Reviews - page 66

Research shows that keeping a journal is great for your mind. It allows you to clear your thoughts or think through problems in different ways. Finding a good way to journal is easy with the Day One app. Designed to provide a feature-rich, modern journaling experience, Day One gives you the ability to keep track of, write about, or create a virtual archive of almost anything you want.

External batteries are widely available but surprisingly few of them are really designed with Apple users in mind. That’s because all too many require a microUSB cable to get power. The mophie Powerstation Plus XL is a rare exception.

It’s recharged through a built-in Lightning port. The new accessory has a Lighting connector on a built-in cable too. If that wasn’t enough, it can be wirelessly recharged.

For the past several years, the iPad has served as a tool to digitize the analog world. Board games are now virtual, books are electronic, and with the art app Paper by FiftyThree, your sketches and artwork are turned digital. Thanks to the incredible touch interface of the iPad and Apple Pencil, the app makes your device feel like its analog counterpart.

When Apple Music launched in 2015, the service received mixed reviews. One of the biggest gripes was the impact it had on the Music app. Instead of it being a place for your music library, the app began catering to the streaming service.

Cesium offers a better music library experience. The simple, brilliant app brings back the classic Music app (aka the “iPod” app), making it easy to view and enjoy your personal song library.

Having a wireless charging pad on my nightstand means never having to fish around in the dark for a Lightning cable plugged into the wall. However, there’s a tradeoff: Switching to wireless charging also means I’ve awakened to a nearly drained iPhone more often than ever before.

Well, help is on the way for this admittedly first-world problem. The new Logitech Powered Wireless Charger eliminates the main drawback I’ve found when it comes to charging my iPhone wirelessly.

Sadly, most Apple Watch charging stands look like utter crap. For a device beloved by Apple fans — some of the most design-savvy people on the planet — the Apple Watch accessories selection seems strangely miserable.

Some Apple Watch chargers look like old-school joysticks. Others look like Amish craftwork or the kind of 1980s rack you might see in a department store, loaded with ugly shirts nobody wants.

Email can be a total productivity bottleneck. Following conversations between multiple participants gets confusing. The unfortunate result of all this email chaos? Important tasks get lost in long email chains.

Luckily for collaborators everywhere, messaging app Slack replaces the need for internal email, allowing for real-time productivity and communication for teams. Instead of redundant threads and signatures, Slack strips away the cruft of the email inbox. It turns your communication into what it was meant to be — a conversation.

The company we know as Strapple (a company featured in Cult of Mac’s Watch Store) sounded a bit too much like the maker of Apple Watch. The tiny brand speedily changed its name to Strapa and doubled-down with the release of one of its most striking Apple Watch bands yet — the Primus.

Strapa explains Apple’s (minor) involvement in its sudden name change and site relaunch. During this transition, this company continues to make some of the best leather bands we’ve worn. The Primus Apple Watch Band is the latest in Strapa’s lineup.

For the last few years, health has been a key focus area for Apple. Fitness tracking, sleep tracking, nutrition tracking, mindfulness and even reproductive health have made their way into the Health app. Unfortunately, when it comes to your sexual wellbeing, Apple’s offering is pretty minimal. With Clue: Period and Ovulation Tracker, you can track a wide range of physical and mental details and gain useful insights into patterns and abnormalities in your natural cycle.

Spect is in the one-thing-well school, apps that focus on a single task and make that task as easy and fast as possible. And because Spect comes from Panic developer Steven Frank, it does its task very well indeed.

So what is Spect? It’s a Mac image browser app that lets you dump folders containing thousands of images onto it, and then speed through them, viewing, culling, selecting and deleting along the way.

Some of the most useful apps on iOS take system features and turn them up to 11. For a few years, the photos app has had basic markup tools but it’s felt underwhelming and lacked pro features. Annotable for iPhone and iPad adds pro-level annotation and markup tools to highlight or hide whatever you want in an image.

A wireless charger for your iPhone is very convenient, and now you don’t have to miss out when you’re on the road. The mophie Charge Stream Travel Kit includes a travel-size Qi wireless charger and the add-ons to use it in a hotel room or even your car.

This mobile charging kit currently sells for $49.95 on Amazon, and is compatible with the iPhone X, iPhone 8, and iPhone 8 Plus. It also works with any Qi-compatible phone or accessory. Don’t miss our hands-on review. 

