Most iPad drawing apps take a rather old-fashioned approach. They try to mimic paper and pencil, or paint and canvas, and of course they never get it quite right, even with pressure-sensitive styluses and fancy paint engines. Archipad takes a different approach: it recognizes that you’re drawing on a computer screen and embraces that fact, letting you draw to scale, in 3-D and with perfect lines, all my using a finger or stylus.
If you want an SLR-style mirrorless camera, the Olympus OM-D E-M5 is the camera to beat. But if you don’t want to spend $1,000 on the Micro Four Thirds body, then you can now opt for the OM-D E-M10, a $700 body which uses lots of it’s big brother’s parts.
What if you could print your iPhone photos and have them sent to your door, without paying a penny? Sound impossible, right? But that’s exactly what new Kickstarter-hopeful startup Flag is planning to do. The catch? An ad, printed on the back of each picture.
Evernote’s elephant logo is curiously appropriate. Not because it never forgets your notes, but because the service is slow, lumbering and hard to control. Now, thanks to a complete redesign of the backend servers, one aspect has improved. Sync is now, according to Evernote CEO Phil Libin, four times faster.
For the last few weeks, I have had a little pebble-shaped gadget sat out on the wall of my balcony. It’s the Tempo, a Bluetooth thermometer which keeps the last 24 hour’s temperatures in memory, and passes them to your iDevice on demand. It’s also pretty tough, as we’ll see…
If you’re a movie nerd, then you’re going to freak out about Yeah! Movies. It’s an iPad app which lets you stream many great films (Kill Bill, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Mad Max, Blade Runner, Caddyshack and so on, but it doesn’t stop there. You also get around 500 “curated extras” with every movie purchase.
Do you hear that tinkling, rattling sound? That’s the sound of a million teeth skittering across the floor tiles as their previous owners relax their legs after smashing the teeth out of their own skulls with their own knees.
What the hell am I talking about? The absurd, almost violent knee-jerk reactions to Apple app updates that pare back functions in order to provide a clearer path for future updates. It’s like these folks never heard of pruning a rosebush to promote better growth.
And the news: Applescript is back in Numbers.
The much-leaked Fujifilm X-T1 is now officially official, and will surely be a sell-out success when it goes on sale next month for $1,300 (body only). It’s an SLR-style camera with an electronic viewfinder, Fujifilm’s trademark (16.3MP) X-Trans sensor, a metal body and a whole mess of mechanical knobs and dials.
Dark Sky, the Instapaper of weather apps, just hit v4.0. It’s still only available in the U.S and the UK, and it still gives you accurate, hyper-local predictions for rain, but just about everything else has changed. For the better, I might add.
Readability, the oft-overlooked but competent rival to Instapaper and Pocket, has reached v2.0, and added an iOS 7 makeover, plus a few neat new features.
This must be just about the worst gadget ever, which of course makes it the most fun to write about gadget ever. It’s a love-detecting bra, which will only open its front clasp if “true love” is detected. Where “true love” means “iPhone” and “detected” means Bluetooth.
In Germany, bank cards come with NFC chips that let you make small payments just by tapping your wallet onto the POS machine. You pre-load the chip with money from your bank account (only small amounts are allowed, because if you lose the card you lose the money) and spend it as cash.
So I finally see the point of NFC in a phone. And now I can have NFC in my iPhone, thanks to Incipio’s Cashwrap case.
Cortex Camera fixes one big deficiency with the iPhone’s camera: low-light noise. Or more specifically, the iPhone has no way to avoid cranking the ISO when shooting in low light. With a regular camera, you can just choose a longer shutter speed to keep the ISO low, steady the camera on a tripod or other sturdy base, and enjoy noise-free pictures taken in the dark.
And now you can (kinda) do this with your iPhone, using this sweet and simple app.
Today brings a big update for users of Pushpin, the already-excellent Pinboard bookmarking client for iOS. V 3.0 brings a sweet iOS-friendly look (it really does look great), plus a proper iPad interface, plus… well, a lot. Let’s taker a quick look.
Macminicolo has been around for nine years, plugging Mac Minis into its data center and letting you use them as your own. Thy can work as servers, or just as 24/7 automation machines. Now, the folks at Macminicolo have launched Macprocolo (Mac Pro Co-location). You can probably guess what it is.
The KLOQE is billed as “the iPhone case for those who don’t like iPhone cases.” As a vocal member of that group, I feel qualified to judge this case. But that;s not it. The KLOQE also promises to be the only aluminum iPhone case without reception issues. So let’s get that part out of the way first.
Love chess, but don’t have the time or the sticking power to play a whole game? Then you should probably take a look at the $1 Mate in 1 Puzzle app, newly updated for iOS 7 and ready to puzzle your brain with something a little more satisfying that an other round of QuizUp.
You know how you really, really love your significant other? And how you like to remind him/her of just how important they are to you by sending sweet little messages to them every day? Well, now there’s an app for that, letting even the most forgetful, self-centered idiot make himself look like the most romantic person in the world. Behold, Romantimatic, probably the first app ever to combine pink and cogs into a single logo.
Dispatch is one of the greatest email apps for the iPhone (but sadly still not the iPad). It’s purpose is to let you power through your emails and whittle down your inbox in double-quick time. And the latest update adds some welcome streamlining.
I probably wouldn’t written anything about the new Netatmo Weather Station Channel on IFTTT, but then I saw one of the sample automatic actions that it can trigger, and figured I had to show you. Once set up, you can have IFTTT send a Twitter DM to your roommate when his music is too loud. Amazing.
Most of use post our crap onto Twitter, Flickr, Instagram or – ugh – the Facebook. But creative pros have their own social network. Behance is more than just a place to hang your latest photos, motion-graphics, fashion or branding design, though. It’s kind of a mix between an online resume and and portfolio, with plenty of concept ideas thrown in for good measure. And it’s also built into some Adobe apps: Lightroom lets you publish straight to Behance, for example.
Which is a long way of getting to the point. Behance v3.0 for iOS just launched, and it brings an updated look and new features.
Evernote continues to suck as an app, and excel as a back-end service for better-designed apps. EverMemo is yet another quick note taking app which posts your important scribblings direct to your Evernote account to be indexed and assimilated, all without having to launch Evernote’s own bloated monster and tap desperately as you try to find the new-note button before you forget whatever it was you were trying to remember.
You’re most likely using one of two calendar services, or maybe both: Google Calendar and/or iCloud. Now – if you’re using the truly excellent Fastmail email service – you can test out the beta version of its new calendar. It’s as clean and simple as the mail service, and syncs perfectly with your iDevice or Mac using CalDAV.
Got a car? Got an iPhone? Like to tap away at the iPhone screen and distract yourself instead of watching the road ahead and earning the trust that pedestrians and cyclists put in your every time they venture out onto the road? Then I have good news! Now you can careen down the highway, secure in the knowledge that your precious iPhone will never slip off the dash, nor even deviate from it’s perfectly-chosen angle.
If you have a modern Mac, there’s almost no reason not to use FileVault, the all-disk encryption that’s built in to OS X. It doesn’t slow the computer down, it keeps your data safe and – if the machine is switched off – then even if a baddie pulls your drive he’s stuck with a useless chunk of silicon.
And now Apple has added one more convenience for the cautious user: authenticated reboots.