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Cult Favorite: Auto Verbal Pro Lets Devices Speak For You

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What it is: Auto Verbal Pro (iTunes link) is handy, if not quite full-featured augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) software that gives non-verbal people an inexpensive tool to communicate using an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad.

Why it’s cool: Other high-end AAC solutions such as Proloquo2go (iTunes link) cost well upwards of $100 while Auto Verbal Pro hit the iTunes store a couple of weeks ago at 99¢. The introductory price won’t last long but even when NoTie Software kicks its offering up to $30 it will still be a bargain for the help it can bring to people with autism or other conditions that make it difficult for them to communicate verbally.

With over 100 pre-programmed icons in its intuitive interface, Auto Verbal Pro makes it easy for a non-verbal person to say basic phrases such as “I am tired,” or “I am OK,” and things such as numbers, days of the week, shapes, colors, food items, animals and so on. There are 10 icons which can be custom programmed to utter more complex phrases, such as “This software is the bomb, isn’t it?” and a text entry field in which any phrase can be typed and played through the device speakers. Users can choose between large and small buttons, which can be very useful to the visually impaired or fat-fingered, and between male or female sounding computerized voices in low-fi or hi-fi quality.

While great strides have been made in recent years developing software to speak for us, Auto Verbal Pro showcases some of the limitations that persist. The built-in low-fi voicings are certainly intelligible but lack any kind of nuance or expressiveness. Hi-fi voicings are even more intelligible and slightly more expressive, but they require WiFi Internet access in order to work, since the files live on NoTie’s servers. When a custom or typed phrase is called on to use a hi-fi voice, the software connects to NoTie and plays back the sounds using QuickTime, which results in clunky, irritating delays. Where no Internet access is available, the program defaults to the low-fi voicing.

All and all, this is useful and potentially even quite amusing software; with good reason it quickly jumped into the Top 5 Paid Medical apps on the iTunes App Store.

Where to get it: Auto Verbal Pro (currently English-only, but with French, Spanish, and German versions planned) is available on the App Store for a limited time at 99¢, after which its price will jump to $30. It’s well worth investing a dollar now to see if it’s something that could be useful to you or someone you care about.

Cult Favorite: i2KQuickage Revolutionary Panorama Software

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Elegant, seamless panoramas with one click
Elegant, seamless panoramas with one click

What it is: i2KQuickage is curiously named but unbelievably powerful photo panorama software from the genius minds at DualAlign, software developers whose primary markets have long been medical communities and defense sorts. There’s no reason to keep this software’s incredible charms from the broader photography market, though – it gives even the humblest talents and rigs (such as those possessed by this reviewer) the power to make arresting panoramic images with just one click of the mouse.

Why it’s cool: If you ever spent time using photo editing software to stitch together several photos into a panorama, you likely praised the heavens with the arrival of auto-stitching and panorama tools to Photoshop. But even Photoshop users — and users of other specialized software such as Double Take, which integrates well with both Aperture and iPhoto — still have to deal with quite a number of considerations to get the job done. Image registration, correction for exposure anomalies across the range of images used to build a panorama, distortion correction, seam selection and blending, and final image processing — Photoshop, Double Take and other solutions all require multiple user choices and steps to achieve optimal results.

i2KQuickage ends all that. Its proprietary algorithms produce stunning panoramas — with the user’s responsibility being no more than selecting the images to be used and clicking the “Create Montage” button. Even using images captured with a camera set in the “Auto” mode, which can led to dramatic differences in illumination and exposure between
images, even with movement of people and natural phenomena (such as waves on a beach) in the photos, the results produced by i2KQuickage are outstanding.

Cult Favorite: We’re Smarter Than You, And We’ll Prove It With Highly Addictive, Socially Wired ‘Qrank’ Quiz App

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Sure, the app store is swimming in trivia quiz games, but Qrank is different — and ever since the game raised its shiny little head up off the App Store floor earlier this month it’s had us hooked like sugar junkies to a candy factory.

the free app cranks (you knew it had to be in here) out a fresh quiz every day, and you’re only allowed one crack at it per day, which is one big reason why it’s as addictive as, well, crack. That, and the way the game connects players socially — everyone has to answer the same questions, which makes it easy to let your friends know you’re smarter than them.

