This week’s must-have iOS apps include the universal release of the official Twitter client, a fun and unique way to make music, and an app that turns your device in to a USB memory stick.
Check out a few of our favorite apps from the past week after the break!
As an iPhone user I have always shied away from cases as I have never found one that enhances the design of the iPhone rather than devaluing it. But the latest version of Grove’s Bamboo case for iPhone 4 is a game changer. It is hands down the best case I have ever used or reviewed.
That is a bold statement I know, but here’s why:
If you’ve recently purchased an iPhone 4, you’ll be wanting to protect your shiny new device from scratches, scuffs and bumps. Now that it’s been around for a few months, there are a lot of cases on the market that claim to do just that, but how do you know which one’s right for you? I’ve lost count of the number of cases I purchased for my previous iPhones that, after using for a week or so, I decided weren’t suitable for a number of reasons.
This is where the iPhone 4 Case Review comes in; it’s a weekly review of a variety of iPhone 4 cases which aims to give you some advice and guidance on protecting your beloved new gadget. We’ll test out a range of cases so that you don’t have to, and hope to help you decide which case is best for you. We’ll try out snap cases, sleeves, protectors, pouches and anything else we can find!
Our first review is of Incipio’s Feather case. I chose this one first for one reason; out of all of the cases I purchased for my 3GS, the Feather was the one I used most and the one I was most impressed with, although it did have one flaw. Check out the review after the break.
There are hundreds of decent iPad cases out there. Unfortunately, very few leave you room for anything other than the iPad itself. What about your stand, your wireless keyboard, your charger or your headphones? Carrying all the accoutrements needed to set your iPad up and use it more like a notebook may seem to defeat the purpose somewhat, but a lot of us use our tablets like that every day. If you like to carry your iPad fully loaded, the Incase Travel Kit Plus ($59.95) is a great solution.
It may be somewhat hard to remember — what with sporadically poor call performance, lots of other hardware to play around with and all those apps — that the iPhone is more-or-less primarily a tool for voice communication. And there’s no better or cheaper way to use that tool than through the Skype app.
The Just Mobile UpStand iPad stand is simply perfect. The form factor the stand assumes and the material it is made of coupled with how much it weighs makes it the perfect place to perch my iPad on. The stand sits just right upon my desk and holds my iPad horizontally or vertically leaving complete access to all buttons, switches, and ports — especially the docking connector.
Click the read link for more information about this product and a gallery of photos of it in use.
My dad was a magician at sniffing out great places to eat. We’d drive by some hole-in-the-wall we’d never seen before, and he’d point and say, “that’s where we’ll eat, it’s good.” Then I’d scramble to check out the hole-in-the-wall’s rating using the Yelp app on my iPhone, to see if he was right. The result was always the same: me shaking my head in disbelief as Yelp’s vast community of raters would invariably agree with him.
Unfortunately, most of us don’t have a magic nose. But that’s ok — we’ve got Yelp.
As an avid watcher of movies, I was thrilled by the prospect of watching the latest releases on my iPad. In practice however, I haven’t watched a single film all the way through and the reason is this – the iPad is simply too awkward to hold at the right angle for long periods of time. Even when placed on your lap, you end up getting leg ache after trying to stay in the right position.
MoviePeg from UK design house magneticNorth offers a solution to this problem by offering a versatile and compact stand solution, for a very reasonable $19.
And here’s Percolator, today’s Best Thing Ever for people who love their iPhone photography.
What does it do? It re-renders photos in glorious approximation, creating gorgeous mosaics out of roundels of color.
I grabbed myself the Alfred Powerpack over the weekend, and so far it’s looking very promising.
Alfred, you may remember, is a fast little app launcher, web searcher and doing-stuffer for OS X. Clearly inspired by the likes of Quicksilver, it offers basic features for free and now, with the Powerpack, adds a few extras for a fee.
The EyeTV One from Elgato makes pulling Digital TV (DTV) from the air and down to Earth as simple as 1-2-3. Install the included EyeTV software then plug the device into an available USB port on your computer and you will be watching DTV on your Mac in no time at all.
