When Cliff Weitzman emailed me about his Black SMS iPhone app, I was impressed by the pitch alone. An App Store app that encrypts text messages and emails between iPhones and iPads? Sign me up!
Black SMS accomplishes a task that I haven’t seen anything from the App Store come close to replicating. It does indeed encrypt your texts and emails so that they are unreadable without the Black SMS app and an associated password. CIA agents and paranoid boyfriends should take notice of this one.
Breaking free from the mold of conventional apps like Tweetbot and the official Twitter for iPad, developers Adam Bell and Miles Ponson have created a unique Twitter app for the iPad called Crest. Priced at $1.99 in the App Store, Crest isn’t a power user’s tool for digesting vast amount of tweets. Instead, it’s a fun, leisurely way to view your Twitter stream from the comfort of your new iPad’s Retina display.
The recently-updated version of GarageBand — Apple’s popular music-making app for the iPad — finally turns it into a serious tool for bands rather than something limited to solo artists and their session collaborators. With a shared connection, up to four band members can play or jam to a piece of music, be it a pop song or a classical overture. For the first time, it brings live performance to the iPad app.
The most common reaction people have when they see me wearing my Koss PortaPros is: “Don’t you work in tech? Can’t you afford some Skullcandies or something, instead of those hand-me-down headphones from the 70s?”
I always want to smack these people for their shameful ignorance and misguided elitism, but don’t… mostly because this is exactly the same reaction I had when, two years ago, I saw a pair of Koss PortaPros perched upon Cult of Mac review editor Charlie Sorrel’s lank, salt-and-peppery head.
Since then, I’ve converted a dozen friends to Koss PortaPros the same way Charlie converted me: by taking them off his head and making me put them on and listen to them for a few seconds. Everyone I’ve converted has sworn by Koss, just like Charlie and I do.
Koss’s PortaPro series isn’t old or antiquated: they’re design and quality are timeless. There’s a difference. But that doesn’t mean a timeless design can’t be improved or added upon, and with the PortaPro KTC line, Koss has done it.
How? How else. A built-in mic and in-line controls for your iPhone. Those sneaky devils.
This is the Arcam rCube, a high end speaker dock for iPhone and iPod touch. It’s a large-ish, solid cube weighing 11lbs, beautifully styled to match all your Apple stuff. It looks great, sounds fantastic, and offers some useful non-wifi wireless playback functions; but it costs a fortune.
New on the App Store is Paper for iPad, made by the team at 53. It’s a gorgeous, simple digital notebook that deliberately ditches features in a bid to keep things simple.
The result is something that’s unusually elegant, and a delight to use.
Ion Racer is a new high speed futuristic racing game for iOS from SGN. Sadly, if this is what racing’s going to be like in the future, I think I’ll take up fishing, because it will be more exciting.
AirPlay speaker systems are finally hitting the market in droves, but most of the ones we’ve come across cost more than a new iPad. As much as I love lusting over the devilishly good looks of higher end speaker systems, I don’t like forking over a ton of cash for a speakers even if they do come with AirPlay support. iHome’s iW1 sets out to become the wireless airplay system for the average consumer. It looks good. Plays pretty tunes. And at $300 it’s fairly cheap, but should you buy it?
There is a theory that apps are the new hit singles. You can’t make money from releasing a song any more, so you might as well try and make money from something people are still willing to pay for, like apps.
And you might not even need to charge them for the app, either. You can give the app away for free, and pad it out with extras that cost money. It’s bound to pull in a few paying customers, right? Right?
Described simply, the Apogee Jam ($99) is a just little gadget that lets you plug your guitar into your Mac, iPhone, or iPad. But in this pairing of instrument and iDevice, the Jam unlocks a wonderful world of musical possibility that is nothing short of magical.
If you know your Apple history, you’ll probably know that NeXTSTEP, the grandfather of modern OS X, had a clever feature called the Shelf, a placeholder where you could temporarily drop files while dragging them from one location to another. Sadly, Mac OS X has never replicated this in Finder.
So today there’s a brand new app for OS X that seeks to fix this. It’s called DragonDrop, and you can buy it for five bucks.
Developer Mark Christian released it independently today after weeks of trying to get it into the Mac App Store. Apple weren’t interested, and rejected it every time.
TwelveSouth’s BookBook case for the iPad is a hard, leatherback binder that’s designed to look like a vintage book. It’s handmade and it features a soft, velvety interior that promises to keep your tablet free from scratches and scrapes, while its hard exterior provides impact protection from all angles. It also boasts a fully-adjustable stand using “the oldest trick in the book” — a button and a piece of string.
Because it’s hand distressed, every BookBook case is unique, and TwelveSouth claims that no two look alike. We were more than impressed by the BookBook case for the MacBook Air, so we had high expectations for this one. But did it live up to them?
