Reviews - page 131

Apple’s new iBooks Author application for Mac is an impressive piece of work, even more so when you consider that it costs nothing. Although easy to use compared to many other page layout apps, it’s still quite a lengthy and complicated process to produce a book with it. It’s also squarely aimed at the education market. It was designed for the creation of textbooks.

So what if you want to make a shorter, simpler ebook? What if your kids want to make one? iBooks Author, for all its benefits, would probably be overkill. Enter, stage right, Book Creator for iOS. This five-dollar app lets you create simple ebooks on your iPad with very little fuss.

Today’s Best Thing Ever has to be Stuck on Earth, an app for travellers who haven’t left home yet.

If you’re the kind of geeky person who experienced a little thrill of joy when the hacking scene in Tron:Legacy included realistic use of a genuine command line interface, you (or perhaps your kids) might also enjoy playing with Hacker Typer.

I’m actually typing this review using Belkin’s Bluetooth Keyboard Folio for iPad 2 ($100). There are a few keyboard cases out there created to both house the iPad 2 as well as provide an alternative to the iPad’s digital keyboard, but this keyboard case’s keyboard is an iPad-toting writer’s dream.

Back in 1981, Bill Gates co-wrote a PC game called Donkey, commonly known (as some apps were back in those days) by its filename, DONKEY.BAS. If you’re old enough to remember those days and old enough to yearn for them, you might enjoy playing Donkey all over again on your iPhone.

There are those faithful who will never surrender their little white Apple earbuds. To them we say: Wear proudly. But for the rest, for those who don’t want to deal with sub-par sound, earbuds flopping around and having to hunt for foam covers, come with us — and we’ll show you a world of possibilities.

I distinctly recall a bit of maneuvering when Joe Daileda, head of sales and marketing at MEElectronics, contacted us about reviewing some of their earphones. Joe seemed particularly keen on getting a pair of their ceramic CC51Ps in our hands, but I wanted none of it — being the armature junkie I am, I was fixated on their armature-powered A151s ($75). Joe eventually ended up sending us three models (impressions of the unique, modular SP51 coming soon to a review near you).

Joe’s favoritism may have been entirely in my head — I get like that sometimes; but true enough, the CC51Ps turned out to be a stunning revelation. The A151s? Not so much.

We love Jeff Broderick’s work here at Cult of Mac. We’ve told you about some of his web app projects, like QuickWiFi and QuickContact, and his latest creation is called Photogram. As the name implies, you can use Photogram to view Instagram in your web browser. The app is beautiful and optimized for both the desktop and mobile experience.

Meet one-eyed Evi, a one-dollar alternative to Siri which works on older (non-4S) iPhones.

She’s had a bit of a rough introduction to life, thanks to a much-hyped launch followed by 24 hours or so of struggling to keep up with demand.

New from Tap Tap Tap is Serenity, a relaxation app for iPhone or iPad.

Relaxation app? What’s one of those? It’s an app for relaxing by; in this case, a digital jukebox of all things peaceful, calm, tranquil, and imperturbable. It plays sounds and moving images to lull you to sleep, or at least to a less troubled state. It’s an anti-alarm clock. Without the clock.

Out of the box, the iHealth HS3 Wireless Bluetooth Scale ($70) is somewhat impressive. With its digital (albeit not backlit) display and snazzy looking-glass top, this is a scale that will at least look spiffy in your bathroom when company is over. Even in the box, the scale makes a good case for gadget adoption: It promises to keep track of your weight, calories and exercise easily using only the scale itself and an accompanying app that can be used on your iPhone or iPad. Technically, the iHealth Scale does do that, but there are a few kinks that make this product’s promises fall flat.

Tree is an outliner with a difference – it offers an unusual horizontal view of your document alongside a host of useful outlining features.

I’m lucky: the real Stonehenge is only about 40 minutes’ drive from my front door, so I can go and visit whenever I like. For students of prehistoric monuments who live further afield, the Stonehenge Experience app for iPad offers a tiny glimpse of what this ancient English stone circle is all about.

This is Mou, a rather cute little text editor that you might like to check out if you ever use Markdown to format stuff for publishing on the web. Or even if you don’t.

The idea behind Kinotopic is to capture those little moving moments with Harry Potter-esque animated photos.

Wait – animated photos? I mean animated gifs, right? Well, yes and no.

The Pentax WG-1 GPS ($350) is a waterproof, shockproof location-aware camera.

If you’ve never tried a waterproof camera before, it can be quite a jarring experience. Every fibre of your soul tells you that you shouldn’t put electronic gadgets in water, so immersing this beast feels decidedly like the wrong thing to do.

As soon as you’ve done it, though, there’s a rush of delight as you press the on button and the screen lights up, and everything just works as if it were out on dry land.

This is FlickrBucket, a cute one-dollar uploading utility I found on the Mac App Store this week.

The idea behind the Zeo Sleep Manager Mobile ($99) is that the quality of your sleep affects your health in a bigger way than we generally recognize, and that measuring the amount of time we sleep and its quality — then quantifying that sleep with a number on a 100-point scale — will give us the information we need to improve our sleep, and ultimately our health.

All this time, people have blindly taken the Birds’ word for it, and joined them in their campaign of violence against the pigs. Nobody thought to ask the pigs for their side of the story. Until now.

Here’s a treat for Indiana Jones fans. It’s called Temple Run, it’s free on the iOS App Store, and it gives you the chance to relive your Indy treasure-hunting dreams.

Despite all our 21st-century technical wizardry, one of the easiest and least expensive ways to get a very basic idea of physical health is through a metric that’s been used for a very long time: body weight.

The Withings WiFi Body Scale ($160) takes this concept to the next level in many ways, including allowing you access to all your data on a gorgeously designed iOS app. It also adds an even more important metric, body fat percentage, and goes a long way to erasing many of the pitfalls using a simple scale can lead to — and it does this all while remaining incredibly easy to use. In fact, it might be the most effective tool I’ve used to keep healthy.

This is it, people — this is the year your New Year’s resolution to get fit really takes hold. This year, you’re going to stick it, and we’re going to show you how.

Launched a few weeks ago, the Pogoplug Series 4 ($100) is Cloud Engines’ latest attempt at making their network-attached storage device as ubiquitous as the microwave oven. Like its predecessors, the S4 allows you to attach a hard drive or flash drive to create your own cloud, which you can use to stream media, share files or create slideshows, all of which can be accessed over the Internet and shared with others. Additionally, it can also be used for remote backup.