I tested the EyeTV One on my Macbook Pro, iMac, and Mac Mini and it worked fine on all three systems. My ultimate goal was two-fold. First I wanted something that would give me TV on the go and second I wanted something that could bring DTV to my Mac Mini which may ultimately serve as a hub for my entertainment system.
If you’re a rugged, outdoorsy type — or just really careless — you’ve undoubtedly been looking for the toughest case ever for the iPhone 4.
OtterBox has been the go-to company for this sort of iPhone protection. And while it’s taken them some time to come up with something for the iPhone 4, the company has finally released something in its tough-as-nails Defender line.
OtterBox offers three levels of case protection. There’s the Impact, which is designed for everyday casual protection; the Commuter, for people who are looking for a little more; and the bulk-be-damned Defender series, for those who want the absolute most protection money can buy.
How does it measure up?
I like to keep my todo list nice and simple, so for a while now it has been a plain text file that sits inside Dropbox.
That still meant that remote edits of the file using my iPhone were tricky and fiddly. They won’t be any more, though, because I’ve just spent a dollar on Nebulous Notes, a new text editor for iOS devices that’s designed for dealing with documents stored in the cloud.
Specifically in this case, documents stored inside Dropbox. You have to tell Nebulous Notes your Dropbox sign-in credentials, and it offers to remember them for you (with added protection of a four-digit PIN for security’s sake).
The editor itself offers a choice of a handful of fonts and colors (including green-on-black for you green-on-black text editor fans).
There are a few other basic Dropbox-level functions, too: the app can create new folders and text files, as well as delete stuff you’ve already got in your Dropbox. It is strictly limited to displaying and editing plain text, though: it can’t handle rich texts, and it won’t display images or PDFs. But if – like me – the main thing that matters is the words, that’s not going to be a problem.
I love my iPhone photography apps, and I thought I knew about all the best ones. Turns out there’s always something new to learn.
Heather Powazek Champ posted a list of her favorite iPhone photography apps, and among them was one that was totally new to me: Diptic.
Phone Disk, from Macroplant, is a utility for Mac OS X (and Windows) that runs quietly in the background on your computer until you plug-in an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad using a USB sync cable. Plugging in your favorite iDevice causes Phone Disk to seamlessly mount the iOS file system on that device to your computers file system. Once mounted you can directly access the files on that device using Finder (and Windows explorer) or any other program.
You’ll be interested in this application if you’re an IT Ninja looking for another good troubleshooting utility to carry around or you’re simply curious about the data that resides on your favorite iDevice.
Osmos for iPad is a unique game for Apple’s new platform. It reminds me a little bit of Spore from Electronic Arts, but only a little. I got bored with Spore on my Mac and iPhone pretty quickly, but I cannot say the same about Osmos.
The app makes good use of the iPad’s graphic abilities, touchscreen interface, and audio hardware. The latter provides nice music and sound effects that make playing the game for long periods of time enjoyable. However, the rapidly changing game play, that made me feel immersed in a totally new gaming experience, was what really made me fall in love with this game.
I’ve been using Apple’s Magic Trackpad for just over a week, and I can confidently say it’s replaced the mouse for me.
The Magic Trackpad is easier to use, much more functional than even a multibutton mouse, and possibly less prone to causing repetitive strain injuries.
Independent app developer Tim Sears has just released his latest creation for iPhone, and if you are a Foursquare user, this is one for you.
Future Checkin utilizes the new background location features available with iOS 4 and allows you to check-in to your favorite, recent or nearby venues without even getting your phone out of your pocket.
Rolling Stone‘s Special Issue of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time made its debut Tuesday on Zinio, a digital publishing platform that could spell the difference between “survive” and “thrive” for old-school media publications looking to keep the doors open in coming years.
With a stable of top-tier periodicals such as National Geographic, Esquire, American Photo, Car & Driver and many more, Zinio definitely leads the way in showing how paper publications might remain not only relevant but vital and attractive to a new generation of “readers” weaned on the sizzle and flash of gaming and 3D entertainment.
Publication is morphing into something beyond simple words and pictures, evolving into an immersive medium that both pushes ideas and information out to consumers — and draws them in with interactive features and activities that take one beyond the superficial layers of what an article or essay might seem to offer.
