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Aelios Lets You Explore The World’s Weather with an Innovative Concept

Released earlier today in the App Store and created by Jilion, developers of the beautiful SublimeVideo HTML5 video player, Aelios for iPad is a new weather app that I’ve been testing over the past week, which aims at offering a fresh and innovative experience for “exploring weather” on the tablet like no other. The app, rather than displaying complex data sets and graphs to showcase current weather and forecasts with every possible detail, wants to give users a great new way to browse an interactive map on screen that’s also able to automatically tell the app the location you might want to check out.

The concept is new, so here’s how Aelios works: the main UI is made of a map and a “ring” you can dial and move on the map. When you move the ring on the map, it automatically locks to the most highly populated location it finds; so, for example, if you head over Italy quickly, the ring will lock into Rome by default, and same applies for London in the UK. If you do want, however, to fine tune your location search and see the map in greater detail, you can zoom in and choose any other location recognized by the software, or simply hit the button and fetch your current position. You can also manually search for a location thanks to the search button in the upper right hand corner. Once you’ve found a location you’re interested in, it’s time to focus on the ring. By default the ring displays time in a convenient 24 hour format that places midnight at the top and noon at the bottom in a virtual watch. The watch also shows the hours of dark and light, and visualizes how many hours of the current day are left before tomorrow. As you tap on the screen, weather icons for current conditions and forecasts will jump next to the ring to show temperature and wind depending on the time of the day. Everything happens around the ring and virtual watch locked to your location, basically. But if you try to rotate the dial, the ring switches to a different view and shows the next 7 days of forecasts, rather than just today. The concept is the same with icons next to the virtual watch, temperature, wind, and so forth. When you want to go back to the 24 hour view, rotate again and you’re set. The animations, the graphics, the sounds are top-notch in Aelios. The app supports both landscape and portrait mode and allows you to tweak units in the Settings.

At $2.99 in the App Store, Aelios is a beautiful app by Jilion that doesn’t disappoint when it comes to quickly checking out weather forecasts through an innovative UI that might be disorienting at first, but grows over time as it makes the entire experience of browsing maps and tapping around real fun. Make sure you don’t miss the promo video on the app’s website.

Zootool for iPhone Collects Your Visual Bookmarks

Zootool, a visual bookmarking platform I had the chance to review when it first came out almost two years ago, has launched an official app a few weeks ago in the App Store, taking the full Zootool experience to the iPhone. If you’re already a Zootool user, you know what to expect from the service: Zootool allows you to collect anything from the web anytime and anywhere thanks to a series of bookmarklets that are capable of grabbing images and videos, as well as entire webpages to save as bookmarks in your account; accounts can be either public and private, with the former option allowing you to share your web discoveries with other Zootool users, a vibrant community that collects cool inspirational resources and links from around the web. Items in your “zoo” can be tagged and collected in packs, plus the service, unlike other bookmarking tools like Pinboard and Delicious, adds a whole visual layer to saved websites and files thanks to inline previews for everything. Zootool is highly visual, and the iPhone app is the perfect replacement for the web browser while you’re on the go.

The main screen gives you access to your bookmarks, the public timeline of people you follow, your profile and active / popular / featured users. Users can be followed in-app, you can check out their recent “lasso catches”, and all entries and links to other web profiles (like Twitter). Entries from others can be copied and opened in Safari, viewed inline or added to your collection; Zootool for iPhone provides the same editing interface of the web app to modify tags, descriptions and links, but the developers also went as far as adding a new bookmarklet built specifically for Mobile Safari that will help you save images and pages from the browser. In the “Your Zoo” view, the app allows you to view all your entries, items organized by packs and tags. Youtube videos can’t be viewed inline as in the web app, but everything else performs exactly as you would expect from Zootool, only it’s been ported to a native app. One cool thing I’ve noticed: if a URL is in your clipboard, Zootool will automatically detect it and ask you to add it to your Zoo.

Zootool for iPhone is a great example of how a full-featured web app should be brought to a smaller screen. The app is elegant, fast, gorgeous to look at and retains all the functionalities seen on the web. You can download Zootool for iPhone at $1.99 from the App Store.

Tweed for iPad Filters Your Timeline, Integrates with Instapaper

Released earlier today at $2.99 in the App Store, Tweed is a Twitter client for iPad aimed at presenting you links from your Twitter timeline. Instead of visualizing all tweets from people you follow, mentions and direct messages as most Twitter clients do, Tweed filters links out of your timeline, enabling you to “drag them” onto a stack on the right that will generate previews for the selected webpages. As you log in with your Twitter credentials, Tweed will display tweets that contain links in a narrow sidebar on the left; if you place your finger on a tweet, you’ll be able to move in on the right, and go back to the timeline. The more tweets you save in the right panel, the more pages Tweed will stack on top of each other, letting you tap on them to read the original article. Very simple. When in web view mode, you can check out the normal page or switch to text-only mode. When you’re done reading, you can tap on the tweet bubble and flick it to delete it from the stack.

