I've been a fan of Flexibits' Fantastical since it released for iPhone a while back, but Readdle's new (and universal) Calendars 5 is certainly great competition. As with Fantastical, Calendars 5 allows you to use natural language to create events. For example, you can type something like "Meet Shawn at Blue Bottle Coffee every Wednesday at 3pm" and it will recognize exactly…
Reeder 2, the newest version of the widely beloved RSS reader, is now available on the iOS App Store as a $5 universal app. The interface has been redesigned and looks as beautiful as ever, yet maintains the same sort of UI aesthetic you know and love from the previous version. My favorite thing about this upgrade is that Feed Wrangler is…
The Magnus Mini is a clever little magnetic stand designed for the iPad mini. It's very portable, it has ten embedded magnets to hold your iPad mini in place, and the rubberized exterior prevents it from slipping all over the place. It stays connected to your iPad well enough to move from room-to-room, but is also easy to remove when necessary. The…
Editorial for iPad, released just this morning, is a long-awaited Markdown text editor and workflow automation tool for iPad — and boy, is it a doozy. Developed by Ole Moritz – the guy behind the popular Pythonista app for iOS – Editorial looks like your typical iOS text editor on the surface. It has the requisite support for things like Markdown previews…
Some people like to work in an office, while others – like myself – are at our creative best in a comfortable environment like a coffee shop. For those of us in the latter camp, Coffitivity is an excellent app for Mac, iOS, and the web that recreates the acoustic experience of working in a bustling coffee shop. Choose one of three…
Morning is an iPad app that aims to get you as informed as possible about your upcoming day, through the use of various panels of information. These include weather, reminders, commute time, news, calendar, stocks, countdown(s), and date/time. This is a fairly customizable app. There are five different color schemes to choose from, and the info panels can be arranged any way…
Downcast has long been one of the most popular "podcatcher" apps for iOS (I'm more of an Instacast guy myself, but the fact remains). If you've been wishing for a Mac version of Downcast, you're in luck because it just released today. It's got all the features you'd expect, such as subscription management, importing and exporting of OPML files, auto-updating schedules, smart…
Thanks to Nate Boateng, I found out that the well-regarded Scanner Pro is on sale for $2 right now (down from $7). This app will let you scan paper documents and receipts with your iPhone or iPad camera, then send those scans off to places like Evernote and Dropbox. It even uses an algorithm to clean up the images and make them…
This Wednesday (July 10, 2013) is the 5th anniversary of the iOS App Store. There hasn't been any official announcement from Apple yet (Update: Now there has), but we've found that several popular developers are offering their top apps and games for free this week. If you've never gotten around to trying these out, now's your chance. We will try to keep…
Learning iOS Design is a book written by William van Hecke, the User Experience Lead at the Omni Group (the makers of OmniFocus and other well-known apps). In this book, William takes you through the process of becoming an iOS app designer, regardless of your experience level. You'll learn how to flesh out your app ideas, from early sketches and wireframes to…
If you spend a lot of time messing around with spreadsheets, you might want to check out Permanent for iPad. It's an easy-on-the-eyes spreadsheet app that's been optimized for touch and supports the XLSX and CSV formats for easy importing/exporting. As you'd expect, you can also write your own equation formulas. Normally this app costs $20, but for today only (June 25th,…
If the 'Night Sky' edition of Field Notes wasn't enough of an astronomy fix for you, I'd recommend checking out Sky Guide for iOS. This thing had been sitting somewhere in my AppShopper wish list for a long time, forgotten, until Ben Brooks wrote about it yesterday. I'm glad he did, because this is such a cool app. The way it works…
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…
We've covered the Apogee ONE here before, but now the recording rig has a big brother: the Apogee Duet for iPad & Mac. Check out this list of I/O: MIDI input/output (USB-A type connector) DC power supplies charge to iPod touch, iPhone or iPad USB 2.0 audio with 24-bit/192kHz A/D and D/A conversion 2 Analog inputs with world-class mic preamps and selectable…
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…
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),…
The Bowers & Wilkins 'zeppelin' family of speakers has always been a popular lineup, and for good reason. Each one has an interesting design, they all sound fantastic, and B&W continually adds awesome new features with each revision. The latest model is the Z2, which resembles their previous Zeppelin Mini model from a few years ago, but now has a Lightning dock…
Of course, just after I finally bought myself one of their Ultrathin Keyboard Covers for my iPad 4, Logitech has announced a new iPad keyboard: the FabricSkin Keyboard Folio. Rather than having a hard plastic keyboard, its keys are integrated directly into the folio's fabric, which comes in matte leather or woven cotton depending on the color you choose. Both the keyboard…