Posts in reviews

Alarmify Wakes You Up With Spotify Tunes

I’ve never really been a huge fan of third-party alarm applications for the iPhone, mostly because many of them can’t run in the background and, at the end of the day, they don’t provide any additional feature that I’d miss from Apple’s simple, unobtrusive Clock app. Sporadic Daylight Savings bugs aside, the Clock app does exactly what I need: it lets me set up alarms and lock my iPhone at night. I don’t need to stare at a flip clock while I’m in bed, I don’t need weather integration, nor do I feel I’m missing out because the Clock app doesn’t have themes. It’s simple, and it works for me.

But Alarmify, a project by three students from Hyper Island, wants to bring something different to the iOS alarm scene by integrating music with the whole passive experience of scheduled alarms. Sure, picking songs from the iPod app isn’t new to unofficial alarm clocks for iOS: but how many of them integrated Spotify – the music streaming service – to let you choose a song you want to wake up? As far as I know, none of them did. And that’s exactly what Alarmify is doing, for free, with a beautiful interface.

As you fire up Alarmify, you’re presented a dashboard with a clock, a menu to set an alarm and another tab to find a song from Spotify. You’ll need to have the official Spotify iPhone app installed on your device – which unfortunately is only available to Premium users and it’s not on sale in the US App Store. The app basically acts as a bridge between the alarm you set and Spotify – when the alarm goes off, the app will launch Spotify and start playing a song. Which brings me to a major caveat of Alarmify: you’ll have to leave it running all night, as it can’t work in the background and forward a song to Spotify when the iPhone is locked. Not exactly “great”, but at least you can turn the device in landscape mode to get an elegant flip clock.

For Spotify users looking for an alarm app that can wake you up with songs, Alarmify is a no-brainer. Get it for free in the App Store.

Showyou: An Interactive Wall To Watch and Share Videos

Released yesterday for free in the App Store, Showyou is a new universal app aimed at letting you discover videos shared by your friends on Twitter and Facebook, and share these findings yourself in your social graph. Unlike Squrl – which we reviewed yesterday as well – Showyou isn’t a service meant for curating videos in collections and grab them from a web browser through a bookmarklet: rather, it’s a very simple app that wants to offer a better way to browse videos found on Twitter and Facebook with the “Showyou Grid” – a 2D video wall that you can pan horizontally and vertically, very similar to what we’ve already seen in the Aweditorium iPad app.

Once logged in with Twitter or Facebook, Showyou will find friends that are already using the app and it gives you the option to “follow them”. The more people you follow, the more videos you get and the more populated the Grid becomes. By default it shows nearly 1,000 videos – many of those collected from Showyou’s system, so it really depends on how many people you start following and how much content they decide to share publicly. But there’s no doubt Showyou works best the moment you start following people and engaging with the service itself, as it also showcases “featured users” the developers recommend you follow to get interesting videos. The video wall was quite responsive yesterday when I first installed the app, but I’m noticing some slow loading times today – presumably a lot of people gave Showyou a try (again, it’s free) and the servers are getting hammered under heavy traffic. When videos load, however, not only you get a beautiful presentation with big thumbnails and an elegant Futura font – you can tap on each video to view it in a bigger popup window overlaying the main grid, share it or leave a comment. You can also tell a user you liked a video he shared by “thanking” him. If you don’t like the Grid view, you can switch to a cleaner list that shows you videos one after the other.

Overall, Showyou it’s a really simple app that gets one thing done extremely well: collecting videos shared by your friends. It’s not as full-featured as Squrl when it comes to exploring the Internet hunting for cool videos to curate (I mean, they’re two deeply different products), but if you’re looking for an easy way to see what your friends are watching you should take Showyou for a spin.

Squrl: Collect Videos From The Web, Watch Them Later on iOS

Released yesterday on the App Store and the web, Squrl is a new service powered by an HTML5 interface that allows you to save videos from several supported services, collect them on the iOS and web apps, and watch them later at any time. The concept behind the service is very simple and attractive: much like an Instapaper for video, Squrl enables you to save videos from Youtube, Vimeo, Hulu, Netflix and many other providers with the click of a bookmarklet (which you have to install from the website). Unlike Watchlater, though, Squrl doesn’t stop at collecting videos in a single place, it also packs social functionalities and organization features to let you create galleries and collections of videos, share them, or even subscribe to collections shared by other users in your social graph. Read more

The iPad 2 Dock Review

The iPad 2 Dock is by far the accessory people ask about when getting a new iPad 2. Apple’s iPad Camera Connection Kit and their Digital AV Adapter are clear in purpose; both products add utility to the iPad when used with a camera or television. The iPad 2 dock, however, is a questionable purchase. What utility or benefit will it provide me, and should I pay a pricey $29.00 for a plastic stand that comes with no cable and only provides audio out? The portrait only dock is an additional expense many owners are unsure about, and today we’re taking a look at whether one of these guys can be of benefit to you now that customers are receiving the first batch of shipments in the United States.

