app - page 18

The app known as iTunes can become a real unwieldy mess, especially as it grows courtesy of downloadable content, cd importing and the like. It’s a pretty smart program in that it can “occasionally” know what Track 1 is based on the album it comes from, but what if you’re importing a mixed CD? What about album cover art? That doesn’t always register. And what if you’ve got two instances of the same song in there? Getting them out of iTunes manually is a real pain. What if iTunes could have a little extra “magic” added to it?

Well it can…with TuneUp. That’s because TuneUp “transforms your music collection…automagically™”.

Cleaning up your iTunes Library has never been more robust and easy-to-use. TuneUp hooks up with iTunes to organize and categorize your music from top to bottom. And for a very limited time, Cult of Mac Deals has it lined up for you…and for just $30!

There is a theory that apps are the new hit singles. You can’t make money from releasing a song any more, so you might as well try and make money from something people are still willing to pay for, like apps.

And you might not even need to charge them for the app, either. You can give the app away for free, and pad it out with extras that cost money. It’s bound to pull in a few paying customers, right? Right?

If you know your Apple history, you’ll probably know that NeXTSTEP, the grandfather of modern OS X, had a clever feature called the Shelf, a placeholder where you could temporarily drop files while dragging them from one location to another. Sadly, Mac OS X has never replicated this in Finder.

So today there’s a brand new app for OS X that seeks to fix this. It’s called DragonDrop, and you can buy it for five bucks.

Developer Mark Christian released it independently today after weeks of trying to get it into the Mac App Store. Apple weren’t interested, and rejected it every time.

Earlier this year Apple announced iTunes U, making it clear that Apple intends to make the iPad ubiquitous in academia. The iPad is truly coming into its own as a legitimate alternative to the PC. For students, this means that the iPad is quickly becoming a powerful learning tool, which is good for a lot more than reading.

I sat down with a Boston-based PhD student who, for the past year, has been using her iPad nearly exclusively for her studies. Here are the core peripherals and apps that she recommends in order to supercharge your iPad for use in the academic setting.

A new app for the iPad, The Guitar Collection: George Harrison, is rather like a little pocket book of the former Beatles’ most famous axes. It features the history, pics, guitar model specifications, and historic photographic images of the iconic instruments.

But unlike a book, it’s a multimedia feast full of 3D models, music clips, and videos of George and his pals talking rock ‘n’ roll. It’s a rich potpourri of sounds and visuals for Beatlemaniacs. Trouble is, there’s so much missing.

Frameographer is an excellent $3 photography app for stop motion and time lapse video recording. It works because it keeps things as simple as they can possibly be.

As we reported yesterday, the latest Hipstamatic update adds something that’s not just new for the app, but new for the App Store: direct access to the Instagram API.

Does it make a startling difference to the way you use Hipstamatic? No, not really. Only regular users of both Hipstamatic and Instagram will notice a substantial difference.

I confess: I didn’t think they could do it. When I heard that Angry Birds Space was coming, I honestly didn’t see how Rovio could create a game that was different enough, while still retaining the original Angry Birds magic. But I shouldn’t have doubted: this game is a success, precisely because it gets that balance exactly right.

Rhombi, triangles, and rectangles probably don’t elicit a sexual response from you most times, but Apple thinks those beautiful shapes can be a little bit too orgasmic when combined in different configurations. Artist Luciano Foglia’s app of geometric shapes was recently rejected by Apple because they claimed it contained “excessively objectionable or crude content.” But it’s just a bunch of geometric shapes, so why did Apple label it as pornographic? Take a look and judge for yourself:

Doozy is a todo app for iOS with a difference. It’s not about lists, it’s about organizing your stuff visually. Although it’s more complicated than many of its rivals, it’s also somewhat more powerful, and offers some task tracking and monitoring features we’ve never seen anywhere else.

Stick with photography long enough, and eventually you’ll need a a camera remote so you can trigger your DSLR without touching it.

