iMore isn't just a website, it's a community fueled by millions of people who comment on the stories, give and get help on the iPhone and iPad forums, and join us each and every month in discovering great new ways to enjoy our iPhones, iPod touches, and iPads. This month we chose Ty (aka EmceeGeek) and she is exactly that kind of super engaged, incredibly helpful, truly awesome iMore community member.

But enough from us, let's let Ty do the talking.

Tell us a little about yourself?

My name is Ty, I’m an unordinary girl from Metro Detroit. I’ve been into technology my whole life, and have been fortunate enough to have the means to support my Tech Addiction. I’m a student majoring in psychology; pre-major computer science. I am also a YouTube partner; with hopes of expanding my channel. I just need more subscribers! EmceeGeek Channel

How long have you been an iPhone or iPad user?

I’ve been a iPhone user since the 1st Gen was available. I had it jailbroken, and was using it on T-Mobile. I haven’t missed a model since. I started using the iPad when the iPad 2 was released. Stood in line at Best Buy on release day and was hooked! When the 1st gen came out I wasn’t interested enough, I knew the 2nd gen would have a lot more in store; knowing Apple’s history.

What brought you to iOS?

I’ve been a Apple user all my life, so when they moved into phones and tablets it was just a given. I love the interface, how smooth it runs, its user-friendly and great for those who are just learning.

What brought you to iMore?

I like forums and iMore was a iOS community that I felt fit. iMore grabbed my attention back when I was switching between the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry; and were using CrackBerry and the one for Android. I just so happen to look up and there iMore was. =)

What are your favorite apps?

• Twitter
• Instagram
• Nostagio
• Gifboom
• Tapatalk

What are some of your favorite accessories?

• OtterBox Defender Series
• Speck Products
• ZooGue Cases and Stylus
• Incipio Products

What are you most looking forward to from Apple in the future?

I’m looking forward to seeing an actual Apple TV set (rumored) and the new iPhone. Oh, and I can’t forget the new iMac.

Thanks Ty!

If you haven't joined our incredible community yet, there's never been a better time. Meet great people, get help with your iPhone and iPad, share your ideas, and enjoy fantastic conversation. Perfect for newcomers and pros alike — Join now and maybe you will be picked for our reader spotlight along with a free iPhone case of your choice!

Twitter for iPhone isn’t your early adopter, power user app. It’s not designed fro the gadget nerd with tons of followers who engages in non-stop repartees with like-minded friends, peers, and colleagues all day. It for the new mainstream Twitter user who has very few followers, follows tons of celebrities, and is looking for more and better ways to find something… anything… to do on Twitter. Like it or not, since the last redesign, that’s the the official Twitter app’s target user now. And that’s who they’re improving things for with this update.

Discover promises “more interesting and timely content that matters to you”. Basically that means you see a paid placement on top (mine’s a Yahoo! add I could not possibly care less about out), a hashtag (mine’s #NewFront, which is impenetrable to me), a trending tweet (mine is something about an Ex-Liberian president that it says is trending but I’ve never expressed any interest in), a trio of recent friend activities, including their retweets, follows, and favorites, a trio of additional trending hashtags and terms, and a trio of people Twitter recommends you follow.

Activity appears below the redesigned stories in Discover. Now you can tap any story once to see Tweets about a particular trend or news article. You can then read the entire story or join the conversation by replying, retweeting or favoriting related Tweets.

Again, I’m not the Lady Gaga following nouveau Twitter type, I’m not their target user, but all of this is completely lost on me. This tab could disappear tomorrow and my enjoyment of the app would only increase.

Search has also been improved, and claims to be simpler and more error-proof with different spellings and related terms. The search box is present in both the Connect and Discover tabs, the former of which prioritizes @names and full names, the latter of which prioritizes #hashtags or keywords. You can also get a search history in the Discover tab.

We've also made a few improvements specifically for iPhone: when you tap the search box in Discover, you'll see your most recent queries. You can also go directly to someone's profile when searching for a username in Connect.

I usually prefer one search box to rule them all, Twitter optimizing different search boxes for different types of content works well, even if it adds extra cognitive load by making users choose the “proper” tab before they can query the system.

Notifications have also been made more robust, and you can now be alerted to tweets, retweets, and follows, in addition to the usual @mentions and direct messages (DMs). It brings Twitter for iPhone up to parity with some other clients, but is also a power user feature in what’s clearly a mainstream targeted app. Unless Lady Gaga is retweeting and favoriting me left and right, this feature would have felt far more at home in the older version of Twitter.

