Spoken notifications can come in handy when using your iOS device while working out at the gym, riding a bicycle or attached to your car’s hands-free audio system via Bluetooth.  No need to actually look at the screen and read the message you just received. All you need to do is listen. Here is how to set it up.

Enable the VoiceOver Accessibility setting

The iOS setting that you need to enable is actually an accessibility feature called VoiceOver.  This feature can be used to read all aspects of the screen using Siri’s voice, including notifications that pop up on the screen.  The following steps will also allow you to easily turn on and off the VoiceOver setting, as it may not be a feature that you want enabled all of the time.

• Open the Settings App and navigate to the Accessibility setting located within the General settings.
• Select the VoiceOver settings located at the top of the list, but do not turn it on just yet. Instead scroll down to the bottom of the VoiceOver settings and turn on Speak Notifications.
• Navigate back to the list of all Accessibility settings and scroll down to the bottom of the list.
• Set the Triple-click Home Button setting to turn on VoiceOver and exit out of the Settings app.

That’s it.  Now every time the Home button is triple-clicked, the device will enter into VoiceOver mode.  Once in VoiceOver mode, Siri’s voice will read aloud all of the information on the screen, including notifications. To turn off VoiceOver, simply triple-click the Home button again.

Works with any Notifications-capable app

This VoiceOver feature as configured above will work with any app that takes advantage of iOS’s notification system.  Just be sure to configure the notification setting so that the app you are interested in can display an alert on the lock screen.  Using VoiceOver this way will respect your Do Not Disturb settings.

One app in particular that is useful to use in association with this feature is Twitter.  I have enabled certain news accounts that I follow on Twitter to be able to send me notifications.  With VoiceOver feature enabled, Siri will speak over the music that I am listening to and read the tweet to me.  It’s like adding your own custom news service to your favorite music stream, which I have found to be a very useful feature.

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Any.DO is a standout for a number of reasons, but one of the most interesting is that it debuted on Android, not iOS. The simple but elegant mobile app appeared in 2011 and I quickly took to it on my Android. What stood out to me was the excellent design and interface; something that most Android apps didn’t share at the time. Any.DO only got better from there, launching on iOS in June 2012 and, most recently adding the Any.DO Moment feature that helps plan each day:

I had a brief email conversation with Any.DO’s CEO and founder, Omer Perchik, and although he wouldn’t provide a detailed user breakdown, he told me the app still has more users on Android than on iOS. However, according to Onavo Insights, Any.DO was the most used “to do list” app on iOS in the U.S. during the month of March, beating out other well-known names such as Remember the Milk, Wunderlist and AnyList to name a few.

Besides a version of Any.DO for Android and iOS, the company also offers a Chrome extension that keeps tasks in sync between your desktop browser and your mobile phone. Now flush with some cash, what’s next for Any.DO? I asked Perchik if Windows Phone 8 or BlackBerry 10 would be the next likely platform target, but he wouldn’t bite.

“The next step of the company is to continue focusing on growth and becoming a more and more vital part of people’s everyday lives,” he told me. So I’ll add an Any.DO task to watch for more announcements.

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Apple’s issues with mobile photos and cloud storage were brought to light this week with a great post from an app developer, Peter Nixey. In a widely circulated personal blog post, he expressed his frustration with Apple’s current approach to managing photos on the desktop and on mobile. He presciently noted there would be a time when competitors — he named Google or Dropbox — would come along with better cloud-storage options for mobile photos.

Well, here comes Amazon with one such solution. Cloud Drive Photos, already available on Android, is a place to store all your photos (“thousands,” according to the company). Images taken with an iPhone or iPod touch get uploaded automatically to Cloud Drive when the app is opened. And you can also see any of your photos stored in the cloud on the device with the app. It’s free, and available on the iOS App Store now.

Just like Google with Maps, Search and Mail and Facebook with social things, Apple’s biggest and most important competitors are repeatedly besting Apple on its own platform when it comes to producing well designed, popular basic apps that are core to the mobile experience.

This Amazon app is different than, say, Yahoo being better at making a weather app than Apple. Or Kindle being a better ereader app than iBooks — sort of embarrassing, but not really areas Apple considers its core mission.