Trigger Happy, an applaud-worthy idea currently on Kickstarter, let’s you do just that, but with your iPhone and one simple cable instead of one of those expensive, camera-specific triggers.

Draw Something is the hip game to be playing on iOS right now. Is it just an electronic version of popular board game Pictionary? Well, yes, sort of, but with added iPad cool. It’s enormous fun to play, only let down by a stubborn insistence on having a live internet connection.

If you’ve been looking to build yourself a website, you’ve got plenty of options out there. But there’s not many that combine ease of use with elegance to boot.

Enter Sandvox, which allows users to create websites using their Mac simply and easily. And we’re bringing you Sandvox at 50% off the regular price in our latest Cult of Mac Deals offer.

We’ve all seen news reports on the TV when stock markets take a nosedive. The footage is always the same: traders looking in despair at screens full of red rectangles, each one representing a falling stock.

Those magical digital rectangles are no longer for traders only. Now you can play with them yourself, in a $4.99 iOS app called StockTouch.

Vocre (pronounced voh-creee) is a translation app that’s not new on the App Store, but has one important new feature: it’s free.

Encyclopedia Britannica is the oldest English encyclopedia still in production, with roots dating all the way back to 1768. If you went to school before the dawn of Wikipedia, you might have fond memories of rummaging through Britannica’s pages while researching a sixth-grade report.

Sadly, the 32-volume printed edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica will no longer be published, as the company focuses on presenting its content digitally.

Camera+ is one of the best photography apps available, period. And today sees the release of Camera+ 3, a major update with lots of new features.

Virtual school The Khan Academy just released an official iPad app today, and if you have kids in school you might just want to grab a copy, because it’s excellent.

In 1971, Coca-Cola unleashed one of history’s most iconic commercials on the world. “I’d Like To Buy the World a Coke” showed people of various ethnicities and social classes standing on a hilltop, singing about how much they’d like to buy everyone in the world a soft drink originally based on coca leaf extract. The commercial was a huge success during its time, but watching it today becomes slightly unbearable with all of its cheesy happiness.

No one sings on hilltops anymore, so with a little help from Google, Coca-Cola has reimagined their iconic advertisement to be more fitting in the digital world. The end result is pretty crazy: rather than singing about buying the world a Coke, users of the Coca-Cola iOS app can actually purchase a Coca-Cola for people across the world.

Here’s the video showcasing the app:

In Phoenix, Arizona, rain is a commodity scarcer than a purple elephant slowly lumbering down Main Street. Consequently, people go straight up loco when their iPhone’s weather app predicts rain. Most of the time the hours sadly glide past and the clouds and precipitation never show up. A collective mourning rumbles across the city, and meteorologists cower under their desks, ashamed at their disastrous predictions. They never can quite seem to predict the rain.

It’s sad that we can put a man on the moon but still suck at predicting the weather. IBM’s mind-blowing “Deep Thunder” iPad Weather app is seeking to change all that though, by becoming the most insanely accurate weather predicting tool ever.

Newly launched at SXSW this week is Picle, a free iOS photography app with a twist: the aim is to make something that sounds like Instagram. It’s a lovely idea but the initial release suffers a few disappointing problems.

Along with everything else in iLife for iOS (and iWork too), iMovie got an update at the new iPad announcement on Wednesday. The big new feature is trailers, which you may have used before on the desktop. Now you can make them on iPhones (4 or later) and iPads (2 or later).

We wanted to put the new iMovie through its paces, so here’s a trailer we made.

Here is the new Pages for iOS, as announced by Apple last night.

Not a huge amount has changed here, to be honest, but there are one or two nice additions, stuff that help Pages retain its top spot in the small world of word processing on iOS.

Did you know that the Calculator app built into iOS has a hidden swipe gesture that allows you to delete those digits that you tap accidentally? No, neither did I until this morning, when I discovered this nifty little backspace trick by accident.

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.