Overall, the user interface remains gorgeous, the functionality solid, the implementation silky smooth, and the focus on Twitter’s new mainstream audience commendable. It’s just not the good old Twitter many of us knew and loved, and it’s a little sad there’s no official Twitter Pro app that could have somehow melded the new experience with the old, more power-user centric functionality and layout.

Free – Download now

Source: Twitter blog

Here’s another gem to add to your puzzle game collection – Polymer for iPhone. In Polymer, your goal is create shapes, called polymers, by sliding around the rows and columns. A polymer isn’t complete unless all the ends (which are marked with black dots) are closed.

As I was playing polymer and thinking about what I was going to say in this review, my mind kept wandering into thoughts of a Rubik’s Cube and the similarities it has have with Polymer. I was pleased to discover Polymer’s description in the App Store claims the game “combines the logic of Rubik's Cube, the sliding mechanism of Chuzzle, and the creativity of Lego.” Bingo – that’s a perfect description.

Polymer has three game modes, but only one of them is initially available. It’s called Two Minutes, and as its name implies, you are given two minutes to create as many polymers as you can. To create a polymer, you simply slide around the rows and columns to match up the pieces. All the black dots on the pieces must be connected for a polymer to be complete — or, as I like to think of it, all the ends must be closed up. Larger polymers give more points.

The more you play, the more points you earn and the more features you can unlock, including additional shapes (which make game-play more difficult), and more game modes. If you’re impatient, you can also unlock these features with in-app purchases, but it’s not required.

The other two game modes are called One Polymer and Bombs. In One Polymer, you have as much time as you want to create the biggest, highest point-value polymer that you can. In Bombs, you must destroy the pieces that are bombs before they destroy you. Again, these game modes will be unlocked as you earn more points by playing the game, or you can unlock them for $0.99 each.

There is also an in-app store where you can purchase other color schemes for $0.99 each, or you can unlock all content, including all game modes and color schemes for $2.99.

The Good

• Very fun and challenging
• Great music and sound effects
• In-app purchases aren’t required to gain content
• More color schemes available as in-app purchases

The Bad

• Two minutes is great, but would love to see longer time options

The Conclusion

Polymer is my new go-to puzzle game. It’s a lot of fun and very challenging. Combined with the beautiful colors and awesome music and sound effects — I’m hooked.

$0.99 – Download Now

Dag Kittlaus, creator of Siri, recently spoke at an economic development event in his hometown of Michigan City, Indiana, and iMore had the chance to listen in and ask him some questions about the challenges they faced in implementing Siri and where he thinks the future of technology is headed. According to Kittlaus, interfaces such as Siri and talking to machines is something we can expect to see a lot more of in the very near future.

In 2007, after becoming frustrated with some management decisions at Motorola, Kittlaus connected with the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA. He was hired to come look at their technology and figure out what possible products could be made to be commercialized. This is where he met Adam Cheyer and Tom Gruber, who co-founded Siri. Their first idea actually involved studying twins and DNA. Kittlaus joked about an idea he had to start a company specializing in DNA dating and molecular best matches, but didn’t think people were ready for that. Yet…

Kittlaus also talked about what mobile phones were before the iPhone, and how interfaces were rapidly changing.

Mobile phones were just really hard, especially back before the iPhone came out. Phones were tough. It took about 30 clicks to find a ringtone and download it. But what if you could talk to a phone? What if you could just type in a few key words and it understood what you were trying to do and just did it for you? That’s pretty powerful. The speech part of it, we didn’t even start that part until about a year later. It just didn’t work that well. About a year later, speech recognition got really good.

Kittlaus discussed what goes on when you interact with Siri.

First, when you speak it turns the sounds into words. It says “this is what you said”. That’s not what Siri does. We work with a 3rd party that does that. But what the world didn’t have at this point was a machine that could understand what the words meant and do something about it. So that’s what Siri does. Even after all the research and development, it took us three years to build it.

The next challenge they faced was getting Siri to interact with humans and getting people to understand what it was. It wasn’t Google or a search engine. They didn’t want it to take input and simply spit out 10 links. It needed to understand humans and be more human-like. Kittlaus joked about coming up with a tag line:

What are we going to call this thing and make people understand what it is? The first tag line I came up with was “Siri, practically human.” Well, it’s not really human yet and kind of sucks at this point. We need something better. So this version we’ll call “Siri, periodically human.” Then we said ok, at a certain point, the next version will be practically human. The version after that will be positively human. Then unfortunately, the version after that will have to be kill all humans.

