My buddy Andrew J. Clark (of The Menu Bar fame) just released his gorgeous, first-ever iPhone app, Numerical. The tagline for the app is "A Calculator Without Equal", which is not only clever from a marketing perspective, but also true because the app does not have an 'equals' button. It simply calculates answers on-the-fly, and lets you use swipe gestures to undo,…
I use FeedPress to provide the RSS feed for my site. Although they have a decent responsive page for checking subscriber stats from my iPhone, it can be a little difficult to interact with sometimes (particularly the subscriber graph). A native iPhone app would be more preferable, and today I got my wish with the latest update to Static. It tracks statistics…
Pinswift has been one of my favorite Pinboard clients for the iPhone ever since it released a couple months ago. It has a lovely, simple interface, with robust features for power users beneath the surface. Some of these advanced features include x-callback-url support, saved searches for tags and whatnot, and full-text search (if you've paid for the Pinboard archival account upgrade). And…
Plex is one of the better solutions out there for organizing and streaming your movies and music between devices. Sign up for a Plex account, put the Plex Media Server app on your Mac, and then you can use the iOS app to stream your stuff from anywhere in the world. The iOS app also allows you to control the media being…
1Writer is one of those iOS writing apps that I always thought looked very nice, but it never provided a good enough reason to switch away from something like Editorial or Byword. You'd still have to pry Editorial out of my cold, dead fingers, but the latest update to 1Writer now puts it at least above Byword. It's now my go-to iPhone…
Chicago Avenue Moon is an unexpected new app from Junecloud—the studio behind Delivery Status Touch—that blows my mind a little. It's designed to generate a personalized soundtrack for the listener as they move about, but that description doesn't tell the whole story so I'll just quote the source: “Chicago Avenue Moon is a responsive, generative music app that gathers a set of…
For a long time now, the only RSS reader I've used on my iPhone has been Reeder. I never imagined another app would come along that would be worth switching to, but that all changed last night with the release of Unread. Unread's philosophy is all about slowing down and really reading things that are worth our attention, not just flying through…
There's certainly no shortage of great calendar apps for iPhone, but it can't hurt to try something new like Peek Calendar. On the surface it looks pretty simple, but there are some neat things under the hood. Tap on any given calendar date to "unfold" the list of events for that day, or hold on a date to create a new event.…
Searchpath, developed by Manton Reece, is a neat little search box you can easily embed on your website or blog. All you have to do is add a little Javascript snippet to your site (in the footer or wherever else you might want a search bar) and Searchpath will index everything so that it can be searched by visitors later. The results…
On the latest episode of The Prompt, Federico Viticci mentioned an iOS app called WordBook that sounded interesting enough for me to check out. It's a pretty powerful English dictionary and thesaurus, and I think it might just replace my long-running "Words to Remember" list in Simplenote. You can bookmark your favorite words and have them sync between devices via iCloud, have…
Instashare is yet another file-sharing app for iOS and Mac. You can send photos, PDFs, and more, all over a local Bluetooth connection (no WiFi or login necessary). The nice part is that the sharing goes both ways; it's not just Mac-to-iOS, but also vice-versa. It's all done via drag-and-drop—about as simple as it gets. The universal iOS app is free (with…
I've been a Spotify subscriber for a while (going on something like 2.5 years now), and although I've always loved the service, their iOS app has consistently felt a little lacking to me. I've tried Rdio as well, but never found a compelling enough reason to switch. But now I've had a chance to try out the new Beats Music iPhone app…
Storehouse is a neat new app for iPad that makes it super easy to create long-form stories that can be shared with the world. Using a combination of text, videos (30 seconds or less each), and photos (pulled from your camera roll, Dropbox, Flickr, and Instagram), you can put together something like this. Or this. Everything can be resized, moved around, and…
I recently linked to an app called Command-C that allowed you to copy and paste between Mac and iOS devices. It's an awesome thing to have, with one caveat: it won't work on any WiFi networks where multicast has been disabled, and thus, Bonjour connectivity (which is the case at my local coffee shop). In those cases, your devices won't see one…
My wife and I are big fans of Disney's theme parks. We actually intend to visit Disneyland and California Adventure later this year, which will be a perfect time to try out this brand-new Magic Passport app for iPhone, designed by the awesome folks at Pacific Helm. Here's how they describe it: “Contained inside your Magic Passport is a list of all…
Blur is a universal iOS app that does one thing well: it lets you custom-blur images to be used as wallpapers for your device. Tip: have a normal image set as your lock screen wallpaper, then use a blurred form of that same image as your home screen wallpaper. This works exceptionally well on iOS 7 devices. Blur is only $0.99 on…
Every now and then, I need to insert some unicode characters into something I'm writing — for example, , ★ , ♫, ™, etc. Typically, I either use CopyPasteCharacter (along with its companion iOS app) or a custom set of TextExpander snippets to get the job done. But today, there is a new, free app for this purpose: Simbol for iPhone.…
Thanks to a review by Federico Viticci, I got to hear about an awesome app for Mac and iOS called Command-C. It allows you to push the contents of your clipboard between devices over a local network. Thanks to the backgrounding features of iOS 7, you can share between an iPhone and iPad without even having to open the app on the…
Eastgate, the folks behind note-organization app Tinderbox, have put on a winter holiday sale featuring several awesome writing apps for the Mac. The sale includes Tinderbox itself, Scrivener, Scapple, DEVONthink Pro, and Nisus Writer Pro. In each case, you can use the promo code WINTERFEST2013 to get 25% off the normal price. These are some great apps for writers (especially Scrivener) so…
Sometimes a new writing app comes out that has everybody talking about it for a while. Right now, Writer Pro, the successor to the ever-popular iA Writer, is the new hotness. This app is designed around the four basic stages of any writer's workflow – note-taking, writing, editing, and reading – each of which is represented by a different typeface and color.…