There’s no shortage of “list creation apps” on the iPhone and iPad. Since the opening of the App Store in 2008 and the release of the iPad last year, developers and consumers have apparently re-discovered the usefulness of digital lists (for shopping, groceries, to-dos, you name it), and the popularity of these applications has seen a terrific rise. Lists are everywhere, but very few of them support syncing of items across devices and computers. Droplist, a $0.99 app released last week, is a good-looking alternative to more complex solutions like Simplenote that does essentially two things: it creates lists and syncs them back to Dropbox. Read more
Posts in reviews
Droplist: Create Lists On Dropbox & Edit Them Anywhere
Eavesdrop: Share Your iOS Music Library Over WiFi & Bluetooth
When I was in high school, I remember we didn’t have iPhones with wireless sharing capabilities or music streaming apps like Pandora and Spotify. But we did have some iPod Classics, and sharing headphones with friends asking you to listen to your “new songs” was normal. And sharing headphones was annoying: you were forced to mess with cables, you didn’t get the full quality of a song, you always ended up with broken earbuds after a few days. Though, like I said, that was normal.
We have better ways of listening to music nowadays: streaming aside, we have portable Bluetooth speakers like the Jambox and iPod nanos that fit in every pocket and are relatively cheap. Eavesdrop, a new app for the iPhone released a few days ago, aims at taking the whole “local music sharing with your friends” concept a step further by enabling you to broadcast your iPod.app library over WiFi and Bluetooth. Read more
Kalimat Takes On Words With Friends; Remix For Speed Play
If you haven’t had enough of word based tile games for your iPhone, Kalimat is ready to take on Scrabble and Words With Friends as your go to game of choice. While I’m personally not a fan of the OpenFeint ecosystem in general, I was able to anonymously create a new profile with a gamer name to play online. Kalimat is interesting not because of differentiation in run of the mill gameplay, but because of its additional remix mode. Remix mode is interesting because there’s a timer (no casual thinking / cheating here), and you can swap out one letter per turn. The speed based gameplay is pretty wicked, and I thoroughly enjoyed this. There is also an additional secret tile (kind of like landing on a bonus in Jeopardy… okay it’s nothing like that) that awards you an additional fifty points. The Ali Baba can change the game at any time, so you’ll always want to be thinking of high scoring words to stay ahead. Kalimat supports multiple users, and the game board itself is easy to use with simple drag and drop controls. If a player drops a word on the board you’re unfamiliar with, you can look it up in the dictionary or simply chat with your opponent. For $2.99 in the App Store, Kalimat is a refreshing alternative in the word-game genre.
Samurai II For Mac: Good, Bloody Fun
For fans of the original Samurai: Way of the Warrior, we ended on quite the cliffhanger. Confronting your demons, things hadn’t turned out exactly as planned. In Samurai II: Vengeance (now on the Mac App Store), the quest for revenge will leave no prisoners. Cel-shaded environments mix with 3D combatants for a hack & slash adventure that takes you through the second chapter of the Samurai story line.
Heads up: there are some graphic screenshots behind the break (those swords can be pretty sharp), where we take a look at how well Samurai II fares with a keyboard or mouse.
Embraceware’s Awaken 5 Now Available
Awaken, Embraceware’s very popular alarm clock (and more) app, has just been updated to version 5. It’s available in the Mac App Store or if you’re an existing customer, you can “Check for Updates” within the app. New customers may purchase the app via the Mac App Store for $9.99, or download a demo version via Embraceware’s Awaken page. Read more
Flare: Photo Editing with Style
The Iconfactory, makers of apps such as Twitterrific, CandyBar, xScope, IconBuilder, iPulse, and Frenzic, are the “World leaders in icon design, custom design services, software, royalty-free stock icons and much more.”
So what app niche could they fill next? How about photo editing. Unless you’re a pixel pro who uses Photoshop, Lightroom or Aperture, there are few options for the semi-pro and amateur out there to dabble in image effects. That’s where Iconfactory’s new app, Flare, comes into play. The Iconfactory worked together with ARTIS Software to bring Flare to the Mac. Read more
Drink Up or Stay Sober with BeerStat for iPhone
Drinkers of beer tend to settle the evenings in a local pub or in backyards over an open grill and a standing longneck. Quick work is made of the Sam Adams shuffled between the ice cubes in the cooler, and pretty soon you’re two beers in towards your eight beer weekly limit. BeerStat for the iPhone is all about statistics, tracking how much cash you’ve spent, and keeping a long log term log about your total alcohol consumption and previous records. If you ever wanted to know how much of your monthly salary you spend on beer or how how much beer you’ve chugged in body weight, BeerStat keeps those statistics based on your personal profile and beer of choice.
