apps - page 50

Ever want to run multiple copies of a program at the same time? Yeah, me neither. But when I ran across this tip, I thought, hey, that’d be pretty cool. I could run two copies of Calculator on the same Mac. At the same time! Or even something like NetNewsWire, running one instance of the app that uses one Google account, and a second instance of the app that uses a different account. Pretty neat, right? But how? It sounds complicated. The word “instance” sounds complicated.

Turns out, it’s really fairly simple. Let’s try it out.

Helpless and lost in a whirlwind of tasks I can never remember to complete—that’s me without a good todo app on my side. And so, since my last favorite app started having issues the developers seem intent on never fixing, I decided to give the Producteev iPhone and desktop todo apps (free) a try.

Now, with my tasks nicely cloud-synced across my Macbook and iPhone, I’m finally getting stuff done again, and I think it’s safe to check “find a new favorite productivity app” off the ol’ list.

Simply Write for the iPad is just about the closest you’ll get to an electronic piece of paper. The app is designed for handwriting, and for getting out of the way. And its clever close-up writing method for text input makes sure it does both.

If you use Evernote, it’s possible that you store everything in there that you possibly can. Now, thanks to the MySMS service, you can also archive your text messages in your favorite everything-bucket.

No, it’s not Egon. HDR Express, the enthusiast-level high dynamic range Mac app from Unified Color Technologies, is now out in a new version with improved de-ghosting algorithms for images with moving subjects, among a handful of other interesting new features.

Rovio has released the official gameplay trailer for Angry Birds Star Wars, and while it blends all the familiar Angry Birds’ physics we’ve come to love, it looks to be the most feature-rich one yet. you’ll find a slew of new abilities, powers, and even a cameo by the Millennium Falcon. An array of Star Wars themed Angry Birds characters are present and ready to take down the Ham-Empire and any Porkside treachery it has to throw at them.

If you’ve had a horrible experience with Apple’s new Maps app, you’re probably anxious for Google to hurry up and get Google Maps back onto your iPhone. The Google Maps app is reportedly in development and should be ready for launch by the end of 2012, but some people at Google say they’re not optimistic that Apple will approve the app.

According to a new report, Google employees think that Apple will reject the app once Google submits it for approval because Apple will want to “keep moving forward in an effort to make its obviously inferior product better.”

IShredder is a curious app. It claims to securely erase the files on your iOS device using better-than-military grade algorithms. The idea is that you can then sell your device without leaving sensitive data behind.

The problem is that this is already built in to iOS.

Quick Route is my new favorite routing app, not least because it’s so bike and pedestrian friendly (regular readers will know how I feel about those death boxes they call “cars.”) It’s optimized for the iPhone 5, it exhibits the level of design and polish you’d expect from a developer who also works for Panic, and it has a unique and neat way to pick your origin and destination.

Evernote 5 beta, which was teased last week, has been launched to great success. In fact, it has been so popular that Evernote has had to shut down the option for Mac App Store customers to use it. Why?

This is due to large numbers of users re-syncing their entire accounts as part of the transition from a Mac App Store download to a direct downloaded version of Evernote

Paper is an iPad app which proves that you don’t need to add bells and whistles to your software if it’s well designed. Unless your app is a bell and whistle simulator, I guess.

But Paper, which won fans with its ultra-simple interface and amazingly natural brush-and-paint engine, really was a little too stripped down. The new v1.2.1 fixes that, adding custom color palettes and a very sweet new color mixer, plus support for a pressure-sensitive stylus.

It’s November, and you all know what that means: No, not the growing of wispy, creepy mustaches. November is National Novel-Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for (almost) short.

NaNoWriMo is the annual attempt by many tens of thousands of people to finally get that novel out of their head and into the cloud storage option of their choice. The goal is to write a 50,000-word novel by midnight on the 30th November, and you can get there by fair means or foul. The rules? It has to be a novel, it has to be 50,000 words (or more) long, and it has to be written in November.

The tools you will need most to write your NaNoWriMo novel are inspiration and a lot of perseverance. Luckily, apps can help you with both. Here’s the definitive guide to NaNoWriMo apps on the Mac and iOS. If you can’t drag that novel kicking and screaming into the world with the help of these apps, you can’t do it at all.

