When I first saw the PR blurb for the Quicam app, I thought “What could possibly go wrong?” After all, who could ever foresee a problem with an app that lets you snap photos and immediately send them to Twitter and Facebook, automatically and without a single extra button press.
Really, what could possibly go wrong?
Let’s be honest, finding apps on the App Store sucks. There isn’t a great way to find new apps, other than looking at the top of the charts and seeing which apps are most popular. Even though Genius support is coming to the App Store in iOS 6, we’re not getting our hopes up that Apple will be able to fix app discovery on their first shot.
There are a couple websites out right now that focus on discovering new apps, but one of the more exciting startups right now is Ooomf, which offers a set of tools for both developers and app users, to find new apps or promote current content.
Bark is a great way to pipe your Growl notifications into Mountain Lion’s Notification Center – at least until Growl offers official support. There are other ways to make Growl-capable apps work with the native Mountain Lion notifications, but Bark has a few unique tricks which make it better – and maybe easier – to use.
It’s time to see what it’s like to live in the shoes cloven hooves of the egg stealing piggies responsible for making birds quite angry. Millions of adorable green swine have been mercilessly slaughtered for simply trying to feed their families. They’ve tried protecting themselves with hardhats, makeshift houses, and have even gone as far as to leave their gravity loving homes in favor of the cold darkness of space. No matter what they do or where they go, there always seems to be a giant slingshot waiting to blast an Angry Bird at their hide. That all ends this month, with the release of Bad Piggies for Android and iOS.
Denominations is an iPhone currency converter app that is actually useful. No, it doesn’t offer a slew of options, nor does it even look particularly swish or fancy. But it is dead easy to use, and this will make it just about the best conversion app around when you actually need it.
There are about fifty hundred billion apps in the App Store. Some of them are really amazing, while others are just shoddy ripoffs of other successful apps.
Getting an app removed from the App Store because it copies some key parts of your app has been a hassle for developers, but Apple just released a new tool that streamlines the process to dispute apps that may be guilty of copyright or trademark infringement.
Rhino has become the first native iOS client for Alpha.app.net available in the App Store. App.net, you may remember, is a Twitter-like platform whose social networking service – Alpha – costs users $50 to join. Up until now, users have had to struggle along with a web view, or get invited to one of the many beta (and alpha!) programs for new apps.
Etchings is an iPhone photography app which takes your pictures and turns them into very realistic etchings. Or fake etchings, I guess. Whatever you call them, if you pick the right source pic then you’ll end up with something that looks as if you lacquered your own metal plate, etched it, dropped it into an acid bath, washed and dried it, inked it up and ran it through a printing press.
Only instead of taking a whole morning, it takes just seconds.
The world’s first cross-platform MMO is still alive and kicking. Whether you’re just getting into it or have been around since its iOS debut back in April 2012, you’ll be happy to hear that today marks the beginning of Pocket Legends’ Double XP weekend!
With the release of iOS 6, Apple will offer business users a range of new features. A few of which are VIP email filtering (already in Mountain Lion) with custom notifications, more options when declining a phone call on the iPhone, much-needed privacy options, and Apple’s new Do Not Disturb feature – which should help some mobile professionals to “switch off” after work and maybe even get a good night’s sleep.
iOS updates are generally designed to be user-friendly and easy enough that anyone can manage to install them. As with any major OS or business critical software upgrade, however, there may be unforeseen issues with iOS 6 – particularly when it comes to internal iOS apps and iOS access to enterprise systems.
An iOS 6 upgrade policy and strategy is something that every IT department should have in place before Apple releases iOS 6. For businesses that actively support user devices in the workplace through a BYOD (bring your own device) program, that upgrade strategy is even more critical.
Concept is one of the nicest implementations of the virtual corkboard/scrapbook we’ve seen. You can add photos, post-its and index-cards to various “boards,” and rearrange them at will.
It’s a 1.0 release, and as such lacks a few basic niceties (like portrait orientation) but the polish and ease of use make up for it.
The “bad piggies” have something diabolical planned, and whatever it is, it’s PIG, erm… BIG! They’ve started their social networking campaign and even “Haz a Facebook.” Now we’ve got a teaser video of what appears to be an incoming spin-off to the Angry Birds phenomenon. Perhaps it’s time for the pigs to finally have their day. We’re just going to have to wait and see, for now, here’s the teaser video.
