Four ways to remove your pictures from Photo Stream in case of emergency

Having a picture of your genitals displayed on your living room's TV wasn't probably what the team of Apple engineers considered when working on Photo Stream. One of the potentially most useful features in iCloud just happens to be the most annoying. The brilliant service that backs up your pictures automatically to the cloud can turn into a nasty surprise if you don't control the snaps taken with your iOS devices... And users are learning the lesson the hard way.

Let's rewind to last June when Apple introduced iCloud. Advertised as "automatic, effortless and free", it isn't exactly foolproof. The back up service for all your pictures taken with your iOS devices automatically pushes a copy to all the other Apple products linked to that iCloud account, including your Apple TV, home iMac or your kid's iPod Touch. The service does not only manage to keep a safe record of your shots, but also fix one of the most annoying bits for every iPhone user: importing your pictures to your desktop. 

If you're using the service, there's a reason why you're reading this post. Like many of us keeping every IIII picture taken with your iPhone cannot be a good idea. Unlike that camera roll where you can delete those blurry, embarrassing or simply compromising pictures in a couple of taps, Photo Stream doesn't have the option. Why? Many of us are still asking the same question and I don't want to be misleading: there's no easy way to do it.  

I have, however, scoured the support forums and got some ways to get around this issue. I also noticed that this seems to be a very popular request from users who would like, or desperately need, to delete individual pictures from Photo Stream. I'm hopeful someone will look into this issue and introduce a reasonable way to do this in a future iOS update. In the meantime, we can try these solutions: 

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The Journey Planner series - Next Bus London

After a couple of weeks of testing is now time to return with a post for the London Journey Planner series. If you missed the introduction and the review for Bus Checker, my goal is to complete a guide with the iPhone apps that use the live departure feed of Transport for London - basically, testing and reviewing the apps that tell you when a bus arrives to your stop.

In the second episode of this guide I'll have a look at Next Bus London [iTunes Link] by Jeevan Takhar. I've you've been searching the App Store for a bus tracker app, I'm pretty sure you've spotted this icon before. I'm not a fan of text used in icons, but in this occasion, the image of the front of a double-decker bus and the words "next bus" tell you what this is all about without strange metaphors and interpretations of TfL's official logos. This is at least is a good start.

The simplicity continues the first time you launch the app: you'll notice the very simple UI without any custom element except the subtle transparency on the bottom bar. In fact everything looks minimalist, neat and tidy. The default view is a map with your current location and a number of standard red pins to indicate the stops nearby. Once you tap on them, the actual letter that identifies the stop is displayed along with the direction of the traffic and the lines that stop there.

Up to here, this is a very conventional behaviour. Tapping on the station details gives you a list view with the departures and the schedules for every day of the week with their expected frequencies - the sort of thing you see on the posters. 

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Super Crate Box - Probably the most frustrating touch controls on iOS

The hectic jumping and shooting in a setting reminiscent of the ol' Donkey Kong, the endless quest to collect crates and the short lived adventures of a micro hero can only mean one thing: the Dutch indie studio Vlambeer has completed and launched its award-wining survival platformer on the App Store successfully. 

Super Crate Box [iTunes Link] originally debuted on PC as a free game gaining the respect of the gaming community and industry accolades. The biggest recognition comes, however, from fellow iOS developers inspired by gameplay mechanics. Muffin Night and Ninja Fishing by Angry Mob Games and Gamenauts respectively seem to distill ideas from the Dutch duo. But that's a different story.

After this long wait and only after the App Store submission orgy that is December, we get the iOS port out of nowhere. The first impressions count, and seeing iCade compatibility on the description is always encouraging for retro heads. The pixel graphics are welcoming and the newcomer could never guess the survival challenges, frustrations and difficulty ahead. I never played the Mac or PC versions, so I was technically a virgin too.

Super Crate Box simply throws you at it: a simple scenario where mindless creatures fall from top to bottom down to a pit. No instructions given. Only you and a gun. And some wooden crates with mysterious contents. 

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Five reasons why texting apps like WhatsApp and iMessage are killing SMS

Many could see this coming: the end of text messages as we know them. From carriers around the world offering SMS bundles and packages as part of their contracts, all that people ask is that the smartphone in question will be able to run WhatsApp. I witnessed this recently at an Orange shop where a surprisingly knowledgable salesperson was asked if Nokia's Lumia 800 could be able to run Viber to make free international calls.

I acknowledge I'm an appfreak and maybe my point of view is distorted. I'm not expecting top management in carriers to keep track of the most downloaded App Store apps. Even if they hear the Viber ringtone every ten minutes in their offices. It doesn't take much effort to realise that an app that allows users to surpass the carrier dominance over messaging is now being bundled with the most popular smartphone - the iPhone and its iMessage, and that WhatsApp is the only non-game app that seems to keep up with the pace of Angry Birds on the charts. 

1. Out of the box texting alternative

There's nothing to setup and no sign-up forms. In an effort to keep things simple for the user, you're asked only once if you want to attempt to send your texts using iMessage - directly from the same app where you use to send your SMS. There are some glitches when either sender or receiver isn't connected to a 3G or Wi-Fi network, but in my experience so far, iMessage tries to deliver it even if it has to do it both for free and on traditional SMS - yes, those duplicates you get from time to time.

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