If you don’t have friends, the game publicly ranks you against everyone else playing that day, so you can be smarter than your state, the nation — or the whole world.

Micromanage Peasants In Addictive iPhone Game, We Rule [Favorite Apps]

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What it is: We Rule is an addictive world-building iPhone game that blends Sim City with Facebook’s Farmville. Set in medieval times, you must build a prosperous kingdom by micromanaging the peasants and expanding trade with other online players.

Why it’s good: The game blends the best empire-building aspects of Sim City with the social aspects of Farmville.

As a teenager, I was totally addicted to games like Sid Meier’s Civilization, and Sim City. Even though they had terrible graphics and long load times on my old Pentium 1 PC, the sense of being a ‘god’ and having power over all those little guys made it a deep and immersive experience. Now Ngmoco has brought this gaming experience to the iPhone.

Cult Favorite: Omni Apps Prove iPad is Not Just a Toy

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OmniGraffle brings professional diagramming to iPad.

OK, class, weekend playtime is over. Time to get to work. More than 300,000 of you have had fun since Saturday playing games, watching movies and lazing around in bed with the Sunday New York Times on your new iPad. Now it’s Monday morning and the question is: can you justify bringing Apple’s new gadget into the office and putting it to work as a productivity tool?

Well, should your work involve producing graphs, flow charts, schematic designs or anything similar the answer is a resounding yes if you’re hip to the productivity apps from Omni Group.

Cult Favorite: Political GPS Puts You on Track to Make a Difference

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What is it?
Political GPS is, hands down, the best way to leverage your iPhone or iPod Touch as a tool for political activism.

Created by Thomas Huntington, this handy dandy app can help pinpoint your personal location in the political spectrum, provides unprecedentedly comprehensive contact and biographical information for every senator and member of congress in Washington, DC, allows quick access to the full text and summary of every bill passed by the US Congress, back to the 106th — including all versions and amendments — and features the full texts of such seminal documents of freedom as the US Constitution, the Magna Carta and the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

Why it’s Cool:
Did you resolve to become more politically active in the coming year?

Perhaps you’re disenchanted with the return you seem to be getting from your vote in 2008 for Barack Obama or your local senator or congressperson. Perhaps you find yourself firmly in the Libertarian/Conservative quadrant of the political compass and smell both blood and an opportunity to swing the balance of power rightward in November’s midterm elections. Perhaps you’re just intrigued by the idea of a tool that might help you make your voice more easily heard with your representatives in congress.

Political GPS is the app you’ve been waiting for.

No flashy graphics or a fancy GUI here, but a quick 30 question survey helps you place your own political leanings on a compass-like map that measures general attitudes toward ideas of economic and social freedom, plotting your answers on axes measuring liberal/conservative and anarchist/totalitarian tendencies, as well as those for communism/libertarianism and socialism/fascism.

You can view your results in a theoretical landscape or plot them against the views of historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin and Ronald Reagan.

Full disclosure: this writer’s views aligned most closely with Ghandi and the Dalai Lama.

Then the real fun begins. Political GPS’s Congress Tracker gives you detailed information for each member of the US Congress. From biographical information and links to each member’s website to in-depth voting information and the ability to easily contact each member by phone, email, or Twitter, Political GPS helps you to learn more about your congress.

The search engine built into political GPS is far more robust and sophisticated than something you might expect to pay $2 for. Search representatives by name or state, search congressional bills by topic, content, title, or bill number; the member tracker and bill tracker databases are linked, too. Comprehensive information about the laws passed by congress and the people passing them has never been so easily accessed.

