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Posts in reviews

Pulse Starts Moving Out Of RSS, Embraces Facebook

Pulse, one of the most popular news reading apps for iPad, just introduced a new feature that marks an important milestone for Alphonso Labs’ creation: Facebook support. Pulse now lets you log in with your Facebook account through Connect, enabling you to check on links shared in your stream, your friends’ status updates and your own Wall. The update is available now, for free.

Pulse has come a long way since its first release in May: first the developers got into some sort of fight with the New York Times and saw their app pulled from the App Store a few days after Steve Jobs mentioned it in a keynote, then they got back in the Store and added support for Posterous built into the app to let users quickly “like” posts coming from RSS sources through Posterous’ infrastructure. Read more

Gift Plan: Shopping Lists Just Got Sexy

I knew the guys at Glasshouse Apps made great apps. After all, they’re the folks behind Barista, Cellar and The Early Edition for iPad. They’ve always cared about delivering beautiful pieces of software packed with information and functionalities. But their latest adventure on the iPhone, Gift Plan?

It’s hot. It’s a gorgeous app that not only makes it easy to check on upcoming occasions (birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas) but it also serves as a nice shopping list / gift manager that helps you keep track of your friends tastes and stuff you’ve gifted them in the past. Pretty pixels are all over the place – so is a highly custom user interface – and I’m not even sure I’ll use this app regularly in the future, but I’m willing to give a try. Read more

360 Panorama: Simple Real-Time Panoramic Photos for iPhone

One of the apps I was really looking forward to just showed up in the App Store: Occipital’s 360 Panorama 3.0 for iPhone has been released, and it rocks. This app allows you to take panoramic photos using your iPhone or iPod Touch camera, but unlike many other similar apps available, 360 Panorama doesn’t force you to take multiple shots, stop, take another shot, stop again and then merge all the photos you took.

Occipital’s app does all that in the background and adds an Augmented Reality layer to the iPhone’s camera, meaning that you’ll see a 360° grid on screen and you’ll just have to slowly move the camera around you to build your panorama. It’s almost magical. Read more

I Finally Closed My Google Reader Tab. Reeder for Mac Is That Good.

RSS readers for Mac have been ignored for too long. After an enormous, and maybe initially unexpected, success on the iPhone and iPad, developer Silvio Rizzi set out to create the best new desktop RSS reader. A very simple goal. Perhaps the most difficult to accomplish.

See, they say RSS is dead. Some claim saying “something is dead” is dead. Truth is, Twitter users, Instapaper lovers and Foursquare dwellers don’t know what “dead” means anymore. Especially when it comes down to apps and services, everything can be dead or excellent in a matter of a few weeks. Just take a look at Instragram’s numbers. RSS isn’t for my father or my average non-tech savvy friends, but it definitely isn’t dead. It was just looking for a new desktop house to spend his retirement days in.

Here comes Reeder for Mac to redefine the rules, conventions, UI decisions and navigation schemes of RSS on the desktop.  Read more

Spaced: Beautiful App With The Latest News From Space

NASA is holding a press conference tomorrow “to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life”, and what better way to check on the coverage of the conference than Spaced app for iPhone and iPad?

I found this app in the App Store this morning while I was looking for my daily software fix. I’ve always been interested in reading space-related material, but I’ve never really subscribed to a set of sources with my RSS reader or bought magazines for that matter. I just followed a bunch of people who regularly tweet that kind of news and I don’t mind giving Reddit’s space section a read every two days or so. Read more

Paperless: Customizable Checklist App for iPhone

I’m not really that kind of user who’s into checklists, but I can spot a good app when I see one. I daily depend on OmniFocus and Simplenote for my projects, tasks and notes – yet I can see why many users prefer checklists (or just “lists”) on their mobile devices: they’re simple to play around with, yet they allow for a certain level of complexity.

Paperless for iPhone is based on this very same concept: it’s a simple app everyone could use, but it also lets you customize the way it works to achieve more complex setups. Read more

Notica: A Visual Database For The Most Important Things In Your Life

We love discovering and talking about new apps for the iPhone and iPad. In fact, we love covering apps so much that sometimes we feel a little guilty when we can’t seem to find the right app to feature on MS. This week though, also thanks to a huge Black Friday sale that kind of forced us to buy new apps, we’ve got plenty of material to feature.

Notica is a new iPhone app by Cleversome which aims at enabling you to collect the most important things, people and moments of your life inside a gorgeous and intuitive interface. Notica is a little, elegant app you might just fall in love with in a couple of minutes. Read more

Review: Cloud Calendar, Google Calendar Client for iPad

While searching for interesting alternatives to Apple’s own calendar application for iPhone and iPad, I stumbled upon Cloud Calendar by Clean Cut Code. Cloud Calendar is a new calendar app for iPad that’s specifically meant to work with Google Calendar – and being Google’s calendar solution part of my workflow already, I decided to give it a try.

Cloud Calendar is undoubtedly a very good app to manage your calendars on the iPad, it comes with an elegant interface design and it’s intuitive enough to let you add new events with one tap. It still needs some additional customization options though, the ones that could probably break the app for “calendar power users” that can’t live without edit mode in shared calendars. It’s a very good app overall, so read on past the break for all the details. Read more

Read It Later 2.3: New Article Parser, Better Attribution

Before falling in love with Instapaper, I was a loyal Read It Later user. I used the service for months and couldn’t be happier with it. So what made me switch to Instapaper? The fact that Marco Arment’s software had a better text parser – that little magic that takes content from the cluttered web and presents it in a beautiful, readable and uncluttered fashion.

Read It Later introduced a few minutes ago a new “insane” article parser, which doesn’t stop at text but extends the service’s capabilities to images and embedded videos. Plus, developer Nate Weiner has refined the whole text parsing process to make RIL smarter and faster at fetching articles.

Am I going to ditch Instapaper and jump on the Read It Later bandwagon all over again? No, but I’m going to give this a deep week-long second try. Read more