conversion

What do Steve Martin, Salman Rushdie, and Nascar all have in common? A new special feature on their Twitter accounts that lets followers decide whether to see their tweet conversations.

Twitter announced today that on certain verified accounts of well-known musicians, actors, athletes, and brands, users can decide whether to see back-and-forth exchanges. The way it works is by clicking "all" above the Tweets timeline on the user's profile page to see full conversations or by clicking "no replies" to see only original tweets.

We'll be frank: Quick Conversion is one of the ugliest programs we've seen. It's also fairly light on features. But if you're looking specifically for a program that can convert between both English and metric units of length, it can get the job done.

Quick Conversion's interface consists of a list of units of measurement: inches, feet, yards, fathoms, rods, furlongs, miles, and leagues, as well as millimeters, centimeters, decimeters, meters, decameters, hectometers, and kilometers. A drop-down menu lets you select the unit of measurement that you want to convert from and enter the number … Read more

Apple has filed a patent application detailing a better process for encoding and transmitting data over Bluetooth.

The patent application, uncovered by AppleInsider, was refiled back in February as a continuation of a December 2008 patent application and shows Apple's continued commitment to get the best performance from its mobile, battery-powered devices.

"Data Format Conversion for Electronic Devices" seeks to improve your iDevice's battery by simplifying the data conversion process that occurs when sending information to other devices via Bluetooth connections.

Data sent over a Bluetooth connection must be compressed due to limited transmission capacity of … Read more

True to its name, this popular and affordable app's main functionality is converting graphic files--importing from some 200 formats and exporting to about 80 at last count, with a tremendously time-saving batch processor thrown in for good measure. But GraphicConverter also proves invaluable as a high-speed image editor that lets you quickly browse, resize, sharpen, adjust color, and optimize for the Web, all at a price that makes commercial packages blush.

GraphicConverter's interface hasn't quite kept up with its ever-growing feature set (and many of its most useful features can be accessed outside of the app anyway, … Read more

Sparrow is an attempt to get away from supercomplex, feature-packed e-mail clients in favor of a simpler e-mail experience on iOS. The interface is elegant while remaining very straightforward: e-mails are listed with the newest on top, and all your actions can be completed with simple gestures. Setup only requires that you add accounts; then you can get started right away.

Though the interface is sparse you still get plenty of the common actions and options you'd expect from a basic e-mail app in Sparrow. You can save your draft e-mails; Star (or mark as favorite) specific conversations; add … Read more

As far as I'm concerned, we have a global musical crisis on our hands.

The cassette tape was the dominant music format through most of my childhood. The first read-along books I had as a kid were on cassette tape. The first time I ever bought music with my own money, it was on a cassette tape (which, by the way, I'm proud to say was Run DMC's "Raising Hell"). The first time my band ever released a demo, it was a demo tape.

For independent musicians of the '80s and '90s, cassette tapes offered … Read more

HTC plays with streaming music, psychiatrists study Internet addiction, and MySpace beats on with the MySpace Music Player.

Links from Wednesday's episode of Loaded:

Sparrow is an attempt to get away from supercomplex, feature-packed e-mail clients in favor of a simpler e-mail experience. The interface is elegant while remaining very straightforward: the left side of the interface shows where e-mails are from, and the right side displays the message and any photos or other media commonly sent through e-mail. Setup only requires that you add accounts; then you can get started right away.

Though the interface is sparse compared with many big-name e-mail clients, you still get plenty of the common actions and options you'd expect from a basic e-mail app in Sparrow. … Read more

Gmail for iOS is the official e-mail client from Google for iOS, and it's mostly a solid offering with only a couple of issues. The initial release got off to a rocky start with notification errors, but a subsequent release seems to have ironed out the major problems.

Obviously, the Mail app that comes with your iPhone lets you connect to Gmail accounts, but with the official app from Google, you'll get a few more options that you may have come to rely on when using Gmail. Get started by creating a new Gmail account or logging in … Read more