Google+ updated to support full resolution photo uploads as well as the ability to add a +1 on photos and search. Here’s the release notes:

• full resolution photo uploads
• search
• photo +1
• bug fixes and performance improvements

It’s not mentioned in the notes, but the icon was also updated to reflect Google’s new favicon logo.

Now, who’s waiting for the update that turns Google+ into a universal application for both iPhone and iPad?

Google+ is available on the iPhone for free.

[App Store link]

We’ve kicked off another week here at TiPb so you’ll want to make sure you stay tuned, not only to the blogs for all the latest and greatest news, help and how-to’s but also the TiPb forums as well. Have some questions? Need some help? Or maybe you just want to chat — either way, the TiPb forums is where you’ll want to be. You can register now for the forums and get started today! Check out some of the threads below:

• iPhone 4S Forum: iPhone 4 vs. iPhone 4S – Which to choose?
• iOS5 Forum: Safari not remembering passwords, anyone else?
• iPad Forum: Risk in buying a jailbroken iPad 2 — is there any?
• iPhone Apps and Games Forum Another native Google+ app

If you’re not already a member of the TiPb Forums, register now!

How do you shop on your iPhone or iPad? Do you browse websites in Safari on your device the same way you would on your desktop? Or do you use dedicated apps? From Apple’s own Apple Store app to Best Buy to Walmart to Bloomingdales, a lot of big retailer have dedicated apps in the App Store these days. Even the big online retailers like Amazon, eBay, and Etsy, the ones that made their fortunes on the web, have dedicated apps. Some of them are pretty sweet too, with slick interfaces and cool effects that make the shopping experience just that much better.

If you have the option, do you prefer to create an account or just check out as a guest? There’s certainly convenience to having a frequently used store like Amazon keep your shipping and even payment info recorded, but for smaller stores without big brand names, privacy might be more important.

Do you typically pay by credit card or do you prefer services like Paypal that sit in the middle? Most credit card companies have fairly good fraud protection, but Paypal can be easier and quicker to simply log into.

What about the checkbox for customer mailings, do you like getting sent special promotions and newsletters, or do you just want to shop as you so wish and be left alone and not bothered afterwards?

It’s really nice to be able to shop on your iPhone when you’re on the go, or curl up and browse on your iPad when you have a moment’s peace. Which one do you prefer to shop with, and how do you prefer to get your shopping done?

HoursTracker is an app for keeping track of your time and earnings at your hourly job or as an independent contractor. You can clock-in and out to as many jobs as you need, and HoursTracker will do all the work and even calculate your earnings, including overtime, so you can view them by day, week, month, or job.

I must say, the iPhone version looks quite beautiful.

Keep track of your time and earnings at your hourly job, or track time as an independent contractor. HoursTracker makes it simple and easy. Jump in and start a timer with two taps of the finger. Or, track your time by entering in your punch times manually. View your earnings (even overtime!) in the app, or export via e-mail in text or CSV format and work with it however you need to.

• Tracks your time while you use other apps (or power off your phone!) without running in the background. No extra drain on your battery just because you are clocked in to your job in HoursTracker.
• Add as many jobs as you need to track, there's no limit.
• Assign a pay rate and HoursTracker will calculate your earnings, even taking overtime into account.
• Supports daily and weekly overtime with two thresholds and rates for each. So if you get paid time and a half over 8 hours and double-time over 12 hours or by the week (or both!), HoursTracker has you covered.
• Track your time in real-time by clocking in/out while you work. Watch as time and earnings accumulate in real-time.
• Already working but forgot to clock in? No problem, use "Start Clock At…" and start counting time from when you started work.
• Clock in to any number of jobs at a time, or set it up to have only one timer running at a time automatically.
• Enter time manually — just choose a start date/time and an end date/time or duration. Add comments, change the hourly rate for that time, and easily subtract breaks.
• Flexible rounding options to automatically round your time worked can be configured per-job.
• Set up pay period details and view your time by weekly, bi-weekly, semi-monthly, or monthly pay period on the Pay Periods tab.
• View your time and earnings by day, or by calendar week or month, or by job, on the Entries tab.
• Date formats and currency symbols respect your device's international settings.
• Export data via e-mail in text or CSV formats in the message body or attachment. Export all jobs, or any selection of jobs, for all-time or between any two dates. Combine all entries into one daily summary, or export each one including the clock in / out times.
• Full edit and delete of jobs and hours worked. Easily copy a job if a new job will have similar settings.
• Basic cloud data backup/restore included free with the app. Enhanced Backup services also available, including automatic backups and moving data between your iOS devices. iTunes File Sharing is enabled, so you can keep your data entirely under your control if you prefer.