If you’re learning to play the guitar, then you will constantly be looking up two things: Scales and chords. After you get a bit further into it, you’ll add arpeggios to that list. And you will keep referencing them for years, becasue there are a zillion way to play each chord, scale, or arpeggio on the guitar. And here’s the problem. Reference materials for these three essentials are a pain to use. Either you spend more time clicking around an app than you do practicing, or you have to keep a ton of PDFs around, and try to keep those organized. Now, though, a super simple (maybe too-simple) app finally ge ts it right. It’s called Fretbud, and I love it.

For the last few years, discussions about whether you can do “real work” on iOS have circled the internet. One of the most commonly cited issues with iOS was the lack of a file browser. In iOS 11, Apple gave us the Files app, but it suffers from some major limitations. Documents by Readdle takes the file management on iOS to the next level.

Just how much aluminum and glass can you take? If you’re a longtime Apple fan but you’re getting bored with your devices’ sleek surfaces, wood could be the answer.

In particular, wrapping your iPhone in a wooden case from Rustek might cure you of your aluminum ennui. With eye-catching graphics made of laser-cut wood veneers, these cases look really different.

Menace Synth is aptly named. This experimental iOS synth starts off sounding cranky, and rapidly goes downhill from there. Let’s check it out.

This is less of a review, and more of a heads-up. If you’re looking for a desktop iPad stand, then you should probably just go ahead and buy the AboveTek Elegant Aluminium iPad Stand Swivel Stand.

Yes, I’m serious. It may be a no-brand Chinese commodity gadget, sold under different names by different sellers, but it’s also the best iPad desk stand I’ve ever used.

If you’ve ever done a freelance project, worked as a consultant, or spent any time being self employed, you know how important keeping track of time spent working can be. Some people prefer to log their time on a sheet of paper, while others have little routines to mark the start and stop of work. Hours for iPhone is a time tracking app designed to make logging your time easy.

Since its introduction, the iPad has slowly won over new markets of people. Over the past couple years, photo and image editing apps have found a home on Apple’s tablet. Pixelmator for iOS takes photo editing and graphic design on iOS to a new level, bringing a photoshop-like experience to your fingertips.

The Newton MessagePad is simultaneously one of Apple’s biggest flops and one of the company’s most underrated products.

A series of PDA devices available during the 1990s, today Newtons are much-sought-after relics among a group of enthusiastic Apple fans. These collectors recognize the devices for the forward-looking gadgets they truly were. The Newton product line is now the subject of a new feature-length documentary, titled Love Notes to Newton. Can it do justice to its beloved subject matter?

When a “premium accessories maker” known for its battery packs and dongles sets out to make wireless headphones, you might fear for your ears. But the only thing in danger from Moshi’s Avanti Air Bluetooth headphones is your wallet.

With a price tag of $299.95, these headphones certainly fit the “premium” bill. Happily, they’re beautifully designed and will please your ears as well as your eyes.

Streaming music has revolutionized the way we listen to music on the go. Starting with streaming radio, and quickly evolving to carrying millions of songs in your pocket (thanks to cellular data), streaming services have enabled incredible access and discovery of great music.

With Spotify, you can experience your favorites and discover great new music better than ever, thanks to algorithmic intelligence and some genius features.

Brooklyn brand Ghostek manufactures some really interesting phone cases, backpacks, speakers and headphones. One of its latest offerings, the Ghostek Rapture Bluetooth headphones, are some of the first to hit the market with graphene drivers.

These lightweight on-ear headphones come in at just $125 (or $99 if you pick them up on Prime Day) but sound a lot better than any other wireless headphones I’ve tried at that price point. Check out my full review below.

For a huge percentage of mobile photographers — from amateur snappers to creative artists — the iPhone is the camera you always have with you. Every iPhone packs an undeniably great camera. But, as with DSLRs or mirrorless cams, the more you shoot, the more variety you crave.

Swapping out lenses at will helps you create a vast mélange of visual adventures with your iPhone. Our roundup of the best iPhone lenses shows you how to find the right external lens or lens kit for your needs.

Apple’s new MacBook Pro offers buyers significantly improved performance at the same price as last year’s models, as well as a “quieter,” improved butterfly keyboard and a True Tone display. But is it worth the upgrade?

Early reviews of the 2018 update are out now. Here’s what they say about Apple’s fastest and most impressive laptop yet.