Mockup Your Next iPhone Application with Interface App

I’m not a designer of any sort, but I can recognize a well made interface, wallpaper or icon when I see one. My girlfriend says I’ve got good taste in things, I say all that time spent on MacThemes at least was useful for something. Also, writing reviews everyday helped in developing my sense of “graphical taste”, and I think I’ve come to a good point when my eyes spot a beautiful UI meters away from the screen.

Sometimes I try to think as a designer though, and I guess it must be a hell of a job to come up with the right interface, with everything at the right place, for the right application. With the myriad of iPhone apps out there, many of them sporting lickable stunning UIs, there’s no lack of inspiration or references, but on the other hand that could become a problem when trying to be unique, still respecting the interface guidelines provided by Apple. More important, mixing custom design elements with standard ones might result in having an app that feels somehow awkward and weird. Designers and developers should mockup, wireframe and sketch before trying to put in design their thoughts, and what better than an iPhone application that lets you..mockup an iPhone app?

Meet Interface, a mockup and prototyping tool for iPhone…on the iPhone.

Read more

Can the Kindle Compete on the iPad?

Jim Dalrymple, at The Loop:

“What Amazon has going for it is a strong, existing customer base. For the same reason Apple’s competitors find it hard to compete in the music and video space, Apple will find it hard to compete against Amazon.

However, I don’t think that will last long. Apple has one of the best mobile delivery systems ever built in iTunes. That is going to be key to e-book distribution for Apple and they have a proven track record. They can get it done.”

Grades, The Must Have App for Students

I was trying to think of a fancy title for this review, but quite simply, Grades is the must have application for iPhone toting students. If you’ve checked out our preview, already you know that Grades is shaping up to be the app that finally answers the question, “What grade do I need to get on my next test?” While you don’t necessarily have to shoot for an A-, certainly an application like this has huge potential for being on the homescreen. Forget pulling out a calculator - Grades makes an average calculation based on what you have in a matter of seconds.

Read more

Keypoint, The Mini Keynote. Review and Giveaway.

Being the busy business man I am, suit and all, there’s always all of those sweaty meetings to attend, things to present, and doughnuts to eat (mmm… doughnuts). The presentations are the worst part. I mean, I can deal with sitting in a room full of sexy Italians while dickin’ around on my iPhone, but presenting takes effort. And what if I forget my presentation materials? Uh-oh. With Keypoint, I can not only create those presentations while traveling in my million dollar limousine, I can do it fast and professionally.

Read more

Cathodique: Flashless Youtube Videos On Your Mac

I think Youtube is one of the websites where I waste most of my internet free time. I bookmark videos (especially music videos), watch rare and unreleased live performances of the artists I like, laugh at those compilations of internet memes, which never grow old. Together with Wikipedia, Youtube is a huge time waster, and since they rolled out the HTML5 playback beta feature, it’s even less memory consuming and stable to me.

But if Wikipedia has some dedicated clients (for iPhone, just check out Articles), the same doesn’t apply for Youtube: it’s quite difficult to come up with original ideas for a Youtube specific application other than allowing the users to download videos and let them browse videos as thumbnails in a grid.

Cathodique is an app I stumbled upon two days ago, it’s new, and it’s got some nice features that made me keep it in my Applications folder.

Read more

Air Contacts Winners Announced

Thanks everyone who entered the Air Contacts giveaway. Also, we’d like to thank the Project Cocoa developers for the promo codes they gave to MacStories.

Here are the winners:

Jonny

leesui

Kody

cjmegatron81

Davide85

You’ll receive the licenses in your inbox in a matter of a few hours. Stay tuned for other giveaways coming this week.

In the meantime, you can follow the official MacStories Twitter account as @macstoriesnet .

thermoCLine Updated - Adds Yojimbo, Things, Coda Support and More

thermoCLine, the quick entry text field for Mac OS X , has been updated and is now known as Threshold. The new version now sports better integration with a lot of 3rd party applications, including Things, Coda, Yojimbo, Omnifocus, Textmate and many more.

As the developer writes “the goal is to be a universal quick entry text field for all your applications”. And with the latest update, Threshold is on the right path to do so.

Echofon for Mac. A Review.

If you followed the latest MacHeist nanoBundle 2 happenings, you should know that Loren Brichter (atebits) teamed up with the MacHeist team to a) include Tweetie for Mac in the bundle and b) offer the possibility to enter the beta of Tweetie 2 as soon as it will be out. This thing alone made the MacHeist double their sales in two days. As you can guess, Tweetie 2 for Mac is one of the most anticipated apps of 2010, and the user base is literally going crazy to put their hands on Loren’s newest creation. But on the other hand, there are many users who got tired of waiting months and months to have a Twitter client which supported - say - native retweets and lists, so they changed their default application from Tweetie to another one. And in most cases, the “another one” is Echofon for Mac.

I never tried Echofon before, but I decided to give it a spin after all this talking about the Mac version being good, stable and faster than Tweetie. Let’s see what the kid’s got.

Read more