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Photopod Aggregates Your Photos From the Cloud: Flickr, Facebook, Dropbox, Twitter

It’s been rumored that with the next versions of iOS, and most notably the MobileMe service, Apple will heavily rely on the cloud to allow users to store media like photos, music and videos online and stream them at any time on the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. A move to cloud-based storage would allow the company to produce cheaper devices with less internal storage, and let users access personal content anywhere as long as an Internet connection is available at the same time.

Photopod, an iPhone app available in the App Store and developed by Dear Future Astronaut, wants to become the ultimate photo aggregator and manager by providing a unified interface to browse pictures stored on a variety of online services. Think of it as a way to access content anywhere (and download it) using an application that does everything automatically through a tabbed “accordion” UI that brings Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Dropbox, Picasa and your Camera Roll all together.

Once authorized with the aforementioned services in the Settings (note that Twitter will only fetch images shared through TwitPic on your account), the main screen of the app will display a series of vertical tabs you can expand to reveal their contents – namely photos. As you open a tab, a list of thumbnail previews slides down allowing you to see all the photos you’ve stored locally or online. Tapping on the share button in the upper right corner will let you select multiple photos at once to upload them to a specific service. It’s very cool as it also lets you upload pictures from one service to another, or from your device to the cloud. You can also download photos to view them offline, or enter a basic editing mode that enables you to rotate and crop pictures. Everything is kept simple and accessible. Flickr, Facebook and Picasa even get menus for sets and menus you’ve organized your photos with.

I like Photopod because it brings the most popular photo sharing services together into a beautiful package that’s easy to use, fast, reliable and intuitive. The app is available here at $1.99, don’t miss it.

Another Leaked Case Suggests iPad 2 Will Simply Be Called ‘iPad’, Comes with Rear Camera Hole

As noted by Apple Bitch, a new leather case for the next-generation iPad leaked to German website Macerkopf.de (Google Translation) confirms a series of rumors we’ve been hearing about the device like tapered edges, thinner design, rear-facing camera and flat back, but also provides some details on the actual name of the ‘iPad 2’. The term ‘iPad 2’ was indeed created by journalists and bloggers to indicate the second iteration of the tablet likely to ship in April; the retail packaging of this new case, however, comes with a simple “For the new iPad” label that may or may not suggest the ‘iPad 2’ will actually be called…iPad.

Of course, we can’t confirm on the authenticity of this leather case – which was allegedly leaked from a Swiss dealer that received more than 100 of these cases. The accessory also puts a lot of attention on the larger speaker cutout, supposedly implemented to let the new iPad achieve a much higher volume output comparable to Apple’s MacBooks.

Check out more pictures of this new case here. Another case surfaced on the internet last week reaffirmed other iPad 2 rumors such as smaller design, cameras and tapered edges.

Update: it also needs to be noted that current iPhone 4 accessories don’t come with labels like “Made for the iPhone 4”. Instead, Apple went for a simple “Made for iPhone” that doesn’t point to the “iPhone 4” name in any way. Still, we think ‘iPad 2’ isn’t really a great product name at all - especially considering Apple hasn’t named a product “x 2” since the Apple II and the iPhone is the only product that has gotten some kind of a numeric update on each generation.

On a personal note, I remember reading on videogame magazines a few years back that Microsoft didn’t choose to name the second-generation Xbox ‘Xbox 2’ to avoid the sound of an “inferior product” against Sony’s PlayStation 3. And so Microsoft went for the Xbox 360 brand that would play nice with PS3. Following this theory, Apple might not want to call the second-gen iPad ‘iPad 2’ to avoid confusion and confrontation with the iPhone 4, or even iPhone 5.

Apple’s Furthest-North Store To Open in Anchorage, Alaska

ifoAppleStore reports Apple will open a new Store in Anchorage, Alaska in September, making it the furthest-north Apple Store for months and years to come. The report comes after a job listing on Apple’s website that suggests the company is looking for retail staff in the Fifth Avenue Mall (Anchorage) location. The store, reportedly in construction at the second floor or the mall in a space left by Eddie Bauer at the end of January, will become the most-northern Apple retail store at 61° north latitude, 20 miles south of the Arctic Circle.

