Alongside the powerful iPhone 5, and now the amazing iPhone 5S, iPhoneographers in 2013 have enjoyed some pretty rad photo apps. What follows is a completely subjective list of my favorite photo apps of the year. Some are in there because I use them and love them so much (I’m looking at you, Snapseed and PhotoSync), and others because they brought something truly new or great to iOS. Whatever, they’re all worth a look.
You know how when you’re working with numbers on paper, and you draw a line from the result of one equation to kind of “link” the result to the beginnings of another? Like maybe you’re planning a New Year’s Eve party and you tot up the cost of drinks in one section, the fake mustaches in another, and the overall cost in yet another?
Well, with Tydlig you can do that with your iPad and iPhone. And even better, the linked numbers get updated in any linked equations.
One thing that’s still lacking in the Nerdiverse is a way to collect quotes which I clip from, well, from everywhere. How neat would it be if you could collect snippets of text from Kindle books, web pages, news articles and so on?
Very neat, is the correct answer.
Lightly comes pretty close, and with a new update, the clip-to-Evernote service can run in the background indefinitely, grabbing anything you copy to the clipboard. In theory at least.
There’s something utterly terrifying about the above image, which is the promo picture for the Shot Trak HD, an HD gun camera. There’s nothing wrong with hunting (as long as you’re actually eating the animals you’re killing), and I guess that recording the action is no different than clamping a GoPro to your helmet and jumping off a mountain wearing a squirrel suit.
But the idea that you’d sit around with friends and family to view the kill shot in the comfort of your own living room? That’s a short trip to Creepsville, man.
Heyday for the iPhone is a little like the great (and defunct) Everpix flashback feature, which showed you photos you took on this day in history. Only Heyday goes one better: it doesn’t just remember photos, it remembers places, and weaves the two together into a rather neat little automatic journal.
Wahoo has added yet another low-power Bluetooth sensor to its range of bike fitness gadgets. The RPM is a cadence sensor which works without magnets, or bulky attachments on the frame, and talks direct to compatible apps on your iPhone.
Does the recent spat over Writer Pro and its software-patenting shenanigans leave you wishing you could use its beautiful Nitti Light font in a different developer’s app? Or are you so scarred by years of using Microsoft Word that you can’t concentrate unless you’re staring at a page of Times New Roman?
Fear not, friends, because The Soulmen have the answer. Hidden in the latest update to Daedalus Touch is a way to import any font you like. Yup, I’m talking about Comic Sans on iOS.
I was all ready to write a sarcastic post about the Splitter, a little box that allows independent volume control of the two pairs of headphones you jack into it. After all, sharing a music track is something spontaneous – adding a specialist piece of hardware into the mix seems a little like quickly clipping your FitBit to your pubes before making love.
But then I thought about traveling, and movies.
As nerds, one of our Christmas holiday duties is to fix the computers of family and friends. And if the past is anything to go by, fixing Macs can mean opening them up for kitchen-table-top surgery. Hell, there’s even something to be done about common iPhone problems, too: switching out a smashed glass back on an iPhone 4/S, for example.
But a real doctor doesn’t go to work without a proper set of tools. I’ve stripped enough screw heads with cheap screwdrivers to know this. What you need is VisionTek’s new “12 Piece Toolkit 900671.”
DeGeo is an app that removes the location data from your photos before sharing them, while leaving non-location metadata intact. As someone who switches off the location option in Instagram whenever I’m at my home or a friend’s home, I’m totally into this $1 data stripper.
Have you ever responded to an e-mail from your boss with some angry knee-jerk reply, then you’ve accidentally sent it, only to regret it later as you sweep the contents of your desk into a cardboard filing box? Me too, but as Leander never reads any of his e-mail, I — unlike you — still have a job.
Let.ter is a brand new app which will help you stay employed next time. It’s a beautifully simple Markdown-based app with one purpose: composing e-mails away from your main e-mail app.
One of the best things about Instapaper now being owned by Betaworks is that the developers spend their time adding new features and services instead of complaining about things on their personal blogs.
And today that ethic has paid off, bringing us Instapaper Daily, a new site which shows the most popular story in Instapaper today. And of course, because Instapaper is all about reading later, you can browse back to any day in the past and see the headline story form that day, too.
Apple has just posted its iOS 7 Tech Talks videos online for streaming by information-hungry developers. The videos show the full sessions of the roving, mini-WWDC sessions that have been taking place throughout the world since October.
