News

You may possibly have heard hushed whispers and noticed a few subtle indications that royal nuptials are afoot. Supposedly, some prince or other might be getting hitched at Westminster Abbey tomorrow. It could just be hearsay and we’re not sure we believe these vague rumours, but we’ve decided to enter into the spirit of things, regardless. Any excuse for a party: we love a good old-fashioned knees-up, we do.

As the world vigorously celebrates all things quaintly British and somewhat pointless, we’re delighted to inform you that we’ve spruced up our BigBen clock app, giving it a makeover for this most romantic occasion. For a limited time, you can download it to your iPhone for free. Why not whip it out during the ceremony and wipe away a tear as you salute the monarchy and listen to our cherished London icon belt out its famous Westminster Chimes? Ding Dong!

It’s been a long time coming, but we’ve finally updated BigBen with some hi-res photos and professionally recorded chimes.

It now plays every quarter and correctly starts the chime on the hour, to end in time for the first bong to play as the clock strikes the hour.

Check it out here and tell all your friends.

Hello, hello. We just wanted to give you all a brief update to let you know what we’re currently up to here at Ettore Towers. Understandably, some of you may have interpreted our recent quietness as a bit of a lull in development activity; rest assured, however, that this couldn’t be further from the truth. The hamster never stops spinning in its wheel round these parts – our cosy little office has been buzzing with frenzied activity. So here’s the skinny:

• We’re continuing to refine our much cherished, long-standing flagship product TypeIt4Me – like good wine, it just gets better with age – and there are some new features in the pipeline.

• We have a nice surprise up our sleeve for Italian would-be TypeIt4Me customers. Stay tuned…

• We’ve been throwing around some ideas for a couple of nifty new iPhone apps that we think you’ll really like. Such things take time to develop properly though, so we hope you’ll bear with us. Without wanting to lay the corny platitudes on too thick: good apps come to those who wait. These puppies will be more sophisticated than our initial forays into app creation.

• …Speaking of Xylophone et al, we didn’t sleep through uncle Steve’s presentation last week, either: you can expect some updates to our existing suite of apps, as soon as we have a spare pair of hands to deal with them. Mmmmm, retina display.

TapIt4Me 1.1.1 has been tested and is fully compatible with the new iPhone 3.0 software release. It’s in the app store now as a free update. Apologies for those of you who had trouble with the previous version.

One of London’s most famous attractions, Big Ben, is celebrating 150 years of keeping time. To celebrate this milestone birthday, our Big Ben iPhone app will be available free of charge in the iTunes App Store for the next 48 hours. Get it while you can!

Get the time of day in style and add some Great British flair to your iPhone, with our salute to the iconic clock tower that watches over the UK houses of parliament. Today we release Big Ben 1.0 for iPhone – available in the iTunes App Store for the modest price of 59 pennies.

Those of you who’ve been following us since the 1980s may have noticed that this is a nostalgic nod and wink to one of Ettore Software’s earliest creations for the Mac software community. This new and improved portable version is way better, though. It’s in colour, for starters.

TapIt4Me – the little brother of TypeIt4Me – is now available in the iTunes App Store, priced at £2.99. TapIt4Me enables you to type much more quickly and efficiently when composing notes, emails and tweets, using the same abbreviations and snippets created in TypeIt4Me or TextExpander. Introduced at the Macworld Conference & Expo earlier this month, TapIt4Me was awarded Best of Show by Macsimum News and MacTech. Save wear and tear on your index finger – check it out.

ContactMailer 1.0 is now available in the iTunes App Store, priced at £1.19. Sometimes you want to just quickly forward someone’s phone number and / or one or two other details rather than a whole contact card, right? Apple doesn’t currently provide this facility, but our ConctactMailer app allows you to do just that.

Xylophone 1.0 is now available for purchase in the iTunes App Store, priced at £0.59. It turns your iPhone (or iPod Touch using headphones) into a fully functioning toy xylophone, featuring:

• Realistic xylophone samples
• Ability to play chords (multitouch)
• Prongs that move when hit
• One octave C4-C5

It’s silly, but hey it passes the time. Entertain yourself, your friends, your kids. Annoy the person sitting next to you on the bus.