Ideas is an iOS app for managing, organising and sorting your ideas and thoughts. It stands out from the crowd thanks to a refreshingly different interface that does the job very well. It usually costs two bucks, but right now it’s on sale for one dollar.
There are no shortage of gadgets out there that allow you connect your guitar to your iPhone, putting the power of The App Store at your guitar’s disposal. But if you’re looking for the best of what’s around (see what I did there?), Sonoma Wire Works’ GuitarJack ($150) has a mixture of beauty and talent you’d do well to consider.
Yesterday we highlighted the release of TextWrangler 4, the wonderful free text editor from Bare Bones Software. Here’s a closer look at the new stuff you’ll find in this update.
Rebus Show is an iOS Rebus puzzle game with visual style and flair.
The CASELLET is a snap-on case for the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 4S that also doubles as a wallet for your credit cards and bills. Unlike most other wallet cases, which are traditionally made from leather, this one’s made from a durable plastic that aims to provide you with better impact protection against dings and drops.
It will hold up to four credit cards on their own, or three credit cards and a few bills. It comes in black, white, or pink, and it’s complimented by a brushed aluminum backplate. As you’d expect, it provides access to your camera, volume rocker, mute switch, and more. The CASELLET is the spawn of a very successful Kickstarter project, but is it actually any good?
Renowned developer Steven Troughton-Smith has released the iPad version of his popular Speed iPhone app. Thanks to the iPad’s larger 9.7-inch display and Retina resolution, Speed for iPad is the perfect GPS for your automobile. Not only does Speed track your location on a map, but the app tells you how fast you’re going and the distance you’ve traveled.
When I first heard about Drafts, I thought “What’s the point?” After all, who needs an app in which to draft messages before sending them off to Twitter, or mailing them, or otherwise disseminating them to the world at large? My Twitter and mail apps take care of that already.
And then I used it, and it has turned into possibly the handiest little note-taking app I have on my iPod Touch.
Everyone knows the iPad’s speaker is, well, weedy. To compensate, Big Blue Audio has just released two new Bluetooth speakers to give a lift to music, movies and game-playing on your iPad.
Available from Brookstone, the Big Blue and Big Blue Live resemble kitschy white kitchen appliances. The $149.99 Big Blue packs 30-watts of aural pleasure for music lovers, while the speaker’s little sis, the $99.99 battery-powered Big Blue Live, is designed more as a portable companion for amplifying phone calls and apps. These new speakers are introduced to compete favorably both bang wise and buck wise versus other popular wireless speakers of similar specs / dimensions, for example the Logitech Boombox and the Jawbone Jambox, respectively.
With their sci-fi looks and packaging, they are certainly noticeable — but do they sound good too? Read on….
Banjo is an iPhone app that aggregates pretty much all of your social networks’ data in one place. And a new update has just added Instagram, making it pretty much the most comprehensive option yet. There is a problem, however: While the app itself is dead easy to set up, and even works with iOS 5’s own Twitter integration, it is a complete mess in use.
Celebrity physicist Brian Cox is famous in the U.K. for making physics accessible to the public through bestselling books and several popular TV series. Now he brings elements of both to a gorgeous new iPad app: Brian Cox’s Wonders of the Universe ($6.99).
Featuring amazing animations and lush, high-production video, the app will sweep you back in time to witness the Big Bang, and then look ahead to the universe’s end, when the last black dwarfs will fizzle away to entropy.
As Prof. Cox points out: while the universe evolves momentarily from order to chaos, now is a precious window of time when life is briefly possible, for us to be able to contemplate the universe…
One of the saddest things about tech is that unlike other fashionable things, the aesthetic trend that might dictate what gadgets look like for a few years never gets a chance to come back into style. The most we ever get is the chance to be nostalgic about the look of an old gadget, not to fall in love with the aesthetic behind its design all over again, as if new.
For example, debatably thanks to AMC’s period drama Mad Men, Danish mid-century design has really come back into style. A whole new generation of people have come to discover and love a design trend that a mere two years ago, all but a few people would have, at best, only known by a couple musty old relics collecting dust and mouldering in their grandparents’ garage. Watching Don Draper slip into an Eames lounge chair, or pour himself a drink from a gorgeous teak sideboard, or turn on a tulip lamp designed by Eero Sarinen, though, rejuvenates these items by allowing us to see them as they were meant to be used and experienced. It removes real, living objects from the obscurity of textbooks and turns them into fresh ideas, ready to be used again.
It’s for this reason that I love seeing wood in a gadget. It takes a trend that was ubiquitous in the 70s and 80s, when home electronics were big and bulky enough to be mostly considered a kind of furniture, and presents it as a refreshing anecdote to a modern trend in tech design that puts the emphasis on more impersonal and space-age materials like plastic and metal, silicon and glass.
For me, wood can imply an intimacy — a device is yours, it was made for you — that makes it a perfect material for a smartphone: a device that is, by definition, the gadget with which most of us have our most personal relationship. And while Apple understandably doesn’t make iPhones out of wood, I’m delighted that a company like Monolith does, by offering a stunning line of natural wood backs for the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S that are as practical as they are beautiful.
Remember the Microsoft Courier? It was a concept tablet device from Microsoft, with two side-by-side digital touchscreens that could fold together like a book. Well, Taposé is a new iPad app inspired by that concept. Sadly, it doesn’t live up to it.
Voice Dication, or Voice Dictation – Voice To SMS, Email, Facebook, Twitter And Other Apps to give it its full name, is a voice control app from Europe, designed to offer something vaguely Siri-like to those of us still stuck in the Dark Ages on our pre-4S iPhones.
Does it work? Well yes, actually it does. Better than expected.
I love the look of old canvas camera bags; they have a style and charisma that the bags of today can’t touch. But the problem is, canvas bags often aren’t comfortable to wear, and they also lack the padded protection of today’s more modern sacks.
With the Retrospective 5 ($137.50), ThinkTank aimed to blend the vintage look of yesteryear with the comfort and protection of today’s modern bags. They were trying to meld the best of both worlds when they created the Retrospective 5, and I think they succeeded.
Barefoot Books World Atlas ($8) is a kind of digital globe for children, giving them easy access to a simplified cartoon overview of the whole world.
From the orbital view (for want of a better word), you see the globe peppered with hundreds of colorful icons. Spin the globe and zoom in. The little icons grow and become tappable controls. Each one reveals a snippet of information in text and audio form (read aloud by the UK’s favorite TV geographer (yes, we have those), Nick Crane). There’s also a photo to look at for each fact, which is often much more informative than the icon was to start with.
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.