iPhone

Easily browse all the iPhone compatible apps that we have reviewed here.

News / Reviews
Winston For iPhone

Winston for iPhone

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I get my news from the internet. I rely heavily on my RSS feeds. However, when I’m on the road and driving I obviously can’t read news stories on my phone. It would be great if I had my own personal news assistent that would not only read me the news, but the news that I’m interested in. That’s exactly what Winston for iPhone aims to do. Think of Winston as your own personal news butler with the accent and all! You set up the App by picking your topics of interest. When you’re ready to hear the news you launch the App and tap “Briefing”. Winston will very politely start by telling you the current time and date, then he continues with tomorrow’s weather forecast for your current location and then start reading the news from the headlines you are most interested in. If you want to skip a story simply swipe to the next one. If you configure your Facebook and Twitter accounts it will read your Facebook news feed. I find this pretty much useless as it says things like “John posted a picture and several people like it”. Same with Twitter, it tells you that someone posted a tweet and perhaps the subject, but not the actual tweet. It’s best to stick to the regular news feeds and topics of interest.

Winston does a good job and I enjoy listening to it while I’m driving. It has a healthy list of Channels including: NPR Headline News, Reuters: Top News, The Guadian, Washing Post World, All Things D, TechCrunch, The Verge, Engadget, USA Today Sports, NPR Sports, Wall Street Journal, CNN Politics, Fashionalogie, Dining and Gaming sites too. However, it needs the ability to read RSS feeds that you supply it. If they turn this into a full fledged news reader I’d enjoy it even more! For now Winston is worth a download and let’s hope it gets better with future updates.

iTunes

Productivity / Reviews
PredictiveTyper - Text Editor with Smart & Fast Predictive Text Keyboard

PredictiveTyper – Text Editor with Smart & Predictive Text Keyboard

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Typing large amounts of text on an onscreen keyboard has never been something I’ve enjoyed. Perhaps my fingers/hands are too big, but I find that anything over a paragraph wears on me quickly. While iOS does a good job with autocorrecting many things as you type, predictive typing may allow you to type faster. The next time you need to type more than a few words, launch the PredictiveTyper App 1st! With a Predictive Typer instead of trying to correct what you’re typing, it tries to guess what you’re typing by offering a list of words. You start typing “fin” and it suggests “find”, “fingers”, “finger”, “final”, etc. once you key in just a few letters more than likely the word you’re typing appears in the list and you just tap it. With predictive typing you can get a lot keyed with just a few letters for each word. Once you’ve completed your text in this App you can share it via texting, email, Facebook, Twitter, Print, the “Open In” command or simply copy and paste it into the app of your choice. This is great for emails and blogging on mobile devices. You can also save these notes as documents in the App. Think of it as a mini word processor for your iPhone or iPad. PredictiveTyper is a Universal App and therefore you can use it on iPhone, iPad or iPod touch and take advantage of your device’s full screen size. The only downside is that it is a separate App. Of course this is not the fault of the developer as Apple doesn’t allow you to change the text engine at the iOS level. With that said, from now on I won’t cringe when I get an email that requires a lengthy reply or wait til I get back to my computer to write a more detailed note. PredictiveTyper is a must have App for anyone wishing to type more than a few words at a time on their iOS devices.

iTunes

Reviews / Travel
Trip Weather - Forecast for Every City of Your Tour.

Trip Weather – Forecast for Every City of Your Tour App

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I have several great weather Apps. On Monday I even showcased a new one called Haze. While these apps are great at showing you all about the weather for a given location, they are all missing one thing. They are all focused on one location at a time and not geared to show you a forecast for multiple cities on a trip or tour. I’m currently on the Adobe Create Now World Tour and in some cases going to a different city each day. As I was flying from Baltimore to Milwaukee with a layover in Minneapolis and then later driving to Chicago I wondered what the weather was going to be like for those destinations on the days I’d be there? While I can certainly sit down and put each city into any of my weather apps, I wanted to have an App that gave me the upcoming weather for multiple cities in one view. Trip Weather was the 1st one that I found to give me just that. The concept is simple. You enter the cities and the dates you’ll be in those cities. When you’re done, you’ll have a scrolling display of your weather forecast for your upcoming stops. It does this well.

Great, but I want more detail sometimes

The App does exactly what it says it does and I can’t fault it for what it does. However, what I’d like to see in an update is the ability to tap on any given day/city and get more details for that day/city. Perhaps it would expand with an hourly forecast. Other than that simple request Trip Weather was exactly what I was looking for. I even like how it’s in the Travel category on the App Store instead of the Weather category. It’s definitely a travel tool more than a weather app. If your travels include multiple back to back destinations, then you definitely should check out this app.

iTunes

News
Google Maps

Google Maps for iOS Updated with Contact Search

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Although we cheered when Google Maps returned to iOS as downloadable App, there was one feature missing that we had before. The ability to search your contacts for addresses to navigate to. Although this update is not using the built-in contacts, it will use your Google (GMail) contacts in all searches now. I don’t mind this since I sync my iOS and Google contacts with this great app. It would have been nice to use the built-in contacts since that’s where most users will have their contacts, but I can see Google (an iOS competitor) wanting to keep everything in their own eco-system (just like Apple does). This update also brings fast category searching such as restaurants, bars, cafes, gas stations, etc. and the ability to choose between Miles or Kilometers as your preference.

The more I use Apple Maps, the more I’m happy that we have alternatives. While Navigon is still my overall preferred full featured turn-by-turn navigation App, Google Maps is great for a free alternative.

iTunes

News
Adobe Photoshop Touch for phone

Adobe Photoshop Touch Now for iPhone

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Adobe just released its very popular photo editing tool originally for iPad, Photoshop Touch on iPhone and Android. That’s right you can now have the power of Photoshop Touch on your iPhone or your iPad. This new App offers a touch friendly interface to the functions that users will need the most when editing and compositing images on their iPhone. I have to say I’m even more excited to see Photoshop Touch on iPhone than I was when it was released for iPad. The simple reason is that I take way more photos with my iPhone camera than I do with my iPad and therefore I’m more likely to use a photo editing App on my iPhone than my iPad. Also since Photoshop Touch works with Adobe Creative Cloud I can start an edit on my iPhone and finish it on my iPad or Photoshop on the desktop if I choose.

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Adobe Photoshop Touch for phone offers powerful new capabilities for smartphone users:

·         Enhance images using popular Photoshop features such as layers, selection tools, filters, tonal and color adjustments

·         Apply effects and add graphical text for endless creative possibilities

·         Edit images as large as 12 megapixels with layers

·         Combine images together quickly using the Scribble Selection feature, and easily refine your selection with the Refine Edge tool

·         Automatically sync images to Adobe Creative Cloud™ with free 2GB of storage

You can get Photoshop Touch for iPhone here
iTunes

You can get Photoshop Touch for iPad here
iTunes

Yes you can also get it for Android here.

 

To make it even better, get one of these

Brushing with your finger is ok, but if you want more precision I highly recommend getting one of these Wacom Bamboo Styluses for touch screens.

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You can get one here.

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