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Welcome to TUAW's 2011 Holiday Gift Guide! We're here to help you choose the best gifts this holiday season, and once you've received your gifts we'll tell you what apps and accessories we think are best for your new Apple gear. Stay tuned every weekday from now until the end of the year for our picks and helpful guides and check our Gift Guide hub to see our guides as they become available. For even more holiday fun, check out sister site Engadget's gift guide. If you're an iPhone or an iPad owner, or you're looking to acquire or gift them, a good dock is a worthwhile accessory. Some docks will handle both. They're great for a dorm room, your desk at work or a nightstand so you can keep your iOS device charged while you're sleeping. Here's some suggested docks to get you started, and below we have a few usage scenarios for them. A dock in the bedroom can serve as a great secondary stereo system. Several systems double as alarm clocks, so you can make sure you wake up on time and with your iPhone fully charged (all prices are USD). Sony Speaker Dock for iPod and iPhone (on sale for $79.95, normally $99.95) -- An earlier model of this system is the one I currently have in my bedroom, and it's been fantastic. The speakers are robust and the sound is rich. The alarm is loud and you can program dual settings for more than one person. The Sony remote (included) is small, but still easy to spot and I haven't lost mine yet. If you want to control the dock with your phone, use the free D-Suppli app. The one drawback is that the dock itself doesn't work well with some cases that cover the 30-pin slot, such as some of Otterbox's cases. Stem TimeCommand Audio Alarm Dock ($99.95) -- Fellow TUAW blogger Steve Sande reviewed this dock a few months ago, and he was impressed with the features. It'll charge your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch and has many of the usual alarm clock features. What sets the TimeCommand apart is the extra plug on the AC adapter for plugging in a lamp. Using the free Stem:Connect app, you can control dimming your bedside lamp, get access to free Internet radio stations and control the dock's features. This clock is available only through Apple retail Read More

by on 27. Oct, 2010 in Desktop alarm clocks don’t have many features, take up a lot of space, can take some time to set, and are especially annoying in the morning. For these reasons it is a great idea to invest in a nightstand app for your iPhone, iPad, or iPhone Touch, so here a couple have been reviewed for you. This app is loaded with lots of features to help you wake up in the morning and start your day. The alarm that you wake up to is easy to set and allows you to wake up to an actual alarm, a radio station of your choice, or a song from your music library. The actual clock is big and easy to read, but unfortunately you cannot view it in landscape mode. Nightstand: The Professional Alarm Clock also provides you with the weather, and even though it does not give you tons of information, it still gives enough for most people. This is viewed by switching from nighttime mode to daytime, and doing this opens up other features in addition to weather. From here you can listen to the radio or your iTunes library right through the app, and by selecting the “News and Internet” tab you can view visual bookmarks that you added which make it quick and easy to view your favorite sites in the morning right from within the app, without getting out of bed and without even opening up Safari. This app has a nice interface, but could use a small update. The backgrounds are not really visible, and making the buttons look a little newer and more updated, and maybe some other small visual tweaks, would make this app even better. The main screen looks very nice, although the unnecessarily large black box with the time obscures the background. Aside from that you get the date and the weather, as well as the ability to control music from your music library. Here you will also find a slider, which you are supposed to slide when you go to sleep and wake up. This is an interesting feature and you slide it in order for it to provide you with sleep stats, such as how often you hit snooze and how many hours of sleep you get. iHome + Sleep also allows you to set alarms with the ability to wake up to a buzzer, Read More

By – Use them anywhere and anytime on any of your iOS device! The OpenNMS iApp provides users of the open-source network management platform OpenNMS (http://www.opennms.org/) with quick access to everything they need to check their network’s status while on the go. You can view outages, alarms, and node information. You can even acknowledge alarms — and their associated notifications — right from your device! Want to take control of your Parallels Desktop for Mac virtual machines while your Mac is out of reach? Now you can with Parallels Mobile! Elements is a beautiful, versatile text editor for iOS. Elements allows you to view, edit and share plain text documents on your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch. All of your data is stored in a folder on your personal Dropbox account so that it’s accessible from any device you have. Tired of looking up your friends on 2 or 3 different networks every day? Tired of checking in on all those networks every time you go out? TwentyThree is made for you! myPhoneDesktop provides an easy and effective way to work with your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch directly from your desktop. Whether you need to make a phone call; send a long SMS; copy large amount of text; open a long and complicated to retype URL; or save an image to your iPhone – myPhoneDesktop streamlines your workflow. Forum Runner allows you to browse your favorite forums the way they were meant to be on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. With Forum Runner you no longer have to worry about waiting on the entire forum web page to load up in Safari – it only loads the actual forum information which loads much faster. You can log into the forums and post in them as you normally would in Safari. Dropbox is the easiest way to sync and share your files online and across computers. iHome+Sleep is the award-winning, feature-rich alarm clock for iOS devices from iHome, the most popular name in iPod & iPhone accessories.   Related Posts Read More