The website also notes the new Store will be geographically located “above” the current most-northern Aberdeen store in Scotland and any Scandinavian city that might be chosen by Apple in the future. That’s quite an interesting detail to share and, why not, it’s also pretty cool. Apple is also rumored to use other spaces in the mall for stock, offices and Genius rooms, although no official construction plans have surfaced at this point.

New MacBook Pros To Feature Hard Drive / SSD Combo for Faster OS?

The new MacBook Pros are approaching the rumored February 24th release date, with several retailers sold out  and various Apple online stores reporting shipments within 3-5 business days – a timeframe that plays very well with the Thursday, Feb. 24th rumors. BGR has posted some interesting details on the new models, which will come in five different SKUs as previously reported and will be lighter at around a half-pound less than the current generation. BGR also claims the new MBPs will have bigger glass trackpads.

The curious tidbit, however, is about a hard drive / SSD combo that would allow the new MacBook Pros to store the OS on the faster solid state disks and load everything else straight off the regular (and perhaps very large in capacity) drive:

The next bit of information doesn’t quite make sense to us, but we have been told the OS on the laptops will be loaded to a separate (internal) 8-16GB SSD while everything else will remain on the regular hard drive. There will be options for just SSD drives but the base models will feature regular hard disks with the SSD combo for the OS.

The rumor is interesting because it replicates what many users have been doing over the years to achieve a faster OS and still manage to store hundreds of GBs of media on their computers: install the OS on a small internal SSD, offload media and apps on a second internal (spinning) hard drive. It’s not a full SSD setup, but it has worked well for thousands of Mac users in the past years.

Does this make sense to you? Personally, I think I will go with the single (and more expensive) SSD option, but this could be a good move to introduce SSD in the MacBook Pros without increasing costs for the base models and yet provide a full-featured SSD option for those who want the speed and efficiency of solid state.

InstaTodo: The To-Do App with Templates and Toodledo Sync

InstaTodo, a new iPhone app by the developers of MacStories’ favorite myPhoneDesktop, is a to-do app with a unique twist: it’s got Toodledo support for online sync, but it also lets you create templates to save time when adding new tasks and checklists. InstaTodo is a full-featured application to manage your tasks and projects that’s heavily based on the concept of making the creation of these tasks simpler and faster by delegating everything to templates.

You can build a list of templates for everything, from simple tasks to complex lists that require sub-tasks and multiple actions to complete. On top of that, you can turn any existing or completed task or list into a re-usable template – thus avoiding the need of having to start over every single time. It doesn’t come as a surprise in fact that most of the tasks we create and check off on a daily basis are based on the same criteria: for me, it’s “review this application on MacStories” or “install beta app and send feedback”. Everyone has a typical set of tasks that needs to be created and organized over and over. InstaTodo addresses this issue with a collection of built-in templates to choose from in the Settings, and the possibility to create new ones at any time. Read more

Affix Lets You Email Notes to Yourself With Prefixes, Gmail Filters Approve

Back in September I reviewed Captio, a simple iPhone app to send text or pictures to yourself via email. The concept behind Captio is simple and very appealing: when things to remember are too many and opening your GTD app of choice always feels like a thousand taps away, Captio offers you the 1-tap shortcut to dump anything into your mail inbox. Cool link to check out later? Email to myself in the inbox. Task to complete? Email. Youtube video? Same. Captio literally requires one tap to be ready to feed your inbox content to be consumed later, and for many it’s an insanely useful and time-saving little app.

Starting from this idea, developer Raul Rea Menacho created Affix, which is a $0.99 iPhone app that like Captio lets you email things to yourself, but gives you more control over the ‘Subject’ and ‘From’ fields. Captio, in fact, focuses on speed but doesn’t let you specify a subject for the notes you’re going to email yourself. Furthermore, incoming messages are received from Captio’s own email address – something that might not be OK for some users. Affix aims at becoming your new default solution for dumping tasks and ideas onto your inbox by providing a way to set multiple templates for subjects, completely editable from the main screen at any time. You can change the default email address to send messages to with the tap of a button but, more importantly, Affix relies on iOS’ mail interface to let you change the ‘From’, ‘CC’ and ‘BCC’ fields when you want to. In fact, Affix uses the in-app email UI you know and love and that’s it.

