This week’s roundup of must-have apps kicks off with a brand new iPhone app from AOL Music that has been described as “Instagram for music.” AOL PLAY is completely free and focuses on music sharing and discovery, allowing you to listen to and share music with your friends on Twitter and Facebook, stream selected albums, and access over 47,000 SHOUTcast radio stations.
We also have an awesome new app called Trimit which will turn entire articles into a few short sentences, and Readdle’s latest iPad app that will turn any document into a professional PDF.
AOL PLAY — (Free) iPhone — Music
AOL PLAY is a music app like no other that focuses on listening to, sharing and discovering music with your friends:
Music brings out something special in all of us, it trigger long forgotten memories and creates new ones that will last a lifetime. Sharing those memories is something we all love to do, especially with friends, and over 400,000 users agree. PLAY by AOL is the premier music application of 2011 — it’s a free, fun and simple way to listen to, share and discover new music with friends.
Set it up to connect with your Twitter and Facebook accounts to find and follow your friends, and share your musical experiences. When you post your favorite tracks, you can either choose to include its default album art, or you can accompany it with a photo of your choice that represents your memories associated with the track.
Discover music posted by your friends and listen to previews of their favorite songs, which you can instantly buy from iTunes, or comment on and ‘like’. Tag your friends in comments by using their “@username” and they’ll get an alert to notify them.
Trimit — (Free temporarily, usually $0.99) iPhone — Utilities
Trimit is a new app for your iPhone from Frimby Limited that automatically summarizes large bodies of text to fit the character limits of social networks like Twitter and Facebook. For example, let’s say you’re reading an interesting article and you want to share it with your friends. Rather than just posting a boring old link, you can summarize the whole story into a few short sentences.
There are six preset character limits, including Twitter, Facebook, SMS and Tumblr, and can also choose to enable or disable vowels and abbreviations to make your results even shorter for sharing. Trimit utilizes a ‘highly complicated’ algorithm to automatically summarize (or trim) the webpage you entered into the specified length, attempting to convey only the integral information of a piece of text.
It’s a concept that works surprisingly well, and although there are occasions when its output doesn’t seem to make any sense, 9 times out of 10 it’s impressively accurate.
PDF Converter — ($6.99) iPad — Productivity
Readdle is famous for its plethora of impressive productivity apps for iOS devices, and their latest continues that fine trend. PDF Converter — a $6.99 app for the iPad — will turn any document into a high quality PDF, including Word, Excel, Powerpoint or iWork documents, and even web pages, photos and clipboard content. The whole process is done entirely on your device, so it’s completely secure. And there’s no need to upload or download anything, so there’s no need for an internet connection.
Once PDF Converter is installed, the app will appear as an option for opening documents on your device, allowing you to save PDFs from apps like Mail, Dropbox, GoodReader, MobileMe iDisk, Readdle Docs and lots more. To save a webpage, the change the “http” at the beginning of the URL to “pdfhttp” within Safari — it’s that simple.
Dragon Go! — (Free) iPhone — Lifestyle
Dragon Go! from Nuance uses the companies state of the art voice recognition technology to enable you to find the things you want on the internet simply by saying them. It uses the best mobile sites to find the results you’re looking for, such as Fandango for movie showtimes and trailers, Accuweather for local weather updates, Pandora for internet radio, Yelp for local reviews and recommendations, and lots more. For example, you say “Cowboys & Aliens showtimes” and Dragon Go! app will take you to straight to Fandango to watch movie trailers, view showtimes, and purchase tickets for your local theatre. You need never type to search again!
Panamp — ($2.99) iPhone — Music
Panamp is another awesome new music app that aims to replace your iPhone’s built-in Music app. “At Clever & Son we believe that listening to music is a dynamic synthesis of expression and entertainment. To harness this essential nature of music, we developed a powerful iPhone and iPod touch music player app that expands those principles into every aspect of your listening experience.”
Panamp is packed with awesome features, like the ability to create dynamic ‘queues’ of music by simply swiping a track, and a power search function that allows you to locate artists, track or albums quickly and efficiently. Playback controls are on-screen throughout the app, equipped with fast and efficient gesture controls to put your entire library at your fingertips. For those looking for a replacement to the built-in iOS music app, I don’t believe you’ll find anything quite as good as Panamp.