By Chris Hall on August 17th, 2010 iHome + Radio brings streaming music to the new iHome iDevice docks. iHome is an established name in the iDevice dock department, but lately, in an attempt to make their docks more appealing, they’ve been getting more into app making. Their first app, iHome + Sleep works with any app-enhanced iPhone dock to give users the most comprehensive alarm anyone has ever seen. Many people complain that it is too comprehensive, having multiple alarms, sleep and wake music options, social updates, personal reminders, a whole range of stats, and more… but hey, it is free. If you can handle the complexity, it really is a nice app. iHome + Radio isn’t the first internet radio app out there. In fact, it’s probably not the 10th, but it is a well made app. It have a fairly comprehensive 20,000 radio station catalog covering music, sports, and talk from all around the world. The collection isn’t quite as impressive as Wunder Radio, with its 50,000+ stations, but seriously, how many versions of your local rock station do you need to hear. The thing that sets iHome + Radio apart is its integration with iHome + Sleep. iHome + Radio nicely lets you save your favorite stations into iHome + Sleep, as well as provides a control system for you new app enhanced iHome dock. “iHome+Radio is a great stand-alone app for enjoying a multitude of Internet radio stations from around the world,” said Evan Stein, Vice President of Marketing, iHome. “However, when integrated with one of our app-enabled units like the iA5 and our award-winning iHome+Sleep app, the level of enjoyment and overall experience is enhanced, giving our customers the ability to sleep, wake or casually listen to their favorite radio stations from around the globe, regardless of their location.” If you’re in the market for a new iPhone dock, pick up an iHome iA5 and plug in iHome + Radio. The combination works really nice, looks pretty, and will give you so more streaming tunes than you can handle. $1.99 iPhone App - Designed for the iPhone, compatible with the iPad Released: 2010-08-03 :: Category: Music Read More

iHome has announced the first clock radio with a fully functioning iPad dock. In addition to traditional clock radio features, you get a Bluetooth connection to use with your iPad. You will be able to sync the proper time from an iPhone, and in turn, the alarm settings from the radio get synced to your iPad. You can also pair the physical device with the free iHome+Sleep app, which will eventually gain iPad optimization. You will be able to use both iPhones and iPods with the dock. It's a neat idea, but this begs the question -- what took so long? This sort of dock makes sense, especially for those who get a lot of use of the iPad in the bedroom, or even in other rooms such as the kitchen. I'm surprised that iHome did not announce this months ago. No price or release date was revealed, but the company's price range for similar models for the iPhone start around $80 and average around $100. Given the Bluetooth connection, I wouldn't be surprised to see this clock priced around $150. Read More

The iHome iA5 alarm clock is an interesting little number. It’s an iPod / iPhone dock, but it’s also a stand-alone alarm clock. And it also has its very own iPhone app. You can fall asleep and wake up to music from your playlist, you can program multiple alarms and even change the length of a snooze from the world standard of nine minutes. You can track sleeping patterns, and with the help of the app wake up to a full display of all the Facebook activity you missed while sleeping. The iA5 looks like your standard iPhone dock. Except that it has a standalone clock built into it, which is nice if you or your spouse goes on a trip, taking their iPhone with them: you still have a useful alarm clock sitting on your nightstand, instead of a useless chunk of plastic that won’t do anything until the iPhone comes home. The clock on the iA5 can be set directly from your iPhone, so you don’t need to do the “crap, I pressed the hour button one time too many and now I need to press it eleven more times!” dance to set the time on your clock. I bet that’s handy for Daylight Savings time, too. And it has a programmable snooze, so if you want your snooze to be ten minutes instead of nine, by gum you can do that! You can snooze up to 29 minutes, if that’s your thing. The iHome app is a fancy programmable alarm clock for your iPhone. It uses a “cards” metaphor, which allows you to define a number of alarm situations: for example every weekday at 6 AM, with a snooze of 5 minutes; or 10 AM on weekends with no snooze. You slide the “card” into a virtual slot to activate it, which doesn’t seem entirely intuitive, but I suppose that’s easily overcome. You can connect the app to your Facebook and Twitter accounts, so that you can broadcast to the world when you go to sleep or wake up; and the app will helpfully collect all the Twitter and Facebook traffic you missed through the night so that you can review it as soon as you wake up! The iA5 normally sells for one hundred US dollars, but we’ve got one to give to a lucky reader. All you need to do to win is leave a comment Read More

