Under its previous owner, Instapaper was a good-but-limited iOS app with a barely functional website component. Under its new ownership at Betaworks, the app has slowly become part of a great ecosystem, with the latest addition being a Safari extension.
Forgotify is kind of like that box at the back of the thrift store which holds vinyl records so bad that even the sample-crazy music nerds won’t touch them – only on the internet. It’s a web service that collects the roughly 4 million (!) unplayed tracks on Spotify, and serves them up to you at random.
I love the press-to-shoot feature of Instagram’s video mode: it stops you from making one long boring take to fill up that eight seconds or however long it is that you get. But maybe you want to make a boring one-shot clip, or you’re planning on making the world’s shortest remake of Hitchcock’s Rope. Whatever, this neat trick from Photojojo is for you.
Maybe you scan all your receipts and bills, and toss the paper into the recycling bin. Congratulations! You’re paperless. You’re also out of luck when it comes to actually finding any of those scans when you need them. You’ll be stuck flipping through stacks of PDFs as if they were stacks of paper.
Unless you get your Mac to automatically run OCR on those scans, making their text searchable. And then maybe you could have you Mac file them for you too, just like computers were supposed to do for us all along.
Sound good? Then check out this neat tutorial from Mac Power Users’ Katie Floyd, which uses Applescript, PDFPen and Hazel to do it all for you.
Evernote now does natural-language searches. Type something like “images from Barcelona” into the search box and your query will automatically be turned into a search query with the form contains:images place:Barcelona.
You can also search on the device that created the note, document types, tags and notebooks and pretty much everything else you can think of. It’s like a local Google for your notes.
Facebook Paper is a pretty great panacea to the social network’s usually crummy iPhone apps, but unfortunately, it’s only available in the United States, leaving those overseas out-of-luck. But because Paper is a free app, you can download it pretty easily even in other countries. Here’s how.
How about an app which lets you view your entire iPhoto or Aperture library on your iPad, without syncing, and without having either of the Mac apps running? That’s PhotoScope, a $5 universal app for iPad and iPhone which does just that.
I’m a terrible DJ (unless you count success by the number of people you can force off the dance floor with one track, in which case I’m a total mix master), but I’ve worked with enough DJs to know the tricks of the tracks. And one of those tricks is the old left-it-at-home routine.
When somebody requests a song you don’t want to play, you say “Excellent song! I love that one.” Then you pause and say “I think I left it at home.”
Now, Djs will have no excuse, becasue the new Pacemaker app will let you spin and mix tunes from Spotify’s huge gazillion-song library.
Unread is an iPhone alternative to the king of iPad RSS readers, Mr Reader. Not that it works the same way, or looks anything like Mr Reader, or has anything to do with it at all. No, the thing that the new super-minimal, gesture-based Unread has in common with Mr Reader is sharing.
Today, Facebook released an incredible new app called Paper that is a total reimagining of what Facebook on a mobile device means. As I wrote over on Fast Co. Design, it’s the opening sentence in Facebook’s next 10-year plan that puts mobile first.
It’s a great app, but there’s just one problem: the name. There’s another widely known drawing app called Paper by developers FiftyThree Inc. FiftyThree’s not happy about their name being lifted. Facebook’s response? Basically, “tough noogies.”
Gross is an iPhone app that’ll tell you just how lazy you’ve been for the last week. And believe me, unless you’re managing to get out an exercise in the middle of this icy winter, then the first time you fire up the app you’ll probably find yourself saying it’s name out loud.
Transloader 2 is an update to the very handy iOS/Mac utility that lets you browse the web on your iPhone or iPad, and have any files you want to grab downloaded to your Mac, automagically. V2.0 gets an overhauled design, but otherwise keeps performing the same useful service as before.
PDF Scanner is a new iOS app that scans your paper documents and turns them into PDFs. The gimmick that sets this app apart from all the others that do the same thing is that PDF Scanner can auto-detect and split double-page spreads into single sheets. And if that’s what you need then it may be worth struggling through the rest of the app to get to them. But probably not.