But the secret behind Amazon’s cloud-based photo storage is something at which Amazon is verifiably awesome, and something at which Apple is not: the cloud. Even with its billion-dollar data center and more on the way, Apple repeatedly struggles with keeping its cloud-based services reliable for users. And even when things are added to iCloud, like photos, some users still run into problems, as outlined in the link above, with multiple copies or confusing organization.

The more troubling part of it all is that Apple’s cloud services aren’t just supposed to be something added on to its hardware offerings. Linking users’ data, whether it’s photos, music, videos, documents, email or messages, and making it accessible regardless of device, is part of Apple’s plan for growth.  As CEO Tim Cook has said, it’s at the centerpiece of its strategy for the next decade.

Apple’s going to have to start offering far better core mobile apps that connect with its cloud if it doesn’t want Amazon and others to peel users off to their own services.

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The special iTunes plan costs $7.99 per month and is available directly through the Boingo Wi-Finder app for iOS. The software also includes a VPN service. By using the iTunes in-app purchase, users can immediately get a Wi-Fi subscription for their iPod touch, iPad or iPhone. The subscription is an auto-renewal, however: if you don’t want to continue it on a monthly basis, you’ll have to cancel it.

This is a clever move by Boingo to make it easier for paid Wi-Fi access. There are two things I’d like to see in the future though. First, offer an in-app purchase for other Boingo plans, such as an hourly or daily basis. Currently, the company does offer Boingo Credits, which provide an hour of Wi-Fi access for $1.99, for example. Second, why not extend the same simple in-app purchase on Android through Google Wallet?

Either way, potential Boingo customers using iOS devices now have one less barrier to get connectivity in airports, shopping malls, restaurants, universities and other locations around the world.

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That’s instead of Apple’s default solution, which would be to link to YouTube on the web, Safari and Apple Maps, respectively.

It should come as welcome news to heavy users of Google services or those who simply want to be able to pick what apps to connect to on their phone. It’s also, as CNET noted, a sort of “end run” around Apple’s services. Even as Apple has decoupled its iPhone partnership with Google for everything except search — removing YouTube and Google Maps as default iOS apps in the second half of 2012 — the web company has still found a way to reach its users who have iPhones and iPads through Apple’s regulated App Store.

The Gmail update comes a week after the introduction of Google Now for iOS as part of the Google Search app. That service also takes advantage of Google services users’ activity across a variety of Google apps, including those used in iOS.

Google isn’t alone among Apple’s competitors who have aspirations of this kind: Amazon and Facebook have also been able to build a series of apps that can act as replacements for Apple’s core iOS services, from music and videos to making phone calls and texting.

Apple certainly benefits by being able to offer the most popular services and apps on its platform, but at some point it must be concerning for Apple that the most basic services of its flagship device are being bypassed by superior apps coming from its fiercest competitors.

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Since the beginning, Apple has set the bar for good design, which is reflected in the majority of what you find in its iOS App Store. But as the iOS platform has aged, new design trends have emerged. The faux-leather texture on the Contacts app, or the wooden bookshelves on iBooks and Newsstand were welcoming and familiar six years ago. But like smartphones, they are no longer new. And as a design philosophy, the overly textured look that incorporates real-world objects is becoming less necessary in a world where mobile computers are more familiar than ever.

That’s why we’ve already seen some of the best and most adventurous third-party designers on Apple’s platform already embracing new design techniques on their own, incorporating flatter design elements as seen in places like Microsoft’s Metro design for Windows UI and elsewhere.

But if Apple embraces a new look that’s flatter and tones down the stylized textures, more will probably follow what we’ve seen in Letterpress, Clear, Embark and others: apps with a flatter look that still incorporate what we’ve come to understand as the standard iOS user experience.

Good design practice

Major design tweaks will ripple out into custom-designed apps, Phill Ryu, co-founder of mobile design shop Impending and a designer behind Clear, told me.

“Apps with custom UI benefit from, and in a way rely on, incorporating design features from the OS that its users would already be familiar with, as stepping stones to guide them through a new unexplored experience,” he said. “The stepping stones may need to be swapped out or tweaked if iOS 7 changes significantly.”