Thus, with such crucial stakes at hand, did Zinio, Apple and Rolling Stone produce something of a mixed scorecard with the 500 Greatest issue.
Ever tried asking a cow about the weather? Because they’re not really the most informative beasts (about the weather, anyway).
“Cow, it looks like it might rain sometime today — any idea when?” Cud-chewing.
“How strong d’you think the wind will be later?” More cud-chewing, accompanied by blank staring.
“Look, cow, can you at least tell me if there are any severe weather advisories I should be aware of?” Cud-chewing stops, then resumes a few seconds later; blank stare may or may not actually be a look of terror.
Using the iPhone’s native Weather app is like asking a cow about the weather: it’s cute and harmless, but not very informative. Unless you’re exceptionally partial to cows and/or don’t mind walking off into the occasional surprise thunderstorm, it should be banished to the back page and replaced with The Weather Channel’s app.
Since the dawn of time, more or less, the iPhone’s inability to play back Flash has been a consistent point of complaint from the anti-Apple crowd, particularly proponents of Android. Never mind the fact that, until TODAY, no one outside of Android developers had used Flash on any Android phone.
More comically, of course, Hulu, that prize of Flash video, doesn’t run on Flash-enabled mobile phones. But now it does run on the iPhone, along with the PlayStation 3 and a few Internet-enabled TVs — for a price. I was admitted to the $10-a-month beta for HuluPlus, and I’ve put it through its paces. While it is undeniably quite an achievement for mobile streaming video, it’s also undeniably a beta, and I’m miffed to be paying.
Apple’s iMovie is an app designed to run exclusively on the iPhone 4, but it will actually run on an iPhone 3GS by applying a hack. The app puts a mobile video studio in your pocket and gives you another creative way to use your iPhone by offering you some nice video editing and enhancement features. You can turn otherwise boring videos into something more exciting with it. It won’t replace iMovie or Final Cut on your Mac, but as a portable alternative to those apps it can be pretty handy.
The iPhone 4 brought changes in shape, function, features, and so on, but to the joy of many cell phone photographers, the device now includes a rear facing 5-megapixel camera with an LED flash and a forward facing VGA-quality camera. Apple enhanced the cameras via software improvements like FaceTime, zoom, etc. linked to the hardware changes above. These changes will probably calm the complaints about the camera that I heard about on the previous iPhone models. However, regardless of the issues users have developed exciting ways to use the camera and there are innovative third-party applications to help along the way.
One such app is Camera+, which is a joint effort between Taptaptap and Canadian photographer Lisa Bettany. I figured it was worth taking a look at it since it was on sale Sunday for $1.99 (regular price is $4.99).
Newton Peripherals carved out a niche in the gadget-universe, guided by the simple principle that the best gadget is the one you take with you — because that’s the one you’ll use. They created the MoGo Mouse, a mouse-remote hybrid that tucks away into a laptop’s pc-card slot, then followed it with the MoGo Talk: an ultra-slim Bluetooth headset that resides in — and actually forms part of — a case which attaches to the back of the iPhone 3G/s.
But while the design concept is brilliant, engineering-wise, the Talk wasn’t quite ready for prime-time when originally released; complaints surfaced that the headset was difficult to eject from the case, and more alarmingly, that the case’s pop-up charging port was fragile and often broke, removing the only method available for charging the headset.
ID8-Mobile has since snapped up Newton Peripherals, addressed the Talk’s problems, made a few other minor improvements to the case (while leaving the headset unchanged) and re-released it as the MoGo Talk XD. So did they get it right?
Unfortunately, Second Life definitely ain’t what she used to be. There have been more than a few headline-grabbing scandals in recent years, user numbers have fallen off a bit and the newest official Linden Labs viewer software hasn’t exactly gotten rave reviews.
However, there is still a very large and very loyal SL contingent that is eager to access their digitized world wherever and whenever they can. Those people have been begging and pleading for a reliable Second Life viewer for the iPhone since day one. Those same people really began clamoring for something more mobile when the iPad came on the scene.
Pocket Metaverse Pro ($2.99) is just that app. With versions for the iPad and iPhone (and free versions to boot), Pocket Metaverse is more than adequate for accessing Second Life and other similar Open Grid virtual worlds while on the go.