As a compliment to your MacBook, your iPad often becomes the getaway for reading, playing games, and couch surfing the Internet. Though we readily find uses for the iPad such as turning it into a giant trackpad for controlling a Mac Mini underneath your TV or for remotely controlling Dropbox shares, one use we occasionally struggle with is utilizing our iPad as a second monitor when the extra screen real-estate is necessary for getting work done. DisplayPad by Clean Cut Code is one of many apps that turns your iPad into a remote monitor, perfect for extending your desktop like we do when covering Apple events.
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DisplayPad Turns Your iPad Into A Touch Friendly Second Monitor
Tap To Chat Is A Simple, Useful App for Facebook Chat
I don’t use Facebook much, but when I do it’s for one thing: chat. I don’t like Facebook Messages, I don’t want to get in touch with my friends on walls, I don’t get the new Groups functionality – thus, I use chat. It’s not exactly reliable and full-featured (hello? easily file and photo sharing?) but as all my friends are on Facebook (and addicted to it) it’s the best way to get ahold of them.
What about the iPhone? The official Facebook app does chat, among other things. Those “other things” is what I don’t need: I don’t need to jump to people’s profile while I’m chatting, I don’t need the grid interface, I just want to find my friends online and chat. A simple request.
Guess what, we have an app for that. It’s called Tap To Chat, it’s universal for iPhone and iPad and it’s available at $0.99 in the App Store. Tap To Chat is the simple Facebook chat app meant for those who just want chat to work without all the bells and whistles of Facebook. Simple factor aside, Tap To Chat (developed by the same creator of Buddies) has a few tricks up its sleeve that make it the best implementation of Facebook chat I’ve seen on iOS devices. Read more
Dring - Beautiful Ringtone Creation and More for iPhone
Ringtone creation on the iPhone is still new to the App Store; there are several out but only a few that have a great UI and functionality. Wake Apps’ Dring arrived last week and does it look beautiful and work wonderfully.
Dring has a finely tuned, gorgeous retina display UI that lets you customize and create your own ringtones right from your iPhone with sliders, toggle switches and buttons that look real. I can almost feel the textures under my fingertips and they lay perfectly on top of on a wood grain background. Every little detail looks absolutely great, even the spinning tape recorder wheels that come up after hitting record look authentic to a time of analog that’s long lost. Julien Martin is the magic man behind the UI of Dring, I saw some dribbble shots of Dring months ago was drooling then. Read more
iRip 2: The Best Way To Get Anything Out Of iOS Devices
The Little App Factory has published some great Mac apps in the past year. First for me came Evom, a simple and free utility that can save videos from the web (even Flash videos) and convert to a number of different devices, such as iPads or Apple TVs. Then I installed Rivet, another little utility for the Mac that can stream video from your local machine to a PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 console in your local network. Works like magic.
Last week I took a look at The Little App Factory’s latest effort, Grappler for Mac. Grappler provides an integrated view to browse Youtube without leaving the app and download videos to convert for an iTunes-compatible format. It’s got a great UI, inline previews and a lot more. Make sure to check out my review here if you missed it. Read more
Diacarta Adds Retina Graphics, Notifications - I Can Finally Use It
Diacarta is a cool app for the iPhone which, unlike most task managers quick reminders, doesn’t let you create items in a list. Diacarta wants to enable you to have a “picture” of your day by making an analog clock its main screen. Tasks are visualized as big icons linked to the clock in a specific time of the day. This way, Diacarts provides a quick view of your upcoming activities that you can edit at any time.
It’s visually rich and very, very custom. Read more
There’s A New Text Editor On My iPad: Writings
The iPad. The perfect writing device, right? The tablet surely doesn’t miss apps meant for writers, quick note takers and bloggers alike. There are hundreds of text editors available in the App Store, not to mention the word processors and apps meant for more specific tasks such as novel or screen writing.
The iPad has the writing tools.
One may wonder whether all these tools actually have something in common or are all single pieces of software based on fundamental differences and unique features. It is undeniable that the trend amongst most text editors for iPad is to come with Dropbox sync capabilities. Of the “writing tools” mentioned above, the text editors rely on sync nowadays. And to good reason: it was a pain to save a post or note as a .txt file and manually manage it. Now everything happens in the cloud, in the background, automatically.
The Dropbox trend has lead to great apps: PlainText, Elements, IA Writer – just to name a very few. Writings, a new app released today by Italian developers Ludovico Rossi and Vito Modena, shares a feature set similar to other writing applications available in the Store, but comes with new functionalities and interaction methods that have made it stand out from the others on my iPad.
Writings makes composing text on the iPad a real pleasure. Read more
Invaders Corruption Mutates Invaders With Geometry Wars
I like to hunt down different indie games that fulfill the ever growing desire to feast my eyes on well made, yet simple titles that are available on a variety of platforms so that even our Windows readers can take part in all the fun. But mostly I’m just looking for some casual pixel love for my midnight Mac gaming cravings. Last week I came across Invader Corruption, where a unique name creates an individual gaming experience so that no two games are quite the same. What starts off as a boring and possibly mundane shooter ends up being compelling and totally addictive. Shoot past the break to learn more about this frantic free title.
NoiseES: The Perfect App For A Nintendo Nerd
Released in iTunes a few minutes ago, NoiseES by Shaun Inman might as well be the coolest iPhone app I’ve stumbled upon this week. It’s a retro / pixel / 8-bit style music player that allows you play old Nintendo chiptunes, saved as NSF or NSFe files. Basically, old soundtracks from NES games.
Totally awesome. Read more
Twitter Just Got Its Most Beautiful iPad App. It’s Called TweetMag.
TweetMag is, without a doubt, the most beautiful Twitter app that ever landed on the iPad. Yes, TweetMag is more attractive than Flipboard. But they are two different apps. And there’s no way I’m going to focus this review on a comparison between them.
Let me get this out quickly before I dive deeper into this piece of software that appeared on the App Store tonight: Flipboard and Tweetmag are two different products. Both in the intentions, and realization. Yes, they both aim at letting you build a”digital magazine” out of links shared on Twitter. Yes, they share some aspects of a same concept. And yes, they can live together. This is not about which app is going to kill Flipboard, the iPad app of the year. This is not a piece about the functionalities that you’ll find in both the apps, either. This is about TweetMag, a product of its own that aims at providing a new Twitter experience.
You notice how the most used words until now have been “difference”, “experience”, “product”. TweetMag and Flipboard have a lot in common, yet some aspects underlying the overall concept manage to put them on two separate roads. That’s why I’m running both of them on my iPad. Read more