Full text access to historical documents is the lagniappe in Political GPS. Easily study the US Constitution, the Magna Carta and the Declaration of the Rights of Man right inside the app. Organized by Articles, Sections, and Amendments, it’s easy to go right to the area you want to read and it’s all easy on the eyes with large fonts and antique parchment backgrounds that give the documents a weighty feel without making them harder to read.

For anyone who believes in the idea that you should be the change you want to see in this world, Political GPS is certainly one of the coolest tools available to American iPhone and iPod Touch users.

Where to get it:
Political GPS is available at the Apple iTunes App Store in both free and $1.99 versions. But really, just pony up the $2 and make your voice heard.

Cult of Mac Favorite: MobileStacks Is the Best Reason To Jailbreak. Period.

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I really like Stacks on my Mac. Stacks makes it fast and easy to find files, folders and apps right from the Dock. It makes managing a Mac pretty slick with all sorts of little UI tricks. That’s why I recently gave MobileStack a go on my jailbroken iPhone.

I must say that it lives up to the challenge of making an interface that is intuitive and user friendly enough for the small iPhone screen. In fact, it’s definitely the best excuse to jailbreak.

Cult of Mac Favorite: Orbit, SpringBoard Navigation The ‘Exposé’ Way for Jailbroken iPhone and iPod Touch

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I recently came across orbit, which is one of the best navigation options available for the iPhone and iPod Touch. I have an iPhone that has over 100 applications and it’s definitely a pain to get to the applications on the last page. I can always put the useful applications on the first page but at this point, I have just stopped arranging them. This is when Orbit enters the scene. Instead of swiping across all these pages, it lets me jump to a particular page quickly using simple tile view, saving me a lot of time. That’s the reason it’s one of my favorites.

Cult of Mac Favorites: “HiHowAreYou”

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What it is: A simple puzzle platformer in which you play Jeremiah the Frog, a cheerful fellow trying to escape Satan’s curse by turning floor squares red and green with his hops — all to the music of brilliant indie rock outsider Daniel Johnston.

Why it’s cool: Didn’t you read the description? Ah, well. The play control is smooth and easy to pick up, the graphics are beautiful and cartoony, and the soundtrack is amazing. I’ve only been playing for five minutes, but I’ve already heard “Some Time Spent in Heaven.” Better still, Jeremiah is based on a mural Johnston painted in Austin, Texas, who cheerfully declares “Hi, How Are You?” to people on the campus of the University of Texas. But it’s a good game whether you know that or not.

Where to get it: On the App Store, of course. Link. It’s only 99 cents for a limited time.

Via FingerGaming

Cult of Mac Favorite: Tab Toolkit, a Swanky Music Tablature App for iPhone

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What it is: Tab Toolkit is a sophisticated guitar practice and education app from Agile Partners, makers of the handy Guitar Toolkit app that came out in 2008. Tab Toolkit lets users read and listen to real-time guitar tablature files, scrolling through songs at the correct tempo, showing both traditional and tablature notation and superimposing fingering notation updated in real-time on a virtual fretboard or piano keyboard.

Why it’s cool: Tab Toolkit is an app for serious guitarists willing to invest $10 in something that will make tab charts come alive on the go. That said, the app is cool because it shows the user exactly where to finger guitar parts as a synthesized version of a song is playing in real time through the iPhone or iPod Touch speakers or headphones. Songs can be stopped and started, scrolled forward and back, and the sound output can be muted to allow users to concentrate on their own playing. The fretboard can even be flipped to accommodate left-handed players.

Tab files can be a bit of a rare beast to come by, with the most useful files optimized for Mac being those created and readable by GuitarPro software, which runs $59.

Online libraries such as GPro Tab offer free sharing of user-generated GuitarPro tabs, which can be a great way to get started in the rich world of online instrument practice and education. Tab Toolkit supports text files and PDF files as well, but the genius behind the app is best appreciated with a GuitarPro tab.