One cool feature I’ve noticed in Tweed is direct Instapaper integration. Tweed comes with a Read Later tab, but unlike other apps that support Instapaper and also have their own reading queue, Tweed’s reading list mirrors every link to Instapaper – if you save 5 articles in there, those 5 articles will be immediately sent to Instapaper. If you can’t find enough reading material in your timeline, Tweed’s developers have baked some curated Twitter lists into the app showcasing relevant Apple and tech news, world news, and so forth. The selection is pretty good, although limited for now given the early nature of the app.

Tweed won’t replace your default Twitter client, but it may come in handy if you’re looking for a way to turn your timeline into a list of links you’re likely interested in. You can download Tweed at $2.99 from the App Store.

Tweet It Makes Tweeting from iOS Simple and Integrated

There’s no shortage of Twitter clients with embedded web views on the iPhone and iPad: most Twitter apps nowadays allow you to check out a webpage inline without leaving the timeline and jumping to Safari, thus making it easy to follow links from people you follow and go back to the main view in seconds. However, most of the time I still find myself discovering articles and stuff I want to tweet when browsing the Internet using Safari or iCab mobile: whether it’s a new post by Ben Brooks or Shawn Blanc, or a cool video I stumble upon on YouTube, I want to be able to easily send a webpage from the browser to my Twitter client of choice. But that’s usually not possible, as Twitter clients typically don’t offer integration with the system browser in the way I want – that is, being able to send both the webpage title and URL from Safari to the client. And those apps that do offer bookmarklets to send a link from the browser straight to the app are often limited to the link itself and not the title, which I always have to copy and paste manually.

Tweet It, a new $1.99 universal app released today, provides a sweet solution to tweet links to webpages including the title of the original source, also allowing you to set up a custom URL shortening service for a bit of personalization, and other options to make tweeting super simple. Tweet It is solely focused on enabling you to tweet links: the app supports multiple Twitter accounts but there’s so timeline at all – it’s an app to tweet links you found interesting. Sure you can send regular status updates too, but the focus on browser integration is made obvious by buttons to shorten a link using CloudApp, bit.ly and goo.gl, or an embedded web view that, through another button, lets you open webpages within Tweet It and choose to insert a title, URL or title+URL in the message. Alternatively, if you’ve copied a link from Safari and you launch Tweet It, the app will detect the link in your clipboard and offer you the possibility to fire it off to Twitter. There’s more: with the installation of a bookmarklet, you’ll be able to send a webpage title and URL from Safari to Tweet It in seconds. In any way you want to share a page, Tweet It has you covered.

Tweet It is minimal, simple and powered by a delicious UI. It runs both on the iPhone and iPad, and it’s got some clever ideas to make tweeting links a real pleasure. You can download Tweet It at $1.99 from the App Store.

Picturescue Recovers Photos from iOS Backups

When an iPhone or iPad gets stolen or lost, we immediately worry about our personal data stored on the device (like email, contacts, passwords and history) being accessed by someone else with no good intentions. Whilst Apple’s free Find my iPhone service allows us to easily block and wipe a device that’s no longer with us, the loss of personal media like photos and videos is something we can’t fix remotely, at least not yet. Picturescue, a new Mac app by developers Pádraig Kennedy and John Ryan, provides a dead-simple solution to recover photos from an iOS device: rather than plugging directly into an iPhone or iPad, Picturescue reads the backup stored locally on your computer to retrieve photos and export them in their original format to a new location. This means that, provided you’ve synced your device with iTunes and you’ve decided to save an unencrypted backup (Picturescue can’t read encrypted iTunes backups for now), you’ll be able to view photos and export them at any time. It’s as easy as firing up the software, selecting the device in the sidebar, and choosing the photos to export.

Picturescue can be downloaded for free if you only want to view photos found in the backup file, and a $4.99 purchase gives you the possibility to export. The lack of support for encrypted backups is a major downside, but considering iTunes defaults to unencrypted backups on Mac and Windows machines, this shouldn’t be a problem for all those people that don’t care about password-protecting their iOS device backups. Get the app here.

3do: A Reminder App with a 3D Twist

There’s no shortage of reminder apps on the iPhone: from the excellent Due app that also works on the iPad with Dropbox synchronization of alerts and tasks to Notificant, a cloud solution that fires off notifications on iOS devices, Macs and web browsers, one could say reminder apps are the new Twitter clients or GTD apps of the App Store ecosystem. As the iPhone is always with us, being able to be easily reminded of important things has become a priority for iOS software developers. 3do, a new app by Cleversome, aims at reinventing the mobile notification space by offering an innovative interface based on swipe gestures that, instead of forcing you to switch between multiple screens to get your alarms and due dates going, allows you to do everything in one screen thanks to beautiful 3D animations within a single menu.

