Ever had an idea for an app, but no way to record it? Worry no more: Pop is an ingenious free app for prototyping apps. You don’t need to know any code. All you need is a pencil and paper and an idea.
The Speck CandyShell is a dual-layer case with a patented design that aims to give you all-around protection for your iPhone 5. It combines a soft, rubber interior with a hard outer shell that offers plenty of impact resistance for those unfortunate yet inevitable drops.
The CandyShell also provides protection for your volume keys and sleep/wake button, while providing access to your headphone jack, Lightning connector, mute switch, and camera.
It costs $34.95 and comes in a plethora of color combinations, including black and slate, white and charcoal, raspberry and black, grape and malachite, and many more.
Meet Dave. Here he is. Dave Pell. He writes one of the best internet newsletters there is, and now his newsletter is an app called NextDraft.
Anyone with fond memories of playing Zoo Keeper on a Nintendo DS a few years ago probably doesn’t need to read any further. Just go get it for iOS now, and have fun.
If you missed out on Zoo Keeper first time round, or if you’ve simply never encountered it, allow me to enlighten you: this is fantastic fast-paced color-matching puzzle fun. And for the time being, it’s free.
“OMG—it’s huuuuge…” That’s what my friend said when she first saw me holding the Retrospective 50 camera bag from Think Tank Photo ($240). My ego properly boosted, I heartily agreed with her.
But besides being the size of a japanese automobile, the Retrospective 50 (R50) is a continuation of functional, understated, vintage-looking camera bags from Think Tank. And unlike the other smaller bags in the Retrospective line, this one has a special space reserved for your 15-Inch Macbook Pro, which I discovered in testing, can be both a pro and a con.
This is Curiosity, a free iOS game from British gaming icon Peter Molyneux. The idea is that all of us – everyone playing the game – work together to peel off layers of cubelets that make up the larger revolving cube. At the center, a surprise (and a prize) awaits the person lucky enough, and determined enough, to tap on it at the end.
Only two people in the whole world know what’s at the center. Do you care what it is? Do you care enough to spend hours tapping on your iDevice to find out? No, really: hours.
I like my iPhones in wood. Part of it’s to satisfy my Danish mid-century pretensions, but as I’ve said before, there’s something perfect about making a smartphone after wood. Wood implies an intimacy that metal or plastic doesn’t — that it was hand-crafted with you in mind — which makes it a natural (but not practical) material for a smartphone, which is the gadget with which most of us have our most personal relationships.
Back when I had an iPhone 4S, I replaced the glass back of my device with a replacement teak back by Monolith and never looked back. Not only was it more practical and more unique than the iPhone 4S’s easily shattered glass back, but it felt just sublime in the hand.
When the iPhone 5 came out, I was eager to know from Monolith whether they’d be doing replacement wood backs for Apple’s latest handsets. The response I got was a disappointment: while it was possible to replace the back of the iPhone 4/4S by just popping out two screws, it was impossible to replace the iPhone 5 ‘s back plate in the same way. The best Monolith could do, they said, was adhesives. My heart sank. Surely, wood stickers you slap on the back of your iPhone 5 would just suck.
They don’t. Defying both my expectations and experiences with similar products, Monolith’s wood iPhone 5 skins are every bit as amazing as their wood iPhone 4 backs. They’re beautifully made, wonderfully packaged, easy to apply, feel rich and luscious to the touch and are so thin as to make you have a hard time believing they can shave a tree this thin.
Wonderful Day is a different sort of one-dollar reminders app. It’s there to remind you of the things you’d like to get done, not the things you have to do. Although it sports an attractive visual design, it suffers from a handful of crucial failings that make it less useful than it could be.
The Ballistic Tough Jacket is the clearest case of overkill I have seen in a while. If you need protection at the cost of size, weight and style, then you should probably buy one now. Otherwise, read on. The case is actually pretty useful.
Readers of a … certain age. Will remember. The way William … Shatner. Used to talk. On Star Trek. Few of you will have … wished to make poetry that sounds. Like. That. On your iPhones. But now … you. Can. My God, Bones. My God.
Questions is a video ask-and-answer community for iOS. A bit like a video version of Quora – although where Quora encourages thoughtful discourse and discussion, Questions is all about brevity and snappiness. You only get 10 seconds to ask a question or submit an answer.
When I first heard that Angry Birds Star Wars was on its way, all I could think was: I have a bad feeling about this.
The cynic in me felt disgruntled about the repetitive nature of the Angry Birds brand, but the realist in me told the cynic to shut up, chill out, and enjoy the game.
The FlexiShield Skin from MobileFun is a translucent silicone case for iPad mini that’s designed to offer long-lasting protection, extra grip, and a slender profile that “highlights the form of your iPad mini” rather than spoiling it.