The app supports multitrack parts, so users can learn two different guitar parts to a song, for example, or the bass part, the keyboard part, or even the vocal. Tempos can be speeded up or slowed down, and getting tabs from a user’s computer on to the iPhone are a snap over a wireless network connection – from the web onto the phone they are just as easy using the embedded Safari browser.

This reviewer doesn’t have too many $10 apps on his iPhone, but as a musician, I can say without reservation that Agile Partners have created an incredibly useful, well-thought-out app that performs – so far – flawlessly.

Where to get it: Tab Toolkit went live in the iTunes App Store on Tuesday; it sells for $9.99

Cult of Mac Favorite: Reevoo’s iPhone Site For On-The-Go Comparison Shopping

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If you haven’t encountered Reevoo before, go and take a poke around it now. It’s a UK-oriented customer reviews site that’s managed to aggregate an impressively large database of real comments from real people about real products.

And the iPhone version of the site is incredibly useful when you’re out at the shops trying to track down the best product at the best price.

Cult of Mac Favorite: 12 Mail, a Great Video Sharing iPhone App

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12mail is the first video messenger for the iPhone.

What it is: Developed by the creators of the excellent photo/slideshow sharing app 12 Seconds, which was among the first iPhone apps to support shared audiovisual messaging, 12mail is the first app to fully support streaming video messaging.

Why it’s cool: 12mail features full integration with Facebook and Twitter, allowing users to instantly populate the app with contact information for their friends on the the two most popular social media platforms in use today. The app breaks contacts into Everyone and Favorites groups, making it easy to find those in heaviest rotation, and has an option allowing public posts to a user’s Twitter page or Facebook wall.

Compiling videos stored on a user’s phone or recording new video is dead easy, and most brilliant of all, the app only uses the first 12 seconds of any video users choose, keeping messages small enough to send and receive painlessly even over a slow Edge connection. The app uses push notification and features the ability to annotate with text titles and geotags.

All video streams from servers at 12seconds.tv, which avoids use of limited storage on a user’s device and allows people without the app to receive and even initiate 12mail video messages of their own.

Where to get it: 12mail is free and went live in the iTunes App Store today.

Cult of Mac Favorite: Snow Leopard’s New Services

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Snow Leopard’s revitalised Services menu is probably my favorite improvement among the many included in the upgrade.

At long last, the user has been given total control over Services. We can choose whether or not they are used, we can assign keyboard shortcuts that suit us, and we can create entirely new Services using Automator.

The crucial difference between Services in Leopard and Services in Snow Leopard is context.

Cult of Mac Favorite: Pix Remix Lite – Stellar iPhone Photo App Gets Free Version

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What it is: The developers at Jump Associates – creators of the highly regarded iPhone photo application Pix Remix – have created a free version of the app, called Pix Remix Lite, that blows the doors off of any free photo manipulation software on the App Store.

Why it’s cool: Back in July, we wrote about Pix Remix, the very cool photo transformation application that allows users to easily combine a group of photos with captions into an animated collage or documentary-style narrative show within minutes – and share with friends and family easily via email or posting to Facebook and Twitter.

The free Pix Remix Lite has all the basic features of the highly acclaimed original software, plus some new features that have also been incorporated into an updated version of the 99¢ paid version, making Pix Remix a must-have tool for anyone who likes to share photos from their iPhone.

New features available in both versions let users remix shows others have sent to them, upload photos to a Facebook gallery while posting a show, and embed shows in any blog or webpage.

The paid version of Pix Remix now also lets users save shows locally on their device, export a collage as a high-res JPG (up to 1024×682), and use Copy and Paste to add photos to a show. Users can also save individual photos from a show (one they have created or one they have received) to the iPhone’s Photo Library, allowing for easy syncing with a computer.

Pix Remix Lite limits collages and shows to 5 images, while the paid version supports up to 10 images in a single collage or show.

Check out the YouTube demo here, and go here to see more sample shows like the one above.

Where to get it: Pix Remix and Pix Remix Lite are both available now on the iTunes App Store.