So the 25 billionth download from the iOS App Store was none other than Where’s My Water? Free. It brought its owner a shiny $10,000 iTunes gift card and worldwide fame for 15 minutes. But will it bring you anything? The short answer is probably: no.
The IDAPT i1 Eco Universal Charger ($25) aims to be your charge-every-device portable charger. But this is one instance where bigger is indeed not better.
Fuzel is another one-dollar photo collage maker for iOS. There are dozens of others, so what marks this one out?
Well actually it’s rather impressive. To start with, it has a lovely natural interface that begins with the faux-textured front cover of a photo album, with your most recent creation poking through a hole. Swipe this aside, and keep swiping through your creations, just as you would with a real album.
This simple image has become a cliché in the UK in recent years, and is now much parodied and remixed everywhere you look. Now you can remix it yourself, thanks to a variety of (very similar-looking) apps for iOS.
Yesterday we showed you how to make your own gorgeous pixel art with The Grix. Today we’re looking at pixels again, this time with a clever new photo toy for iOS called pxl, by Rainer Kohlberger.
First things first: Pentax calls this “the smallest, lightest interchangeable lens camera in the world,” and they’re dead right. This camera is small. You thought your micro four-thirds camera was small, but it’s huge compared to the Pentax Q. It’s hard to appreciate just how small it is, until you put it next to something else that’s really small. Like an iPhone.
As you can see, the Q sits neatly atop the iPhone’s screen, not even touching the edges of its case. It’s tiny.
Camera Awesome is a new all-singing, all-dancing photo app on the iOS Store this week. But just how awesome is it?
Brought to you by photo sharing site SmugMug, the first noticeable thing about this app is the price: it’s free. There are no adverts inside it, you’ll be pleased to hear. But there are quite a lot of extras that can only be unlocked with in-app purchases.
The Grix is a cool new $5 pixel editor for iOS, with wide appeal for serious pixel artists and anyone looking for a creative way of killing a dull moment.
Monster collaborated with rapper/actor Nick Cannon to make the N-ERGY “high performance in-ear headphones.” I put the last part in quotes because the N-ERGY headphones ($70) are neither “high performance” nor “in-ear.”
I’m not an audiophile, but I appreciate and know good sound when I hear it. It took a total of 15 minutes for me to realize that the “NCredible” (yes, that phrase is used to market the product) N-ERGY headphones are awful. They look great, but they’re about as painful to listen to as Nick Cannon’s comedy.
Here’s Tomahawk, a music player with a difference: it plays music from anywhere and almost everywhere. Not necessarily music from your collection, either.
TinkerTool is the Swiss Army knife you need for your Mac.
With its blades you can activate – or deactivate – all sorts of features that are normally hidden from view.
I first heard about Launch Center from my old TUAW colleague Dave Caolo when he began writing a series of posts about it on his excellent 52 Tiger blog.
Read what Dave writes, and take careful note of his wise words: Launch Center is an ingenious little marvel that’s well worth having on your iPhone. Allow me to explain why.
Determined to acquire sea legs before the America’s Cup breezes into San Francisco in 2013, I’m learning to sail. Well, learning is a big word. Mostly trying not to get smacked by the boom and checking out the porpoises.
The Bay Area is known for its challenging waters, so I figured it’d be a good place to test out DryCASE, which vacuum seals your iPhone into a waterproof pouch that you can wear as an armband or around your neck.
ThumbTack is a Menu Bar utility for OS X that puts your most recent Pinboard bookmarks in easy reach, no matter what application you’re using.
Korg debuted the nanoSERIES2 line following the success of its predecessor, the nanoSERIES line. The lineup consists of the nanoKONTROL2, the nanoKEY2 and the nanoPAD2. As a trio, they offer a truly flexible experience for musicians in the studio and on the go. The only thing you sacrifice with this slim-line MIDI controller series is the bulk and weight of traditional MIDI controllers. Korg and its educational arm, Soundtree, were generous enough to provide test units of the nanoSERIES2 line.