Giveaway

Developer Carlos Ribas kindly gave us promo codes to give away to 5 lucky readers! For a chance to win, just leave comment below telling us which version you want, iPhone or iPad, and about how many hours a week you expect to track with HoursTracker.

HoursTracker is available on the iPhone and iPad for $2.99 each.

[iPhone App Store link] [iPad - App Store link]

Have an app you’d love to see featured on TiPb? Email us at iosapps@tipb.com, tell us about your app (include an iTunes link), and we’ll take a look.

Last one left holding this steaming spud gets their names in the senate hearing!

The For iPhone Lens for the iPhone 4S and the iPhone 4 comes with a tripod, a holder, a case, and large zoom lens that can take your photos all up close and personal.

Assembly is easy and the results are good. It’s not priced in the thousands like Nikon or Canon lenses, so set your expectations according, but it does exactly what it claims — adds an 8x optical zoom to your iPhone photography.

I tried it out on both an iPhone 4 and and iPhone 4S. Both take good photos and the iPhone 4S takes great photos for a phone, but the built in digital zoom is… really not great. So, my primary concern here was for something affordable that handled optical zoom but otherwise got out of the way and let the iPhone camera do the heavy lifting. And that’s what I got.

If you don’t want to lug around a DSLR or even a pocket camera, but still want something to help you take pictures of your kids soccer game, your favorite band in concert, your special someone accepting an award, wild life on your nature walk, or anything else you need to get a closer look at but just can’t get closer to, the For iPhone Lens is definitely something to consider.

Source: Photojojo

For today only, the TiPb Store has the OtterBox Reflex Series Case for iPad 2 on sale for only $39.95!. Get them before they’re gone!

OtterBox Reflex Series Case for iPad 2 now!

Justin Williams from Carpeaqua breaks down the egregiously horrible user experience involved in just trying to get an issue of GQ, Esquire, or Sports Illustrated magazine loaded on the iPad.

Reading magazines on the iPad is an exercise in frustration. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. As great a device and, more importantly, platform as Apple has created, magazine publishers have done nothing short of fumble the snap in their own end zone.

Williams provides a list of 10 things publishers can do to help improve things, and it’s a good list but it doesn’t address the core problem — publishers are the wrong people to fix it.

The record labels didn’t create iTunes. Apple did. The record companies still, to this day, over a decade later, don’t understand the fundamentals of selling content in the digital age.

Jim Dalrymple of The Loop nails it:

The first rule of any business should be "don't piss off your customers." Many publishers are failing.

Imagine if, instead of iTunes we had the Warner Brothers app, the Harry Potter Movie app, the U2 app, and a myriad other, fragmented, experientially challenged, old-model ad festooned crapware.

It would be untenable. It is untenable.

Forget publishers. We need iMagazine.

Source: Carpeaqua via The Loop

• Danny Boy: Guide Danny Boy through 32 high quality levels collecting coins while avoiding obstacles and killing birds. [$0.99 for iPhone - App Store link]

• Weight Controller: an application that will allow you control your weight in an easy and simple way, giving you all the information you need to control how you lose or gain weight in an efficient and professional fashion. [$1.99 for iPhone and iPad - App Store link]

• Nature Sounds(sleep and relax): Do you wish to get close to the nature and feel free from the problems that surround you? Do you feel that the stress of everyday life deprives you of your ability to focus, relax, sleep – in short, affects your overall well being? Then this app is the best one for you! All pictures and sounds in this app are professionally mastered! [$1.99 for iPhone - App Store link]

• Photo Wallpapers: Put your Facebook, Instagram and personal photos in exclusively designed, custom wallpapers. [$0.99 for iPhone - App Store link]

• My Life In Numbers: Lets you measure and celebrate events in your life in unusual and different ways. Find out when you will be one billion seconds old, how far the earth has travelled today, how much the richest man in the world has earned since you started work. [Free for iPhone - App Store link]

Giveaway

The good folks at Reapptive LTD have given us four promo codes for Danny Boy to give away to our readers! For a chance to win, just leave a comment below!

Any other big app or game releases or updates today?

Have an app you’d love to see featured on TiPb? Email us at iosapps@tipb.com, tell us about your app (include an iTunes link), and we’ll take a look.

A new jailbreak mod by the name of H1Siri claims to allow a fully working port of Siri on the iPhone 4, but this one comes with a number of questionable aspects.

First of all, the package is available via a custom Cydia repo from a relatively unknown group of hackers that also houses pirated materials, so there’s a major warning sign right off the bat. The biggest drawback, however, is that the port uses a custom server to process requests on the back end instead of Apple’s own servers. In other words, you’ll be sending your personal information to who knows where without any assurance that you’re information will be kept safe.

Additionally, since this mod uses said custom servers that have apparently been hit pretty hard, there’s no telling when it will actually work for you. iDB tried to get it working without success shortly after it became available, and other users have reported issues with the Settings app not functioning properly along with sporadic reboots.

