Months after its original release, I’m still using Aweditorium as my primary “music discovery tool” on the iPad. The app is nothing but a grid containing interesting independent artists and bands the Aweditorium developers think you should check out. You can listen to songs directly from the app, send them to an external speaker with AirPlay, run the app in the background or stay in there and check out bios, interviews and lyrics while you’re listening. It makes for a great way to discover new music when you have some free time to dedicate to music. But in Aweditorium, you won’t see your favorite artists coming up every once in a while, as the app is entirely based on music you’ve likely never heard of before. That’s where (I think) Australian music start-up Jammbox got inspired to develop Discovr for iPad. Read more
Posts in reviews
Discovr for iPad: An Interactive Map of Music
Sociable Updates Your Status On Multiple Social Networks At Once
A few weeks ago I reviewed Update, a simple $0.99 iPhone app that can update your status on Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, LinkedIn and Hyves with a single screen, all at once. In what seems to be a renewed trend in the App Store, here comes Sociable, another take on the “share on multiple websites at the same time” idea. Sociable can share messages on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. Every time you want to share a new status update, all you have to do is choose the services you want to send it to.
So why would anyone prefer this over Update, which we already covered and liked? Well, Sociable comes with a beautiful interface and a great icon on your home screen. I couldn’t help but notice the pixels that went into this app. The sharing screen, for instance, kind of reminds me of the compose window in Twitter for iPad. The wooden background and icon are elegant.
Sociable is a $0.99 purchase in the App Store.
Handoff Pushes Web Pages From Your Computer to Any iOS Device
One of the features many users wish Apple implemented by default on OS X is the possibility to easily and quickly send any kind of content to iOS over the air. Through the Internet, in seconds, from a computer to the iPhone or iPad. We’re not talking “sync” here: I’m talking about web links, images, maps, phone numbers, Youtube videos “pushed” instantly to an iOS device. The other way around, from iOS to the Mac, would be welcome as well: instead of relying on third-party apps, one could save content and information to consume later on a Mac. Like a video you don’t want to watch while you’re out because, honestly, Instapaper wasn’t meant for video.
Luckily for us, a number of apps that enable OS X to iOS communication over the air have surfaced in the past years, and today we’re taking a look at a new one. The app / service is called Handoff, and it’s probably the simplest I’ve stumbled upon so far. It allows you send web links from your browser to the iPhone or iPad (the iOS app is universal) through a bookmarklet or extension. Read more
Get Lion’s Launchpad On Your Mac Now with QuickPick
One of the most intriguing features of Lion that Apple previewed at its “Back to the Mac” event in October was, in my opinion, the Launchpad. In pure iPad fashion, Launchpad will be “a home for your apps”, with fast and easy access to software downloaded from the Mac App Store, or folders created to better organize these apps. It all looks like an iPad’s Springboard brought to the Mac, with pages and iOS-like folders.
QuickPick, a $9.99 app available on the Mac App Store, brings some of the features we’ll see on Lion’s Launchpad this summer to OS X now. QuickPick lets you access apps and folders through an overlay interface that will sit on top of your currently opened apps, Finder windows and Spotlight searches. Once installed, QuickPick can be invoked either through a keyboard shortcut, a click on its dock icon or an active OS X corner. As QuickPick’s grid comes in the foreground, you’ll be able to arrange apps and create pages for your most used apps, folders or documents. Almost any file that can be dragged out of the Finder can be taken into QuickPick’s grid. In the app, you can adjust the grid’s spacing and text size. You can even create multiple pages of apps / documents thanks to a “Page Dock” that allows you to set up as many “grids” as you want. Alternatively, you can move between pages with a three-finger swipe. Again, just like the Launchpad in Lion.
QuickPick, of course, doesn’t bring all the features and details we saw demoed in Launchpad, such as the iOS folders or page indicators. If you drag a folder from the Finder to QuickPick, in fact, that folder won’t open in-app but will launch a new Finder window instead. I guess it’s a fair trade-off, considering that this app is running on Snow Leopard and we haven’t seen enough of Launchpad anyway. Still, everything’s smooth and works just as advertised.
QuickPick is available at $9.99 in the Mac App Store, and it gives us a taste of things to come in Lion by providing an alternative solution for OS X 10.6. Will Launchpad be different and more refined come Lion’s public release? For sure. But until then, you should give QuickPick a try. Check out our brief demo video of the app below.