I give great, fluid, professional-appearing speeches. Put me up in front of a crowd and I’ll crow on all day log, with nary a stammer nor a hesitation. The problem? I have nothing to say.

Other people actually have interesting information to convey, and yet they’re scared stiff of public speaking. Speeches app is here to help. It won’t boost your confidence, but it will help you to remember what you’re supposed to be talking about.

Lookout is like Apple’s Find My iPhone app, only it adds a whole bunch of extra features. It’ll let you track your lost phone from any web browser, even when the battery has dies (kinda), and it also adds a slew of features that only the dumbest of people will need.

Google’s updated search app adds lightning-fast voice-controlled search, just like you get on Android. It’s simple, impressively fast and will run on just about any iDevice you might have, not just the latest hardware.

But it has a long way to go to compete with Siri.

Office Drop is kind of like a mission-specific Dropbox. It comes with Mac and iOS clients, and lets you upload and share your various documents between them. However, it has one big stinking extra which could be amazingly useful to some people: It performs automatic OCR (optical character recognition) on your stored documents.

Purple Haze, is in my brain… Ah, sorry. Just singing a little Hendrix there. But — completely coincidentally — this next app brings purple haze correction to the iPhone. If you want to listen to Jimi Hendrix songs as if played on an un-amplified classical guitar, then this may be the app for you.

Skeuomorphism, or the tendency to deliberately make something new look like something old and familiar. Some people love it, some people hate it and think it’s tacky.

No matter how you feel, his love for skeuomorphism is one of many reasons that former iOS chief Scott Forstall was fired yesterday. Replacing him is Apple’s Senior VP of Design, Jonathan Ive, who will lead a new Human Interface Group in Apple… and whom reportedly loathes skeuomorphism with every fiber of his being.

All that fake leather stitching, those hideous textures, those bizarre font choices in iOS’s stock apps? If Ive gets his way — and we think he will — they’re all about to change.

Here are the eight skeuomorphic apps in iOS 6 we hope Jony Ive is going to change in iOS 7, along with some third-party apps we hope he takes inspiration from.

If Rick Deckard had carried an iPhone in the movie Blade Runner, and he’d used a camera app, that app would have been BLUX. Not only is it a pretty great iPhone camera replacement app, but it has all the bleeps, bloops, on-screen graphics a futuristic sci-fi replicant could ask for. Hell, it even has a neat computer voice that offers photographic advice.

Squarespace, the slick website hosting company, has come up with an interesting take on Drafts-style fast note-taking apps. It’s called Squarespace Note, and it is pretty nice looking.

You know what’s neat about Apple ditching things like Street View from its Maps app? What’s neat is the vacuum which it left, and the apps which have rushed to fill it. WhatsGoLa might not be the first Street View app in the App Store, and it certainly isn’t the best named, but it might be the cutest.

ThrowMeApp is a camera app which will magically turn your Android phone into something useful. The idea is that you keep your precious iPhone safe in your pocket and then toss your Android phone into the air as high as it will go.

The app then takes over, firing the shutter automatically and snapping an aerial shot of you. neat, right?

IoShutterCam is a neat, new take on iPhone camera apps. Instead of focusing (ahem) on adding filters to your images and sending them off to ever more social networking services, the new app instead concentrates on capture.

If you’re interested in time-lapse, triggering your shutter with sound, or many other neat shutter-tripping functions, then the $3 ioShutterCam is for you.

Actions turns your iPad into a remote control for your Mac. No, it’s not a VNC app which lets you project your desktop onto your tablet’s screen. Nor is it a media remote (although it can be). Instead, Actions lets you assign, uh, actions to easy-to-tap tiles on the iPad’s screen, and these actions are then performed on the Mac (or PC).

The short version: Actions lets you trigger Mac keyboard shortcuts from your iPad.

Noteshelf, the iPad’s best handwritten note-taking app, is now even better. V7.0 adds new pens, customs colors and support for pressure-sensitive styluses. If you already own Noteshelf, you likely already downloaded it with great excitement over the weekend. If not, what are you waiting for?