| Cult of Mac

App Watch: Homemade photo filters, self-scheduling calendar and more

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This week we get creative, making our own photo filters with Vibrance, writing stuff in the amazing Matcha text editor, and scheduling efficient days to fit it all in with Timeful. What are you waiting for? Check out the most interesting new iOS apps and updates in our weekly roundup.

Camu is a fantastic new camera app that combines all the essentials into one slick, superbly-designed and fun to use app. Plus, thanks to smart design and gestures, you can use it one handed. Swipe to change filters, swipe again to change their strength, tap to take split-screen (diptych) pictures, add captions and blur and share. A really nice photo app and – amazingly – it’s $Free

Matcha is so well designed you’ll want to write, just to use it. The text editor syncs with Dropbox and iCloud, and gives a great Markdown preview, but the point here is the details (and the beautiful, simple interface). You get full text search, right from a nav box at the top of the screen. And this means full – it digs into your entire Dropbox to search file names and paths, and inside local files’ contents. It has full (external) keyboard control, lots of (on-screen) keyboard tweaks, plus way more. It’s so well put together that it’s my new favorite text editor on iOS. $5

You know how some smart apps have a little 1Password icon next to the login field, to quickly take you to the 1Password iOS app to grab your details? In iOS 8, that button could pop open a 1Password window right there in the app, allow you to auto-fill passwords and even payment fields without leaving the app. You know, like you can already do in OS X. Want to know how this awesome feature works? Read the AgileBits blog post.

Somewhat inexplicably there are almost no decent blogging apps on the Mac – you’re forced to contend with your blogging service’s lame web interface instead. Blogo brings together a text editor, an image editor, offline mode and Evernote sync. It also looks fantastic, which is a boon if your job is to stare at a text editor all day long. $15

Contexts offers four ways to switch windows on your Mac. Hover over its mini Dock-like switcher at the side of your screen and click, or hit ⌘-Tab and access the keyboard-triggered popover. This floating popover lets you keep tabbing between windows, or get direct access by tapping a number key, or by search to narrow down your windows by title or app. It’s dead simple, and it acts on individual windows in apps, not just the whole app itself. $9 with free trial

Vibrance lets you create your own photo filters on-the-fly. Take or load up a photo from your camera roll and either choose a built-in filter or make your own. A slider runs from dark to light, and you can tweak the color of any tone along that slider, giving, say, bluish shadows, yellow highlights and a little purplish kick in the dark mid-tones. It’s simple and powerful, but the interface is a little clunky. Free with IAP

Timeful combines your calendars and reminders, and then helps you with your scheduling. It will suggest times for new tasks and appointments, and even help to schedule routine tasks like exercise or shopping. It’s location -aware, it syncs with your existing calendars and it even makes adding a new event easy, letting you pick between reminders of calendar entries as you go. $Free

Lytro’s new app lets you view its light-field camera photos on your iOS device. The Lytro is that weird camera that lets you adjust the focus of you picture after you take the shot. Previously you needed a desktop computer with a desktop browser to display these interactive photos, but now you have this Universal app. It’s basic, just like the camera, but it’ll let you view your own publicly-shared Lytros, along with anyone else’s. $Free

This plugin lets you upload your photos from Lightroom, straight to the “thinking person’s photo-sharing site,” 500px. Just drag the pictures you want to share to the new 500px publish service and they’ll be sent to your online portfolio. It can even read and write comments and lets you view your site stats from within Lightroom. $Free

ISO500 Is A Beautiful iPhone App For Browsing 500px

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As Flickr is to Instagram, so 500px is to Flickr. 500px is a photo-sharing site that focusses (huh…) on showing only your best pictures. To this end the website and various apps bring beautiful hi-res images to your iDevices (it’s especially good on the Retina iPad), and the account upgrade options are geared towards professional portfolios.

But the quality of the official apps hasn’t deterred the folks behind ISO500, a brand-new iPhone app which brings a super-minimal interface to the 500PX site. And, like 500px itself, the app is free. Mostly.

Tumblr iOS App Follows Vine and 500px Into 17+ Rating Territory

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Buttons like this just make kids want to press it.
Buttons like this just make kids want to press it.

The Tumblr iOS app updated about three hours ago, stating “small bug fixes” as what’s new in the app. This move comes shortly after 500px app was pulled from the app store, only to return with a 17+ rating, and Twitter-owned Vine got some flack as well.

What’s not listed in the App description is that version 3.2.4 of the Tumblr app is now rated for people 17+, and users will need to click through a dialog that says they are old enough to use the app. Because that totally works.

500px Returns To The App Store, Now Rated 17+

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The national porn nightmare is over, apparently.

It’s back! 500px — the photo sharing app that was yanked from the App Store last week for letting users check out artful, non-pornographic nudes — has returned to the App Store, with some changes to keep genitalia and nipples away from impressionable eyes.