Rdio, our favorite online music streaming services has hit version 2.0 with its iOS and Android apps. With a new look, better navigation the ability to pick up a song on your phone you were playing on your computer seamlessly, this app just keeps getting better. Rdio has 18 million tracks in the cloud, and you can share what you're listening to…
Tweetbot is a well-known iOS Twitter client with loads of features like muting, iCloud sync and more, all powered by a beautiful and charming interface that only Tapbots could deliver. Tweetbot for Mac brings all of that to the desktop. Complete with Retina support, multiple-column views and all of the great iOS features (including sync via iCloud), it's the best way for…
Marco Arment of Instapaper fame has a new app, named The Magazine. The Newstand app is a modern magazine for geeks. It features articles from well-known writers. In fact, both Shawn and I will be featured in up-coming editions. Instead of being made up of glorified PDFs that take up tons of space on your device, Marco's new app is lightweight, just…
We're huge fans of Devour, the popular blog dedicated to curating YouTube from the wild west of the Internet to a stellar collection of funny and remarkable videos. With the iOS app, Devour is available on your iOS device with a much better experience than offered by Mobile Safari. It even supports AirPlay, so you can stream your favorite video to your…
If you've downloaded video from the Internet, you know that the metadata or file format isn't always what you want, especially if you need to sync that video to an iPad or sling it to an AppleTV. Enter iFlicks. The $20 Mac app takes a wide variety of video formats and can transcode them to H.264 files, optimized for iTunes, iPad or…
Flipboard is a great iOS (and Android) app that makes reading from numerous sources easy and enjoyable. It takes web services like Twitter, Tumblr and Google Reader and re-flows the content to a device-friendly magazine of sorts. The service just announced that they have passed 20 million users. It's not going anywhere. Check it out. The best thing? It's free.
So long as we're on the subject of nifty $0.99 camera apps, my current favorite is VSCO CAM from Visual Supply Co. Like most other photo-editing apps, VSCO CAM let's you snap a photo from within the app or import one from you camera roll. From there you can apply one of 10 different filters — 3 of which are black and…
While the iPhone 4S' camera hardware is pretty great for something you always have in your pocket, Apple's simple shooting software has left room for dozens of great apps to spring up. The winner in my book is Camera+. It has some great filters and borders, nice cropping tools and (most importantly) is super fast to launch and shoot. It can import…
If a full-blown weather station isn't your cup of tea, this app might be. Seasonality is a complete weather center for the Mac. The app ships with 34,000 built-in locations in more than 200 countries, with the ability to add custom locations beyond that. Seasonality gives you a 7 day forecast, graphs of past weather conditions, a custom satellite/radar image, and much…
Dark Sky is unlike most weather apps on the App Store. Dedicated to telling you if it's going to rain (or snow) in your exact location within the next 60 minutes. Able to give minute-by-minute forecasts, Dark Sky can be the difference between running to the car in the rain or waiting 90 seconds and staying dry. Dark Sky features some of…
Dark Sky is a new weather radar app that was born on Kickstarter and is now available for your iPhone and iPad. It does just one thing: forecast the next 60 minutes of weather. It does this by taking all sorts of data from the NOAA and running it through a lot of custom code. Moreover, Dark Sky animates its radar to…
Only one game for the iPad has ever really snuck itself into my free time, and that was Plants vs. Zombies. That is, until now. Kingdom Rush has a similar feel to PvZ in that you set up your defensive strategy before the level starts, and then keep maintaining it and fighting off the attackers. It's a lot of fun, very cartoon-y,…
At most, I am a casual gamer. But every now and then an iOS game comes along that is just the right amount of fun. Mage Gauntlet happened to be one of those games. The graphics are a classic 16-bit, the gameplay is challenging and engaging, and the plot isn't all that bad either. And the game itself is only $2.99 in…
Speaking of iPads and meetings, Pear Note is a brand-new iPad app that was made for exactly that. This note-taking, audio-recording, Dropbox-syncing, iPad app is built with one thing in mind: taking notes while at meetings and events. It records audio as you type your notes and comments, and then it maps the audio time stamps to the notes you typed. Clever…
Instacast is not the first iPhone app dedicated to managing your podcasts, but it is the first I have ever truly liked. Its most notable feature is that it offers over-the-air updating of your podcasts. You can update all your podcasts at once, or just one subscription, or even just one episode at a time. It will update the listing of all…
Ever since that weekend in the 5th grade when I binged on Super Mario Brothers I have spent very little time playing video games. But thoughtful, and artistic puzzle games like Machinarium have always caught my eye. I played through Machinarium when it first came out for Mac a while ago — it has a wonderful soundtrack, the artwork is beautiful, and…
When you work on a 23-inch monitor a good full-screen writing app can be hard to find. Apps that look good in full-screen mode on a 13- or 15-inch screen don’t necessarily scale well to 23 inches. Byword, however, scales quite well. It looks great regardless of if I’m writing on my laptop display or my cinema displays. And the dark color…
Dialvetica is the best way to find contacts on your iPhone. It’s like the whole app has been built for a single purpose: get to a contact fast. Dialvetica’s custom interface is designed for this sole purpose, and so is the way it works under the hood. Searching for a contact within Dialvetica is far superior to searching within the Contacts pane…