Remember Favs, the Mac app which collects your favorite items from pretty much any service on the internet and puts them all together in one place? Well, now you can use it on the iPhone, too: Favs for iOS just launched and it looks like a great way to keep track of your starred items when on the go.
The new 1.3 update to the stop-motion-animation app Frameographer has a new feature called Smart Zoom, and it is so obviously good that every video-shooting app for iOS should be using it already.
Along with Instapaper, the iPad gets another big app update today. Comic Zeal — long my favorite comic-book reader — has gotten Retina support for the new iPad, along with a few interface tweaks which makes organizing your comics easier and sometimes a little less confusing.
Instapaper will now fetch your news when you arrive at, home, work, anywhere.
Instapaper just got yet another update (developer Marco Arment seems to be on roll these last couple of months) and it brings a very neat new feature – when you arrive at any chosen location, Instapaper will automatically update your articles in the background. This should mean that never again will you be without your latest saved articles when you rush of to catch a bus.
Photography is one place where older is definitely better — for now at least. We take amazingly high quality photos with our digital cameras and then add filters, grain, vignetting and all manner of other imperfections to make those pictures look like they were shot on film cameras. And not even good film cameras: pretty much all of the effects we use mimic defects in the photo processes of old.
Now, with Osmo Leaker, we have an app whose sole purpose is to add simulated light leaks to our photos. Tap the film-cartridge icon and random orangey strips will be added to your photograph, just as if you had accidentally opened the back of the camera before you rewound the film. Don’t like the result? Tap again. Decided you actually did like the previous leak better? No problem, you can go back (in the Pro version).
When you’re done, you can export to the usual places — Facebook and Twitter — and also save to the camera roll or open the image in Instagram. And that’s it: Osmo Leaker is a one trick pony, but it performs that trick very well. There are two versions available, a free version and a $1 pro version. The Pro app has more effects, full-res export and no ads, as well as the back button for fickle mind-changers.
All this has me wondering how ridiculous this retro-fication might be if applied to other technology. Low-res movies with barrel distortion to replicate the crappy picture of an NTSC CRT TV? Crackles and pops applied to lossless music to simulate vinyl? Wait, that last one actually exists!
DC Copy is a universal app which lets you avoid iTunes.
DC Copy is a new app that does one thing. It lets you copy your photos and videos to your iPhone’s camera roll via iTunes? "What?!" I hear you shout. "We can do that already!"
Well, yes, you kinda can, but it’s a testament to the true horror of using iTunes that this app exists at all, and that — furthermore — you’ll probably be downloading it by the end of this short post.
One of the hallmarks of great Apple software is that it makes you smile like a kid when it does something unexpected and undeniably cool. The first time you pinch-to-zoom, for example, or when you swipe over a picture in iPhoto for iOS and it automatically applies a correction depending on what’s under your finger.
The other hallmark of Apple’s apps is that they look great.
Scalado’s PhotoBeamer manages the first of these things, appearing to work as if by magic. On the second, though, it fails somewhat.
A warehouse nestled in the heart of Louisville, Kentucky is home to hundreds of unnamed machines. Each white box gently wields a robotic arm that grips a normal-looking pen. As I walkdown the aisles separating the machines, disjointed sounds of clicks and squeaks fill the air. I’m in the home of Thank You Pen, a new startup that aims to blend technology with good, old-fashioned, dead-tree communication. “And while the service’s creator modestly says he can’t compete with Apple, Thank You Pen is doing what Cards can’t: putting love, care and soul into every card sent.”
Check your App store updates people because Drafts was just updated to version 1.2 and includes new actions to post to Facebook, Evernote, create a calendar item, and add to OmniFocus.
Russian news website The Village got sick of douche parking (apparently a big problem there) and decided to do something about it. How? By using an iPhone app tied into social media sites.
The app lets users snap photos of badly parked cars and upload them, but what happens next is pure genius.
Facebook has launched its official iPhone app for managing Pages. After a slow rollout throughout other parts of the world, Facebook Pages Manager for iPhone is free and available now in the U.S. App Store. If you manage Pages on Facebook, this app will let you check statistics, post, comment, and more on the go.
FreezePaint is a very neat iPhone app that lets you “remix” the world around you. Or rather, it allows you to make a scrapbook of anything you see, just by pointing your iPhone camera at it and painting in the parts you want to keep. And don’t be put off by the photos on the site — they’re a little cheesy, but when you actually start playing with the app, you’ll be surprised by its potential.