Michael Simmons of Flexibits, maker of Mac and iOS app Fantastical, pointed out that the most important aspect of app design isn’t following trends, it’s that they’re easily understandable to users.

“The point of native apps is the user is familiar with that — give them an app with that same user interface so they don’t have to learn something new,” he said.

“If Apple changes the user interface … we would have to adapt at some point to make our app more OS-like. We have a red header [in Fantastical, which stands out from Apple's usual neutral blue] but we still use standard [iOS] controls,” Simmons said. “It still fits into the ecosystem. And that’s the key: you do want to follow what Apple’s doing because you want your experience to be as close to the native experience as possible.”

Still, if there are changes to iOS 7, he isn’t anticipating them to be so startingly different that it will require app makers to retrain iPhone and iPad users.

“Apple doesn’t make drastic changes — they evolve,” Simmons points out. “It’s never been Apple’s thing to make a massive change.”

A good bet as to the kinds of changes we’ll see? Apple’s own Podcasts app offers a good example. The recent redesign didn’t alter the overall user experience, but they did nix the old-school reel-to-reel tapedeck. It still kept the basic functionality, but freshened up the look and feel with less gimmicky elements.

Design philosophy is just one aspect of the changes afoot at Apple. The competitive field in mobile is vastly different than it was when Steve Jobs first introduced the iPhone and iOS. As we’ve seen already, the company no longer can market the iPhone the same way it used to six years ago or even two years ago, so it’s adapting with new tactics to match a more realistic understanding of that market. The same is true for mobile OSes: a redesigned iOS 7 would be another example of how the company is looking toward the future by breaking with the past. The key will be to help third-party app makers and their users navigate these changes as painlessly as possible.

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Now Shuttleworth, who used tens of millions of his own dollars to fund Canonical and made it his ambition to entrench Ubuntu Linux on desktops and servers is now launching a full-on assault to put it on your smartphone, your tablet and the computers that run your favorite cloud services via OpenStack.

Taking on the giants

It’s a gutsy bet. He’s basically taking on Google’s Chrome Browser, ChromeOS and Android OS. And then there’s iOS. Not a job for the faint of heart. In a recent interview with GigaOM,  Shuttleworth said a key Ubuntu advantage is that its basic code really does run everywhere from itty-bitty mobile devices to big iron. No Android-Chrome OS divide here.

“The core of Ubuntu that runs on the server is the same as on the phone and that’s a wonderful resonance,” Shuttleworth said. “We’ve done  pioneering work to put server Linux on ARM chips and the core of those ARM chips is the same for servers as it is for smartphones,”  Shuttleworth said.

Admittedly, it’s still early days for running ARM servers in a production environment — my colleague Stacey Higginbotham reported that Baidu is doing it — for storage — but few others are. But the need for energy-sipping servers is not going away. And ARM servers address that demand.

As more cloud services get delivered via smartphones and tablets, all that “resonance” could come in handy. But timing may be a problem. Android and Apple iOS, which dominate that smartphone and tablet market now, will be hard to dislodge. If you believe Google Chairman Eric Schmidt — a biased observer — Android Android’s growth rate is, is on track to hit 1 billion downloads within the next 6 to 9 months. And, to further complicate matters, Microsoft seems willing to spend big to build its presence in smartphones and tablets as well. As much money as Shuttleworth has, Microsoft has more.

Seemingly undaunted, Shuttleworth says Ubuntu is getting serious looks from silicon providers, from carriers and from handset makers who are interested in offering it on their devices. He declined to provide names. It is true that Google’s acquisition of Motorola’s mobile assets still worries third-party handset makers who don’t relish the thought of competing with their OS provider, but that doesn’t seem to have slowed Android adoption.

Ubuntu shows strength in cloud

Ubuntu is already a big presence in the cloud by virtue of Amazon Web Services where it is the most popular operating environment on EC2 — at least as measured by the Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) that people create. “The number of AMIs running Ubuntu is 5 or 6 times as many as Windows or any other operating system,” said Stephen O’Grady, principal analyst with Redmonk. One caveat is that people create lots of AMIs that they may not actually use, cautioned The 451 Group analyst Carl Brooks.

And Ubuntu came earlier than many other vendors to the OpenStack party. It’s got a leg up in the enterprise two years ago when  HP named it the lead host and guest OS in HP’s OpenStack cloud. That relationship continues to this day.