This article first appeared in the Cult of Mac Newsstand magazine
Wi-Fi lightbulbs are either the greatest thing ever, or final proof that our society is about to collapse form absurd decadence into fully-deserved chaos and misery. But as long as we’re buying into the convenience of the modern-day Clapper, why not make it even more useful by adding Bluetooth?
That’s the idea of the Lumen, which can be controlled by your iPhone from even where there’s no Wi-Fi network. It changes color, turns on and off and — if the accompanying video is anything to go by — it can help you get laid. All this, and the incorporation of “automatic manners” too. Who wouldn’t want one?
This article first appeared in the Cult of Mac Newsstand magazine
The Lightning connector has made the iPhone and iPad dock a pretty tricky thing to get right: the plug is so happy and snug in its little Lightning hole that it just won’t come out without a good tug, and this means that the dock usually comes with the iPhone when you lift it up.
The Alubolt doesn’t help with this, but it does at least come with its own Lightning cable, so you won’t have to pony up another $20 just to use it — which is kind of a downer on Christmas day.
This article first appeared in the Cult of Mac Newsstand magazine
The Versacover has two uses. One is to protect and support your iPad Air, offering many, many different ways to prop it up thanks to the origami-like folding front cover, which can be flipped into a large-but-limited number of iPad-bracing shapes.
The other use is to make work for idle hands, in the same way that a Rubik’s Cube used to do back when I was a child. All this and a microfiber lining to keep the screen clean: it’s the perfect Christmas Day accessory.
The built-in iOS Reminders app has two big advantages: it’s ubiquitous, and it syncs flawlessly between devices. This makes it a great back end for other apps’ reminder systems, which is handy as the reminders app is a nightmare. Viewing and checking off completed tasks is fine, but creating them? Even Siri starts to seem attractive.
Luckily, you can now use an app called This Week to create and use your reminders. Better still, it excels at adding and managing due dates, which is the weak point of Reminders’ already weak task-creation offering.
What would happen if you took a dork-o-lithic nylon “Executive Laptop Case” and tossed it onto a (giant) blender with a Chrome messenger bag? Well, I guess the blender would choke and break, but if you used a metaphorical blender then you’d end up with a slurry that could be turned into the Boa Nerve, a bag designed to take you “from the conference room to your bike.”
The IMDB app has finally – finally – been updated to fit in with iOS 7’s tasteful decor. Heavy users of the app won’t really notice anything different in the layout, which remains as easy to use as ever (and way better than the terrible web version), but everyone will appreciate the new lick of paint, and the other new features that have been added to v4.0.
Speaking of remote-control and movies, Filmic Remote is a new companion app for the fantastic-but-fugly iOS movie-shooting app, Filmic.
As you will have guessed from the name, Filmic Remote lets you use one iOS device to remote control the Filmic app running on another iOS device.
AirWeb is web browser for your Apple TV. It uses your iPhone or iPad as a control and shows the results on the big screen via AirPlay, letting you quickly browse to any site using your multitouch screen.
You know hellish it is to watch somebody else browse the web as they double-click links and circle their cursor/finger around the page as they search for something to click? AirWeb solves that problem.
Back before there was home video, there was Super 8, Kodak’s home movie system which used film cartridges to record sound and moving images, ready to be played back onto a giant projector screen at home. So pervasive is the aesthetic of Super 8 that even today, fake home movie footage in TV shows and movies is usually degraded to look more filmic.
But this isn;t a post about nostalgia. It’s a post about a sweet new digital cartridge – the Nolab – that brings old Super 8 Cameras back to life.
For nerds of a certain age (my age), the Sinclair ZX Spectrum was our first home computer/games console/escape from the nightmare world of normal humans. And now this iconic machine is set to be reborn in its home country of Great Britain, only now it’ll be a Bluetooth accessory for your iPad.
Jolicloud, the Norwegian Dropbox alternative that doesn’t have to secretly give your data to the U.S. police state whenever it’s asked, has made available a beta version of its v2.0 web app. And it’s pretty amazing. Up until now, Jolicloud was very similar in intent and execution to Dropbox: a folder that’s everywhere.
Now, though, you not only get online access to your Jolicloud folder, but to all your other internet accounts. Including Dropbox.
You may remember Unclutter, the app which “sweeps away desktop detritus.” Well, now it’s back, and it’s tidier than ever.