I downloaded five Sacramento-specific mobile apps to review to find out if there is truth to the famous slogan "There's an app for that." I had a mixed bag of results, with some useful and some novelty. Midtown Sacramento Price: Free The app encourages its users to explore Midtown, helping them find parking, taxi service, restaurants, boutiques and other needs. It also keeps users up to date with neighborhood events, sales and friends' updates and tweets through an in-app tab for Twitter and Facebook. Upon opening the app, I was pleased by the clean outline showing 12 different icons representing the different options to choose from: events, eats and drinks, entertainment, galleries, h

KVIE and PBS announced today the release of PBS for iPad and soon to-be-released PBS App for the iPhone and iPod touch. Both apps make PBS video and KVIE scheduling information available anywhere, anytime. These efforts continue KVIE’s transformation into a multi-platform media leader serving Northern California through television, mobile, the Web, and other platforms, including classroom interactive whiteboards. PBS is premiering the first episode of its multi-part series CIRCUS (www.pbs.org/circus) on PBS for iPad. The episode is available for streaming beginning today, in advance of the broadcast premiere on KVIE (ch. 6) on November 3 at 9pm. These new apps build on successful initiat

 It was a dark and stormy night. Well, not really.  It had been a dark and stormy afternoon, however, and about 4 p.m., I thought the River Cats series finale against the Colorado Sky Sox was in jeopardy of being rained out.   Fortunately, the storm broke around 5 p.m., and by game time there were only a few clouds in the sky.  I arrived about 6:30 and was pleasantly surprised to find a press pass waiting for me at Will Call.  I'd thought that ship might have sailed after the "flip flop incident," but apparently not. I felt like a good cop, though somewhat of a loose cannon, who'd lost his badge and gun because of his erratic behavior.  Like Mel Gibson in "Lethal Weapon". On Monday, I g

Andy Ihnatko is an amusing, sometimes irreverant, technology journalist for the Chicago Sun-Times. Andy's style is both self-effacing yet knowledgeable with a little theatre like presence in his style of delivering what can be sometimes abstract concepts about new media. He is a contributor to Macworld Magazine as well as a technology commentator on CBS’ Early Show. He also has written some books with his latest offering, Iphone: Full Loaded, available through Amazon. He was a featured speaker at this year's Macworld held in San Francisco. This is the year that Apple previously had decided not to attend leading many to muse as to what impact this would have to this long time event. It is a