Shuttleworth also said Ubuntu’s OpenStack gets tons of interest from telcos and carriers that are rushing to create their own cloud services to better compete with AWS. One theme coming out of the OpenStack Summit last month was that these sleeping giants, many of which offer VMware vCloud Director options that price them out of the market, are finally waking up to the threat that AWS poses to them. And that is something Shuttleworth feels Ubuntu, with Canonical behind it,  can capitalize on.

“We are in a very good position when carriers want to look beyond standing up OpenStack to what the end-user experience is,” he said.

In his view, Ubuntu more than other Linux OpenStack flavors, offers simplicity and power — a claim that other OpenStack players would likely dispute. Linux rivals Red Hat, SUSE and are also all in the mix here. And Nebula’s selling point is its OpenStack controller that makes it easy to plug OpenStack into existing legacy environments. There will be a ton of competition among the OpenStack providers even as they all contend with CloudStack and Eucalyptus options.

Shuttleworth maintains Ubuntu’s advantage, however.

“We really are at the point where you can take a USB with Ubuntu, stick it on 1 to 300 servers and in a short period have a high-availability cloud — compute, storage, and network — up and running that provides a lot of value,” he said. “This is real and it’s helping people get over the conceptual hurdle of moving to cloud. It’s at the point where you can have ten people debating it for a week or you can just go and do it — the cost is low enough and the lessons are valuable enough to make it happen.”

But what about revenue?

There’s one not-so-small hitch here. As many good reviews as Ubuntu Linux has gotten, the revenue or profit picture is about as clear as mud. Canonical’s business model is that customers pay for support and maintenance on free software. But the privately held company won’t say how many people actually pay for any of that. And it doesn’t talk about how much money Shuttleworth has ponied up since founding the company in 2004. The question is whether Canonical (and Ubuntu) could stand on its own without his deep pockets. Face it, it’s hard to take a customer from free to non-free.

When it comes to questions about revenue or profitability, Canonical will only say that customers including PC, phone and tablet manufacturers and big companies that deploy Ubuntu at scale  use Canonical’s paid tools and services to support their server, cloud and client environments.

That may not be enough detail for enterprise buyers who want to know if the vendor they use today will be around next year or the year after. For a company that has such grand plans for a free operating system, Canonical needs to address these questions at some point.

Shuttleworth will be talking about his grand cloud vision at GigaOM’s Structure Europe in London in September, so here’s your chance to ask.

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That is what Kansas City, Mo.-based startup Leap2 hopes its new search site that combines the web, location and social in a way that delivers detailed results while allowing for serendipitous discovery, will be: Disruptive in a way that draws search market share from Google. The startup launches its site Tuesday on mobiles and also said today it had raised $1.6 million in first round funding. The round was led by Dundee Venture Capital, with support from OpenAir Equity, Linseed Capital and the Wichita Technology Corporation.

Mike Farmer, the CEO of Leap2, is no stranger to search, having tried seven years ago with a web site called Kozoru. But this time he thinks that focusing on mobile, as well as bringing in social elements to a search gives end users better results as well as a few nice surprises.

The Leap2 web plus social results page.

For example, when the app opens, you see a home screen that offers the day’s news as a slate of pictures. Some are self-evident and others are perhaps a mystery. Clicking on a picture offers you one of the day’s top news stories. Once you enter a search term, the screens splits in half with the top half showing Twitter results related to the search and the bottom half showing images of the web sites that match your search.

Here’s where it gets dicey. Searches for “the best brunch in Austin” or “tacos and tequila Austin” (it’s a restaurant) worked well. I saw relevant websites, pictures of places, and even tweets from people who were there and a tweet promising me a discount next weekend at a brunch locale. But when I searched for my name and other people’s names, I started running into what is the bane of the mobile web — requests to download apps.

My people searches drew up magazine and LinkedIn results that I couldn’t see without clicking through to the “no thanks” button on the screen that pops up asking me to download a mobile app. I, like the rest of the population, hate those screens. Farmer is hoping that the mobile web becomes less about apps and more about the web soon, but I’m not holding my breath.

Location results page.