BeerStat is recommended in part because of its lust worthy design, showing off beautiful pixels as the streamlined interface is overlaid with booze-tastic 8-bit icons. Instead of your traditional tabs, you can scrub through the various sections of the app as you dive between records, your calendar, and a way cool section on fun-facts about beer. It’s got everything you beer-drinking hipster-loving designers would want in an iPhone app, but I will complain slightly about adding your favorite beverages. You can add your favorite brand of beer and its various qualities to BeerStat, but I wish there was a simpler way to add common supermarket brands with just a couple of flicks. Beer is individually priced, so you have to divide out the price of a bottle from a six pack. I’d like to see a quick pick implementation in a future update, but as of now you specialty drinking / pint loving fools can brag or keep tabs on just how much beer you actually consume. BeerStat is only a dollar in the App Store, and would look great donning your homescreen next to that Starbucks icon. Check out the video after the break.
And please. Drink responsibly.
Watchlater: iPad App That’s Like Instapaper For Video
Instapaper is one of my favorite apps ever made for iOS: it allows me to save any article for later, and enjoy it in an uncluttered view on the iPhone or iPad without the stress of the web browser. Offline access makes sure I can read everything even when an Internet connection is nowhere to be found, and the recently introduced social sharing capabilities enable me to stay up to date with items liked by people I read and trust. Instapaper is a great tool, but it works for text. And besides text, I happen to consume a lot of online video, too.
The idea of an Instapaper for video always came back to me as an intriguing experiment someone had to try: just like Instapaper, you hit a bookmarklet and the video is saved in your online account. You fire up an iOS app, the videos are automatically retrieved and cached, and you can watch them whenever you like. Without the anxiety factor offered by Youtube’s website design or, again, the information overload of the desktop browser. Just video.
Watchlater, a new iPad app available at $2.99 in the App Store, wants to become the “Instapaper for video” on iOS, and admittedly it’s a pretty neat application. I’ve tested the app over the past months, it’s got lots of potentialities and still a few issues to fix / missing features. But it is available now, and allows you to collect videos from Youtube and Vimeo in a single place. Read more
TweetMag 1.1 Released: Faster, Full Readability Integration
When I first reviewed TweetMag back in December, I called it the “most beautiful Twitter app” for the iPad. Lots of things have changed since then, but I stand by my statement: the iPad 2 is now available and Flipboard went under a major update that refined the UI and added Instagram integration, yet TweetMag still holds up as a gorgeous way to consume Twitter as a magazine specifically built for the tablet. There are some similarities with the iPad app of the year 2010, Flipboard, but with the recent 1.1 update TweetMag takes another important step to become the most beautiful alternative Twitter app.
TweetMag 1.1 is faster. The backend was entirely rewritten, and you can immediately tell the difference in speed – especially on an iPad 2. Images load faster, tweets are parsed in seconds, content appears within moments after choosing a magazine from the top “rack”. The speed issues encountered by several users in the first version have been fixed, and rarely did I stumble upon wrong headlines or non-loaded images in TweetMag 1.1. There are still some minor issues here and there (1.1.1 update coming soon?), but this thing is simply faster now. The new system that powers TweetMag definitely shows its capabilities.
Two new features in TweetMag 1.1 allow you to create a magazine out of your favorite tweets (and consequently add tweets to Favorites directly within the app) and link to your Readability account to create a Read Later mag. We’re big fans of Readability here at MacStories, and full integration with the service is more than welcome. You can add articles to your reading queue or simply head over to the rack to check out your Read Later mag – made of articles you have saved in your online Readability account. Instapaper support is gone, but it might be coming back in a future update. We appreciate the developers’ choice to support publishers by adding Readability right into TweetMag – which still grabs links off any Twitter timeline to present articles in a uncluttered layout with great-looking typography.
Other new features in 1.1 include a Featured section with the top publications worth following, and the possibility to add or remove friends from the app. TweetMag is a $2.99 purchase in the App Store for a limited time, and it’s still the most beautiful Twitter app, now with a faster engine. Recommended.