A new app for the iPad, The Guitar Collection: George Harrison, is rather like a little pocket book of the former Beatles’ most famous axes. It features the history, pics, guitar model specifications, and historic photographic images of the iconic instruments.
But unlike a book, it’s a multimedia feast full of 3D models, music clips, and videos of George and his pals talking rock ‘n’ roll. It’s a rich potpourri of sounds and visuals for Beatlemaniacs. Trouble is, there’s so much missing.
Frameographer is an excellent $3 photography app for stop motion and time lapse video recording. It works because it keeps things as simple as they can possibly be.
I love getting to review products from Just Mobile because I know they will always have excellent build quality. The Highway car charger for the iPhone is no exception. At about $35, the Highway isn’t exactly price sensitive. You’ll be able to find a multitude of cheaper solutions at your local Walmart, but you won’t find anything quite as luxurious.
Lightroom 4 isn’t nearly as big of an update as versions 2 or 3, but that’s more of a sign of a mature product than anything else. There are a few all-new features, but the one thing that will really, really want to upgrade is the new Highlights and Shadows section. It really is good enough to justify this point-release upgrade all by itself.
As we reported yesterday, the latest Hipstamatic update adds something that’s not just new for the app, but new for the App Store: direct access to the Instagram API.
Does it make a startling difference to the way you use Hipstamatic? No, not really. Only regular users of both Hipstamatic and Instagram will notice a substantial difference.
Apple has come under fire for shipping two new products that aren’t revolutionary breakthroughs, but incremental improvements on what came before.
The new iPad and Apple TV have been called underwhelming because they don’t clean your floor while also making a cappuccino. But in both cases, they are significant improvements on what came before.
The new Apple TV, now in its third generation, adds a faster A5 processor and can now stream high-def video at 1080p.
Is it worth the upgrade?
I confess: I didn’t think they could do it. When I heard that Angry Birds Space was coming, I honestly didn’t see how Rovio could create a game that was different enough, while still retaining the original Angry Birds magic. But I shouldn’t have doubted: this game is a success, precisely because it gets that balance exactly right.
Biologic is a – hmm, what is it exactly? It’s hard to describe. It’s not a Twitter client, although you can see Twitter with it. It’s not a Facebook client either, but your Facebook friends are all here if you want them to be. So what is it? The people who made it say it’s a “playful environment for exploring your friends’ activity streams from your favorite social networks.” Yeah, that covers it.
The iPhone gets great battery life, but we no longer live in the era of simple cell phones with week long battery life. That smartphone in your pocket isn’t just a way to make calls, but a real humming along inside your pocket, checking email, playing music, keeping an eye on your location, accepting text messages, sucking up push notifications, running Skype and a million other uses beside. That all takes up precious charge, and the more you pull that iPhone out of your pocket, the more quickly you use your battery up.
Given the realities of smartphone power management, battery cases like the Mophie Juice Pack are a necessary evil. Sure, they double and sometimes triple your battery life, but they also double and sometimes triple the size of your iPhone in your pocket. Worse, they are all-or-nothing affairs: if you want to use one, you need to take your existing case off your phone and put the juice pack on instead.
Boostcase’s new Hybrid Case does away with all that. It’s really two cases in one: a lightweight plastic protective case that can snap onto a beefy battery upgrade pack as needed that can juice your iPhone back up. And it’s a pretty great choice for anyone who doesn’t want to juggle cases on the go.
Doozy is a todo app for iOS with a difference. It’s not about lists, it’s about organizing your stuff visually. Although it’s more complicated than many of its rivals, it’s also somewhat more powerful, and offers some task tracking and monitoring features we’ve never seen anywhere else.
Since I got the Changers solar charger to test, I haven’t plugged a USB-chargeable device into anything else (with the exception of my iPad). Changers comes as a kit containing a solar panel and a battery pack, along with a a bag of tips that fit most cellphones and gadgets. But this description doesn’t do justice to what is a rather excellent and useful device.
Draw Something is the hip game to be playing on iOS right now. Is it just an electronic version of popular board game Pictionary? Well, yes, sort of, but with added iPad cool. It’s enormous fun to play, only let down by a stubborn insistence on having a live internet connection.
As a business owner, I love being able to take payments on my iPhone or iPad when I’m on the go — like at my booth during Seattle Comic Con. That’s one of the reason’s I’m a big Square fan. But while Square has a beautiful design and makes taking credit card payments a snap, it lacks a lot of features real businesses need.
Enter USAePay, which, like Square, also offers iPhone and iPad-compatible credit card readers. But together with their iOS app, USAePay provides many features Square doesn’t. And it’s for that reason, I decided to take USAePay for a spin; here’s what I found.