When you combine a student’s most necessary tools, something pretty great is bound to happen right? For the iPad notetakers reading our site, Audiolio combines the best of audio driven notes, Dropbox, and sharing for some pretty superb control over class lectures and meeting presentations.
You’ve been there before: you’ve reached the maximum volume level on your Mac, but that Youtube audio is just too low. Or, you’ve bought a pair of fancy new speakers for your MacBook Air but the default volume output doesn’t satisfy you. The annoyances of low volume in situations when you’d like to rock out your room are terrible, if you ask me. But luckily, a Mac app properly named Boom by Global Delight will allow you to dramatically increase the volume of your OS X machine with a simple slider in the menubar. (more…)
It’s been rumored that with the next versions of iOS, and most notably the MobileMe service, Apple will heavily rely on the cloud to allow users to store media like photos, music and videos online and stream them at any time on the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. A move to cloud-based storage would allow the company to produce cheaper devices with less internal storage, and let users access personal content anywhere as long as an Internet connection is available at the same time.
Photopod, an iPhone app available in the App Store and developed by Dear Future Astronaut, wants to become the ultimate photo aggregator and manager by providing a unified interface to browse pictures stored on a variety of online services. Think of it as a way to access content anywhere (and download it) using an application that does everything automatically through a tabbed “accordion” UI that brings Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Dropbox, Picasa and your Camera Roll all together.
Once authorized with the aforementioned services in the Settings (note that Twitter will only fetch images shared through TwitPic on your account), the main screen of the app will display a series of vertical tabs you can expand to reveal their contents — namely photos. As you open a tab, a list of thumbnail previews slides down allowing you to see all the photos you’ve stored locally or online. Tapping on the share button in the upper right corner will let you select multiple photos at once to upload them to a specific service. It’s very cool as it also lets you upload pictures from one service to another, or from your device to the cloud. You can also download photos to view them offline, or enter a basic editing mode that enables you to rotate and crop pictures. Everything is kept simple and accessible. Flickr, Facebook and Picasa even get menus for sets and menus you’ve organized your photos with.
I like Photopod because it brings the most popular photo sharing services together into a beautiful package that’s easy to use, fast, reliable and intuitive. The app is available here at $1.99, don’t miss it.
InstaTodo, a new iPhone app by the developers of MacStories’ favorite myPhoneDesktop, is a to-do app with a unique twist: it’s got Toodledo support for online sync, but it also lets you create templates to save time when adding new tasks and checklists. InstaTodo is a full-featured application to manage your tasks and projects that’s heavily based on the concept of making the creation of these tasks simpler and faster by delegating everything to templates.
You can build a list of templates for everything, from simple tasks to complex lists that require sub-tasks and multiple actions to complete. On top of that, you can turn any existing or completed task or list into a re-usable template — thus avoiding the need of having to start over every single time. It doesn’t come as a surprise in fact that most of the tasks we create and check off on a daily basis are based on the same criteria: for me, it’s “review this application on MacStories” or “install beta app and send feedback”. Everyone has a typical set of tasks that needs to be created and organized over and over. InstaTodo addresses this issue with a collection of built-in templates to choose from in the Settings, and the possibility to create new ones at any time. (more…)
You shouldn’t have to sacrifice the lack of a power outlet when you’re traveling, and I’m betting your iPhone’s GPS is quickly draining that once long-lasting battery. Whether it be for in-car navigation, the passenger playing a game, or those movie watching kids in the back seat, you’ll need a good plan in place to keep those iDevices juiced throughout your trip. A good ol’ fashioned car charger should do the trick.
PhotoSync, a universal $1.99 app available in the App Store, has quickly become one of my favorite tools to enhance my iOS devices’ photo and video sharing capabilities. The app, which requires a free Mac companion software to be installed from the developers’ website, allows you to share photos and videos from your iPhone and iPad libraries between computers and other iOS devices running the app. PhotoSync can send multiple photos at once or sync entire libraries with iPhones, iPads and iPod touches, as well as PCs and Macs. (more…)
Just released today is WiFi2HiFi, a new iPhone and iPod Touch app that effectively allows you to use your device to stream audio from your computer to an iPod dock, stereo system or anything else that can connect to the 3.5mm jack or the 30-pin port. It virtually emulates the AirPort Express feature of streaming audio from a computer to connected sound system, but how well does it work? I was given a pre-release build to review and a review follows the break.
Any product shouldn’t go completely exposed if you care about keeping your devices in their best condition, though the baggage of a flip-style case or ‘tuff wrap can be unfulfilling for those picky few. If you have an eye for style and a need to stay fit & slim, iKit’s Exec iPad Case will smoothly slip onto your iPad for a brand new finish.
Available as a limited time offer at $0.99 in the Mac App Store, PDF Hero is a Mac app to combine images and PDF files into a single document you can consequently export as PDF from within the app.
The concept is simple: PDF Hero acts as a “bucket” where you can drop multiple images and PDF files at once. With these files, the app will create a single document where each page contains the files you attached. It should come in handy for those who daily manage dozens of PDFs and find themselves constantly forwarding them to their colleagues or clients, or users who do a lot of image -> PDF converting. In this way, with just a drag & drop, you can create a single document containing everything you need. Please note that the current version of PDF Hero only supports PDFs and images — sadly, .txt or .rtf files won’t be attached. But there is a nice trick I noticed (fluid animations when flicking through attached files aside), and it’s the possibility to keep attaching files to an existing set without having to start over (see screenshot above).
That said, PDF Hero won’t get you to the top of PDF editing and management, but it’s a cool utility to merge images and other documents in seconds. Give it a try.
If you’re not a regular #MacStoriesDeals reader (you should be), here’s a nice Mac app that will help you find the best offers available in the Mac App Store. Store News, a free app available here, allows you to check for deals of free and paid apps in a simple to use interface that brings offers and price drops to the desktop.
The app doesn’t seem to rely on the usual AppShopper infrastructure (the one we love and rely on to curate our daily deals section), instead it aggregates what are considered the best offers from the developers. The app is streamlined and comes with three tabs in the top toolbar to switch between all apps, the ones available for free and paid apps. A blue button similar to the Mac App Store “Buy” one will open a new tab in your web browser, allowing you to launch the Mac App Store and download what you want. Store News also displays previous price before the price drop and a percentage of how much you’re going to save with each deal.
Store News is a pretty good way to stay up to date with offers in the Mac App Store. Combined with AppShopper and our Deals posts, it’ll help you achieve the ultimate deals hunter setup on your Mac. Go download it here.
“Protection Transparente.” Two words couldn’t more boldly describe the hybrid case + sleeve XtremeMac is hoping to find the niche market for. An iPad sleeve is an iPad companion for those who want the protection of case, but still appreciate the naked qualities of aluminum when in use. A middle ground was met somewhere as a plastic shield was added to reveal the iPad’s display, yet the full body coverage of neoprene padding couldn’t quite constitute a case. Today, we look at the weird offspring dubbed the Play-Through Sleeve.
There are hundreds of iPad stands available on the market, but until a few weeks ago none of them managed to stay on my desk for more than two days. Not even Apple’s own dock for iPad, which is a $29 tiny piece of plastic that could work as a stand to hold the iPad upright, but only works in portrait mode. In the past three weeks, however, I’ve been using the Just Mobile UpStand for iPad and haven’t really looked back to find another solution.
The UpStand is an elegant and simple product to hold your iPad in landscape and portrait modes — there’s not really much else to say about it, but read along past the break to see why I decided to use the UpStand as my iPad stand of choice. (more…)
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