Posts in reviews

StreamToMe Streams Music and Video From Your Computer To iOS

With all the talk about iTunes’ “exciting announcement” and the possibilities of a cloud-based iTunes streaming and storage solution, I decided to take a step back to cover one of my favorite apps for iPhone and iPad, an app that allows you to stream audio and video from any computer to any iOS device.

The app is called StreamToMe, and unlike the popular Air Video it can stream music just fine, whether it’s organized in your iTunes library or stored somewhere else on your computer. I keep mine in Dropbox and it works just fine. Not to mention video, which works flawlessly with StreamToMe. So let’s see what you have to do to get things up and running. Read more

Filopanti: Simple Time Zone Conversion Tool for iPhone

Being based in Italy, I have to deal with the fact that stuff happens in the US and I’m in a different time zone. I stay up late at night, and news keep coming in. Also, I have to consider time zone differences when setting up online meetings with developers, writers and casual contacts. Up until today, I used a neat web app called Every Time Zone which comes with an iPad-specific viewport and allows me to quickly check on various time zones worldwide.

Filopanti, however, might be a simpler solution I can fire up at any time to quickly check on U.S. time zone –namely San Francisco’s time. With a straightforward and elegant UI Filopanti lets you pick two different cities and compare their time zones. Read more

Hidden, A Simplenote Client That Keeps Your Notes Private

Simplenote is a neat web service that comes with native iPhone and iPad apps (and a couple of widgets for the Mac, too) which enables you to store your notes in the cloud. I’m a huge fan of Simplenote, and it’s undoubtedly one of the most popular apps available in the App Store.

Hidden is a new iPhone app by Coding Robots (I’m hearing the developers are also working on a Simplenote-based task management app) that can access your standard Simplenote notes, but also allows you to keep private notes no one but you can read. Read more

Readict for iPad Aggregates Twitter and Reader Favorites, But…

I’ve been looking for a very specific type of  app since the iPad came out: something that would allow me to pull content from Twitter and Google Reader favorite items and read it on the iPad. That’s simple. I don’t need tags, categories, offline access or sharing features: if I’ve saved the articles from social networks in the first place, it’s very likely that I won’t send them to Twitter again.

See, I save lots of links both from Reader and Twitter every day: most of them is silly stuff I don’t usually go back to, but a good part of them is made of articles, posts I want to check out later and I’m not sure they need to go into Instapaper. You know what it’s like on Twitter: you put a gold star there, another one here – and you’ve faved 60 tweets on a single day. Same happens on Google Reader.

So like I said, I’m looking for a simple solution to display this content all together so that late in the evening I could sit down with my iPad and enjoy the stuff I saved during the day. This morning I found out about this new iPad app called Readict (free) which promises to aggregate all your favorite items from Twitter and Google Reader. Read more

Shareables for iPhone Makes Sharing Simple

Justin Williams of Second Gear has released some amazing iPhone and iPad apps recently: with the popular Elements Dropbox-based text editor and MarkdownMail he gained lots of users and fans in the App Store.

We at MacStories really like the iOS apps Justin Williams has created in the past months. With the release of Shareables for iPhone today (free in the App Store), Second Gear aims at making sharing on the iPhone simple and fun by enabling you to share cool links with your friends and followers with just a few taps. Read more

Aweditorium Aims At Revolutionizing Music Discovery On The iPad

It’s great when you wake up and you find an awesome new app waiting for you in the App Store. You see, I’ve been keeping an eye on Aweditorium for a while (months, I believe) since Robert Scoble first tweeted he had tested an early demo. The name was cool, the website featured some bands I didn’t know. I was intrigued, so I started following the developers on Twitter.

Aweditorium is now available in the App Store, and it’s more than I thought it would be – but it’s got a few technical limitations I hope will be addressed in future updates. Aweditorium aims at changing rules and conventions, but it has to deal with some iOS restrictions and a few bugs I’m pretty sure are caused by iOS 4.2 incompatibilities. The main concept, however, is all there: Aweditorium wants to change the way you discover great new music on the iPad.

After two hours using the iPad app I’ve already discovered more new music than in the last two weeks reading NME or Pitchfork. Read more

Calendars for iPad: Google Tasks and Calendar Sitting In A Tree

In my ongoing search for the best iOS and OS X calendar setup, I found a great iPhone app called Calvetica which I’m currently using and loving. Calvetica features a great UI design and a simple yet powerful feature set, make sure to read my review if you missed it. I asked for calendar suggestions on Twitter and I received lots of app recommendations, but I’m sticking with Calvetica on the iPhone. No wonder it was also the most recommended app.

On the iPad, though, the situation is much different. The device has been around for a few months, there aren’t as many calendar apps as on the iPhone (whose App Store launched in 2008) and Apple’s own calendar software is simply great – anything like the iPhone counterpart. There’s a huge market for alternative calendar solutions on the tablet, and it looks like developers are starting to understand this. A slew of iPad apps came out in the past weeks, and we’ll review the most notable ones here on MacStories in the next weeks.

Today I’m taking a look at Calendars by Readdle, the same guys behind my beloved PDF Expert, which aims at blending the usual calendar environment with the possibilities offered by another Google product, Google Tasks. Read more

Buddies For iPad Provides A Better Way To Check On Your Facebook Contacts

At this point, I guess you’ve figured out there’s no official Facebook iPad app nor does Zuckerberg plan to tell his team to start developing one. Or perhaps we just have to wait a little bit more, as Facebook is currently focused on mobile devices and the iPad isn’t exactly a mobile device. No matter how you look at it, there is no Facebook for iPad and we have to rely on 3rd party offers when it comes to status updates and photo galleries on world’s most crowded social network running on the iPad.

Up until now, Friendly for Facebook has been the most successful unofficial app for iPad to land in the App Store, and sales of the app sky-rocketed with the recent release of a major update. A new 3rd party Facebook app was released yesterday, it’s called Buddies and simplifies the way you can check on your Facebook contacts on the iPad. All wrapped up in an interesting native interface with noteworthy features and curious navigation schemes. Let’s take a look at it. Read more

Calvetica, The Minimal App That Reinvented Calendars On My iPhone

In my quest to searching for the perfect Google Calendar setup on iOS and OS X, I’ve already stopped by the gates of miCal, a full-featured calendar software for iPhone that could use some UI refinements, but allows you to swipe between lots of calendar views in seconds. miCal isn’t exactly elegant or “great-looking”, but it gets the job done.

When I first asked on Twitter which was the “app to have” when it comes to calendars, practically everyone replied with one word: Calvetica. What’s the deal about Calvetica? I had heard about it before I went asking on Twitter for calendar app suggestions, but I had never really focused on exploring its functionalities – nor did I bother to download it for that matter. So when I got all those recommendations (even from people I deeply respect and admire such as Dave) I realized it was time to try the Helvetica-based calendar thing.

A week later, I’m completely addicted to the features and interface schemes offered by Calvetica. Do we already have a winner here? Read on past the break to find out. Read more