After mentioning ChordGenie on Friday I found this other application for Guitar Hero wanabies.  It is called Guitar Trainer and can be picked up for $4.99 which is cheaper than ChordGenie. This one is more focused towards people who have the basic chords but want to expand their musical vocabulary. The cool part is that it is available in multiple languages ranging from French to Brazilian Portuguese. It worked like a charm on my 8310 but I could not get it to take a screenshot. Every screenshot came out white.

From the description on their website:

How does it work?

It’s very simple: you are presented with a random note on the fretboard, and are offered a variety of 9 choices for the correct answer. Just hit the key corresponding to the correct choice to score a hit!

As your score gets better and you manage to identify notes faster across the entire fretboard, your working knowledge of your instrument increases!

 

Why would I want this?

You would be amazed to know how many experienced guitarists have such a reduced knowledge of their instrument. Most people tend to confine their learning to tablature, and the shapes of certain chords and scales. More often than not, they have no idea what notes they are actually hitting!

Features

• Learn the location of notes on the fretboard of a guitar or other stringed instrument.
• Supports a variety of standard and alternate string tunings: guitar, bass, banjo, ukulele, mandolin.
• Training mode allows to focus learning on particular parts of the fretboard, and even focus on individual strings.
• Game mode provides a fun way to make progress. Work your way through levels of increasing difficulty!
• Train your ear at the same time as you improve your working knowledge of the instrument.
• Display notes as letters (A, B, C…) or solfege syllables (Do, Re, Mi…).
• Left-handed and right-handed neck types.
• Tune your instrument with your cell phone. Open string tones can be produced for any of the supported tunings!
• Dynamic user interface that works on a wide variety of mobile devices.
• Support for pointer input (stylus, touch screen, etc).
• Available in English, French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Brazilian Portuguese, German and Hebrew languages.

Over the weekend one of my friends was a complete broken record. Every few minutes the conversation turned back to how Iron Man is going to be an awesome movie and how I HAVE to see it on Saturday night. It turns out I did not see it (Went out for a drink instead ) but I guess people have really bought into the hype surrounding the movie.  Bplay plans on capitalizing on that with their latest release – Iron Man The Game.

Iron Man – $7.99

You are the invincible Iron Man! Equipped with repulsor rays and the devastating unibeam, you play as the Armored Avenger in this vertically scrolling shoot-’em-up based on the upcoming movie starring Robert Downey Jr. ‘Nuff said.

Visit locations based on locations from the summer blockbuster as you blast away at enemy forces equipped with the weapons that you, Tony Stark, developed. Collect power-ups and destroy relentless waves of enemy units en route to a climactic confrontation with the world’s greatest new foe: Iron Monger!

Sorry for the late notice on this one but one of our readers just let us know that PocketDay has released a new version. It is recommended to upgrade real soon since they have changed weather services and your old weather will not work anymore come sometime this week.

They have also added some new features to the weather plugin including radar images. Mostly they have just updated the tasks and calendar UI to fit better with OS 4.3 and 4.5 devices.

You can pick up the latest version by pointing your BlackBerry to www.PocketDay.com/ota.htm

Here is another chance for you to play Brick Breaker. Even if it’s in your dreams only. RIM has announced some more down time for maintenance tonight or tomorrow, depending on how you view it. The official date is Saturday, May 3rd, from 2:00 am to 6:00 am, and it is supposed to affect “the Americas”. If you live in any of the Americas and intend to be awake during that period, don’t count too much on your Blackberry data service. Don’t panic either. Everything should be OK in the morning. We surely hope so.

I must be a moron since I have never heard of Bank of America’s mobile site until now even though it has been around since last year. Well I decided to rectify my mistake by mentioning it to all of you who may happen to be Bank of America customers.

The website is really cool and even has a BlackBerry shortcut application that you can install on your homescreen. Why did nobody tell me about this!

If you head over to www.BofA.mobi from your BlackBerry browser you will be taken to a page that says:

Please download the ‘Mobile Banking Shortcut for BlackBerry’ by visiting http://mobilebanking.bankofamerica.com/bb. This shortcut will access the correct browser and allow you to securely access mobile banking.

I also found out that if you don’t want to download the shortcut you can just access the website by going to: https://www.bankofamerica.com/mobile/ Please do me a favor and make sure the HTTPS is in the beginning of the URL before you type in your password.

Sadly none of my other banks offer such a service (at least that I know of). Please correct me if I am wrong. Chase allows you to text message them to get your account info but that is a bore. I know Wachovia has some sort of mobile banking option but I don’t use them.

One of our readers just sent in this application that looks cool but for the life of me I cannot read Spanish. (Google translate is not helping much) It seems to be a competitor with SHAPE’s Mobiscope application that allows you to monitor your surveillance cameras from your BlackBerry. Truthfully I cannot imagine this working so well over an EDGE connection but what the hell its good to have options.

If possible could somebody read the application description in Spanish and let me know if the application is free?

If you into this private eye shtick check out the two options for Mobile Surveillance below:

NetCamera Mobile – Works on OS 4.1 and 4.2.1 devices from what it says. It can control AXIS, SONY, PANASONIC, SPARKLAN, and TRENDNET cameras.

Mobiscope – The English option from SHAPE. I would recommend checking it out since it has an English description

I just discovered this great application that I think the BlackBerry truly needed. It is not really made for the BlackBerry but it works like a charm on my BlackBerry 8310. I am a (very) amateur musician when I have a few minutes to spare and this application ChordGenie has been a real help. It auto calculates over 1,000 chords for quite a few instruments. You can pick it up now for the current exchange rate of $10.28 (5 euros as of today). A trial is also available by heading over to wap.chordgenie.com from your BlackBerry.

Just look at the features at this link. Too many to copy and paste. You can even change the application to fit the banjo, ukulele, and mandolin. My favorite feature is the fact that it is fast and requires no internet connectivity.

I have posted some screenshots below for you to get an idea of the application:

Read the rest of this article

One of our readers who wishes to remain nameless just let me know about this nifty new service called Xpenser. What this service does it allow you easily send your expenses to this service. It allows you to do this through multiple methods.

You can email, SMS, IM, or even call in your expenses from your BlackBerry. The example they give is that you send an email of “lunch 78.50 with BigClient” to their services and it is automatically recorded on your BlackBerry. I just wish they had a client that was made for the BlackBerry.

BEST OF ALL you can even export your expenses to Quicken!

My favorite was the list of all the random things you can track other than expenses:

• Tracking diet and calories. Create a report called “diet” and record what you eat. Eg. “burger 325 island’s”, where 325 is the number of calories.
• Tracking mileage. This will be supported soon, but people are already doing it manually.
• Tracking exercise and fitness. People have been keeping track of their exercise regiment. Eg. “running 6 miles”, “weights 45 minutes”.
• Tracking time. Eg. “contract review 0.75 client X”.
• Tracking tasks and bugs. This is an unusual one, but a few of you are doing some sort of project management… We don’t quite get this one, but feel free to enlighten us.
• General notes. Some people are using Xpenser to record general notes and reminders on the run.

If tracking expenses is your thing you can check out the service for free by heading to www.xpenser.com from your desktop.