Stephen King has teamed up with musicians John Mellencamp and T Bone Burnett for a new supernatural digital book musical called Ghost Brothers of Darkland County.

The multimedia gothic story, which comes out on June 3rd from Hear Music/Concord Music Group, will take the form of an illustrated digital book that was created specifically for Apple’s iBooks. The work includes a story by King, original songs and lyrics by Mellencamp, along with interactive video, sound effects and a full soundtrack with recordings by many other artists.

Here is more about the project from the press release:

The Ghost Brothers of Darkland County saga began when Mellencamp told King about a cabin on his land in Indiana where two brothers had gotten in a fight over a girl; one brother accidentally killing the other, only to die along with the girl in a car crash a short time later. King came up with an outline for a play in a matter of days. And then off and on, back and forth, they began to develop it into a full-length musical.

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Spun, a news aggregating app from Broadcastr (the guys behind electric literature), has partnered with the lifestyle blog network Thrillist as part of its Version 2.0 release.

The Spun app works like Flipboard in 3D. It distills relevant news stories to users from across the web depending on their personalized interests and location. It highlights trending national news, local content and odder smaller stories that may catch your eye. You can spin the app to find stories that you’d like to read and then based on the types of stories that you read, the app will recommend others. ”It’s like putting an ‘interesting’ filter on the Internet,” explained Andy Hunter, CEO of Spun in a statement.

The app also uses location data to give readers localized information, Thrillist restaurant recommendations, for instance.

The Brooklyn-based startup has also added a new category to the app called “Top News & Culture,” expanding coverage to worldwide stories. The Version 2 release comes six months after the launch of its local news app, SPUN: City News, which at launch, was available in select U.S. cities.

This pistol-shaped, plastic protective case is made for iPhone 5 users who happen to own too many holsters and not enough guns. Unfortunately, the plastic gun doesn’t shoot anything, not even a tweet… so don’t bother pulling any triggers.

The gun comes in silver and copper. Buy three or more and get $2 off for a special tweet-off among your besties? If you’re more of the brass knuckles type, be sure to get the Ghost Head Rings case, it’s a lot cheaper and is deadly in combination with steely knuckle punches. Read more

Lithophanes are beautiful etched artwork, usually sculpted out of thin white porcelain. The result is a scene revealed with backlit diffused lighting that gives the portrait visual depth and texture. Now, you can make any of your personal photos a lithophane with a 3D printer by converting the grayscale value in each pixels for thickness. Read more

Fanhattan wants to make it easier for you to watch your favorite TV and movies without having to use a ton of devices.

The company has created a set-top box called Fan TV that combines all live TV, cloud DVR and video streaming into one device.

Here is more about the idea from the Fan TV blog:

In the mix of hardware, apps and services, the core of the experience was lost: the actual entertainment. We think of it as the “Friday night fail” – sitting down after a long week to be entertained and quickly getting frustrated by the process of a) deciding what to watch and b) finding it across dozens of streaming services, on demand and live TV options, and c) negotiating a limited timespan before your significant other declares the effort hopeless. The loss – we end up settling for whatever is on rather than finding something we would love to watch.

Where are consumers spending most of their time on their phones? While Facebook, Gmail and Google Search top the list, according to new research from Mobile Posse, consumers spend the most time on their phones checking their homescreen.

Arbitron Mobile conducted the research on behalf of Mobile Posse over a three month period. They installed the “Arbitron Mobile Meter” onto the devices of 3,000 consumers using different Android phones made by Samsung, LG, ZTE and Huawei to monitor the users’ voice, data and app usage.  They found that a preinstalled homescreen app generated an average user session of 88 minutes per month, compared to 74 minutes for Facebook and 44 minutes for Gmail.

So what does this mean for content creators? Well the homescreen is pretty useful property and could be the best place to run ads or even as a place to create fun content for.

Do you wish you could turn your phone into a baby monitor or perhaps Want to turn your phone into a remote control for your physical world? Check out SmartThings, a new set of tools that help developers build apps that can turn physical objects into connected devices.

The apps can be used for things like turning the lights on and off in your home, closing a window when the rain is coming or turning your thermostat up and down. The SmartThings community has already created a phone-controlled tool for feeding pets, a voice activated baby mobile, and a remote control to dim the lights in a movie theater.

Follow this link to check out a video demo of the toolset.

AppNewser asked, What’s Your Favorite App, David Kenny?

The chairman/CEO of The Weather Company chose the note-taking app Evernote.  ”Within Evernote, Evernote Hello is my favorite, because I meet a lot of interesting and it is a way to keep track of when I met them, and what we talked about,” he said. Evernote Hello lets you scan business cards, access your contact’s LinkedIn page, as well as add notes to your contact list so that you can create a rich, browsable history of people and experiences. ”It keeps my life very organized,” adds Kenny.

Kenny uses the app on his iPhone, iPad and Nexus 7 — three devices that he carries with him as he is always checking The Weather Channel apps to make sure that they are working. Read more

MiKandi, an adult entertainment company, is working on a pornography apps for Google Glass and apparently they’ll be ready to launch the first one in a couple of days.

The app will allow users to watch porn and to create their own. Here are more details from the MiKandi blog:

Sharing POV porn is now even faster and easier than holding up your camera phone or using higher quality cameras like GoPro. How fun will it be to tap into your favorite porn star or cam model’s glass video stream? Or go down the rabbit hole further with us and imagine when devices, like Google Glass, can communicate with sex toys. That brings virtual sex to another level.

(Via The Huffington Post).

If you have an iPhone, you’ve discovered that the mute button doesn’t actually mute all sounds – and that’s annoying. To deal with iPhones and their inconsistent audio behavior, Ron Adair created the Mutator, a small plug that connects to the iPhone via the headphone jack. The Mutator assures that all of the sounds from all of the apps are silenced. The end.

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