3do is made of two screens: the reminders you set up, and the settings, accessible with a pull-up gesture from the main screen. Think of Twitter’s popular pull-to-refresh gesture, only applied at the bottom and aimed at opening a new window. It works pretty well, though it may be unintuitive at first. The easiest way to get how 3do works is by adding a new reminder: tap the + button, and begin typing to add a description. Once the reminder is written down, swipe on it to rotate the view and get to another menu with icons to mark a reminder as complete or favorite, share it via email or SMS, or delete it. If you swipe again on the reminder, the view rotates a second time to reveal the alarms you can assign, and I deeply appreciate the fact that you can set up two by default – say one 15 minutes before and one “on time.” But there’s more: keep swiping and the cube rotates to show due settings like “due once”,  “due daily”, “due weekly” and “due monthly”, which are pretty useful to create repeating timers and reminders for the future. One last swipe, and the 3D view gets you back to the original screen. Is 3D a gimmick in 3do? Maybe, but at least it works well. I’ve been beta testing the app, and whilst there’s no doubt the whole thing has fancy effects to capture your attention, I believe using animations to save space and put everything in a single window is actually quite clever. Like I said, using 3D effects surely isn’t “necessary”, but in this app is functional to the main purpose.

3do has also got an intelligent implementation of alarm notifications and snooze options. Besides letting you assign multiple alarms and due dates, when a reminder is due you’ll get the standard iOS notification that brings you to app; but once a reminder nears its overdue time, 3do displays a menu telling you that’s the last alarm, and you can choose to set up a new one in 15 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, or just mark it as complete.

You can download 3do at $4.99 from the App Store. The app might be a little pricey for the average iOS user looking for a simple reminder solution that works across devices (3do doesn’t have iPad or web counterparts at the moment), but if you’re looking for an innovative way to manage and schedule reminders on the iPhone 3do has got you covered. Check out more screenshots below. Read more

PhotoForge 2 Released, Brings Powerful Image Editing to iOS

Announced last week as a successor to the popular lightweight image editing software for iPhone and iPad PhotoForge (which we reviewed here), PhotoForge 2 is a complete rewrite of the original app, sporting a completely new UI, more image editing features, new export options and a faster engine to bring semi-professional editing to the iPhone. In spite of the iPad version being advertised in the launch promo video, PhotoForge 2 is available today at $0.99 on the iPhone, with the iPad version coming in the next weeks as a Universal update. The GhostBird Software developers have decided to make PhotoForge 2 a standalone app, as the App Store doesn’t come with an upgrade policy and they felt that version 2.0 was worth paying a separate price. Indeed, the app sports several new functionalities and paying $0.99 now with the promise of an iPad update for free relatively soon sounds like a great deal. Plus, once the iPad update comes out the app will be priced at $2.99 for the remainder of May, although the full retail price is $4.99. That means you can get the app now and save $4, or wait for the iPad update and still save $2. The app has started propagating this morning in iTunes and is available here.

PhotoForge 2 is a full-featured image editing app for iOS, perhaps the most powerful available on the App Store. Whilst I can’t go through all the features now as I’ve played with the iPhone app for less than an hour (but we’ll make sure to have a full review once the iPad app is released), I can say there’s a notable difference when using the PhotoForge 1 and this 2.0 update. PhotoForge 2.0 has got a whole new interface revolving around the concept of “docks” (like the standard OS X one) that are basically a list of icons and buttons to navigate through the various image editing functions. Once you load a photo from your Camera Roll and start a new project,  you can tap on the FX button in the bottom toolbar to scroll through a series of effects to apply to your photo in real-time, most of them being similar to the ones offered in apps like Instagram and Camera+. In PhotoForge 2.0, photos fit to screen by default, but you can double-tap them to edit them at full resolution looking at all pixels on screen. As I said effects are applied in real-time, with a loading bar at the top showing progress – on the iPhone 4, everything is quite smooth and responsive, though I expect the iPad 2 version to be a little snappier given the A5 processor. There’s lot of stuff to play with in PhotoForge 2.0, including layers, exposure control, brightness and contrast, or standard RGB levels. It feels like a mini Photoshop version, ported to a smaller screen with controls rewritten for multi-touch. Of course, you can’t expect all the functionalities of Photoshop to be available in PhotoForge 2.0, but this thing does undoubtedly have more options and settings than the average iOS photo editor. You can tweak opacity and blend modes, create and duplicate layers or fill a new one with color, copy and paste masks or apply sharpening and noise reduction.