iHome + Sleep is a combination of a couple really excellent features to make an app that is definitely worth looking into. The app's main goal is to create an environment for you while you sleep and wake. It is the alarm clock on steroids. It offers a wealth of interesting features that you will either love or find absolutely worthless. One of the largest features in the app is the ability to create sleep cards. These cards can include a ton of customizations including waking alarm or music, sleep music, and much more. Each card can be activated by dropping it in a slot. The home screen of the app will use your location to determine the current weather in the area as well as the overnight forecast. The app will even post automatically to Twitter or Facebook when you wake up or go to bed if you want it do that. Overall, iHome + Sleep could serve as an excellent replacement for the Clock app at night for some of you. It has a great interface and always worked as expected. At the time of this review it was free in the app store, so check it out and let us know what you think of it. It may not be free for long and it is definitely worth looking into. Visit Appolicious for more iPhone app reviews and articles. Read More

Let's put it out here: My sleeping habits suck. Eventually I'll improve them and maybe something like the iHome+Sleep iPhone app will help by keeping track of snoozing patterns and everything else that goes on during the night. Maybe. The iHome+Sleep app is designed with iHome's future line of app-enhanced speaker docks in mind, but so far it seems pretty neat just on its own. It allows for multiple "sleep cards" to be set up with customizable alarms, gathers up news occurring while you dream, and keeps note of your pesky propensity to hit the snooze button. Who knows whether all of this is truly useful. All I know is that I'm gonna give the app a shot over the next few days and see if I learn anything new about my sleeping habits. After all, the app's free so there's nothing to lose. [App Store] Read More

While the various news outlets of the web may have gotten readers a bit too ecstatic when hyping out the iPhone 5, truth is, there was no iPhone 5 come Apple’s annual press conference. One source says that next year’s iPhone, unofficially and presumably dubbed iPhone 5, will be a It seems that Apple decided to go ahead and give the go to iOS 5.0.1 earlier than we had initially thought. Releasing today, the update brings along multiple new minor features, the most significant, however, being the highly anticipated iPhone 4S battery patch. You’ll first dive into Junk Jack without a clue of what you’re supposed to be doing – running around, tapping on random blocks. Then when night falls, the monsters devour you, and by this time you’re frustrated. Even with the gorgeous pixel aesthetic, innovative controls that no other developer has I think that this product is truly great, and evidently so do atleast 1,220 other people who have backed the MobileMount on Kickstarter. Soon to be available, this spinoff of typical iPhone stands is more than unique. Pretty much since the day of the launch of the iPhone 4S this past October 14th, users reported that they were having problems with the battery life of the device. Rather than posing as an improvement to last year’s iteration of the iPhone, the 4S could barely make it through Over the course of the next few weeks, we’ll be taking comprehensive looks at a multitude of iPhone 4S compatible cases as well as any similar accessories. The first in our extensive lineup, is for Proporta’s Aluminum Lined Leather Case. Compatible with the iPhone 4S and its predecessor alike, the Bracing the App Store earlier this week, is Blosics, a port of an online flash game that involves physics and puzzles which amounts to a whole lot of fun. Polished and compelling as it previously was on the computer, Blosics feels natural when played on the iPhone and just as, Just launching today, Apple aired three new iPhone 4S advertisements on top of the already existent one that was originally aired last week. All three of these show off the iPhone 4S, of course, with Apple’s unique marketing technique. Watch them below. All three of the ads appeal to the Sometime last week, I received a few products from the geeky, and so similar to me, guys over at ThinkGeek. Since Read More