There’s not a lot I need say about today’s Best Thing Ever, so I’ll keep it brief.
Manga Camera does exactly what its name suggests, and it’s no surprise that it’s a sudden huge hit on the iOS App Store.
On the anniversary of Steve Jobs’ death, Cult of Mac is marking his passing with a series of tributes running throughout the day.
Apple has turned its own homepage over to honouring Jobs, including a message from Tim Cook. It’s stirring stuff, the kind of thing you’d simply never see from any other company. But then Steve wasn’t just any other boss.
The whole web is full of Jobs comment and tribute articles today, so here are some links to some of the ones we’ve read and enjoyed this morning.
Apple marked the anniversary of Steve Jobs death with a tribute on its home page today, the kind of tribute that only Apple could do.
You wait for ages for a calculator, then two come along at once. Following on from Sums which we reviewed the other day, here’s Calculator LCD, a smart-looking one dollar desktop-style calculator for iPad.
New from Tapbots is Netbot, an iOS client for app.net users.
If you’ve used Tweetbot, you already know how to use Netbot. It looks almost identical to its precursor, and behaves almost identically too.
If the thought that you still own an iPhone 4 or 4S makes feel you all Sad Face, cheer up: there’s a low-budget way to upgrade your device to modern iPhone 5 dimensions. What it lacks in technical functionality, it more than makes up for with practicality, price and Make style. It’s called iFaux, and you can download it for free.
Co-inciding with her latest TV series, Nigella Lawson’s latest foodie app, Nigellissima is now on the App Store. The theme is simple, delicious Italian food. Nigella, as always, makes amazing dishes look effortless.
The new app is free, but huge, demanding 750MB of storage space on your iOS device. That would be OK if it was packed with useful content. But it’s not.
Sums is a gesture-based calculator for iOS, and whether you like it will, I suspect, largely depend on how much you’re already accustomed to using traditional calculators.
Brian Eno has a new app out. It’s called Scape. Like other apps he’s produced, it’s about making music – even for people who have no musical skill or knowledge whatsoever.
App and file launcher, search helper, and all-round work of genius Alfred has all sorts of tricks up its sleeves. One of those is a clever built-in text snippets manager.
Lex from Modahaus got in touch to let us know about this post on their blog, comparing the macro photography capabilities of the iPhone 4S and iPhone 5.
The chunky K-30 is the latest DSLR from Pentax. Don’t be deceived (or put off) by its unusual looks – in use, it’s a fantastic general-purpose camera that produces high quality, color-accurate pictures. Cult of Mac took it for a spin.
Jonathan Zufi is the curator and owner of the Shrine of Apple, a web-based museum with a single, slightly obsessive goal: to obtain one of every single Apple product ever produced, and display them all online as beautifully as possible.
Zufi wants to do for all the retro Apple stuff what modern bloggers (not unlike our very selves) do for every newly announced product.
If ever a website earned membership of the Cult of Mac, this is it.
Cult of Mac got in touch with Zufi to ask him a few questions about the project. Here’s what he said.
This is the uNu Ex-Era battery case for iPhone 4 and 4S. It offers a degree of flexibility you won’t find in most other battery cases, although that flexibility comes with a drawback – namely that the case doesn’t feel as robust as some of its less flexible rivals. But you can’t have everything, all the time.
If you thought your Lego construction skills were formidable, check out what H.K. Leung has built: a Lego replica of the Fifth Avenue Apple Store, complete with see-through spiral staircase and glass cube on top. It’s incredible.
Michael Raskop is a German photographer based in Lucerne, Switzerland, and is the guy responsible for this set of cool artistic images of iPhones seemingly flying effortlessly in mid-air. Cult of Mac got in touch with him to find out how – and why – he made them.
This is the Sandberg Battery Case for iPhone 4. Designed in Italy, it’s a low-cost backup power supply and case with svelte good looks. It provides a good balance between size and power storage, but isn’t without some flaws. Overall, it’s a good deal but let down by what look like lapses in manufacturing quality control.
We’re nosey as anyone here at Cult of Mac. We are also complete nerds, which means that we’re always peeking into people’s bags at conferences, or checking out what gear people use.
And we figured that you all might be just as bad, so we figured we’d rip open our man bags, handbags and purses and show you what’s inside, and why we carry what we do.
We’ll be doing this periodically from time to time. This week, we take a look into the bag – or perhaps we should say pockets – of apps reviewer Giles Turnbull.
Those of us over a certain age have a lingering hangover from the days before digital: actual photographs. If you’re lucky (and extremely well organized), yours are neatly displayed on the walls and in labelled albums. If you’re unlucky (or plain lazy, like me), they’re shoved in cardboard boxes and left in cupboards to rot. That’s not how it should be, is it?
Triggers is a fascinating new idea for simple input-and-output programming on your iOS device. It gives you access to the system-level controls for various bits of hardware, and control what they do in a limited way. If you’ve ever used If This Then That, you’ll get the idea immediately.
Matt Rimney’s campaign has released an official photo app with a text template that reads “A Better Amercia.” Ooops.
The app comes with a bunch of text overlays (the others, you’ll be pleased to hear, with correct spellings throughout) that you can add to photos of – well, anything you consider suitably Republican and Presidential. I’m sure you’ll come up with something.
It’s not even a very good app. The image you line up in your viewfinder gets shifted down considerably when the overlay is applied, so don’t bother with careful composition.
Oh, and take note of the terms of use: “By using this application, you may be placed on Romney for President Inc’s contact list.”
You know what to do, people of Amercia! Show Mutt Rumnoy your support! Some folks have already started.
Today’s Best Thing Ever has to be InstaCRT, an iPhone photography app that turns all your ideas about iPhone photography upside-down.
Storyful for iOS says it can help you “separate the news from the noise.” It plucks interesting news stories from social media networks, spotting the stuff that’s trending and turning it into a news feed. That all sounds great, until you start trying to use it – although it’s a great idea with great promise, it’s let down by too many performance problems.
Don’t Panic is one of the better names I’ve seen for a GPS navigation app. It’s not a cheap app, but neither is it any more expensive than some of the other premium on-road satnav apps. The UI is a little quirky, but generally speaking it does the job well.
Every now and again you find something on the App Store that brings a smile to your face because you know it’s new, it’s different, and it does something that no other app has done before. Hueless is a one dollar black-and-white camera app that meets all those criteria and more, and after just a day of shooting with it, I think I’m in love.