2010 was the year of the twitter client; so far this year, it’s to-do apps. Many of us don’t follow the GTD mantra, we want a simpler to-do app that has the basics: what I need to get done right now, what I need to do later, and what have I accomplished. Task Eater, by Tobias Wiedenmann (also made SongSwiper), has been teasing us for months on dribbble, the app’s UI has been very popular for quite some time. Read more
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Task Eater: Beautiful and Simple To-Do Management
Thermo: “Hot” Weather App by Robocat, Free
Robocat is a quite popular iOS development studio that released a weather app for the iPhone we have covered a few times on MacStories: Outside. Their latest effort in mobile weather software, Thermo, takes from where Outside left off with beautiful graphics and intuitive interface but adds a serious level of simplicity stripping away all the additional features found in the former app. Thermo is, in fact, free and aimed at letting you see the temperature of where you live.
The app comes with delicious interface design, indeed. In pure Robocat style, Thermo is really, really “hot”. You can select temperature in Celsius and Fahrenheit degrees, check on today’s temperature and the one from the day before. Tap on the thermometer to refresh. That’s it. In the settings, you can disable auto-locate, go ad-free ($0.99) and select your unit of choice.
Thermo is a simple weather app with a pretty design. Go download it here.
Scopy: A Visual Browser For Your Twitter Timeline
Scopy, a lightweight Twitter client developed by Ignition Software, aims at providing a unique visual experience for your Twitter timeline. Scopy, in fact, is a Twitter app for iPhone that displays all the photos shared by the people you follow, inline in your timeline. The app doesn’t support regular status updates as it only visualizes messages that contain one or more pictures. Read more
PhotoToMac Is The Fastest Way To Transfer Photos to OS X
I share a lot of screenshots and photos between my iPhone and Mac every day. Up until today, I’ve relied on third-party apps like iFiles to import pictures into its library and get them on my Mac using Cyberduck, which can connect to iFiles’ built-in WebDAV server. PhotoToMac, a $1.99 app by Galarina, improved my workflow with a system that allows me to import photos and videos without using additional Mac apps. Files shared with PhotoToMac, in fact, end up directly in the Finder. Read more
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Portal: A Revolutionary Browser for iPhone
Over the weekends, I usually spend a bit of my free time browsing the App Store and AppShopper, looking for new apps to try on my iPhone and iPad. Sometime I find interesting new things to test; sometimes I find great apps. Other times – but this is a very rare exception – I find really great apps I can’t stop using. This is the case with Portal Browser for iPhone.
I have been trying a lot of alternative browsers for iOS over the past months, as you may have noticed. Thanks to tweaks available in Cydia, I also installed several modifications to make Apple’s Safari a better, faster, more functional browser. Still, testing new browsers from third party developers has become one of my favorite “work hobbies”, as I believe there’s great room for experimentation and innovation in a mobile app to browse the Internet. I do believe we have only scratched the surface with mobile browsers on iOS and Android which, if you think about it, haven’t done much besides porting the desktop experience to a smaller screen. Portal for iPhone is the first step towards a much better approach to mobile browsing, entirely based on touch interactions, features and menus developed with the iPhone in mind. Don’t get me wrong: Safari is an excellent browser. But Portal, which is sold at $1.99 in the App Store, is more than the usual alternative: it’s a completely different take on mobile browsing. Read more
DropVox: Save Voice Memos to Dropbox In Seconds
DropVox is an iPhone app I discovered in the App Store over the weekend, it’s incredibly simple yet I wonder why I didn’t think of using something like this before: DropVox uploads voice memos instantly to the cloud, and more specifically to Dropbox – the service I use on a daily basis for almost anything in my workflow, from music to app libraries.
Developed by Irradiated Software (the same folks behind MacStories’ favorite Cinch for Mac), DropVox works like this: you fire it up for the first time and log in with your Dropbox account. Every time you want to record a voice memo, open the app, hit the huge Record button, then stop and wait for the file to land in your Dropbox. Boom, just like that. No file management, no renaming features, no time stamps – just record and upload.
DropVox is a microphone for DropBox. Get it now, while it’s still priced at $0.99 as a limited time offer.
MacStories Product Review: Jawbone JAMBOX Portable Speaker
In my review of the Sonos S5 wireless music system, I made the bold statement that I can’t live without music. It’s true, and apps for the iPhone and iPad are only making the need of music anywhere, anytime more ubiquitous than ever. With music accessible at any time, from any device, the need of high-quality portable gear becomes real.
The Sonos S5 is a top-notch music system that’s deeply integrated with iOS and Internet services, but you can’t carry it around. You can’t have it with you at your friend’s house (well, unless you plan on configuring it on his router and computers), you can’t have it at the beach, at the bar, wherever. The Sonos S5 is great, but it’s a “desktop system”. The Jawbone JAMBOX wireless speaker, which I was provided a review unit a few weeks ago, is a different story, and an original one: it’s a tiny, ultra-portable, hi-fi audio speaker and speakerphone that you can carry in you hand or throw in your bag / backpack. It’s really, really small yet it delivers impressive audio quality throughout small to medium rooms. It’s completely integrated with the iOS platform and can double as a speakerphone that’s, again, integrated with Apple’s Phone app.
After the break, you’ll find my review of the Jawbone JAMBOX after three weeks of testing in lots of different rooms and situations with different people and music genres. I really tried to make the JAMBOX fit with any possible scenario I could think of. But I can already say this small and user-friendly speaker is the best thing that ever happened to my mobile music. Read more
Cloud Connect Pro: A Finder for iPad
iOS devices don’t have a Finder, and in many ways that’s a good thing. Apple simplified the approach to file management by making the filesystem virtually invisible to the users and delegating “database functionalities” to apps, which are nothing but containers of files, data and information. Apps like Pages, PlainText or the Photos app itself keep actual files together, it’s just that on iOS users aren’t forced to manage, organize, clean and sort them like on the desktop. It’s a simpler and more intuitive approach. For many, though, file management sometimes is necessary. Either because of an app that doesn’t support sharing (thus documents can’t get out) or working needs that require access to a specific file in a specific location, several users over the years have lamented the impossibility to have a Finder-like system on their iPhones and iPads. We have also seen apps like Berokyo trying to bring folders and files together on iOS by making compromises with iOS’ default interface style and features.
Cloud Connect Pro, a new app by Antacea I’ve been testing for the past week, aims at bringing true Finder-like options and file management capabilities to the iPad with deep cloud integration. This app can connect to any computer, Dropbox or iDisk instance and WebDAV / SFTP / FTP server to access folder structures, files and media. It can stream music and videos, double as a lightweight but useful VNC client, open and preview document and much more. Read more