Seemingly just moments after an iTunes update added the ability to browse our App Store wish lists, along comes Mentio, an iPhone app to do the exact same thing. Only instead of using your existing iTunes wish list, it lets you build your own, and buy apps, movies and music from within the app itself.
To quote the all-seeing Strobist, “Memo to @Nikon: THIS is how you do a retro-dialed digital camera.” Take a look. These are the official product shots of the Fujifilm X-T1, an SLR-style mirrorless camera joining Fujifilm’s X-Series lineup. Isn’t she purdy?
The Todoist todo app has been updated and renamed. It’s now called “Todoist Next,” and it has been turned into a lean, mean visual-scheduling-and-collaboration machine.
Instapaper’s Instapaper Daily feature, which shows the day’s most popular new story for your quick-consuming delectation, was apparently so successful that it has spawned a sequel. Instapaper Weekly. This time it’s not a new website which shows you an ultra-clean view of the day’s top Instapaper story: it’s an email newsletter.
Quick: You have taken a bunch of great photos of your recent birthday weekend in [EXOTIC LOCATION], and your parents want to take a look at your vacation pictures on the big screen. But you also spent some “quality time” with your girlfriend/boyfriend/spousal unit in the hotel room, and you sure as hell don’t want your folks to see those photos. What do you do?
You use Boinx’s PhotoPresenter, an app that’s designed for impromptu slideshows.
Keyboard shortcuts and trackpad gestures are fine, but they’re not as good as dedicated knobs and dials for just getting out of the way and letting your concentrate on the job instead of the interface. But knobs and dials are annoyingly fixed, whereas an on-screen control panel can be changed to fit the function.
Can you see where we’re going here? The Palette does both. It’s a modular, Lego-like set of buttons, knobs, dials and sliders which can be configured in hardware and software to do whatever you want them to.
K’lip is a USB thumb drive that’s actually useful. Yes, you can use it to take PDFs of your boarding passes to the local print shop, but you can also just use it as a keyring, until one day you need to copy a movie or rare bootleg album off your friend’s computer.
Or you could wear it.
You’re going to love Phoenix Photo Editor from the second you launch it. After a neat but not-too-long launch animation, you get straight into your photo library, with oversized thumbnails that let you actually see what the photos contains before choosing to load it. Confused about another “import” button down at the bottom of the screen? Tap it. It’s for grabbing pictures from your i{hone albums, Instagram, Facebook or Flickr.
And it gets better from there.
The biggest surprise about the Joli Originals iPad sleeve is how much I like it. I use my iPad just about as much as I use my iPhone, (which is a lot). Maybe more. And for this reason I prefer a case which I can flip open and get to the screen as soon as possible. In short, I have no time for iPad sleeves. And yet the Joli sleeve won me over.
The Bpen is a clever gadget indeed. It takes something almost useless — an iPhone stylus — and turns it into something useful: an iPhone stand. It even works as a car mount, and yet can still be used as a stylus. And as a regular pen. How is this unholy magic achieved? Let’s see…
Man, do I feel clean today. No, it’s not the fact that I quit drinking two summers ago. Nor that I stopped smoking a few years before that. Nope. I feel clean because I finally deleted iPhoto from my Mac. It’s gone, never to spin up the fans again because it’s detecting faces with the accuracy of a demented uncle, nor to inexplicably flip away from the album I’m viewing every single time I switch to another app, however briefly.
I don’t even need Apple’s worst app (worse than iTunes I say) for Photo Stream any more, becasue now I have the $4, 6 MB MyPhotostream to take its place.
VLC, the versatile play-anything video app that I have installed on every Mac I’ve had admin access to in the last half decade, has gotten a great update in its iOS incarnation. VLC for iOS not only looks better, but will now grab video from Dropbox and Google Drive.
iOS 7.1 takes another slow step closer to launch with the release of beta 4 to developers. As ever, the release notes are scant, so it’ll take some digging to really find out what has changed. There’s on bit of good news though: the Messages app should no longer lie to you about messages failing.
Fujifilm, arguably the company that started the current (and very welcome) trend of putting proper manual knobs and dials back on cameras, is currently teasing what looks like an SLR-style model for its outstanding X-Series lineup. Likely to be named the XT–1, the camera might take over the role of the current top-of-the-line X-Pro1.
The Snap Strap does away with the annoying problem of your earbud cables ending up in your mouth when you’re just trying to enjoy a delicious hamburger and listen to some music at the same time. It’s a clever little strap that clips to the left and right cables of your ’buds and then sits across the back of your neck, keeping the cables away from your gnashing maw.
This lovely retro-style bag is made to carry over your shoulder, or on your bike. Made by the Goodordering Company of Hackney, East London (in England, for those of you who may still be half asleep), the bag can be quickly converted between shoulder bag, pannier (“saddlebag”) or handlebar bag.
The iPhone’s LED lamp is a handy as hell. I never, ever use it for photos, but I use it as a flashlight all the time, and I have it set to flash when my iPhone gives me an alert (usually it makes my jeans pocket flash alarmingly).
Now I can use it to light up my iPhone’s whole back, if I choose to put it in the curvy Theo Light, a case that works like the Kindle Paperwhite’s magical light-up screen. And I might even start using it for photos.
This tiny $7 dongle looks essential for anyone who uses a case on their iPhone or iPad. It’s a Lightning to Lightning adapter that does one thing: move your iDevice’s Lightning port a centimeter (0.033 feet) down from the bottom its host.
Lightroom might be coming to the iPad sooner than your think, if this accidental posting of the photo-editing app is anything to go by. Oddly, it shows “Adobe Lightroom for Mobile, Annual” at $99 per year, which would suggest that this is a landing page for a service, not an actual app as one source of the story believes.
Most musicians I know are struggling to buy a new set of guitar strings, let alone a new iPad Air. But if you are a music-making, iPad-toting, live-gig-playing musician, then you might be interested in IK Multimedia’s new iKlip 2, and the accompanying iPad Adapter.
Imagine that your devices could send you a push notification asking if they could switch themselves off. That you could switch appliances on and off remotely to stop them drawing power in standby mode. That would be neat, right? Well, that’s exactly what the energy-saving Parce plug will do.
Last week we saw Command-C, a super-useful app that uses Wi-Fi, iOS 7 multitasking and push notifications to easily send your clipboard between devices. Now, there’s Scribe, which goes one better by ditching the Wi-Fi sending the clipboard between devices using low energy Bluetooth.
Today is turning out to be photo-journal app Friday, with the latest entry in the list from iOS developer Manton Reece. It’s called Sunlit, and it’s a way to put together a journal of your daily meanderings with photos, text and check-ins. And here’s the twist: the free app uses App.net as it’s storage backend, so you can finally get some use for that account you signed up for but never use,
Just the other day I asked my Twitter followers to recommend me a good app for making animated GIFs out of my photos. The response was stunning in its silence – not a single reply. But I don’t care. I now have PicGIF, a Mac app that does one thing: Turn Pics into GIFs.
Storehouse is today’s big app story. It’s an iOS app that lets you take text, pictures and video and combine them into great-looking stories. It’s kind of like a cross between iPhoto’s Journals and a printed magazine, only better than both.