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Blogsy: A Better Blogging App for iPad

The lack of great blogging apps for the iPad always puzzled me as a strange inconsistency with a device – and overall, a platform – that in the past year has proved to be more than a simple ecosystem for games and utilities. The iPad – and to an extent, iOS – has become more than a lightweight piece of glass and aluminum for watching movies and playing some Angry Birds. Sure it’s great at those tasks, but then I look at OmniFocus, Simplenote, iFiles, or LogMeIn and I realize there’s so much to do on this device than just consuming content. The iPad was indeed quickly dismissed by many as a “media tablet” when it came out last year: but think about the musicians, the writers, the designers and the movie editors that did all those amazing things using only an iPad. Clearly, this isn’t just about playing games anymore. This isn’t about the passive interaction with content: it’s about the two-way relationship with consuming and creating content made possible by the 75,000 apps available in the App Store.

But then I look at bloggers, people like me, and I don’t understand why it is so difficult to rely on the iPad as a tool for working purposes. Let’s be honest: if you’re a geek and you happen to run a blog with lots of new posts added every day, you’ve had issues with using the iPad as your main work machine. We’ve all been there before: the soft keyboard takes a while getting used to, but it’s the lack of great blogging software designed specifically for the iPad that make us question the possibilities opened by this device as far as blogging is concerned. Getting down to my personal issues with the iPad and writing for MacStories, I identify three main problems: the official WordPress app isn’t that great (an euphemism); among the alternatives, several apps lack advanced functionalities like remote draft editing or custom fields; both 3rd party apps and the official WordPress one are terrible at allowing you to easily insert links, photos, and videos. We’re swimming in a sea of text editors, but as I said many times on Twitter in the past we need a more powerful app – something that combines the simplicity of text editors with rich features like media management and full access to the WordPress backend. I know, I’m asking for a complex solution, and quite possibly a software built for a niche rather than the Doodle Jump masses.

After months of waiting for the perfect blogging app to come around and convince us that the iPad could also be used professionally for blogging, I looked at Blogsy with a bit of skepticism. At first glance, it seemed that this new app borrowed a lot from dPad, an HTML editor I reviewed a while ago that’s aimed at quickly inserting media in documents. Considering that Blogsy, however, was touted as an app for bloggers with WordPress and Blogger integration, I decided that I could take it for a spin. Read more

Essay: The Smart, Intuitive HTML Powered Text Editor for iPhone & iPad

Constantly we’re bombarded or introduced to new text editors and word processors that attempt to redefine and strike a balance between what’s necessary and what isn’t. I’m personally getting to the point where enough is enough, as the focus on being new and imaginative in the iOS and Mac App Store has degraded into providing more of the same under a different name and a slightly different interface. While most of us are perfectly content with trend setters such as PlainText and Elements, Essay ended going above and beyond my expectations for an iOS text editor. Sure there’s SimpleNote, but with DropBox sync and a slew of formatting options I’ll sacrifice instant sync with Notational Velocity for HTML goodness.

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Hands on With iheartradio for iPad

It’s Friday afternoon, and if you’re not already slacking off at work why not put your feet up on your desk and turn on some tunes. The iheartradio app has launched on the App Store, giving you access to all of your favorite artists, local (Clear Channel) and national radio stations, artist interviews and videos, and image galleries captioned off for your entertainment. It’s been a while since I’ve checked out an iheartradio app (which is gratuitously advertised by my local radio station), but I have to say I’m impressed with just how fast the iPad app is. Radio station’ connect instantly, there’s AirPlay built in to pipe tunes and video to your Apple TV, and you can favorite stations so you can quickly access all of your favorite radio channels from a handy playlist. If you hear a song that tickles your boom-tubes, you can purchase the song from iTunes in a snap. The features only get better, and we’ll conclude our short review just past the break.

