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Photopod Aggregates Your Photos From the Cloud: Flickr, Facebook, Dropbox, Twitter

It’s been rumored that with the next versions of iOS, and most notably the MobileMe service, Apple will heavily rely on the cloud to allow users to store media like photos, music and videos online and stream them at any time on the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. A move to cloud-based storage would allow the company to produce cheaper devices with less internal storage, and let users access personal content anywhere as long as an Internet connection is available at the same time.

Photopod, an iPhone app available in the App Store and developed by Dear Future Astronaut, wants to become the ultimate photo aggregator and manager by providing a unified interface to browse pictures stored on a variety of online services. Think of it as a way to access content anywhere (and download it) using an application that does everything automatically through a tabbed “accordion” UI that brings Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Dropbox, Picasa and your Camera Roll all together.

Once authorized with the aforementioned services in the Settings (note that Twitter will only fetch images shared through TwitPic on your account), the main screen of the app will display a series of vertical tabs you can expand to reveal their contents – namely photos. As you open a tab, a list of thumbnail previews slides down allowing you to see all the photos you’ve stored locally or online. Tapping on the share button in the upper right corner will let you select multiple photos at once to upload them to a specific service. It’s very cool as it also lets you upload pictures from one service to another, or from your device to the cloud. You can also download photos to view them offline, or enter a basic editing mode that enables you to rotate and crop pictures. Everything is kept simple and accessible. Flickr, Facebook and Picasa even get menus for sets and menus you’ve organized your photos with.

I like Photopod because it brings the most popular photo sharing services together into a beautiful package that’s easy to use, fast, reliable and intuitive. The app is available here at $1.99, don’t miss it.

Facebook Messenger Brings Free VoIP Calls to Facebook Chat

Facebook Messenger, a new iPhone application by the Crisp App developers, promises to bring the ultimate Facebook Chat experience to iOS. The app, unlike several alternatives that use Facebook Chat to let you communicate with your friends in a native iPhone interface, doesn’t only provide a clean design for chat, conversation views and photo attachments, it also lets you receive and place free VoIP calls through Facebook. That’s right: Facebook Messenger leverages the Facebook contact list to allow you to call your friends, for free, over the Internet. Read more

The Future of MobileMe: A Mix of Facebook, Foursquare and uStream?

Cult of Mac is today reporting that some of the new features in a supposedly revamped MobileMe could include a live video streaming service, a location based check-in system and a geo-tagging service. The information was gathered from an anonymous source that said Apple is working ambitiously on cloud computing features for MobileMe, particularly to enable sharing data and location-based services.

The centerpiece of the re-invigorated MobileMe would be a “dynamic webpage that sounds like a mashup of Facebook, Foursquare and Ustream.” This page would aggregate information garnered from a users iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch including the users location, photos and videos. This sounds like a similar service to what Apple was granted a patent to last year regarding ‘Social Workflows’ which would allow simple sharing of information with others.

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Tapu: iPad Browser That Looks Like Chrome, Plugs Into Facebook

Looking for great alternatives to Mobile Safari, I have stumbled upon a lot browsers for the iPad. Some of them are really nice, like Grazing and Browser+; some them are the result of strange experiments gone terribly wrong, like Super Prober. Overall, the trend amongst developers seem to be that of trying to reinvent Safari by adding features over features that, without good software engineering and quality control, may end up cluttering an app, making everything barely usable. It happened with many browsers I have tested so far. Read more

DesignScene: An Inspiration Browser For Graphic Designers

It’s hard not to be inspired from others in the community who started with virtually no experience, and end up building really great utilities for the iPad. Roger Wong and his code partner David Wheeler took arms in 2010 to build an iPad app worthy of being featured as an “App of the Week” on the App Store. The year long development process from HTML junkie to a decorated iPad developer has ended with the fruition of DesignScene, the graphic designer’s browser for finding inspiration on the social web. Some would believe this is a new clone of Flipboard, but I’ll be quick to dismiss that having read Roger’s motivational backstory. Hard work pays off, and again I’m reminded of Mike Rundle’s “be curious” recommendation to success.

DesignScene is very cool, and I’ve been personally looking for something that was purely focused on art and discovering new content. Featuring over thirty sites, DesignScene pulls in regularly updated feeds to provide you with the freshest content from around the web.

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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.

Social Radio Reads Your Friends’ Status Updates Aloud

Social Radio for iPhone is a new app developed by @anshuchimala which is available at $0.99 in the App Store. And it has to be one of the weirdest, most original and useful utilities for Twitter and Facebook I’ve seen in a while. Or should I say “listened to”. This app, in fact, once granted authorization to access your Twitter and Facebook timelines, can read your friends’ status messages aloud. And, you can control the app with your voice, too. That’s it.

What’s cool about Social Radio, besides the fact that it’s developed by our friend Anshu, is that it looks minimal, it’s got Helvetica and it really reads Twitter and Facebook with iOS’ built-in accessibility features. I also appreciated the fact that each status updates comes with the original author, so you’ll listen to the app say something like “Federico Viticci wrote”. Usernames will be spoken aloud, http:// links will be excluded. Smart. The app plays a continuos stream of messages from your timeline starting from the most recent ones, until you hit pause or tell it to stop. You can swipe on the screen to move between status updates or just let Social Radio do its job and auto-play them.

Social Radio may look like a silly experiment to get iOS to read Twitter and Facebook messages. If you think about it, though, the app can be very useful for the visually impaired (just set it up once, then listen to it) or for when you’re driving and you really want to stay on top of your social networks.

Social Radio is a cool app that can be yours for just .99 cents. Give it a try.

Mac App Store Review: DropBook, Desktop Facebook Uploader

I’m not that kind of user who heavily relies on Facebook on a daily basis, but I can spot a good Facebook app when I see one. I may not be the guy who uploads hundreds of pictures every week and posts just about any thought on world’s most crowded social network, yet I don’t mind trying iOS apps that integrates with the platform from time to time. With the release of the Mac App Store, I expected to see some Facebook apps for the Mac to show up; new apps, software we haven’t seen before. After all, a platform like the Mac App Store seems to be meant for the average user who depends on another platform, Facebook.

DropBook is a new app developed by i-NOVATION and released in the Mac App Store at $2.99. It looks like a simple Facebook uploader that’s actually packed with functionalities, but still manages to let users access these features with ease and a few clicks. Read more

Tap To Chat Is A Simple, Useful App for Facebook Chat

I don’t use Facebook much, but when I do it’s for one thing: chat. I don’t like Facebook Messages, I don’t want to get in touch with my friends on walls, I don’t get the new Groups functionality – thus, I use chat. It’s not exactly reliable and full-featured (hello? easily file and photo sharing?) but as all my friends are on Facebook (and addicted to it) it’s the best way to get ahold of them.

What about the iPhone? The official Facebook app does chat, among other things. Those “other things” is what I don’t need: I don’t need to jump to people’s profile while I’m chatting, I don’t need the grid interface, I just want to find my friends online and chat. A simple request.

Guess what, we have an app for that. It’s called Tap To Chat, it’s universal for iPhone and iPad and it’s available at $0.99 in the App Store. Tap To Chat is the simple Facebook chat app meant for those who just want chat to work without all the bells and whistles of Facebook. Simple factor aside, Tap To Chat (developed by the same creator of Buddies) has a few tricks up its sleeve that make it the best implementation of Facebook chat I’ve seen on iOS devices. Read more