Posts tagged apps
1 year ago
I’m a sucker for camera apps for the iPhone. I have two folders full of them including Camera+, CameraBag, CrossProcess, PictureShow, ShakeItPhoto and more. I just love trying out new apps to see what effects they give my photos. The latest one to impress me is Instagram.
Instagram is a fast, beautiful and fun way to share your life with friends through a series of pictures. Snap a photo with your iPhone, choose a filter to transform the look and feel, send to Facebook, Twitter or Flickr – it’s all as easy as pie. It’s photo sharing, reinvented.
The social aspect of Instagram is what makes this app interesting and enjoyable for me. You can add friends from your contact list, Twitter, Facebook or simply search usernames and names. I can view a feed of all the photos my friends are uploading aswell as ‘Like’ and comment on them, reminding me somewhat of Tumblr. You can also share to various websites including Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Tumblr and Foursquare.
Instagram comes with 12 great filters to make your photos look great. Images are saved at only 600×600 pixels, but for me this absolutely works fine for sharing through Instagram. I rarely print photos from my iPhone, for which case I would want it saved at full resolution, but for sharing through the app and on Twitter then I have no problem with the low res. Resolution may be increased in future updates.
I’m really excited to see what more Instagram will have for us in the future – and it’s hard to believe that this app is absolutely free! This app has already started to replace Camera+ which was pulled from the App Store almost 2 months ago for violating the terms and conditions. With no word from the developers on it’s return, it seems this will be a forgotten project with no further updates so myself, like many others, are looking to exciting alternatives that do have a future and won’t slide into obscurity when the next iOS update kills it off.
If you’d like to view the photos I’m snapping regularly and sharing to Instagram then feel free to follow me; purplelime.
Uface for iPhone
21 year ago
Occasionally I like to let the App Store Genius recommend apps to me, based on my past purchases. Some recommendations are very hit and miss, but it can uncover some gems at times. I quite like apps that let you create yourself in cartoon form. These can be useful for using on forums as avatars, or using as Contacts pics on the iPhone.
A few nights ago Uface was recommended to me, based on my WeeMee app purchase. With one touch, Uface Unique Face Maker can make professional looking sketched faces. The interface is very nicely designed and easy to use, with 240 male/female character items, backgrounds, facial expressions and more. Here’s just a few I created of myself…
You can also see one of them that I created in action on my About page. Perfect for people who perhaps don’t want to upload their photo to social networking sites but want to create a profile pic that gives a rough idea of what they look like. You can upload your finished sketched mugshots to Twitter or Facebook, or alternatively save them to your iPhone photo album, assign to a contact or email them.
Uface is a great app – and an absolute steal at just 59p/$0.99 for a limited time only. Grab it on the App Store.
[rating:5/5]
Your iPhone On Your Mac
02 years ago
Some of you may remember my plea last year for a Mac app that would show a notification on screen when you’d missed a call to your iPhone while docked. Here’s a refresher.
Wouldn’t it be great…if there was a Mac app out there which would show a notification on your computer screen when you’d missed a call to your iPhone while it’s docked?
I was just thinking this today when having to leave my iPhone docked after it completely ran out of juice during the night. I haven’t been at the computer much today but have occasionally popped up to have a look at the iPhone screen to see whether I’d missed any calls. How convenient would it be to come up and see a Growl-style notification message on your Mac (that stays there until you close it) letting you know.
I would pay good money for that.
(comments on the entry)
Now there is an answer – BluePhoneElite 2 which is now iPhone 2G, 3G and 3GS compatible. Here’s a table of what is supported…
It’s a shame that SMS Messages aren’t supported, but that’s down to a limitation by Apple and not the software developers. A review of BluePhoneElite 2 can be found at Smoking Apples. You can have a 2 week trial with the software then it’s $24.95 to buy.
So, iPhone users, is this something you’ll be using? I haven’t installed the software yet but wanted to pass on the exciting news for those who have been waiting for an app that does that!
Keep your Apps Fresh
42 years ago
If you have quite a few Apps on your Mac then you’ll know how tedious it can be to open every one of them manually from time to time to see if there are any new updates. Or, worse still, if you’re anything like me you’ll come to open an app for the first time in a couple of months and be prompted to download the newest version just at the moment you want to use it quickly. You’ll ask it to remind you later – which of course you forget all about until the next time you want to use it in a hurry!
I have had a free application called AppFresh installed on my Mac for around a year or so which takes the pain out of manually checking every app by looking for all updates in your applications, dashboard widgets, preference panes and plugins in one go. It does this by checking osx.iusethis.com for new versions. Now all you need to do is remember to run AppFresh occasionally to see what’s available for download. It will even check for Apple’s system updates so you won’t have to run the Software Update separately.
Once downloaded and opened, AppFresh will run through your apps/pref panes/widgets and will show you the status of everything in it’s sidebar. You can choose to download updates individually or select them all. It will safely download updates to your Downloads folder (or folder of your choice via Preferences) so you can install them. This is generally a case of grabbing hold of the application and dragging it to the Applications folder like you would with any app installation. It will install the updates if considered safe, although this is not selected by default in the application so once again you will need to enter the AppFresh Preferences.
