Amid a deluge of rain, it looks like spring is finally here, so finally you’ll be able to keep your eyes glued to a screen outside instead of inside. With that in mind, we’ve pulled together another five pop-culture apps, tips, and tricks for you Byters. This week: a site that makes an exercise playlist for you, an app that lets you never miss a beat, an iPhone case that Steve Jobs hates, a way to turn the cookie aisle into a symphony, and the latest entry in Vulture’s Skeuomorph Chronicles.
Oh, and as ever, we wait by the VultureBytes@gmail.com in-box for your letters.
Jog.fm is a website that asks for how fast you bike/run/walk, and then recommends the music that matches your pace based on the songs’ beats per minute. It’s a smart little site, and about the only thing that’s made us realize how great it is to follow “I’m on a Boat” with Gnarls Barkley. Our only critique: We’d like to be as meta as possible but we can’t seem to find the pace that puts Beck’s “1000 Bpm” on a playlist.
PRICE: Free.
If iPhones are going to track our every movement, they might as well bring our music with it. Seamless does just that by wirelessly linking your phone to your iTunes. (Something that Steve Jobs should have already made possible.) Install the app on your phone and it’ll let you volley your music back and forth between your desktop and your phone, without any pause in between. Just think: You’ll be able to run out of the house and start “Bohemian Rhapsody” just where you left off. And if that particular example has never been an issue for you — in which case, there’s not nearly enough Freddy Mercury in your life — think how useful it would be for audiobooks or podcasts, which are much longer and harder to pick up where you left off than a six-minute rock opera.
PRICE: $1.
An iPod case that looks like Steve Jobs frozen in carbonite pairs George Lucas and the man to whom he sold Pixar: If the carbonite had been mined from Moria, this case would complete a geek trifecta. Unfortunately, this iPhone case was too cool for its own good. Shortly after it made the rounds on all the gadget blogs, Apple sent a cease and desist letter to its designer, Greg Koenig. But, as anyone who has hung out at Tatooine for long enough knows, banning an item only sends it straight underground to the black market. As of this posting, Jobs in Carbonite is going for $150 on eBay, and what’s geekier than owning a collector’s edition iPhone case?
PRICE: $35, with $10 shipping and handling.
Other than an ode to Trader Joe’s, grocery stores haven’t inspired the creation of much music. Until now! The Barcodas app makes music from barcodes, using the different line widths and spacing to make a unique beat and tone for every product. Surely at least one of you can turn this into some hipster DJ set/art project. Or just do the former and call it the latter. That’s what a real artist would do.
PRICE: $1.
Because nobody else keeps track of skeuomorphs — those modern-day design features meant to mimic an antiquated technology — we feel like we have to. First we brought you the app that makes your iPad look like a boom box, and now comes an even older-school variation: a program that turns your iPad into a record player. The creators write that they missed “the old way of listening to music, that familiar crackling sound, the very smell of vinyl” so they made a “sleek vinyl record player for you to carry with you everywhere you go.” They haven’t actually mastered the smell, but you can flick through a “crate” to pick your music on your iPad, pick up a virtual needle to move to another track or specific place in a song, and the program adds a little extra static to elicit visceral pangs of LP nostalgia. This should only be listened to while sitting cross-legged and staring at liner notes.
PRICE: $5