Siri wasn’t an overnight success nor an easy project to implement. During the talk, I had the opportunity to ask Kittlaus about the challenges they faced in implementing Siri.

The first time was — How do you make all this technology work together and actually deliver this experience of talking to a machine? That’s really hard. That’s what we spent the first two years doing. After we got acquired by Apple, now we had to take this technology and make it available for 100 million users. That’s a completely different type of challenge. Nobody had ever done it before. So the biggest challenge was getting it to work. Especially in the software business, you really need the best people. It’s different than many other businesses because the impact of getting the right people means so much more than it does in many other industries. In sales, you can have two sales guys that do as many sales as one guy that’s really good. But in software, it can be 50 times or 100 times different because if you don’t have a good team, you’re going to be writing bad software that all the good guys have to go and clean up later which really slows you down. You can’t throw people at a software problem. You really need the best people.

Kittlaus went on to talk about the “law of accelerated returns” which basically states that each generation of a product exponentially doubles in power over the previous technology. Kittlaus pointed out that the iPhone has 10,000 times more computer power than the original Apollo program. If you apply the law of accelerated returns to the rate of technological growth today, we’ll advance 20,000 years in the 21st century.

If I take 30 steps, I’m over the table. If I take exponential steps, I’m on the moon.

Towards the end of the session a member of the audience asked what the next version of Siri will be like. He jokingly stated that he couldn’t answer that question in fear of the attorneys at Apple, but was able to say that this is just the beginning and we’ve got a lot to look forward to.

A special thanks to Michigan City Economic Development for hosting such a great event and letting me take part in it!

Nintendo recently posted their full-year financial results, which included their first operating loss amounting to a deficit of $458 million. Over the whole year, Nintendo sold 13.5 million 3DS portable systems worldwide; to put that in perspective, Apple sold about 9 million iPhones in the U.S. in the first quarter of 2012 alone. Nintendo is optimistically forecasting $247 million in net income by the end of 2012.

After hearing this news, all eyes drifted to the iPhone for hoarding the attention (and disposable income) of casual gamers who are prone to play on the Nintendo Wii system. Meanwhile more hardened players have been long-entrenched with PC, Xbox, and PS3 consoles. On more than one occasion, Nintendo has called out the smartphone world and Apple for devaluing games, and who can blame them with so many awesome free games available? Steve Jobs shot back that the iPod touch was more popular than the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP combined. One of Nintendo’s top developers admitted that Angry Birds was actually one of his favorite games in the last year, but Nintendo itself isn’t showing any signs of easing its stubbornness.

It’s too bad that such a venerable gaming company isn’t able to progress with the times. Microsoft and Sony are having a reasonable amount of success by supporting mobile initiatives alongside their gaming consoles; I can’t imagine what’s stopping Nintendo from jumping into the smartphone world head first, especially in light of a rough 2011. They’re already digitally distributing classic gaming titles through the Wii’s Virtual Console at a healthy margin – $5 for a 27-year-old game isn’t bad mileage at all, and they could milk that even further on the App Store. Investors have pressured Nintendo to get its titles on mobile, and it’s really just sensible; Penny Arcade really put it best.

As is, Nintendo’s going to push a new console called the Wii U this year, which will highlight a new 6-inch tablet-style controller. Good luck with that, Nintendo – you’ll need it.

Now where’s out Super Mario for iOS?

Source: Nintendo

According to yet another Steve Jobs biography, Apple’s late CEO wanted to hide a golden ticket with the millionth iMac computer and fly the winner out to Cupertino for a tour of the facilities. Jobs said he would even wear the Willy Wonka outfit for the whole thing. This was revealed by Ken Segall, an ex-Apple employee who handled the Think Different campaign back in the day, and helped design the original iMac. His book, Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success, just came out today; here’s the excerpt detailing Jobs’ golden ticket plans.