CloudPic is a great new Kickstarter project which connects your DSLR to your iPhone using Bluetooth 4. By plugging a dongle into the side of the camera, a fast connection is formed and you can beam photos to the iPhone, and from there have them upload automatically to the cloud service of your choice.
It's no Penultimate, but Inkflow's price is certainly right
Inkflow is a new handwriting and drawing app for the iPad and iPhone, and it has one standout feature: you can select, move and resize anything on the page.
The world’s best podcast network just launched an app. Now you can live stream podcasts direct to your iPhone from Dan Benjamin’s amazing 5by5 network using the new 5by5 Radio app.
Droplr, the popular web and app service for sharing files and links online, has launched its Droplr Pro plan. In case you didn’t know, Droplr is an incredibly slick way of sharing and storing media in the cloud. The iPhone and Mac apps can also be used to share files with shortened links, much like CloudApp.
Droplr Pro offers a completely ad-free experience, views/downloads statistics, increased storage, private drops, customized drop views, and custom domain configuration for short URLs. The service costs $3 per month or $30 per year.
SynchroCam is a free app which snaps photos from two iOS devices simultaneously
SynchroCam is an app that uses the cameras of two iDevices to snap a stereo photo. It then combines the two images into one animated GIF, the kind that flick back and forth and give a trippy 3-D effect.
Instapaper 4.2 has just hit the App Store, and it’s a pretty big update. The headline feature is a new iBooks-style page-turn animation, but there is a lot more in there besides.
Polaroid is finally making an iOS app, just five years after the iPhone launched.
Speaking of Polaroid, the ailing-but-once-awesome instant photo company has come out with its own iPhone app. And guess what? It’s yet another Instagram clone, only it’s not free and it even has extra in-app purchases.
The app is called Polamatic, and it lets you snap photos, add filters and grames, and then upload them to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr or Instagram (just like Instagram!). The schtick here is that the frames aren’t just any old Polaroid-ish
frames. No, they’re actual scans of “new, used, and vintage Polaroid frames.”
I’m expecting some really cool iOS/Android stuff to pop out of indy dev First Post. The year-and-a-half-old startup is run by Jacob Robinson, the former art director at Sony Online Entertainment (who had a hand in forming legendary titles like the EverQuest series, DC Universe, Star Wars Galaxies and Unreal Tournament). It’s also completely self-funded, “which is not an easy thing to do at all,” says Robinson.
First Post’s debut game, Snacksss, may not exactly be the stellar breakthrough title one might have hoped for; the cartoony, Sonoran Desert-themed iPhone game has lots of pretty artwork but needs help in the gameplay department, which has the player listlessly flicking a hungry snake at rabbits ad nauseam.
Back from when the internet was too slow for video, we had animated GIFs. Now, in the days of fiber connections and YouTube, we still trade GIFs. Or we would, if we actually knew how to make them.
Enter Gifture, an Instagram-a-like app which makes animated GIFs instead of still photos. It shoots sequences, puts them together and lets you apply filter before sending them off to the web to share.
Twitpic's app is likely too late to really get popular
Twitpic, the photo-sharing service for Twitter, has finally gotten its own standalone app. You can use is to post pictures to Twitter from your iPhone, and you can also browse previous photos you have uploaded to the service (and you probably will have some there already, as many Twitter apps use Twitpic).
You can also use the app as a client to browse photos taken by people you follow on Twitter.
America's trains are getting an iPhone-sized upgrade.
Apple’s iPhone is about to be implemented into the American railroad system in a big way. Amtrak, the government agency that oversees the nation’s train services, will be adopting the iPhone as a digital ticket scanner. The 1,700 conductors who currently work for Amtrak have been undergoing training with the iPhone since November, and the new initiative will be fully rolled out by late summer.
An update to the GPS photo-tagging app PlaceTagger brings support for the iPad, and also shows us exactly what iCloud was meant for. The v2.0 version not only lets you import photos via camera connection kit and then tag them right there on the iPad — it also syncs the GPS data seamlessly to the Mac version so you can tag photos right there. No tedious exporting of GPX files (unless you want to), nor even having to fix time discrepancies with the iPad and the camera’s clocks.
Facebook Messenger's new read receipts and location info in action
Facebook has updated its Facebook Messenger app in the App Store with several new features. You can now see when someone is replying to a message with a live typing indicator, much like iMessage in iOS. Read receipts will also reveal when a message has been read and by whom in a group message. Location information has also been added for showing where someone was when they sent a message from their Apple or Android smartphone.