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Posts in reviews

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

Simplepedia Is A Minimal Wikipedia Reader For Your iPad

I don’t know how I missed this in June. Maybe I was too busy shooting pictures with my iPhone 4. Remember when we first saw the Retina Display? Yeah, good times.

Simplepedia, developed by the same guy behind PDFMate, is a minimal and, well, simple Wikipedia reader for iPad. It comes with a standalone iPhone version, too, but I haven’t tried that one. On the iPad, the app can do two things: search for Wikipedia articles and save them for offline reading. That’s really it, folks. Read more

Note Hub: Notes, Drawings, Maps, Calculator, Tasks and a Browser…In A Single App

Some apps do one thing exceptionally well and some try too much just to miserably fail in the end. Either you’re a great note taking application or you’re a sketching software, but surely you can’t aim at doing both just fine. Note Hub wants to break this convention by being the app you come back to for anything related to…well, a pretty huge amount of things: notes, maps, browsing, drawings, tasks. It’s even got a calculator.

Note Hub wants to be the app you use for your note taking needs, but after some tests I have to say it’s more an app geared towards “visual” people who need to work with rich media on a daily basis and would like to organize content in a user-friendly interface. Read more

ReadSquare: RSS Reader with a Reeder-like UI, But I Don’t Get It

On the iPad, Reeder is my default app for RSS feeds reading. It’s so beautiful, fast, feature rich and, at the same time, elegant I don’t see myself switching to another application anytime soon. But our job is to try new apps and keep you in the loop, right? So when I stumbled upon the preview page of this new iPad app – ReadSquare – I was very excited to try the app and I started waiting for it to show up in iTunes.

Last week, the app was released as free for a limited time. It’s available here for download. But while I was looking forward to see the app in action and whether it could deliver on what the developers promised (what actually got me interested in the first place), I now have to admit the execution is, sadly, very poor.

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iPhotoSync Lets You Effortlessly Transfer Photos Between iPhoto Libraries

If you have recently upgraded to iPhoto ‘11 (I bet many of you have) and you still haven’t found the time to set up that Dropbox-based library synchronization between all your computers you read about on some blog or forum board, perhaps you’d like to wait to give iPhotoSync a try. I was indeed about to drop my entire iPhoto library in Dropbox, but then I realized that iTunes (apps and music) was my priority, so I went for a local sync option. iPhotoSync is an app that can run in the background as an “agent” and allows you to sync iPhoto libraries across multiple Macs running on the same local network.

Developed by Haystack Software (the same guys behind Arq for Mac) and completely compatible with the latest iPhoto versions, iPhotoSync is really simple: make sure you have two Macs running iPhoto and iPhotoSync on the same local network, fire up the app on both Macs, let the iPhoto libraries communicate with each other. For instance, you’ll be able to pull all the new photos from another Mac’s iPhoto library, automatically sync photos added to a specific event, automatically sync photos added in the last month. Basically, iPhotoSync transfers photos back and forth.

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