This Week's Sponsor:

Crickets

The first alarm app for families.

Posts in roundups

MacStories’ 2010 Roundup: Top 10 iPhone Camera Apps

Welcome to MacStories’ 2010 Roundup! In this new series, we collect the best apps released in 2010 for the Mac, iPhone and iPad — apps we have probably already featured here on MacStories. Only the best apps, both free and paid. Apps you shouldn’t miss.

For me, 2010 has been the year of the iPhone camera. Since I bought my French iPhone 4 in June for a whoppin’ 800 Euros (don’t even ask), I’ve been shooting photos like never before. Sure, I know the iPhone 4 is still a cellphone and true photos don’t come from a phone. I’m OK with that. But I’m no professional photographer, nor am I willing to spend money on a DSLR. Not because I disdain quality – I just wouldn’t know how to fully enjoy it. Leave the pro tools to the pros. For me, the iPhone 4’s camera is good enough to provide photos I like, that I can share with my friends.

Which leads me to apps. The iPhone’s camera is great, but apps are there to enrich its functionalities. Apps with built-in sharing features, apps with filters, apps that rely on their own social network, apps aimed at completely replacing the stock camera…the selection is huge. Photography is, indeed, one of the best selling categories in the App Store right behind Games and Productivity.

In this second MacStories’ 2010 Roundup we have collected the top 10 camera apps for the iPhone. We could have included more, but these are the ones that in our opinion really stood out this year. So head past the break, and check out the Top 10 iPhone Camera Apps of 2010. Read more

#MacStoriesDeals - Tuesday

In case you missed our announcement yesterday, we started another new feature, and it’s called #MacStoriesDeals. We’ll try our best to update the list throughout each day.

Here’s some great deals for today on iOS & Mac apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get ‘em while they’re hot!

Read more

#MacStoriesDeals - Monday

In case you missed our announcement earlier today, we’re starting another new feature, this one being a daily occurrence. We’re calling it #MacStoriesDeals. If anymore show up during the day, we’ll be sure to update this list!

Here’s some great deals for today on iOS apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get ‘em while they’re hot!

Read more

#MacStoriesDeals

Another new feature here at MacStories! Last week we started our 2010 App Roundup here at MacStories, and today we’re starting another new feature, this one being a daily occurance. We’re calling it #MacStoriesDeals.

In this new series, we will recommend great deals every weekday on iOS apps, Mac apps and gadgets that are on sale for a limited time. We will be scouring our resources and providing you direct links to what we think are deals you shouldn’t miss out on. Whether it be games, health, lifestyle, music, weather, etc. - we’ve got you covered. So expect some choice picks starting later today!

MacStories’ 2010 Roundup: Top 5 iOS Music Apps

Welcome to MacStories’ 2010 Roundup! In this new series, we collect the best apps released in 2010 for the Mac, iPhone and iPad – apps we have probably already featured here on MacStories. Only the best apps, both free and paid. Apps you shouldn’t miss.

Apple’s iPod app for the iPhone and iPad is simple, effective and pretty to look at, but sometimes I want more from my music. I want up-to-date information about the artists I’m listening to, I want to discover new songs without having to search Google – I want something different than a list of music synced from my hard drive. If music’s an experience, than I want a digital music experience on iOS.

In this post, first of the MacStories 2010 Roundup series, we have collected the top 5 apps to listen to music released this year. We think they are great apps you should go install right now. We could have included more, but we wanted to bring the best of the best to your attention, not just the “pretty good” ones.

So jump after the break, and check our Top 5 list of music apps for iOS. We heard it’s also possible to listen to The Beatles with them. Read more

How to Read Comics Like a Pro on the Mac & iPad

We here at the MacStories institute of app reviews have a feeling that your stack of Dōjinshi, Green Latern, and The Walking Dead comics have been dwindling at an alarming pace. Surely you could fulfill all your Hentai Manga needs online, but what fun is downloading RAR files just to peep JPEGs when you could get with the times and scoop some CBZ or CBR files from your favorite digital vendors? And no doubt you’ve been pulling shenanigans like scanning Super Man covers into PDFs for easy reading in iBooks instead of faxing ass photos to your boss in Italy. While there’s nothing like tearing the plastic off Wonder Woman, flipping pages is best left for the DC fanatics who have a thing for glossy covers and tongue inspired paper crinkling. It’s time to give comics a quick swift kick in the rear and bring the treasure trove of paneled heroism into the 21st century. That’s what Danger Duck would have wanted right?

Read more

My 3 Favorite OmniFocus Addons

I stash my GTD in OmniFocus. For many months now I’ve been a die-hard OmniFocus user, and no one - I repeat, no one - can’t take my GTD away from OmniFocus and me. Not even a buggy iOS 4.2 beta that prevented me from loggin in my Omni Sync Server database in the iPad app. OmniFocus perfectly fits my workflow because it lets me add tasks and throw anything in there in seconds, but it’s also got the power I need when digging through dozens of projects and contexts. OmniFocus keeps my workflow on rails.

In the past two weeks I started looking for some neat hacks/tweaks/addons to integrate the OmniFocus desktop application with other parts of my workflow: the browser, Google Reader and DEVONthink. Here’s what I found. Read more

Battle Royale of the iPad Dropbox Editors

In the previous months, lots of apps have creeped onto the iPad’s App Store that focus on doing one thing really well: writing text and saving your files out to Dropbox. These applications are essentially the same, differing in nuance features such as visual file management and editor customization. Though these applications are rather simple, some of them aren’t exactly wallet friendly – five dollars is a lot to ask for a simple text editor. So the question remains, “Which Dropbox editor is the best for me?” In the pursuit of text friendly shenanigans, we’ve rounded up five Dropbox editors and tossed them into the ring to duke it out for the MacStories crown.

Read more

My Must-Have 20 iPad Apps

Following yesterday’s post about the must-have Mac apps I install every time I have to play with a new installation of OS X, I thought it would be interesting to talk about my iPad setup as well.

Of course the iPad is a different machine from MacBooks: not just because it’s an entirely new kind of computing machine, the concept of “OS installation” itself is radically different. On OS X, installation is a clunky process that can take up to several minutes at best; as for the transition from an OS to another, OS X doesn’t come with the simple Backup / Restore system iOS  has. Sure you have Time Machine and Migration Assistant, but those tools aren’t as consumer-friendly as iOS and iTunes.

Speaking of which, that’s exactly what makes iOS different: iOS devices live inside iTunes. iTunes handles the updates, backups, restores, fresh installations and applications. For these reasons, installing apps on an iPad running a fresh new OS is a different story then OS X. Most users have never messed with restore and betas, so they never really had to deal with “starting anew all over again”. I did, and here are the apps I install every single time my iPad needs to be synchronized for the first time. My must-haves. Read more