Because the feature list is huge and I’ve only been playing with the app this morning, here’s a list of functionalities for comparison’s sake:

  • Curves & Levels with RGB, CMYK and LAB colorspaces.
  • Sharpening & Noise Reduction
  • HSL & Channel Mixer controls
  • Brightness & Contrast, Exposure, Vibrance
  • White Balance, Shadows & Highlights
  • Auto Exposure & Auto White Balance
  • Precise Image Cropping and Resizing
  • Customize your film, lens, flash and much more to create amazing looking photographs with the Pop! Cam add-on
  • Great Black & White and Sepia filters
  • Lomo, Gothic, Dreamy and 3D
  • Crystallize, Pointallize and Impressionist.
  • Bulge, Pinch & Twirl

PhotoForge 2.0 is meant for both for professional and casual users (thanks to an intuitive interface), and I have a feeling the iPad counterpart, with larger real screen estate, will make image editing even better as I’ve noticed editing on the iPhone can be sometimes a little frustrating because of the smaller screen – meaning, when applying some effects or setting other options there’s a chance you won’t see the full image in front of you, and the iPad should fix this issue. However, I was impressed by the sharing functionalities of PhotoForge 2.0, which include Flickr, Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter sharing, FTP and Dropbox uploading, or standard emailing and saving to the Camera Roll. The selection of services is really impressive and the Dropbox addition quite welcome, though I’d like to see direct CloudApp integration as well.

As it stands now, I think PhotoForge 2.0 is the most powerful and beautiful image editor for iPhone. The iPad version is something I’m really looking forward to, and while you wait you should get the app here at $0.99. It’s simply a great update.

DropIn Enhances Dropbox with Menubar Drag & Drop, Filters, Previews

I rely on Dropbox on a daily basis to sync files between computers, my iTunes music library and have access to folders shared with the MacStories team or my friends. In fact, Dropbox is the first app I install on every new Mac or fresh installation of OS X, being the service that stores my most important data, app libraries, and more. But for as much as I love Dropbox and couldn’t work without it anymore, I loathe the desktop Mac app. Not the syncing service that displays a badge next to my files or folders, or the preference panel that (in the latest version) allows me to set up selective sync: I can’t stand the menubar utility, which is an icon that does nothing but displaying my available space on Dropbox and changing its looks depending on whether Dropbox is syncing or not. It doesn’t do anything else, and more importantly it sits in the menubar but it doesn’t let me drag files onto it for quick uploading.

Meet DropIn, a $1.99 utility from the Mac App Store that enhances your local Dropbox installation by letting you drag files in the menubar, browse recent files, set up notifications and filters. Sure, it’s another icon in the menubar, but at least it lets me do a bunch of things the official app can’t. DropIn has two main functionalities: it displays a preview of recently changed files and enables you to create filters for the files you want to see in there; it comes with a Droplet feature that allows you to move files to Dropbox by dragging them onto the menubar, avoiding the Finder altogether. In DropIn’s preferences I told the app to simply copy files into my Dropbox main directory, but you can choose sub-folders as well or enter your account ID to upload files to the public folder and get a link in your clipboard automatically. This one’s a feature I’ve been looking forward to have on my Mac because I dislike stacks in my dock, and I’d rather have an icon in my menubar instead of having to open a new Finder window every time. And it works great in DropIn.

As for recently changed files and notifications, this is something you can do with the official Dropbox app and Growl, but DropIn lets you set up the number of updated files to display in the dropdown menu and it’s also got inline previews and a button to reveal a file in the Finder. Furthermore, you can set up advanced rules in the Filters section to show / hide specific files and make sure you’re only being notified about things you care about, and not those info.plist files from iTunes.

At $1.99, DropIn is a great addition to Dropbox, if only for the drag & drop functionality that makes it incredibly easy to move anything to your personal cloud. You can get the app from the Mac App Store here. Check out more screenshots below. Read more

ForeverSave 2 Review: Universal Auto-Save And Versioning On Your Mac

Everybody dreads it, the moment you realize that the document you had been working on for an hour is lost, all because you hadn’t saved it and there had been a power outage or the program crashed! It seems absurd that, in 2011, so few apps have implemented an auto-save feature that saves your document periodically as you work on it. A few apps do have an auto-save feature, including the Microsoft Office suite (saving me more than a few times) – but the vast majority don’t.

For those applications that don’t feature auto-saving there may be a reasonable solution that requires very little hassle from you. Tool Force bills their recently released version 2 of ForeverSave as enabling “universal auto-save and backup versioning for all documents”. I gave the application a go for the past week so jump the break for a full review and see whether it pans out as a feasible solution.

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