On my last AppFresh update, it showed 41 items as unknown. Many of these were apps that were bundled with my printer and digital camera which don’t have any updater built into them.
So, now all *I* need to do is remember to run AppFresh every once and again to keep my apps all up to date. Now, that won’t be too hard, will it?
The tweetest thing
153 years ago
When the iTunes App Store launched late June, one of the first applications I downloaded to my iPod touch with the 2.0 software update was Twitterrific [opens iTunes]. I use Twitterrific desktop app on my Mac and have always loved the clean simplicity of it. I downloaded the free version on the iPhone as there were some problems with the scrolling (not like butter) and I wanted to see what other apps would eventually come to the app store for twitter.
Since then I’ve downloaded Twinkle, Tweetsville and Tweetie [all links open iTunes]. I wasn’t too keen on Twinkle thanks to it bugging me relentlessly to broadcast my location, but also because it’s not a dedicated twitter client. So, when I was out and about I’d have random people sending me messages through Twinkle who seemed to want to “hook up” with me – people who weren’t on twitter. I decided to give that up and move back to good ol’ reliable Twitterrific.
Then the buzz was all about Tweetsville. The UI was clean and iPhone-like (although a little plain and boring in my opinion) and the search/trends was an attractive feature. But this turned out to be the most sluggish app of all, taking an age to download tweets even over wi-fi. I paid £2.39 for it and have never regretted an App Store purchase more than this. After less than a week of using Tweetsville I was removing it from my iPhone. When you mention this on twitter then you get a barrage of recommendations of another really great app, but that’s what they said about Tweetsville. However, after seeing Stephen Fry commend Tweetie recently then I thought I’d give it a go – and at just £1.79 then it’s not too bad.
Tweetie is by far the best application for twitter on the iPhone that I’ve used, although I do have one negative which I’ll mention in a moment. Downloading tweets is extremely quick on opening the application – within 2-3 seconds…and that’s over 3G! It has a very attractive iChat-like UI and boasts features such as the ability to view twitter trends and perform custom searches which is something that Twitterrific doesn’t have. You can also follow and unfollow people directly through the app which is great.
Now for the negative that stops this short of getting a 10/10 from me: the image uploading to Twitpic. Tweetie compresses the image so that it strips it’s quality and uploads it showing as being posted from twitpic (in your timeline) and the image is in landscape mode. In Twitterrific when you upload an image to twitpic it isn’t compressed and shows that it’s been posted via Twitterrific in your timeline and the image is also posted in portrait mode as intended. Here’s an example…
Image posted to twitpic through Tweetie
Image posted to twitpic through Twitterrific
Same image but horribly compressed and rotated via Tweetie. If they work on this image posting method then I will use Tweetie full-time, no question. Until then I’ll be switching between Tweetie for tweets and Twitterrific for image uploads.
Edit: Tweetie 1.1 update [available today] fixes the upload issue and now posts in portrait along with ‘from Tweetie‘ in the timeline instead of ‘from twitpic‘. See the comments for more.
Wouldn’t it be great…
8…if there was a Mac app out there which would show a notification on your computer screen when you’d missed a call to your iPhone while it’s docked?
I was just thinking this today when having to leave my iPhone docked after it completely ran out of juice during the night. I haven’t been at the computer much today but have occasionally popped up to have a look at the iPhone screen to see whether I’d missed any calls. How convenient would it be to come up and see a Growl-style notification message on your Mac (that stays there until you close it) letting you know.
I would pay good money for that.
Woopra
83 years ago
A couple of weeks ago I found a very comprehensive web tracking and analysis web application called Woopra. After a quick look through it’s feature section I signed up for a free (in beta) account then added my website details in the members section. It took around 5 days for my site to be approved then I was able to choose from putting a few lines of code on the site or installing a plugin for WordPress. Incidentally, in order to add a website, you need to have direct access to the server in order to install the Woopra tracking JavaScript.
Once I’d installed and activated the WordPress plugin I then downloaded the Woopra desktop client for Mac (must be a 64-bit Mac to work). There were a few niggling problems with that as it repeatedly told me I needed the latest Java 1.6, which I already had. A quick look through the Woopra support forums and I soon resolved the issue which I will outline here just incase anyone else experiences the same problem. Go to Applications > Utilities > Java > click on Java Preferences and ensure that Java SE 6 (64-bit) is at the top of the Java Application Runtime Settings list, as you can see in this screenshot. If it isn’t then simply click, hold and drag it to the top of the list. You should then be able to install the Mac desktop client without issue.
The desktop client is feature rich and packed with information about your site visitors with lots of tabs to flick through within the Analytics menu. It’s live tracking means it knows who is on your website the minute they hit it and you can view their details (IP, platform, browser, screen resolution, country, referrer etc…). I can easily see which keywords and queries have brought visitors to my site, how long they stay on the site and so much more. Sure, there are stats packages provided with my web hosting, but nothing beats live up to the minute information that is available as a desktop client. A ticker tape also runs along the bottom of the Woopra app window with up-to-the-minute details such as how many visits today, how many new visitors, how long they’ve spent on the site and so on. Woopra is easily the best web tracking app I’ve tried.
Recent Comments