Macintosh/iPhone software update round-up – January 19, 2009

Macintosh and iPhone software updates and announcements for January 19, 2009:

• Cell Ban, now available exclusively for the iPhone, gives travelers instant access to cell phone laws in the United States and abroad. Depending on the state our country you’re traveling, hands-free or texting citations come with hefty fines. What’s worse, in some countries cell phone infractions can land unsuspecting drivers in jail.
• iRingPro has announced that a portion of every iPhone ringtone sale going forward will benefit Children of Nepal, an organization that provides education, meals and medical care, to impoverished Nepali children. Children of Nepal’s mission is to provide impoverished Nepali children with a positive, nurturing, and stimulating environment in their early years. Such care and education is considered critical in building a sense of safety and a foundation of opportunity for these needy children.
• iPhone application, Talk Radio, will audio stream Barack Obama’s historic Presidential Inauguration, Tuesday, January 19, 2009. At the request of both customers and news agencies, Talk Radio will add a special host program for the inauguration. Users of the application will now be able to participate in this historic event by audio stream from anywhere in the world where their phone has a network connection.
• Saltlick Labs has announce the release of Pocket Workout for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Pocket Workout is an easy-to-use, highly effective calisthenic exercise program stuffed into a mobile application you can take anywhere. Designed for travelers, life-hackers, active parents, students on a budget and kids, Pocket Workout lets users create customized exercise routines based on test results, a weekly schedule, and improvement goals through a unique personal training system.
• Limit Point Software is offering a promotion of it’s products Mailings and iForm. With the purchase of “The Mailings-iForm Bundle” you receive activation codes for both products and free upgrades forever. Mailings is a full featured application for batch emailing that delivers any web page or plain text document with attachments to multiple recipients for marketing, news announcements, product updates etc.
• Synectics Business Solutions, Inc. has announced a new Business Version of their software to complement their well-established online backup service. Built upon the same modern infrastructure as their Enterprise version, BackJack’s Business version delivers more cost-effective, simpler and more secure online backup for business Mac users. BackJack remains the most trusted name for the online protection and recovery of critical files.
• Creolabs has released PayShield, the most complete way to have full access to your PayPal account for the iPhone and iPod touch. With PayShield you can easily check your online balance, get transaction details, refund a transaction, send money to anyone with an email address and much more.
• Ironic Software has released OpenMeta, a new open sourced standard for metadata on OS X. OpenMeta, working with established OS X technologies, ushers in a new wave of standards based document management solutions. These solutions can scale from single laptops through to large organizations. Ironic is also releasing free tools to work with the OpenMeta standard. ‘Tagger’ is an application that allows tagging and rating any document, while omtool is a command line utility.
• Thousands of people are already playing beamME/Up; the only contest that gives you a chance to win a trip just for meeting new people. Celebrate the Inauguration with beamME for the iPhone – the world’s most popular mobile contact exchange app. Every new contact is a sweepstakes entry, and bonuses are available for completing fun challenges through 1/24.
• Big Stone Phone today has shipped a brand new application for the iPhone and iPod Touch named Soundbite. Make your own sound clips for instant replay and customize them with an icon, name and number of loops. Soundbite 1.0 lets you record your own snippets of sound to play back at just the right moments. Unlike other soundboard apps, Soundbite enables users to create their own collection of custom sounds to entertain friends at a moment’s notice.
• Satimage-software has announced Smile 3.4, a data visualization and automation software for Mac OS X. Its plotting interface makes it easier to plot data by importing files, specifying intermediate computations and access display settings, all in the same interface. You can also work by writing scripts which perform the data processing tasks and which make the data visualization graphs. Such scripts can be integrated to a custom interface or to an automatized workflow.
• For iPhone 3G lovers looking to enhance the sound quality from their mobile speaker, Ten One Design, LLC, a New York-based design firm who created the world’s first iPhone-compatible stylus, has just launched the SoundClip, which amplifies iPhone audio by 10dB between 5kH and 20kHz.
• Brightspark 3.0, Inc., has announced the release of a new iPhone and iPod software tool to help golfers improve their golf swing. MyGolfSwing Version 1 uses video and sounds to help golfers perfect their “tempo” and practice their tempo wherever they have room to stand and swing their arms.