apps - page 37

I might be a lapsed Englishman, but there’s something that can never be bred out of me wherever I dwell: my love of a nice cup of tea. Unfortunately, even the Brits are getting lax when it comes to brewing God’s favorite beverage [1], relying on teabags instead of loose leaves and even (the horror!) letting the water sit off the boil for whole minutes before pouring it into the pot (I have seen my own brother do this).

It’s enough to get George Orwell turning in his memory hole.

Luckily, there’s an app for that.

Those looking for a great alternative way to browse their photos on an iOS device might think about Cooliris, an app which has been around in various forms (I think I first saw it as a browser plugin) for some time. Cooliris’ gimmick is its endless wall of photos which you can almost throw around the screen, but recent versions have added so many sources that it might well become your iOS photobrowser of choice.

This week, the app has gotten support for Evernote images, plus more. And it still works great with Dropbox photos.

Evernote for Mac – my favorite I-don’t-quite-hate-it-enough-to-delete-it everything bucket – has gotten quite a big feature boost Not only does it now integrate Skitch, it lets you highlight text files and view files inside the note editor.

Mailbox, the miracle mashup of mail and to-do lists, has just seen the first fruit of its Dropbox ownership – Dropbox Attachments. Thought the release notes don’t make a big deal of this at all – they read “Dropbox attachments integration,” and there’s not even a new screenshot to show it – it’s actually a pretty great new feature.

Diamond Scale is what looks like a kind of fake novelty app which purports to turn you iDevice into a scale. The best thing is to just describe it to you.

Do you snap pictures for your blog using your iPhone, and then do the actual blog writing on your Mac? Or some other combination of devices? Then PUPS is for you. It’s a new iPhone app from the makers of crash-happy blogging app Blogsy, and it has one purpose – to upload pictures from your iDevice to your blog’s media library.

Garmin has just announced a neat new HUD box that takes the map info from your iPhone and projects it up onto your car windshield. Named after the Paul Newman character in the movie of the same name[1], the HUD is designed to work with Garmin’s Navigon and Street Pilot apps, connecting to the host phone via Bluetooth.

Pixter, my favorite text-scanning OCR app for the iPhone, is now available for the iPad. And v2.0 isn’t just now ready (at last) for the retina displays of the iPhone and the iPad, but it sports a whole new iOS7-inspired design which is frankly gorgeous.

JoliDrive is JoliCloud’s new iOS app and it’s pretty good, if a little basic. The general idea is that you use the app to log in to your various web servixes and then use a single app – JoliDrive – to access them.

Another supposed holiday; another super-useful tool from Brett “I just built this” Terpstra. This one is called GrabLinks, and it does just that: Fire the bookmarklet off inside your browser and you can quickly grab a bunch of links and save them out in Markdown. Nerdy? Sure. Useful? Hell yes.

See if you can guess what the app External Flash does. Hopefully you guessed “It’s an app that lets you control the LED lamps from up to 16 other iPhones and fire them in sync with your own iPhone’s camera," because then you’d be correct. If you guessed anything else, then you’re totally wrong. Wrong wrong wrong.

Glui is an antidote for those who think that Evernote’s Skitch has gotten a little too fancy. It’s a Mac app that sits in the Menubar and captures screen shots. It then lets you quickly annotate them and upload them to Dropbox, copying the URL to your clipboard along the way.

And that’s about it.

Twitter’s Vine app was at the top of the mini-video sharing game until Instagram came along and crushed it by allowing users to upload 15-second video clips. With Instagram’s massive user base, you would think that Vine doesn’t have a fighting chance.

In the biggest update the iPhone app has seen yet, Vine has proven otherwise.

Amaziograph really is amazio-ing. Do you remember the Spirograph, the plastic, cog-based drawing tool that lets you come up with all kinds of psychedelic geometric designs using paper and pens? Or the kaleidoscope, the favorite freakout kids toy of bong-smokers the world over?

Well, imagine that you could somehow combine the two into a smoke-free, drug-free (and more importantly, paper-free) app for the iPad. That app would be Amaziograph, a $1 drawing tool developed by 15-year-old Bulgarian high-schooler Hristo Staykov.

Remember Pixa? You should, because it’s awesome. Pixa was my pick, sir[1], to replace iPhoto on your Mac with a non-sluggish, non-horrible photo organizing app. And now it has added extensions for popular Online Web Browsers Safari and Chrome.

Capsule is another “save your place” app, where by “place” I mean “actual location” and not your current page in a book. This one has a beautiful UI and ties in with Foursquare’s database to let you search and pinpoint locations quickly.

After last week’s Mac update, Skitch for iOS has gotten the same neat new features. Now you can use the new arrows, add white space around pictures for clearer notes, and enjoy the new smallness of smaller shapes.

TeeVee 2 is a great iPhone app that tells you when your favorite TV shows are airing. I’ve tried a bunch of these apps in the past, and TeeVee wins out for a couple of reasons – it’s fast, it’s simple and it looks gorgeous.

Pure is an iPhone Flickr app which looks ready for iOS 7 already. As the name suggests, there’s a focus on plain and simple design, and the lack of button-shaped buttons makes even the cleanly-designed official Flickr app look cluttered. However, you mightn’t be switching to Pure just yet, as it lacks a fair bit of basic functionality.

Exif Manager for iPhone and iPad does one thing – it lets you view and sort your photos by various metadata attributes. Want to see all your pictures in descending order of shutter speed used? You can do that.

Everpix 2 has launched, and it takes everything you love about the all-photos-everywhere service and makes it easier to use. It also introduces the comedically inaccurate Explore feature which mistakes breakfast for human faces.

And no, it still doesn’t work in portrait orientation.

“Wow, this is cool.” That was my first thought when I saw CamRanger controlling a full-size DSLR for the first time, then wirelessly beaming picture previews to an iPad 15 feet away.

From ISO, to shutter, to aperture, white balance—-even live view and touch-to-focus—-the CamRanger gives you amazing control of any compatible DSLR from your iPad or iPhone. All it takes to get the magic going, is the tiny CamRanger unit and their free iOS app.

Weathertron is Yet Another iPhone Weather App. In fact, it’s Yet Another iPhone Weather App Built On Dark Sky’s Back End. But as we shall see it’s totally worth a look: it looks great, it’s universal and — best of all — it’s called Weathertron.

Dropbox for iOS just got a great update. No, it still doesn’t have the photo Albums feature found on the web and Android, but it does add some neat new features. Let’s take a look:

NetNewsWire is the granddaddy of RSS readers, and v4.0 is now ready for you in beta form. It still doesn’t really sync, but it brings the arrow-based navigation from the previous incarnations of NNW that might make it the fastest news reader on your Mac.