Previous attempts by prominent developers have proven successful, but those required access to a jailbroken iPhone 4S for Siri-specific files. According to developer chpwn, H1Siri also uses these copyrighted binaries from the iPhone 4S, so we’re guessing the legal implications surrounding this aren’t good.

Given the number of issues laden with this release, we’d caution you stay away until something more solid and sourced is available.

Source: iDB

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Georgia, Rene, Seth, and Engadget’s Richard Lai talk iPad 3 on LTE, iOS code names, Facebook buying Gowalla, Infinity Blade II, Apple vs Samsung and Motorola, and Office for iPad. This is iPad Live!

Hosts

• Georgia (@GeorgiaTiPb)
• Rene Ritchie (@reneritchie)
• Seth Clifford (@sethclifford)

Richard Lai (@richardlai)

Credits

Thanks to the TiPb iPad Accessory Store for sponsoring the podcast, and to everyone who showed up for the live chat!

Music Hear me Roar by iPad Live theme song contest winner, DieselJesus!

This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Over at Technologizer, Harry McCracken has posted his thoughts on how the iPad 2 has become his favorite computer, and number one device for professional content creation. Something he’s been using it for for the last 3 months.

With the iPad [...] you can devote nearly every second of your time to the task at hand, rather than babysitting a balky computer. I don't feel like I'm "using an iPad to write." I'm just writing. It's a far more tranquil, focused experience than using a PC or Mac. It's also easier to dive in, do a bit of work as time allows, then dive out–especially since the iPad's instant-on feature is more reliably instant than the alleged instant-on capabilities of traditional computers.

I know I gravitate to my iPad for the more mundane stuff like reading emails, looking up information, responding to SMS with iMessages, and writing up this blog post. But I still go to my iMac for more fine grained control and power computing.

McCracken, however, uses his iPad 2 with a hardware keyboard and likes it better than his MacBook Air for computing on-the-go because of the built in 3G connectivity and much longer battery life.

Check out McCracken’s full article for a list of accessories and apps he uses, and a description of how he uses them, then come back here and tell us what you think — is the iPad getting closer to replacing your traditional computer?

Source: Technologizer

Mobile Nations 12: 2011 mobile gift guide iPhone Live 182: 2011 iPhone gift guide ZENandTECH 25: Stress-free shopping iPad Live: 2011 iPad gift guide Girls Gone Gadgets 02: 2011 gadget gift guide Mobile Nations Holiday Gift Guides Superpage	ASUS Transformer Prime Review Another Galaxy Nexus at the FCC points toward possible proper AT&T love CyanogenMod updates on CM9 progress, reminds us all it doesn’t use Carrier IQ Android Central Podcast
2012 BBX BlackBerry Roadmap Preview – London, Lisbon, Milan, Nevada, Black Forest RIM responds: We don't put CarrierIQ on BlackBerry Smartphones, carriers shouldn't either but T-Mobile does Win a BBX BlackBerry from CrackBerry.com CrackBerry.com Podcast	Whitman: decision on webOS to come "in the next two weeks"; "It was good, and we didn’t even get a chance." Picsel Smart Office now available on webOS smartphones webOS backups failing? PalmCast Podcast
Apple releases iOS 5.1 beta and XCode 4.3 to developers 2011 iPhone and iPad Jailbreak starters guide Regarding Carrier IQ, iPhone and customer insight mining Win the iOS device of your dreams in the TiPb holiday giveaway! App Giveaway: Infinity Blade II for iPhone and iPad	Native-code access "on the radar" for Windows Phone developers Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore confirms no Carrier IQ software on Windows Phones HTC Titan’s graphics stutter tied to SRS Enhancement? WPCentral Podcast

 

Infinity Blade II has received an update that looks to address the issues that a lot of users have been experiencing. The details are a little scarce on what exactly the update address specifically. We can only assume it will fix the start up crashes that a lot of disappointed gamers have been experiencing.

What’s New in Version 1.0.1, Balance tweaks, optimizations, and bug fixes.

The problem appears to be with users of the first generation iPad and iPod touch fourth generation. The app crashes at start up; so hopefully that will be addressed in this latest update. If you experienced issues before the update, let us know if this solves your problem.

[App Store - link]

 

iPad Live, the best iPad podcast in the universe, is coming your way tonight, so get your snacks in order, pour a tasty beverage or several, and get ready to rock!

Time: 9pm ET, 6pm PT, 2am GMT.

Place: http://www.tipb.com/live

If you have any questions or topics you’d like us to discuss, just leave them in the comments then come be part of the show!

(And yes, you can watch from iPhone via Ustream Viewer app (here’s how) — just search for “mobilenations” and iPad (we recommend Duet Browser.)