bound to happen pretty soon
  • it actually works between these platforms, whether you're exchanging text or photos, videos, sound clips or your location (Symbian doesn't do the last three yet, but that may be due to OS limitations)
  • no need for another ID - your username is your phone number and it just cross-references with your phone book to put together your contact list (and thus only people who have your number can see you in their WhatsApp contact list)
  • they're very well integrated with each platform
  • the developers are very active (I use the Android version and there's an update at least every week)
  • it's quite efficient in terms of data traffic - I've been using it heavily for about two months and it has only generated about 35mb of traffic (this includes file exchanges)

Give it a spin now, it's free (update: except for iOS, no surprise there)...

Office for Mac 2011

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Office for Mac 2011 is finally out, and I've been tinkering around with it for the past few days. I do find it to be a huge improvement over 2008 - here are some thoughts:

  • Dodgy email client Entourage is out and Outlook for Mac is finally back in - apparently they've redesigned it from the ground up in the Cocoa development framework and put in most of the features from the latest version of Outlook for Windows. All my email accounts are aggregated in Gmail so setup was quite simple - and so far Outlook is certainly working much better than expected. It's also much quicker.
  • Word, PowerPoint and Excel are much more stable (for example, 2008 had an extremely annoying problem with switching between documents on different screens)
  • Word has a new distraction-free full screen mode that just works
  • The splash screens are very à la iWork
  • The new icons are finally Mac-worthy