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Plex Releases Major 1.1 Update: The King Of iOS Media Players

If you’re serious about your media library, you’ve probably heard of Plex: dubbed as the “solution for local and online media”, Plex is a fantastic multi-platform media center that runs on Macs and Windows PCs and has great iOS and Android clients. Once installed on your desktop machine (which becomes a “server”) Plex can fetch music, movies and TV shows stored on your computer or anywhere else on an external hard drive, organize them properly into categories by adding the correct metadata, and handle streaming to the clients (such as the iPhone or iPad apps) with live conversion of unsupported video formats. All your media can also be played locally on a computer without the need of a mobile client thanks to the desktop Plex app, which is highly customizable: you can add your own themes, install plugins (like Spotify) and connect to online content providers such as the CNN, Vimeo, Cnet TV, Youtube, Apple Movie Trailers and many others. If that’s not enough for you, Plex can also enable you to connect to your media library remotely via WiFi or 3G with a global hostname, through the iOS apps. Read more

Witness Remotely Locks Your Mac, Detects Motion, Sends You Mugshots

Developed by Orbicule, the creators of computer-tracking utility Undercover, Witness is a new application that’s aimed at remotely locking your Mac, and detecting motion in front of your computer’s camera. Let’s face it: every time we’re away from our Macs, we think about what could ever happen if someone broke into our house or office and stole them. Whilst data protection is essential and there many things you can do to hide critical information stored on your machine (such as disabling automatic login, choose a strong system password or keep everything safe into 1Password, possibly synced with Dropbox), knowing the identity of the person that actually took possession of your computer – or entered your office without authorization – is a whole different story. Unless you’re planning on setting up a relatively expensive home monitoring security system (even with DIY sets, you’re still going to spend a couple of hundred bucks + software to monitor everything) or just carrying your MacBook away with you all the time, there’s no easy to know what’s happening in front of your computer’s screen, and take action at the same time. Orbicule wants to provide an easy and powerful solution to remotely lock a Mac from virtually anywhere, detect motion and be notified with photos and video of who’s doing what in your house.

There are many tweaks and hacks available online to turn your iSight into a security system, as well as utilities to lock your Mac from an iPhone or iPad while on the go. I bet many of you have heard of these methods or at least tried to follow one of those tutorials once. Witness, however, does exactly what a great app has to do: it combines multiple functionalities into a beautiful, easy to use and full-featured package that requires minimal setup and just works. Witness can lock and unlock your Mac from an iPhone, an iPad or the web browser thanks to a system that’s based on an account you’ll have to create on Orbicule’s website. Once authenticated with the account on your Mac, iOS devices and browser, you’ll be ready to start using Witness and be alerted of activity in front of your Mac’s iSight. Witness also requires a desktop companion app that comes as an installer and will restart your computer upon successful installation. The Mac app handles the location of your computer, your account’s credentials, and also lets you decide whether Witness itself or the screensaver should be used to lock OS X. If you choose Witness, a panel will come in the foreground asking for your system’s password. If you don’t want to use the iSight and you have configured other cameras with your Mac, you can choose a different capturing device from the Preferences.

On the iOS side of things, Witness comes with a free remote app that runs universally on iPhones and iPads. The UI is gorgeous, and the app provides a set of functionalities to lock a Mac with a simple swipe, monitor your various machines associated with a Witness account, and browse the history of alerts you’ve received. Being heavily based on the cloud, Witness for iOS will constantly check for updates, pulling images and videos from the Internet if they’re available (meaning: you’ve locked your Mac and something’s going on). If an alert comes in via push notification, you’ll be able to see pictures and videos recorded by your iSight (audio is supported, too). You can email photos directly within the app, and delete alerts you’re no longer interested in. All these features are available on the web counterpart as well.

In my tests, Witness has been very reliable and quite fast both on WiFi and 3G. I was able to lock / unlock my iMac in seconds, receive push notifications moments after motion was detected and download full sets of photos and videos shot through my iSight. A Witness account will cost you $39 as a one-time fee (student licenses available) and gives you access to OS X, iOS and web tools. I highly recommend Witness not only because of the beautiful interface approach and usability – it’s the “just works” factor that combines a utility to lock a computer and turn it into a home alarm system that truly impressed me. You can create a Witness account here, and check out more screenshots below. Read more