There's no shortage of financial software out there, but most of the options are ugly, hard to use, or both. Enter iBank. The Mac and iOS app suite that blows something like Quicken Essentials out of the water. The app can connect to almost any bank, credit union or savings institution, making it easy and fast to check up on accounts, plan…
For the uninitiated, App.net is an ad-free, subscription-based service that is being used for not only Twitter-like conversations, but private messaging, file storage, sharing, and more. If that sounds a little scattered, it is, because App.net is more than just a social network — it's a family of APIs that can power all sorts of individual, discrete services, all with a single…
Chatology is a Mac app that allows you to search your Messages and iChat history, rather than relying on the frustratingly poor search features built into each one. Essentially, it's a well-designed front-end for your Mac's chat logs. You can view your entire chat history with anyone on your list, and it lets you easily narrow down to just the images or…
This won't be the first time we've mentioned VSCO Cam – one of the best iPhone photography apps ever made, in my opinion – but I felt that the recent 2.0 update was worth another look. They've completely overhauled the interface, adding new features such as separate focus and exposure rings while shooting, as well as a white balance "lock". They've also…
Tunebox is a neat iOS app that acts as an audio player for your Dropbox account. It automatically scans your entire Dropbox folder for any MP3 or MP4/AAC audio files, then organizes them the same way the built-in Music app does: by Artist, Album, and Song. You can save any track for offline playing, or just stream whatever you want as long…
Apple's Passbook for iOS is a great concept, but one that – in my opinion – has never really lived up to its full potential. Luckily, a third-party app called Lemon Wallet has stepped up to the plate, offering features you won't find in Passbook. Lemon Wallet allows you to store credit cards, insurance cards, loyalty cards, and receipts by snapping photos…
Another day, another iOS photo app. Mextures is the newest photo app on my iPhone. Instead of straight filters, this app applies custom textures to your images. Examples include grunge and noise, color effects and light leaks. With 70 options available and the ability combine effects, you can create a unique look far easier than in most apps in this space. Mextures…
There have been many Chess games available for iPhone since the App Store opened up a few years ago, but most of them aren't really designed with the iPhone's screen in mind. Rather than taking advantage of the available screen real estate, they're typically cluttered with ugly and unnecessary UI. Not so with Tall Chess, released only a few days ago. All…
While some think heavily-filtered photos are so 2009, the guys over at Realmac Software disagree. Which is great, since their new, $2 photo app is pretty awesome. While it packs just 8 filters, the interface crazy fast and very clean. Sharing to Camera Roll and Photo Stream is easy, as is sending the photo to Instagram or straight on to Twitter or…
If you're like me and use Dropbox for all of your photo storage, Unbound is a life-saver. The iOS app is just $2, and scans your Dropbox photo folder, creating albums from the nested folders. Photos were the last thing I synced to my iOS devices via iTunes, and since I have 75GB of photos, I could never have them all on…
In a world where most smaller seem to run on WordPress, Squarespace or Tumblr, John O'Nolan is trying to launch a new blog platform and engine named Ghost. O'Nolan pitches Ghost as "just a blog platform" — not a full-blown CMS. It comes with a beautiful backend, responsive themes, Markdown support and loads of other goodies. You can support Ghost on Kickstarter, but…
Amazon Cloud Drive is a service from the Internet giant for storing photos in the cloud. With 5 GB of free storage (enough space to store up to 2,000 photos), Amazon makes it easy to upload and access your photos. You can get Amazon Cloud Drive Photos apps for iOS, Android and the desktop.
Limelight for iPhone is a gorgeous new app for tracking movies. You can list movies in two ways: "Watched" and "To Watch". Pretty self-explanatory there. You can rate movies on the "Watched" list, and it will display them in order of rating. Both libraries appear as shelves of beautiful movie artwork, as you can see in the first panel below: Adding movies…
TC-11 is a trippy, fully programmable, multitouch synthesizer app for iPad. Rather than fiddling with a bunch of knobs, you interact with the app by tapping and dragging your fingers around the screen. The sounds produced by the synthesizer depend on where you touch the screen and how your fingers move in relation to one another. Even the accelerometer, gyroscope and compass…
About a week ago, the guys at Pixelmator released version 2.2 of their popular image editing app, code-named "Blueberry". It was packed with new features, such as smarter shape-selection tools, a palette with drag-and-drop shapes, a new light-leak effect, and a lot more. What they didn't announce until yesterday though was that there was another, more hidden feature built in: Vectormator. Press…
This one's for the musicians out there. ScoreCleaner Notes allows you to play, hum, or even whistle a tune, and it will write out the musical notation for you, including the correct time signatures. It can even pick apart multiple voices at once and arrange them in the proper order of lead voice, second voice, and bass line. After these notation sheets…
Yesterday, the developers of the Hueless photography app released an update that added the ability to save photos in Lossless TIFF format and max-quality JPEG, as well as improved shutter response. After seeing this update and running a quick search on Tools and Toys, I was somewhat surprised to see that Hueless has never been mentioned around here before. This app has…
I must be on a gaming kick this week, because I've got another one to talk about. This one is called Star Command, and it's essentially a Star Trek-influenced RPG simulator for iPhone and iPad. You start off by designing a Captain avatar and a small ship, then you build different types of rooms on the ship and staff each one with…
Most gamers need no introduction to Bastion, being one of the most critically-acclaimed games of the last few years and all. In case you haven't heard of it though, it's an adventure game where you play as The Kid, who wakes up after some kind of catastrophic event and must navigate through a series of floating ruins, fighting monsters along the way.…
The developers of the popular Screens VNC client for iOS recently released another great utility called Mini Display. The two apps are similar in that they both require a free Mac app to be running, but what Mini Display does differently is turn your iOS device into an external display for the Mac (as long as they're on the same WiFi network),…