App Reviews

Keeping track of your weight and how much you're eating used to be a difficult and time-consuming task. The App Store has given us dozens of health and fitness applications that complete most of the equation, but they all rely on entering in the number of calories in each meal in order to keep an accurate diary of eating patterns. Recently, a new crop of apps have appeared that use a searchable database of products where the nutritional information is already known, but since it only works with prepackaged food, home made snacks and meals are difficult to enter. Aiming to solve this problem once and for all is Meal Snap, a new application that (as its name suggests) requires nothing more than a photo of whatever you're currently eating to reveal the number of calories it contains.

...

This afternoon I saw a fantastic presentation from Taz Goldstein at HandHeldHollywood, on some of the best apps available on the iPad for film makers. Taz was hilarious and energetic, and was kind enough to chat to me after the show for our lil Podcast, so look forward to that soon. His presentation was a godsend, because most of the ProApps aimed at filmmakers range anywhere from $9.99 to $129, so they've always been the kind of apps that are beyond an impulse buy for me, or that "i guess i should buy it to talk about on the podcast" obligation. So to hear ...

I must confess that it’s been a long time since I was particularly concerned about how much drive space I was using.

For starters, I’m a tech that runs his own business - I don’t mind cracking the lid on my computer(s) and upgrading them and can get the parts I need at wholesale prices. On top of this, my network includes a number of servers with plenty of drive space.

The bottom line, for many years now, is that drive capacity hasn’t been an issue. Mostly, I have enough. If I don’t have enough on any one computer I can easily add more.

This changed a few weeks ago when I got myself a new MacBook Air. These svelte little laptops are just great for light-weight portability but fall down a little ...

If you grew up during the 90s playing video games NBA Jam was king. Pumping money into the arcade machine at Timezone or staying up all night trash talking your mates playing on either their SNES or Megadrive it was good times. I even remember competing in a NBA Jam tournament at my local Blockbuster Video... times certainly have changed since then but if you want to take a trip down memory lane or see what you missed out on NBA Jam is back and on ...

There are plenty of alternative camera apps available for your iPhone. Camera Mic takes a unique approach to taking photos by letting you activate the shutter via the microphone to unleash your inner spy or pervert.

Upon launching the app you are presented with a rather familiar camera interface with the majority of the screen as the view finder and a couple of on screen buttons to toggle the flash, front facing camera and also the microphone shutter ...

So, it's here. The news app so highly anticipated it demanded its very own launch event and the involvement of several Apple executives has arrived. Does The Daily and its content live up to the hype? Let's find out…


First things first: those looking for a truly beautiful reading experience should look elsewhere. The Daily looks good, but I very much doubt Apple's UI team had anything to do with this (rather, Apple's involvement in this app ...

So I don't know how many of you have ever gone to confession, but I have. As an ex-catholic school boy I was marched off to confession every few weeks to tell the priest my sins. That was then, this is now. I have not been to confession for over 20 years and there is now an app to make my life easier (who has time to see a priest?)

When you launch the app you get to put in multiple users, but it does allow you to put in a password. This can be good, because as you see later your sins get saved for later reference. Then you find out for how long since your last confession and can choose which version of The Act of Contrition is best for you. You can choose the short one or if you are really hard core then go the latin version. (If you have no idea what an Act of Contrition then you are getting too deep).

Now the fun part. You get to choose your sins. It is based around the 12 commandments and the examinations of these. So under the 6th commandment you can confess your masturbation, indecent dressing and thoughts (only tick the box once, not one for each time). If you have sinned outside the standard realm of the 12 commandments, then you can add your own sins. I wish there was a way to share these sins amongst users. This could make a great read.

Then you begin confession and it gives you what to say. I would love to see someone walk into confession with their notes they had made beforehand, just to make sure they have them all. It steps you through the list and allows you to skip some if you want.

How many times have you found yourself browsing on the iTunes Store or anywhere on the web for new music releases? I'm looking for the latest releases all the time and it's often only by coincidence that I find something from a favourite artist of mine, which makes me think about all the music I must be missing out on. Apple itself has tried to fix this in the past with their own “My Alerts” feature in the iTunes Store, but isn't particularly prominent or intuitive. Nomis is the latest solution, and may well be the greatest too.

As soon as you open Nomis you know this is an app where its developer knows interface counts for everything. I've chosen to mention this first because the app is probably better defined as a widget – much like Apple's own Stocks or Weather apps, Nomis has two main navigation and one information screen, so if your interface sucks it's going to become very apparent, very quickly. Nomis is based on your library, and like many library-based apps it employs a wood panel design. New releases are accompanied by glossy artwork on the left side of the screen and a subtle “NEW” banner across the top, arranged by date of release.

An album overview fills your screen when you tap on any listed album. It has a ...

The days always go by slowly when you're waiting for an exciting event, so we often like to create countdowns to make sure we don't have to wait a second longer than we should. Mac users will no doubt be aware of a number of Dashboard widgets that allow you to put in a time and date and set a countdown but users wanting a fully fledged solution have been left in the dark.

That is, until a little application called Timer Utility was released.

Timer Utility does more than just countdowns, but let's begin with that particular feature. Adding a countdown in the app is really quite simple: all that's required to add one is a click on the plus button in the bottom left corner of the window under Alarm Clocks. Then you can edit it directly in its list by double clicking on the name then date. Done! If you don't know what exact time your event starts, you can choose to countdown to a date instead by clicking on the Date Countdowns tab and entering a value there.

The cool thing about Timer Utility is that there's much more functionality inside each of those timers. The app has a menu called the Actions Editor, where you can type in a list of automated responses to carry out at the end of a countdown. In the screenshot above, I've added a countdown to 10:00AM Monday for the Super Bowl (for the purposes of this example, try to pretend that it's last Sunday!) and when time runs out, the Actions Editor performs what I've asked it to do: first, flash the screen white for a second, play an alarm (there's a number of alarm sound choices, mostly matching those of Mac OS X) three times, display and speak a message, then launch Chrome and go ...