Desktop organizer and quick launcher Berokyo has been around on the Mac and Windows for quite some time now. On the desktop, the app allows you to organize, sort and manage your most used files and folders for quick access and media consumption. The developers recently released a universal iOS version of the app, which like the Mac counterpart puts the focus on letting users visually organize their documents on a virtual bookshelf; unlike the desktop, though, iOS devices don’t have the possibility to display a file system. The developers thus had to rethink the whole approach of Berokyo, changing the way users get files into the app. Berokyo for iOS can create unlimited bookshelves for documents coming from other apps on your iPhone and iPads (like Pages and Numbers) but, most of all, can sync with Dropbox. Read more
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Berokyo Creates Bookshelves for Anything, Including Dropbox
Movie Player for iOS Plays Most Video Formats
If you feel sad about the removal of VLC from the App Store and you didn’t purchase the app in time before it got pulled, Movie Player is an interesting alternative I’ve been this past week you might consider for your portable movie needs. The app is universal for iPhone and iPad, it will cost you $2.99 and it’s got nice interface design and animations. Most of all, Movie Player can play most any video format you have on your hard drive, ready to be synced via iTunes.
The huge list of supported formats includes: divx, avi, flv, mov, wmv, mpg, mpeg, mpeg1, mpeg2, mpeg4, mp4, m4v , mpv, vob, ts, ogv, ogm, mkv, dv, asf, 3gp, m2p, m2ts, m2v, gxf, wm. I have tested the app with avi, mkv, mp4 and mov files.
In my tests, the app played most formats smoothly, launching files of 2GB in 2-3 seconds. I also would like to point out that I’ve run Movie Player against iOS 4.3 beta, which isn’t officially supported yet. I’ve only noticed slow downs with large movies that had .srt subtitles, also synced with iTunes’ file manager. The app recognized the subtitles but didn’t generate a thumbnail, and moving the scrubber through the movie was a little too slow. Anything else, however, worked perfectly under the new OS on the iPad and iPhone 4.
Movie Player allows you create playlists to watch videos one after the other without interruptions, very useful for TV shows and video podcasts. A small detail I particularly appreciated is the curtain-like animation that shows up when opening and closing a movie.
Movie Player definitely gets its job done, it hasn’t got many additional features but playback is smooth. At $2.99 in the App Store, give it a try. More screenshots below. Read more
OnCue Brings Great Queue Features To iPod App
OnCue is one of those iPhone apps you don’t know you need until you start playing with it. The concept is simple: Apple’s default iPod app allows you to import playlists from iTunes and customize the way you listen to music by combining different songs and artists in a single list, it lets you shuffle your music, but it’s doesn’t come with any queue functionality.
While you’re listening to music on your iPhone or iPod touch and you’re on the go, it’d be nice to be able to select the songs you want to listen to without having to pull out the device from your pockets every time. Use a playlist, you might suggest. But what if I don’t want to create a playlist for each day? I just want to say “hey, today I want to listen to these songs in this specific order”. You can’t create a new playlist every day, yet you know what songs you want. You need a queue function. OnCue does just that, and it works with both songs and podcasts. Read more
Superstash For iPad Snaps And Annotates Web Clippings: Review & Giveaway!
More and more time is seemingly spent on the iPad than the Mac as of late, and it’s funny that I’d forgo the comfort and speed of a laptop for the wrist-destroying aluminum slate. Maybe it’s because of all the great apps developers keep sending us! Casually my iPad resides in a proper case (the Macally Bookstand) that allows me to prop the iPad at a slight typing angle, complete with the “kitchen lean” where I ruin the back legs of my favorite wooden chair. I’ll swipe through Flipboard, pinch into Reeder, and browse Safari before starting my work & school day over a couple hot cups of coffee. Those moments in the morning are often spent finishing the previous evening’s Instapaper & Read It Later queues, then spending the remaining free time looking for new content. On the Mac I’m accustomed to saving bits and pieces of pictures and web pages I find to LittleSnapper, and I haven’t had that luxury on the iPad without some manual work dragging content out of iPhoto.
Superstash for the iPad solves this dilemma: it is the web browser for web hoarders, creative thinkers, and anyone looking to collect, annotate, file, and share good ideas. You’d never think about collecting pictures and web clippings in a browser, but Superstash arrives on the iPad with every intention to reshape those ideas, and to get us thinking about using our iPads as a proper discovery and collection bin.
FaceMan Is Like Photo Booth For Your iPhone
I should have seen this coming. With iOS 4.3 rumored to introduce Photo Booth-like features for FaceTime or the Camera app, a developer created a full-featured alternative to Photo Booth that’s called FaceMan and it’s available now in the App Store at $0.99.