SpamSieve is a top-quality spam-killer for your email account, protecting you from phishing, from lures tempting you to download God-knows-what from dodgy file sharing servers, and from non-existent Nigerian princes offering untold wealth in exchange for, well, a few cash payments up front. To cover expenses, you understand.
There’s a certain kind of computing nostalgia that holds that the art of typing has been steadily wussified since the late 1980s, when the venerable IBM Model M and Apple Extended Keyboard went out of favor.
These keyboards, it is held, were the last of a breed of keyboards for men. Like a vintage Underwood typewriter, these mechanical marvels were made for those who meant for their words not just to be heard, but to be felt: the hefty chunk of each key smashing into the mechanical switch underneath shouldn’t just make a letter light up on a screen; it should land with such authority it shakes your teeth loose.
For the last month, I’ve been trying to become one of these burly typist he-men. I put my Apple Wireless Keyboard — as pale, thin and pretty as the world’s most anemic twink — and have instead replaced it with the Das Keyboard Model S Professional for Mac. Now when I type, it sounds like ten tiny John Henrys working away under my fingers, pounding spikes through the invisible gold-plated key switches beneath each key.
It’s not really for me. Not most of the time.
Denso is a little bit like Flipboard, but just for video content. Open it up, and you’ll see a selection of curated and branded channels that you can subscribe to on your iPhone or iPad.
Here’s how you know you’re a nerd: a charging station gets you excited. Yeah, I’ll say it: the IDAPT i4+ Universal Charger ($60) excites me. And yes, I’ve known the touch of a woman.
Before you judge me any further, let me explain how the i4+ works; you might start getting a tingly sensation too.
Once you’ve downloaded Better Touch Tool and started to explore what it has to offer, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.
This is my favorite bag. I have many (too many) bags, but this is the best. I doesn’t have any fancy features. It has no padding, and there’s no way to lock it securely shut. But unless I have a special task requiring a special bag, it’s the one I always grab. I’m so used to it that every piece of junk I carry with me has its place inside.
And even after more than a year of solid use, it’s as good as new. The bag is the Zero Messenger from Rickshaw, and here’s why it’s so good:
PopClip brings cute iOS-style select-and-click text tools to your Mac. It’s great.
The new Timbuk2 Command Messenger 2012 ($140) is nothing like the first Timbuk2 bag I ever owned, some 11 years and 20 pounds ago, back when I was heavily commited to the world of cycling. Timbuk2 called it the Bolo, and it was a real messenger bag — though messengers almost always opted for it’s larger sibling, the Tag Junkie — crafted from a single piece of vinyl and Cordura; just a massive main compartment with not much more than a small pocket sewn on the outer face for coins and maybe a patch kit.
Although it’s just about as tough, the Command Messenger is light years away from my Bolo (and is really as much a messenger bag as a Chevy pickup is an ox cart): It’s sophisticated, uses several advanced materials, has loads of pockets and a trick feature that makes air travel easier for laptop-toting jestsetters. My how you’ve grown, Timbuk2.
Acorn describes itself as “an image editor for humans”, and that sums it up in a nutshell.
What you get inside Acorn are pretty much all the image editing features you’re ever going to need, for a fraction of the price of some of the competing apps.
One of the things I have always found interesting about bags is the way they are defined by their intent. There is more to them than their fabric and stitch. To judge a bag, you need to look beyond what it is to what it aspires to fill itself with. In other words, bags have souls, and like people, you can’t judge them just by what they are. You must also consider what they want to be.
The Acme Made Clutch is a bag that aspires to be as sleek as the 13-inch MacBook Air and MacBook Pro that it is designed to fit. At that, it succeeds. Those looking for an all-purpose laptop bag to throw anything and everything into should look elsewhere, though. The Clutch is as minimalist, meticulously organized and with as much eye to fashion and form, it’s as if Jonny Ive had designed it for Steve Jobs himself. But Steve never was a guy who needed to keep a lot of things in his bag.