Posts in reviews

JotAgent: The Quickest Way To Save Notes and Ideas in Dropbox

A few weeks ago I reviewed Captio, which is a neat and simple application for iPhone to email yourself a note, or a picture, with one tap. How many times have you wished there was a way to easily save an idea for later? For many, quickly emailing yourself a note is the best way to save it.

For many others, though, getting additional stuff in the inbox can become a nightmare. Not only the inbox is already overloaded, but getting notes in there as well? No way. I’ve set up a nice filtering and tagging system in Gmail to handle Captio notes, but I understand some of you guys just don’t want notes to be turned into emails.

Meet JotAgent: a new app for iPhone and iPad which can be described as “Captio for Dropbox”. Read more

Meow Meow Happy Fight HD Review & Giveaway!

Japan has seen its fair share of crazed destruction through a never ending slew of anime porn and giant robots, but just when you thought lolcats couldn’t get any crazier than tackling Godzilla in the nether regions, Happy Cat appoints a legion of ramen noodles and rice balls to tear down Tokyo alongside zombie children and teen pop-star superheroes. If an invisible issue of glamour girl chasing you down the street with a barrage of homing missiles isn’t enough to get the blood pumping, fist boxing an overly ripe squid while dodging phaser lasers from a secondhand R2-D2 might do the trick. Or everything will just blow up in smoke, as usual.

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Review: FLAC Player for iPhone

If you care about your digital music library and you care about quality, I guess you know what the FLAC format is all about. The Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) is an advanced (free and open source) audio compression codec that allows decompression into a perfect copy of the original audio data. Basically, it’s a high-quality compression method that generates state-of-the-art rips and (here’s the downside) huge data files.  If you lose a CD you care about but have a FLAC digital copy, you have an exact duplicate.

To give you an example, a standard 13-tracks album can go up to 450MB in size. Now think about encoding that Beatles collection you have in FLAC and you get the idea.

FLAC is great, but isn’t as supported by hardware makers as other standards such as MP3 are. Luckily enough for iPhone owners, there’s an for that (sorry Apple, I know it’s a trademark now). FLAC Player for iPhone (and iPad, it’s a universal app) is a simple way to import your lossless albums and songs on your iDevice and listen to them. Read more

Noteshelf: A Handwriting App for iPad I Can Actually Use

I remember the iPad launch day. I also remember the grand opening of the iPad App Store - actually, we were the first ones to take a sneak peek inside it. Between the excitement and the geek dreams of a new device that would change the face of computing as we knew it forever, we didn’t really pay attention to the apps that were being submitted for approval. Six months later, it’s very easy to spot one of the best selling categories in the iPad App Store: handwriting apps. Note taking applications that let you write on the iPad’s big screen using your fingers or, if you have one (I do), a stylus. Penultimate was one of the first notable apps to sell zillions of copies.

See, I’m not usually huge on these apps. I’m faster with a keyboard, I never really got myself into a situation where taking notes manually was necessary, most of these apps don’t come with the proper exporting capabilities I need, namely Dropbox, Mail or Evernote. While they’re pretty to look at and cool to show off to your friends, I didn’t really find much value in them besides using them every once in a while to draw some random mockups.

So how on earth do I find Noteshelf worth a look? Read more

Humail: A New “Emotional” Email Client for iPhone

When it comes down to email, my choice is simple: Gmail. I use Gmail for my work email addresses (everything runs smoothly on Google Apps), and I have a dozen of personal accounts I’ve used in these past years to keep my identity well conceived on the internet. I know you do that, too. Here’s a good tip: create a Gmail account just for your signups (Facebook, Twitter, Gowalla, etc) and forget about your main inbox getting overloaded. It saved my life.

Anyway, while I use the Gmail web interface on the desktop, I’m forced to stick with Mail.app on the iPhone and iPad: the app works fine (could be a lot better though), but the main reason why I don’t use and haven’t even tried other clients is because there are no other clients on iOS. I don’t know if this is about high development costs (maybe) or some restrictions imposed by Apple (likely), still we’re not getting the possibility of installing 3r party mail clients like on our Macs and PCs. That sucks.

There are some Gmail-specific applications in the App Store: Mailroom is one of them, and I love it. It’s like a mobile version of Mailplane, a Cocoa wrapper for multiple Gmail accounts. I use it on a daily basis, but it’s not (and can’t be) my default client. I’ve recently stumbled upon this new app called “Humail” which aims at becoming your new “personal” and “emotional” email client. I gave it a try, and here’s what’s behind the marketing slogans of Humail. Read more

Tasks Touch: The Simplenote of GTD Apps

Maybe you don’t need OmniFocus, and you don’t need Things. You don’t care about whatever David Allen has to say and seriously - the Emergent Task Planner? You just want to enter tasks and have them always available, right? I got you. You’re that kind of user who don’t care about features and UX innovations as long as what needs to be accomplished during the day is driven by a simple software that doesn’t get in the way and doesn’t require you to read a manual.

You’re anything like me, but I think I’ve got the app that might just change your productivity worfklow on the iPhone: meet Tasks Touch, the Simplenote of productivity apps. Read more

Life Web Browser 1.5 Introduces iPhone Version and…Pull To Refresh?

Life is an alternative web browser for iPad I reviewed back in June. The app was quite nice, but I ended up uninstalling it due to its numerous bugs. The feature set was interesting, though:

Life Web Browser tries a different approach, and it does so by telling us that we don’t need tabs and pages, we need to swipe.

Aseid Ghaffari and his team found out that users don’t find Safari’s behavior with new links exactly comfortable. Apple’s Safari forces you to go back and forth between a dashboard with thumbnails of pages, and another take on the subject such as iCab’s desktop-like tabs didn’t impress Ghaffari either. If it’s not about copying the desktop and it’s not about changing pages, then it definitely must be about gestures – the developers thought. So there you have it, you horizontally swipe between “windows”.

The latest 1.5 update, approved and released a few days ago, introduces iPhone support (the app is now Universal) and a couple of new options such as “Open sites” and pull to refresh for webpages. What, really? Read more

Monitor and Geotag Your iPhone Data Usage with DataMan

If you have an iPhone and a contract with your carrier (of course you guys in the US do), then I guess you’re obsessed with data usage tracking: how many messages can you send per month? What’s the threshold for mobile internet access? How much have you consumed this week? Depending on the country and carrier, the experience can be terrible. Fortunately, I have a pretty good plan with 3 Italia over here (4 GB internet / month, 400 SMS, 800 minutes voice) so I haven’t really worried about keeping track of my usage - I understand, though, that this is a problem for many.

DataMan by XVision is probably the most complete app to monitor and even geotag your daily, monthly and week data usage on your iPhone. Read more