No Strings Attached

This week in The New Yorker, Michael Schulman writes about the Whatnot Workshop, a kiosk at F.A.O. Schwarz where shoppers can design their own Muppets. (Schulman accompanied Jason Segel, the actor who co-wrote and stars in the new Muppet movie and who opted to design his creation in Schulman’s likeness.) But don’t fret if you’re far from Fifth Avenue; thanks to Muppet Mail, an app created by Disney, users can design Muppet versions of themselves and their friends to share via electronic greeting cards or on Facebook. Occasions include birthday, friendship, retirement, and love—which is what Segel says the effort to revive the Muppet franchise was all about. Read more at newyorker.com…

‘Tis the Season

When “A Charlie Brown Christmas” debuted in 1965, CBS executives were nervous. The special used children, not adults playing children, for the voices; the soundtrack featured jazz; and Linus’s speech on the true meaning of Christmas was overtly religious. But these supposed liabilities were the things viewers loved most. The show immediately met with critical and popular success, and it’s been on the air every holiday season since. This year, children—and sentimental adults—can play with the recently released “A Charlie Brown Christmas” app for iPhone and iPad, which includes an interactive-storybook retelling of the show, narrated by Peter Robbins, the original voice of Charlie Brown. Read more at newyorker.com…

Raise a Glass

On Saturday, November 5th, three friends arrived at Music Hack Day Boston—in which developers and designers meet to build proof-of-concept sites and apps in a short amount of time—with hangovers. Needing a hair-of-the-dog remedy, they decided their hack should be a drink-recommendation site, and thus Drinkify was born. Type in a musician or band’s name, and Drinkify will give you the perfect drink for your listening experience; the site works by using artist keywords and tempo to determine the “stirring speed” of the cocktail. “It’s been really cool to watch musicians enjoy playing with it—either because their drink is spot on or absolutely terrible,” writes Matthew Ogle, who created the site along with Hannah Donovan and Lindsay Eyink. Read more at newyorker.com…

Main Stream

Say you’ve got a free evening, a good wi-fi signal, and a strong desire to watch the complete works of Martin Scorsese. CanIStream.It, a search engine recently created by the New York-based consulting firm Urban Pixels, scans the databases of Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and Crackle to tell you which movies are available for streaming, with separate tabs that index rental, purchase, and DVD/Bluray options. Read more at newyorker.com…

New Again

October 6th was a busy day for New Directions. Tomas Tranströmer, who has been with the press since the nineteen-sixties, won the Nobel Prize for literature; amid the press frenzy that followed, the publisher pushed ahead with the scheduled launch of its revamped Web site and new literary blog, “Now That It’s Now.” The site features recaps of readings, news items, celebrity book recommendations (Patti Smith likes Bolaño and Gogol), as well as posts celebrating New Directions’ seventy-five-year archive. Read more at newyorker.com…

Growing Up

In the October 24th issue of The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert commented on the world’s population, which the U.N. predicted would reach seven billion this week. “The question of how many people the earth can support over the long or even medium term remains, at this point, open,” she wrote. “7 Billion: How Your World Will Change,” an iPad app launched recently by National Geographic, attempts to answer the question, with photos, videos, interactive maps, and demographic profiles, and features like “Birth of a New Brazil” and “Rift in Paradise,” which explores the effects of population increase on Africa’s Albertine Rift. According to the app, nine billion people will inhabit the Earth by 2050. Read more at newyorker.com…

Food Networked

Jamie Oliver, as Michael Specter wrote in June, is the kind of celebrity chef who deserves his fame. An advocate of healthy eating, Oliver took his campaign to America television in 2010, and this summer got the Los Angeles Unified School District to stop serving “flavored milk” to its students. Recently, he launched the Jamie Oliver Food Guide, an app available for iPhone and iPad that shares his favorite places to eat and buy food in England. Read more at newyorker.com…

Radio Days

The New York classical-music station WQXR, on the air since 1939, has become an indispensable part of the city’s soundtrack. Now the station increases its reach with an app—download it for free for your iPhone or iPad—that features live streams of WQXR and its more contemporary sister, Q2, as well as information on past and upcoming shows, podcasts and videos, and reviews of cultural events in New York. Read more at newyorker.com…

Dear Diary

Is reading another person’s diary an invasion of privacy? Not when you pay for the privilege. Frequent New Yorker contributor David Sedaris recently made his innermost thoughts available in the form of an app. The project, called “David’s Diary,” is a collaboration with the cartoonist Laurie Rosenwald and features six short animated installments. March 4, 2009: Sedaris reads a newspaper article about a barn owl that delivers wedding rings to couples in exchange for a snack of live rat, mouse, or chick. “For the first time in my life,” Sedaris says, “and for all the right reasons, I want to get married.” Read more at newyorker.com…

Bard Drive

Shakespeare was intended to be watched, not read—and yet millions of students still slog through paperback copies of “Hamlet.” Enter the Irish educational company Shakespeare in Bits, and its iPad and iPhone apps for “Romeo and Juliet,” “Macbeth,” and, just released September 7th, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (available for iPad only). Each app features animations and sound to go with the corresponding text, in which certain words or phrases are “modernized” with a touch (Romeo and Juliet become “fateful,” not “star-crossed,” lovers); notes and synopses help explain things further. Read more at newyorker.com…