You know how when you open the Evernote iOS app to joy down a quick note, or snap a quick photo reminder? Usually what happens is that you spend the first half a minute desperately trying to remember whatever it was you wanted to remember while you tap around trying to find the new note buttons. Well, the new Evernote doesn’t help you if you launch into the depths of a previously-taken note, but it does at least make the main page a lot easier to use.
Image Blender is one of my favorite iOS apps. It’s a single-purpose tool that lets you combine two photos by stacking them and choosing the blend mode to get the effect and the opacity you want. If you ever wanted to take a photo and make it look like it was printed onto an old sheet of paper, or to, uh, make an astronaut sit in front of a pile of red sand, then Image Blender is for you.
And now Image Blender 2 is for you, too. The update adds some good functionality, but the best part is that – thanks to an iOS 7 makeover – it no longer looks horrible.
Sick of all those boring blue folders that crowd your Finder windows? I know I am. I can barely copy a file without my eyes starting to cross, my breathing slowing and the tendrils of sleep starting to soothe my brain. What you and I need is Folderol, a $1 Mac app that lets you change the colors of your folders by drag and drop.
Text-to-speech is great. But have you ever wished that it could be a little more creepy? As in, child’s-voice-coming-out-of-your-computer creepy? Well, you’re in luck. Thanks to a service designed to help kids to communicate, you too can make your iPad talk in the voice of a little girl or boy. Shiver.
Most iPad drawing apps take a rather old-fashioned approach. They try to mimic paper and pencil, or paint and canvas, and of course they never get it quite right, even with pressure-sensitive styluses and fancy paint engines. Archipad takes a different approach: it recognizes that you’re drawing on a computer screen and embraces that fact, letting you draw to scale, in 3-D and with perfect lines, all my using a finger or stylus.
Over the last couple of years, Google has been trying to turn its mobile Chrome browser into a sort of meta-operating system in its own right, by allowing Macs and PCs to run dedicated cross-compatible ‘apps’ right within Chrome. It’s actually a cool idea, but because of Apple’s closed iOS ecosystem, it’s been functionality that iPhone and iPad owners can’t take advantage of. But no longer. Google has just brought Chrome apps to iOS.
For the last few weeks, I have had a little pebble-shaped gadget sat out on the wall of my balcony. It’s the Tempo, a Bluetooth thermometer which keeps the last 24 hour’s temperatures in memory, and passes them to your iDevice on demand. It’s also pretty tough, as we’ll see…
If you’re a movie nerd, then you’re going to freak out about Yeah! Movies. It’s an iPad app which lets you stream many great films (Kill Bill, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Mad Max, Blade Runner, Caddyshack and so on, but it doesn’t stop there. You also get around 500 “curated extras” with every movie purchase.
Do you hear that tinkling, rattling sound? That’s the sound of a million teeth skittering across the floor tiles as their previous owners relax their legs after smashing the teeth out of their own skulls with their own knees.
What the hell am I talking about? The absurd, almost violent knee-jerk reactions to Apple app updates that pare back functions in order to provide a clearer path for future updates. It’s like these folks never heard of pruning a rosebush to promote better growth.
And the news: Applescript is back in Numbers.
Dark Sky, the Instapaper of weather apps, just hit v4.0. It’s still only available in the U.S and the UK, and it still gives you accurate, hyper-local predictions for rain, but just about everything else has changed. For the better, I might add.
Readability, the oft-overlooked but competent rival to Instapaper and Pocket, has reached v2.0, and added an iOS 7 makeover, plus a few neat new features.
This must be just about the worst gadget ever, which of course makes it the most fun to write about gadget ever. It’s a love-detecting bra, which will only open its front clasp if “true love” is detected. Where “true love” means “iPhone” and “detected” means Bluetooth.