Things like the discovery of discounts or even insights from Twitter, (Farmer wants to integrate FourSquare, Yelp and Facebook eventually for the social aspects) plus the integrated location and directions, help make this a contender against Google Now, which I adore for its ability to read my calendar and tell me when to leave the house to make a meeting. Leap2 can’t offer that, and it’s going to face the same challenge that all search engines face, which is enticing users to click on it as opposed to going with the already-integrated search functions.

As for monetization, Farmer said that some time in the future Leap2 will integrate sponsored search results, initially among the social cards on the top half of the screen. The goal will be to play relevant results based on the location, the search or other information gleaned. Farmer gave the example of real-time deals. He plans to have the same image-filled-card-like interface that spans the app now, be the same interface for showing sponsored search ads as well.

The mobile app for iOS and Android launches Tuesday, with the website launching on Wednesday. Give it a try. I thought it was worth using, especially when I’m on the go, as it gives a much richer picture on the small screen than I might otherwise get.

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Google Now has been an integrated feature of Android 4.1 since June 2012, but starting Monday, it will, for the first time, be available on the iOS platform. (And no, Google did not have any problem getting the app approved, company representatives said.) The service, which draws on a wealth of user information in Google’s mobile apps and desktop services, aims to give users relevant answers to questions before they’ve even asked them. That information pops up on a “card” on the screen.

For example: if you’ve entered your work address, every morning when you get up Google Now will check the traffic; if it’s going to be a slow commute, the card will pop up in the Google Search app alerting the user to leave earlier than usual for work.

Users can choose what kinds of cards they want to receive. If you want to receive notifications about package deliveries, flight delays, football scores or sightseeing suggestions, that can be set in preferences. Google Now will know when you get, for example, a FedEx delivery notification in your Gmail, and it can alert you to that. Or, it can know when you have an upcoming flight, also based on airline confirmation emails as well.

Using Google Now is equivalent to the “signed-in” experience of using Google services in the browser: it can share information across other Google services to help you and give you information it thinks you want. If that creeps you out — if you don’t want Google knowing where you work or where you’re going on your next trip — you can turn any of those services off. Google Now will still work, it just won’t be as “rich” of an experience, Tamar Yehoshua, director of product management at Google, told me.

There are lots of small differences — and one big, major difference — between Google Search with Google Now on iOS and Siri. Both are described by their creators as the mobile, digital equivalents of “personal assistants,” but Siri is the kind that you have to keep asking to complete tasks. Google Now is the assistant that, when given access to a lot of your crucial personal information, can preemptively do things for you before you ask.

Google said a version of Google Now for iOS is one of its most requested features. And based on the praise the Android version has received over the last few months, it’s very likely to be a big hit for Google.

For Apple, this brings the benefit of offering a useful and popular service through its App Store. But, looked at another way, this is yet another way that its main rival in the mobile world is able to deepen its relationship with its own customers on Apple’s platform. And that’s got to be more than a little bit concerning to the folks in Cupertino as the two companies do battle for the future of mobile technology.

Still, Siri does maintain a nice home-field advantage: it’s actually built into the iPhone’s operating system and can be accessed with a quick long press of the home button. Google Now, for all of its features, still has to be searched for or accessed through push notifications just like any other app.

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The features of Wunderlist Pro will come as no surprise, as 6Wunderkinder accidentally revealed them last month, but here’s the gist anyway: tasks can be assigned among friends or colleagues, and subtasks can now be created. This should make Wunderlist Pro an effective replacement for the axed Wunderkit, which was a project management counterpart to Wunderlist’s task manager.

The Pro version costs $4.99 a month or $49.99 annually, and is available now for iOS devices, OS X and the web. 6Wunderkinder tells me the Android and Windows versions will follow in a week’s time.

“Wunderlist Pro allows you to easily delegate to-dos and effectively track the progress of each task, yet this is just the beginning. There is still a whole lot more to come,” 6Wunderkinder CEO Christian Reber said in a statement.

The first installment of that “whole lot more” will be the ability to attach files to tasks, which can then be shared for collaborative work. Meanwhile, the sharing functionality of the original Wunderlist has also received a boost through the addition of an “action bar” that allows one-click access to email and share lists.

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