The interesting feature is the possibility to create the prefixes to achieve God-knows what complicated workflows in your Gmail or Apple Mail inboxes. Think about it: if you can set up different subject templates with prefixes and if you have control over the sender information, it means you can easily create filters and rules to turn these emails into actions. In Gmail, for instance, you could create a filter to label messages coming from Affix with the “Work” prefix as “Important”, star them and leave them in the inbox. Or again, you could set up Apple Mail to receive emails from Affix with a certain Subject and pass them along as tasks to OmniFocus. The possibilities given by this kind of control over email fields are almost endless and totally up to your geek dreams and needs.

Affix could use some UI refinements, but overall it’s a very good app. Think of it as “Captio for nerds” who would love to deeply customize the way emails can be turned into actions, tasks and reminders within a desktop or web mail program. Affix is available at $0.99 in the App Store. Read more

Amazon Takes Another Swing at Apple with New Kindle Commercial

Amazon released another Kindle commercial today, titled “The book lives on”, which is – again – clearly targeting the issues with the iPad as an eBook reader. Just like in the first commercial posted months ago, Amazon points out you can’t read books in direct sunlight on the iPad because of screen glare – something the Kindle addresses with its digital ink paper-like technology.

The latest commercial, however, showcases more features than direct-sunlight reading. The Kindle is touted as a lighter device with battery life “up to a month”, is being used by people in their mid twenties / thirties (Apple’s typical userbase) and has access to more than 800,000 books available in the Kindle Store. Last, the commercial is backed up by a catchy pop song that’s very similar to Apple’s usual commercial strategy. It’s a very nice commercial if you ask me, but I do see a trend here.

Check out the video below. In the meantime, Apple is rumored to introduce a Kindle-like display technology for a better reading experience in the iPad 2. [via TechCrunch] Read more

iSocial - Upload Photos from Camera Roll to Facebook and Twitter with A Single Tap

With Facebook integration in apps such as iLife, you’d think Apple would have already considered it across iOS. Well, until that happens, iSocial by CoreLab, is going to help. The Cydia Store will soon have a tweak that will allow you to upload images from your camera roll inside Photos.app to Facebook and Twitter with a single tap (after authentication of course).

Open Photos.app, select the photo you want in your camera roll then click the cloud button in the bottom right and choose your social network of choice. There, simple enough for you? We don’t know for sure if it works on bulk uploads but according to the video, it looks as if you can only send one at a time. iSocial will be available soon in Cydia Store at a cost of $1.99, via repository BigBoss.

[via iSpazio]

Socialcam Aims At Becoming Instagram for Video

There is no doubt  Instagram has changed the way iOS users look at image sharing on their iPhones: with a few taps, you can take a picture with your device, apply some filters to make it “cooler”, send it to the Instagram’s cloud to share it with your friends and everyone else. Instagram’s appeal lies in the simplicity of the concept, and 2 million users in a few months can’t be wrong.

But the App Store image sharing scene isn’t just about Instagram. Service picplz has collected a pretty huge userbase lately as well, making it the direct competitor to Instagram and one of the most popular apps to quickly share photos from an iPhone. Videos, however, have always been one kind of a problem for iOS aficionados: put simply, there is no easy way to share a video with your friends. Email is slow with attachments, Facebook’s video uploading isn’t intuitive at all (and again, uploading is slow), Youtube is more meant for videos that need to be viewed publicly.

TechCrunch offers a preview of Socialcam, a new iPhone app from the creators of Justin.tv that, like Instagram, will allow users to upload videos with a few taps and share them with their friends using Facebook’s Connect feature. Socialcam, currently in beta and launching in the first weeks of March, has a tabbed interface with a huge “Camera” button in the middle similar to Instagram’s UI and will let you upload, browse videos shared by others, like and comment them.

The app, which will be available for both Android and iPhone, is pretty simple: after firing it up you’re asked to log-in via Facebook Connect, which is currently the only login option. The app presents you with a list of your Facebook friends who are already on Socialcam and asks if you’d like to ‘Follow’ them (Socialcam uses a one-way follower model like Twitter). After that, you’ll spend most of your time looking at the stream of Socialcam videos posted by your friends. Each video is represented by four frame grabs — tapping on one will cause the video player to pop open the clip will start playing immediately. You can leave comments and ‘Like’ each video, and you can also tag your friends in clips. If you tag a friend who isn’t on Socialcam, it will still show up on their Facebook wall (and the video is playable directly from there — you don’t have to click a link).

You can sign up to be notified about Socialcam news here, and hopefully more details will be available in the coming weeks ahead of the app’s launch.