GPush Review: Bringing Gmail Notification to the iPhone
E-mail addiction is a hard habit to shake. I get more than a hundred emails every day. We’re not talking spam here — we’re talking legitimate e-mails that demand my attention. My inbox is so full, it has it’s own inbox. Given the circumstances, it’s fairly easy to see how I’ve become a compulsive email checker. Watching TV. Writing. Sitting at a red light. No matter what the activity, I couldn’t go more than five minutes without checking my inbox. …and then there was GPush.
Impressions: App Store Genius
As part of the recent OS 3.1 upgrade for the iPhone, Apple introduced a new feature intended to suggest apps based on your previous purchases. Like the similar function introduced to music listeners in iTunes 8.0, this handy little feature goes by the name “Genius.” But does the App Store Genius live up to it’s name like it’s big brother, or is this genius just a C student in disguise?
Simplenote Review: No-Nonsense Notes
The market for iPhone note taking apps is huge. While Apple provides a Notes app, it is very basic and only syncs with notes in Mail.app. The de facto third party note taking app for the iPhone/Mac is Evernote which includes syncing between your iPhone, desktop, and the web. Evernote, however, has many more features than most people need from a note taking app. All the extra features of Evernote can cause it to run slowly on older iPhone/iPod Touch platforms. Simplenote solves this problem as a fast, clean, and no-nonsense note taking app for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
Bevy Review: A Powerful Application Launcher
If you are like me, you probably have a ton of applications that you use, but you also don’t want to have then all on your dock. Bevy, by bergdesign, is an application launcher that will show you all of your applications in one simple window.
When you first launch Bevy you will want to add a few folders. Just click the gear icon in the top left and select folders. Here you will tell Bevy where to search for applications, and Bevy will display you applications in different sections for each folder. This will let you easily keep things organized. You can also exclude some items that you don’t ever need.
Flickery Review: Flickr on Your Desktop
I assume most of you know about Flickr, the awesome, and free (unless you go pro) photo-sharing service. But it isn’t only for sharing your photos with your friends and family, it is also a great image search engine. Many photos on it are under Creative Commons, and the quality of image you get is much higher than on a place like Google. There have been many iPhone apps that let you access Flickr, but not so many Mac apps (surprisingly). One of the only Mac apps is Flickery.
TwitPic Review: Far From Picture Perfect
Twitter users around the world have learned to love the world of 140-character microblogging, but that doesn’t mean a picture’s not worth a thousand words. Over the past year a number of photo-hosting services aimed at Tweeters have begun to pop up. Services like yfrog, Posterous, and img.ly have been gaining traction at an alarming rate, but none have proven as popular as TwitPic. It was only a matter of time until one of these services developed an app for the iPhone, but is it really necessary?
Power Pros Touch Review: The Boys of Summer
Since it’s debut in the summer of 2008, the iTunes AppStore has become the de facto home for a number of genres that had previously struggled to make the jump to portable gaming. But while tower defense and match-3 puzzle games have spent the better part of a year cementing their place in the hearts of iPhone users everywhere, the last few months have seen another genre step up to the plate. For many an iPhone gamer, the summer of 2009 will be remembered as the summer of baseball.
Keymote Review: Keystrokes, Just A Tap Away!
There are many applications to control your Mac in the App Store. Some will let you view and control the whole screen, while some just let you control a single application like iTunes. Keymote, by Iced Cocoa, is a different type of application for your iPhone or iPod Touch. It lets you set custom keystrokes to buttons, so you can create sets (or keysets) of keystrokes for any application. You can even share and download other users’ keysets.
1Password Review: A One-Stop Shop for Online Security
New social networking sites, online banking utilities, even new ways to communicate, are appearing nearly every day. Most of these require accounts made, and of course with new accounts come new passwords. Usually the sites have different requirements for how many characters, what kind of letters, and so on, so one ends up with many different passwords. How is one to keep track of all of these? Enter 1Password.
Movie Genie Review: IMDB gets portable
When we reviewed Movie Brain back in January, we praised its effort to create an IMDB-in-your-pocket experience but were more than a little disappointed with the results. Now, months later, Movie Genie has stepped up to the challenge of becoming the de facto mobile movie database that Movie Brain could not. Does Movie Genie deserve a starring role in the AppStore? Or is this just another b-level horror show gone wrong?