Sony has gotten on the connected, app-enabled camera bandwagon at last with the NEX-5R, an updated 5N which adds Wi-Fi, “apps,” an very sweet new AF system and a couple of extra buttons. Sony’s NEX series is already smoking hot, and these new features might just bring the fire brigade a-runnin'.
FioWriter is yet another new iPad text editor, but with one huge difference: it has Command, Option and Control keys right there on the keyboard.
What’s more, they work as they should: hold down the modifier and hit a key to execute a command. For instance, press Cmd-F (for “find”) and a search box pops up over the keyboard. And that’s not it. Not even close.
Final Draft is the Microsoft Word of the screenplay world: users hate it, but it’s the industry standard, and if you don’t submit your draft/edits in .FDX format, you’re about as popular as Ben Stiller after an award acceptance speech.
Still, in the same way that we all want Word on the iPad, we all want Final Draft Writer on the iPad too. And while it has been a coupleof years in the making, FD is now on iOS.
Static publishing is the new, uh, CMS. Or something. What’s for certain is that there has been a recent surge in interest in blogging platforms which publish single, pre-rendered, static HTML pages instead of generating those pages on the fly from some kind of database. The latest of these uses the venerable VoodooPad to generate your pages instantly, ready for uploading to your web-server of choice.
Back in my shameful Windows PC years, Trillian was my go-to instant messaging app: the software of choice if you wanted to juggle a bunch of different IM accounts without having a half dozen apps open.
When I moved to Mac, I quickly moved over to Adium and never looked back, but Trillian’s been making waves on the Apple side of things lately. First, they ported over Trillian to the Mac, and then they released a native iPhone version.
Now version 2.0 of Trillian for iOS here, and it brings a much clammored for feature: native iPad support. And it looks great.
AutoStitch, the fantastic panorama-shooting app, has been updated to v5.0. And what an update. The new headline feature is called StitchGuide, and it uses augmented-reality overlays to help guide your photo taking.
Kodiak is a PHP editor for the iPad, with one big difference: it can run your code offline. And they said the iPad is only for media “consumption.”
When I was a cub scout, I made my own backyard weather station. It was to get my science badge, or weather nerd badge, or whatever, and it mainly consisted of counting the millimeters of rain in a jamjar with an oversized plastic funnel perched on the top. And there was always rain: This was England.
If I’d had access to the wonderful technology of today, though, I could have stayed in watching TV and let the Netatmo do the work for me. The Netatmo is a weather station for both indoors and outdoors, and is sold as something that will stop you from worrying about your children and — therefore — the future.
Every morning, I scrape myself off of the bottom of my hangover’s hobnailed boot and try to make it down to the gym. About two-out-of-five times, I’ll oogily succeed and manage to douse myself in the pool until I’ve either done fifty laps or turned the water fifty proof, whichever comes first.
If only there was a way to be better motivated, I’ll often think to myself. Which is why I’m intrigued by a partnership between GymPack and RunKeeper, that will not only award me real money when I successfully drag my carcass to the gym, and actually penalize me money when I don’t.
There are a ton of ways to get fit and lose weight. And there are even more stupid books and fad diets that may or may not help you to slim down and get healthier. But there are really only two things you need to do: eat less and do more.
Of course, it isn’t easy. Luckily, those of a certain nerdy bent will find all the motivation they need in gadgets and apps. I have been doing just that for the past few months, and I thought I’d write a little about how to get thinner and fitter by using your iPhone.
Got a spare five minutes? Want to do something fun. Then take a quick look at Gutenberg Variations, a free iPhone app which takes your typed text and turns it onto sheet music. And then plays it.
Evernote’s Smart Notebook might cost $25 – double the price of the almost identical 3.5 x 5.5-inch Moleskine version – but it will likely sell by the pallet-load. Why? Because it is a genuine paper Moleskine which integrates with Evernote itself.
The Smart Notebook has special paper which – in combination with a new update to the Evernote iOS app – makes scanning and tagging easier than ever.
Snapping a screenshot on your Apple device is dead easy: home-plus-sleep-button for iOS, and Command-Shift-4 (or others) for the Mac. But what about snapping a sound-shot, i.e. grabbing a snippet of your system audio?
Well, you could fire up Quicktime and start dickering around with that. Or you could install WavTap and then hit Command-Control-Space.