Steve’s idea was to do a Willy Wonka with it. Just as Wonka did in the movie, Steve wanted to put a golden certificate representing the millionth iMac inside the box of one iMac, and publicize that fact. Whoever opened the lucky iMac box would be refunded the purchase price and be flown to Cupertino, where he or she (and, presumably, the accompanying family) would be taken on a tour of the Apple campus. Steve had already instructed his internal creative group to design a prototype golden certificate, which he shared with us. But the killer was that Steve wanted to go all out on this. He wanted to meet the lucky winner in full Willy Wonka garb. Yes, complete with top hat and tails.

Unfortunately, such a contest would require a purchase to enter, which is against California law, so it never happened. For all of the press heaped on Steve Jobs for being a relentless taskmaster, it’s easy to forget sometimes that he actually had a pretty good sense of humor. If you’ve read Walter Isaacson’s official biography, you will have heard about some of the shenanigans Steve Jobs got up to when he was younger, but it’s good to see the playful streak lived on later in his career as well.

Still, it’s kind of hard to imagine Steve Jobs in a top hat, isn’t it?

You can order your copy of Insanely Great now from Amazon.

$16.95 – Buy now

Source: Insanely Great via MacRumors

For today only, the iMore iPhone accessory store has the Body Glove DropSuit Rugged Case for iPhone 4S and iPhone 4 on sale for only $10.95. That’s a whopping 45% off! Get it before it’s gone!

• Shop Body Glove DropSuit Rugged Case for iPhone 4S and iPhone 4 now!

The Body Glove DropSuit rugged case is designed to provide protection where and when you need it. DropSuit is made of a durable gel material that resists the battles of everyday life.

The case has reinforced corners with a unique shock dissipation system to absorb impact and defend against bumps and drops. The strategically placed side bumpers provide a secure grip and added drop protection.

And if protecting your device from the rigors of life wasn't good enough, DropSuit even provides protection from the elements you can't see. The case includes an embedded anti-microbial agent that prevents the growth of odor, stain-causing bacteria, and other microorganisms.

Features:

Durable gel material defends against bumps and scratches Uniquely designed corners that contain a shock dissipation system to absorb impact Side bumpers provide a secure grip and are reinforced for drop protection Embedded anti-microbial agent that prevents the growth of odor, stain-causing bacteria, and other microorganisms

At long, long last Google has finally unveiled their cloud storage solution — Google Drive. So will you use it? It took so long to get here that many of us have already gone all in on something else, either Dropbox, Box, SugarSync, or even the increasingly iPhone and iPad friendly Micorosoft SkyDrive. While iCloud isn’t exactly the same kind of service, for casual users it might just be enough to negate the need for anything more.

That means getting people to switch from what they’re already using to Google Drive might be a hard sell. We’re creatures of habit, after all, and you need to offer us significant enticement to get us to change habits).

But does Google even need us to switch? Google Drive offers 5GB of free storage, and will increasingly be integrated into the Google Services many of us use every day. Many of us simply added iCloud to our existing cloud storage usage, after all. Many could just as easily add Google Drive. iOS device data and backups, and iTunes content in iCloud, our existing file shares in Dropbox, and a bunch of Google Docs and extra backups in Google Drive… why not?

There are privacy concerns, of course. Google has struggled with some of their new product launches, and their Terms of Service have been unfortunately worded at times, and some people — rightly or wrongly — have grown a little suspicious of Google and their constant desire to index and monetize our lives. Nothing is ever truly free, so we’ll pay one way or another. Some prefer to pay with money, others with access to data — we all have to do what makes us comfortable.

There’s also no iPhone or iPad app yet. (Really? Google takes 5 years to release it and they still couldn’t get the iOS app done in time?)

So what will it be, iMore nation? Does Google Drive have a place in your cloud storage life? Will it be your one-and-only, one-of-many, or nothing at all? Or are you going to wait and see how it works before deciding? Vote in the poll up top and then give me the details in the iMore Google Forums!

During a visit to Boulder, Colorado and Colorado University, U.S. President Barack Obama was caught on video test driving a Sphero — an iPhone controlled rolling robot. Obama first watches the Sphero roll around, remarking “how cool is that, you can make the ball do all kinds of stuff”, before taking the iPhone and taking control of the robot himself. Surrounded by Secret Service — and co-eds — the President of the United States gave it a whirl, seemed to enjoy himself, and complimented the inventor, a Boulder native.

We’ve had the opportunity to try out Sphero a couple of times at CES, and if you like iPhones and robots, it’s definitely something to check out. Video below.

Thanks Obi!