Put simply: FaceMan is great. It comes with 20 effects from the most popular Squeeze and Bent to a geek’s dream like Broken TV and LED; it’s got a slider to adjust the strength of effects; it can do both photos and videos WITH effects applied. Videos don’t have audio right now, but it’s coming with the next update, almost ready to be submitted to Apple. The interface is clean and polished, supports the Retina Display and you just need to flick through pages of effects to pick one and snap a picture. I did, and the terrible result can be viewed in the screenshot above. Full effect list includes: Swirl, X-Ray, Stretch, Heat, Sketch, Sepia, Dent, Led, Emboss, LightTunnel, Bulge, Squeeze, BrokenTv, Mirror, Toon, BlackAndWhite, AsciiArt, ModernArt, 100Me and NightVision.
Last, you can share photos on Twitter, Facebook, email and Tumblr. The app has a dedicated album to view all the photos and videos without having to open the iOS camera roll. I don’t know what else will Apple add in their own Photo Booth app, but FaceMan is an excellent alternative, available now. And it does videos. Go get it.
Movie Stiller: Video Stabilizer for iPhone
In the past, there have been a couple of times I wished that video I shot with my iPhone turned out to be stable. Camera shakiness, in fact, is the first problem for users addicted to shooting flicks with their mobile devices; and especially in situations when you need to be quick to capture a special moment, you’ll be disappointed to find out the video is un-watchable due to your not-so-stable hand. Whoever hasn’t experienced this at least once either has non-human hands or uses a tripod.
Movie Stiller, a new app from Creaceed (the same developers behind Prizmo), aims at helping you get better videos by stabilizing the ones you have in your Camera Roll. Once you fire up the app, choose a video and wait for Movie Stiller to load it and compute it; in the Settings, you can set a stabilization strength, a default scale and process rotation. Movie Stiller works like this: the more you stabilize a video to avoid shakiness, the more Movie Stiller will add black borders around the current frame. You can then make the image bigger to avoid borders, but that will let the video lose some details. Thus the need of achieving an optimal setup depending on each video. In my tests, I’ve found the app to work fairly well with videos that had “average shaking”. Don’t expect to optimize your adventurous tornado shoot with Movie Stiller.
The UI of the app is minimal, but stylish. A few taps are needed to get through the stabilization process and you can also export directly to the Camera Roll once it’s finished. Overall, it’s a pretty nifty app to enhance the quality of videos that “could have been better”. Get it here at $2.99.
Beat The Parking Meter With Honk For The iPhone
Have you ever gotten a ticket because you forgot to refill the parking meter? Sucks doesn’t it? Here’s the deal: you can pay a monkey to keep popping quarters in the slots, or you can pay for an iPhone app that’s honk worthy. Really: parking meters (and remembering your parking spot) shouldn’t be so hard.
Free “Plus” Widget Turns Dashboard Into A Launchpad
Launchpad is a feature of the upcoming Lion operating system that will allow users to have quick access to all their apps and folders through an iPad-like overlay interface. A few weeks ago, we saw developers already trying to imitate this functionality on Snow Leopard as I covered QuickPick, an app that brings a Launchpad-like UI to OS X 10.6. Plus, a new widget by Junecloud, takes a similar approach to QuickPick but it’s free and works with the system’s Dashboard.
Plus can turn anything into a Dashboard widget. That’s right: a widget to create other widgets; sort of meta, and it works. You can in fact drop multiple instances of Plus on to the Dashboard, and make each one a different shortcut to something else. Like an app, a screenshot, a document, a web address or a folder. Anything that you can drag out of the Finder can be dropped into Plus and become a widget of its own; Plus even lets you decide the size of the item’s preview. With a bit of organization and time, you can thus turn the Dashboard into a grid of most used apps and shortcuts, although you won’t be able to expand folders within the overlay the way we’ve seen in the Launchpad preview.
All things considered, Plus is a cool widget that’s being given away for free and definitely works as expected. Give it a try.
NoteTote: Download Files Remotely Using Simplenote
Previously known as MobileDL and now available at $8.99 in the Mac App Store, NoteTote is an interesting solution to trigger downloads remotely on your Mac using the iPhone, iPad or any other device that has access to Simplenote. For as simple as it sounds, all you have to do to start a download on your Mac is paste a URL into a specific note. NoteTote, in fact, upon logging into the service with your credentials will create a “special” NoteTote_Downloads note that will always stay there, monitored by the app running on your Mac’s menubar. While you’re away from your Mac and you want to start a download remotely, open the Simplenote app, paste the link and that’s it. On a regular interval (which can be adjusted in the Preferences) NoteTote will look for URLs inserted in the special note and try to download them. All of this while you don’t have access to your Mac. Read more