apps - page 37

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.

Amazon has just update its Instant Video app for the iPhone and iPad today. The bad news is there’s still no AirPlay video support, but there is a new interface that makes it a lot easier for you to discover movies and television shows you want to watch.

Facebook’s getting into the content scraping biz. So claims The Wall Street Journal, at least: they say that the world’s largest social network is putting together a news aggregation service, a la Flipboard or Zite.

Here’s a great story: Every morning I browse through the news to find stuff to write about. One of my feeds is from the useful but flawed prMac, a site which lists new products and apps in a particularly annoying way. I found an app called Sunscreen Reapplying Reminder, which is little more than a timer app (hint: use Siri to set your reminders without having to gum up your screen with grassy sunblock).

I Tweeted about it:

Just what the world needs: Sunscreen Reapplying Reminder app https://t.co/UhmJsOy6b9

— Charlie Sorrel (@mistercharlie) June 20, 2013

And then the replies started coming. Why? The app, by developer Tania Moise, has a peculiar copyright claim…

Adobe’s entire new Creative Cloud suite has already been cracked, and it appears to be just as easy to do as it was for the old non-cloud version. Crackers have already made the tools available, just days after the official release.

Hazel, the must-have Mac file-wrangling utility, has just been updated to v3.1. That doesn’t sound like much, but there are some real big new features in here. for instance, it can now match dates typed inside your files, as well as upload files and more. Check it out:

"“Morning!”" That’s what this new app will say to you when you fire up your iPad at the start of the day. Only instead of bringing you bacon, pancakes and coffee it’ll put you on a more slimming diet of information: Weather, calendar, news and so on, right there on a big iPad-sized dashboard.

I’m completely reliant on Mailbox for my mail processing now: it’s just so easy to swipe and tap my way to an empty inbox that I prefer using my iPhone over the iPad or even the Mac to get things done (the iPad version of Mailbox is plain terrible, with a janky layout and tiny tiny body text for many messages).

But iPhone mail newcomer Ninja Mail might usurp Mailbox’s place in my daily e-mail “workflow.” No, it can’t file things for later, or even send the messages to folders. But it has one thing that makes it amazing fun to use: Swishing sword sounds that accompany every swipe.

Q: How Does Bob Marley like his donuts?
A: Wi’ Jam in [1].

And Jamn is also the name of this little pocket software toolkit for musicians. It’s an iPhone app which shows you the notes in a any scale in any key, but it has a rather clever gimmick that makes it a lot easier to read: the notes are on a wheel.

PhotoStation 2.0 brings layer support to the powerful but unintuitive photo editing app. Now you can use bezier clipping paths to adjust and fine-tune your image selections on multiple layers, letting you make edits that you usually expect to do on the desktop.

Skype for iOS and Skype for Machas been updated today with support for a new feature: video messaging. But don’t think video chat. Skype’s new video messaging is all about recording brief, meaningful moments and sending them to other Skype users, not as a stream, but as a self-contained message that will reach them, even if they aren’t online.

Lightroom-using, iPad-owning readers might remember an app called Photosmith. It promised to let you sync your photos ’twixt iPad and Lightroom and let you add tags, keywords and metadata, as well as selecting picks and rejecting the crud before syncing everything back again.

The trouble was, it was confusing as hell, and crashed every few button taps. Now we have version 3.0, and it is everything the original tried to be. In fact, it’s pretty great.

iOS 7 looks totally different than iOS 6, and most App Store apps are going to have to undergo a big design overhaul to fit it. Gone are the rich textures and deep garnishes. Corinthian leather has been replaced with Gaussian blur. A lot of iOS 6 apps look instantly out of place.

There are, however, quite a few popular apps that look like they belong in iOS 7. Whether it’s by coincidence or intentional forethought, these 16 iOS apps fit in with iOS 7 very well already:

Mango is yet another browser-based text editor from Hog Bay Software, the folks behind apps such as TaskPaper and FoldingText. This one is a Markdown editor, but as usual with anything made by Jesse Grosjean, it has some clever twists.