Sir Jonathan Ive has won the British Visionary Innovator 2012 award organised by the Intellectual Property Office. The award comes after the competition was open for seven days and allowed the public to vote for their most innovative person of 2012.

After a week of voting, you have chosen Sir Jonathan Ive as your favourite British Visionary Innovator for 2012. He received 46.6% of your votes, making him the clear favourite amongst a list of other hugely talented, creative and innovative people.

Ive easily beat out fellow innovators like Sir Tim Berners-Lee who invented the web and James Goodfellow who invented the the cash-point machine and pin number technology. Ive’s is certainly starting to gain recognition for his amazing talents. He has already received awards for the Most Influential Person on British Culture by the BBC, Inventor of the decade by The Guardian and he was knighted in 2012.

Source: Intellectual Property Office

One of my favorite PDF annotating apps for iPad, Remarks by Readdle, just got even better with the addition of automatic two-way Dropbox syncing. With the new update, a new, blue folder named Remarks and labeled with Dropbox will appear in your notes once you link your Dropbox account with Remarks. Any notes you create in this folder will automagically sync up with Dropbox — you no longer have to manually send a note to Dropbox. It works like a charm.

When I compared Remarks with Noteshelf and Notability, one of my complaints about Remarks was that the handwriting wasn’t all that spectacular. The good news is that this update has also brought major improvements to the handwriting, bringing it up to par with all the major iPad handwriting apps.

These two additional features are huge improvements to Remarks and I’m looking forward to even more updates. I already know that the next one is going to be pretty awesome.

As mentioned above, I have always been a huge fan of Remarks. As a math instructor, I frequently use it to handwrite solutions to quizzes, exams, and worksheets that I then make available to my students in electronic form.

Giveaway

The good folks at Readdle have given us 5 promo codes for Remarks to give away to you, our awesome readers! For a chance to win, just head on over to the iMore forums and leave a comment in the official giveaway thread letting us know why you’d like to win a copy of Remarks and what you plan to use it for.

ENTER NOW

$4.99 – Download Now

It’s Wednesday, which means it’s time to announce this week’s photo contest — and the winner of last week’s panorama photography contest. Before I do, I want to congratulate everyone on their awesome entries. We’ve got some talented iPhoneographer readers here at iMore and it wasn’t an easy decision!

And the winning entry is…

…this gorgeous sunset panorama by Nibbier! Panoramic photos often include a lot of sky, so an interesting sky is a must for the photo to stand out — and boy did Nibbier nail it with this sky! He also did an awesome job of using the rule of thirds on the horizon so that the sky, clouds, and sunset steal the show, while still using the silhouette of mountains to give even more of a “wow” factor. Nibbier used PhotoSynth for iPhone to stitch the panorama and edited it with iCameraHDR for iPhone. Great work Nibbier!

• PhotoSynth, Free – Download Now
• iCameraHDR, $1.99 – Download Now

This week’s contest: Negative Space!

With the end of one photo contest, comes the beginning of new one, and this week’s focus in on negative space! Composition is the most important part of a photograph, so this week I want you to give extra close attention to the negative space of your photos. There is no restriction on the subject or even how much negative space is in your photo — just that the negative space is playing an important roll in your image.

The prize: Glif tripod mount and stand!

In addition to a thumbs up from the iMore crew and all of us yelling about how great of a photo star you are, the winner of this week’s photography contest will have their photo converted into an official iMore wallpaper and we’ll showcase it on the front page of iMore! But that's not all! The winner will also receive a Glif tripod mount and stand!

The rules

The rules of entry are very simple. The photo must have been taken with an iPhone or iPad (we’ll check the EXIF data of the original file to verify) and any edits must have been done with an iPhone or iPad app. No Photoshop CS6! If you have external lens accessories you are more than welcome to use them. You can submit as many photos as you’d like, but remember, this is a contest, so make sure you submit your best work!

Resources

Now, before you run off to take your photos, remember that it’s not technical skill alone that will claim this prize. Even if you’re not the best photographer (yet!), a great eye and a great subject can still get you the win. However, a little help can never hurt, so make sure you check out these articles from our iPhone photography series for some tips.

• How to make your iPhone photographs more powerful with negative space
• How to make your iPhone photography more striking with the "rule of thirds"

How to submit

Submitting your photos is easy. Just head over to the iMore Photography Forum and post your photos to the official contest thread. Don’t forget to state which apps, if any, you used to edit your photo!

That’s it! Now go out and shoot!

ENTER NOW