Read more
Listings For iPhone Is The Better Way To Browse Craigslist
Craigslist is a very weird and scary place depending on what you’re looking for. If it’s not the poor man’s eBay, then it’s definitely somewhere down the alley of sketch-city. The website looks terrible and it’s hard to navigate, listings include everything from broken computer parts to iPhone repair services, and you never know what creepy people you’ll end up meeting in person when its time to exchange goods. What Craigslist needs is a better way to organize and clearly display information.
Listings for the iPhone makes Craigslist easier to navigate while providing tools to help you keep track of items you want to continually check up on. Whether you’re searching for a used MacBook Pro, a new Motorcycle, or looking for a web designer, Listings is a much more intuitive way to search Craigslist.
Translator Free Translates Webpages & Text On The Fly
When you run across a piece of text that you can’t translate, do you find yourself in Google Translate, copying & pasting the text, before trying to determine what was exactly said? Why not cut out the middle-man and download Translator Free for OS X? Available on the Mac App Store, Translator Free is a menubar application that allows you to drag and drop websites and text for immediately translation. If you’re visiting our friends at iSpazio for example, you can simply drag the favicon from Google Chrome into the menubar icon, and a new tab will open with the translated page. It’s very cool.
If you’re throwing Chinese insults at me, watch out! Never before have friends on Facebook Chat been caught off guard so quickly now that I suddenly have language-esque superpowers. You can highlight a piece of text, hold your mouse button down, and simply drag it to Translator Free for instant translation. A window will pop-up allowing you to compare the original and translated texts.
Free in the Mac App Store, students, researchers, and anyone coming across foreign text they’re not familiar with can find Translator Free useful without having to go through the web browser. You can catch some great tutorials on Translator Free’s homepage, and download it here on the Mac App Store.
Outside for iPhone Comeback: Retina Graphics, Free Notifications
The last time I reviewed Outside for iPhone, a beautiful weather app by Robocat, I focused on the interface design that went into the app and the fact that, unlike other weather apps for iPhone, it allowed users to set up push notifications for certain weather conditions. Stuff like, “hey, perhaps you’d like to wear a t-shirt today” or “make sure to grab your gloves”. It was a clever system, easy to understand and packed inside fancy graphics that made Outside truly stand out in the crowded App Store market.
Months passed, the iPad and iPhone 4 came out and Outside basically disappeared. No word from the developers for months, then a “we’re working on it”. See, I really wanted to use Outside on my iPhone 4 but I couldn’t stand the fuzzy graphics. With version 1.2, released last night and available at a discounted price of $0.99, Outside makes a comeback with totally redesigned graphics updated for the Retina Display. Read more
With Version 1.1, Verbs Becomes A Great AIM Client for iPhone
When I reviewed Verbs for iPhone a few weeks ago, I was disappointed by the lack of AIM support and the overall feeling that the app was rushed to the App Store. Verbs came with a delicious interface design and cool ideas such as a Messages-like approach to IM chats, but the fact that I couldn’t plug into my AIM account and I was forced to use Google Talk was a major downside for me. Also, there was no support for local notifications: once you were out of the app, you wouldn’t know if someone was writing to you on Google Talk. The app was beautiful and elegant, but I couldn’t use it at all.
The latest 1.1 version released in the App Store fixes all these issues, and has become the best AIM client for iPhone for me. Verbs is the same elegant and refined app I tested weeks ago, only I can actually use it now. Read more
NoteNow Brings Sticky Notes To The Lock Screen
Even though I have an iPhone, an iPad and two Macs syncing my tasks and projects all day long through OmniFocus’ online service, I often forget about stuff. The most trivial things, like buy some iTunes credit or check on the car’s gas. I guess the reason is that I’ve never settled to bring these common, real-life tasks and activities into my GTD workflow, which is mainly set up for work purposes. I know it’s wrong as GTD should be for everything and anything, still it happens.
NoteNow, a simple $0.99 app developed by Manolo Sanudo, aims at fixing this issue with world’s most popular organization system: sticky notes. Who hasn’t written down things on a sticky note at least once? I have. And boy, you can trust sticky notes when they’re in sight. They make you remember you have to do stuff by looking at you in the eye. But how could you ever make sticky notes work on an iPhone, where there’s no desktop to attach notes to and Apple doesn’t want developers to use private APIs to enable secret, and perhaps dangerous for the iOS experience, features? Read more