It provides impact and scratch protection to the back of your device, while still allowing you to access all of its buttons, ports, and switches. It costs $16.49, and it’s available in white, purple, and black.
No matter how long it spent waiting for approval, Google’s updated search app for iOS was worth the wait. Is it a shameless Siri-clone for web search? Yes, pretty much? Is it fast, instantly usable, and useful? Oh yes. Oh yes it certainly is.
Helpless and lost in a whirlwind of tasks I can never remember to complete—that’s me without a good todo app on my side. And so, since my last favorite app started having issues the developers seem intent on never fixing, I decided to give the Producteev iPhone and desktop todo apps (free) a try.
Now, with my tasks nicely cloud-synced across my Macbook and iPhone, I’m finally getting stuff done again, and I think it’s safe to check “find a new favorite productivity app” off the ol’ list.
Ever wanted a quick-and-easy way to slap a watermark on a digital photo, so that no pesky bloggers can claim it as their own without permission? Ever wanted to slap a watermark on dozens of photos at a time? Image Agent might help.
With the launch of iOS 6, Apple debuted a new panorama mode built into the camera app that allows users to take stunning widescreen panorama photos with almost no effort. Unfortunately, these photos have made for little more than a cool demo until now, because there’s been no good way to share them.
Enter PanoPerfect, an app that’s designed specifically around sharing your panoramic photos. While it’s probably the first of its kind, its sure not short on features.
Liquid is a productivity helper for OS X. It comes in two flavors – free and paid. The idea is to speed up your information seeking workflow. You find something you need to research, and a few key presses later you’ve got some data. Or a unit conversion. Or, in the paid version, a language translation. It’s got a lot of features.
Meet Nick. Nick D’Aloisio. He’s 17, lives in London, and his new news app Summly is attracting quite a lot of interest over in the UK. It seems to me that most of the media coverage is because of Nick’s age than the app he’s created. So let’s take a closer look at that app and see what all the fuss is about.
Here are the two things you need to know about the iPad mini. The form factor’s perfect, it’s beautifully designed, you will love holding it… but the screen’s awful and the performance is lacking, especially in graphics. Even at the price, it’s a deeply disappointing product that most people should think twice about buying right now.
How often do you want to know what sounds look like? I’m guessing not very often, unless you’re a musician. But if you do want to know what sounds look like, and you want to know it in the most stylish and good-looking way possible on iOS, you can’t go far wrong with an app called Soundbeam. It’s just beautiful.
Weather On is a weather forecasting app for iOS that is remarkable for one thing: its very obvious nods to Microsoft’s mobile operating system.
Open it up, and you’ll see a selection of square and rectangular tiles that look and behave just like the tiles you’ve seen on the latest smartphones running Windows Phone.
Born on Kickstarter, the MobileMount is a nifty little tool that allows you to mount almost any smartphone or tablet to a flat surface. Its design is simple; it consists of two suction cups that are held together by a ball and socket joint, so you can angle the stand in almost any direction while it’s mounted.
Both suction cups utilize a ‘turn-to-lock’ mechanism in an effort to ensure it’s super secure, and that your device never becomes unstuck. And because they’re just simple suction cups, you don’t need to remove cases or chargers from your device before you use them with the MobileMount — provided the case you’re using has a flat surface, of course.
This also means you can use one mount for your iPhone, your iPad, your iPod, and more — you don’t need to carry separate, dedicated accessories for each device. The MobileMount comes in black or white, and costs $39.99. But is it really worth it?
A mere 6 months ago, I moved my glut of photography gear into a new, portable home: the Think Tank AirPort International Rolling Camera Bag ($350). Since then, I’ve been able to tote my equipment around easily, in style, but most importantly, packed snugly in a vault of total security.
I immediately loved it.
But as with most reviews, time tells how a piece of gear will really work. And now, with six months of carting the Airport International to and fro, I’m ready to report how it has performed over the long haul.
When it comes to Bluetooth speakers, there’s one company’s product against which all others are measured: Jawbone’s iconic Jambox.
There’s a reason for that. Jawbone entered a pretty much empty market segment with a new product that they polished to hell. The Jambox doesn’t sound like sonic nirvana, but it sounds pretty good, and the rest of the details — from the way it feels in the hand, to the way it’s boxed, to the Nintendo-like bleeps and bloops it makes when you pair it or skip a track — are just polished to hell.
Just like with Apple products, though, that polish comes at a premium: the MSRP of the Jambox is $199.99, which is a lot of money for most people. Enter the CUBEDGE EDGE.sound, a new Bluetooth speaker that attempts to do everything that the Jambox does for an MSRP of $50 less.