Category: iPhone App of the Week

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iPhone App of the Week – Understanding Photoshop-Quick Fixes

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This week’s iPhone App of the Week is actually from my buddy Richard Harrington. I’ve known Rich for years and he’s an excellent instructor.

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His Understanding Photoshop – Quick Fixes app aims to be a series of video tutorials on how to do common tasks in Photoshop right in your pocket. We’ve all been there when you want to do something and you’ve got the app open on your computer and you just can’t remember how to do it or you want to know the best technique to do something.

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Weekend Update

I thought I would share some late breaking updates with you that came out on Friday:

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Adobe Releases the Photoshop.com Mobile App

This app makes it easy for you to do basic editing of your photos including standard cropping, apply effects (including the Sketch effect I used below) and  upload to your galleries on Photoshop.com or send your photos via email. It also allows you to see all of your photos on your Photoshop.com account including the ability to run slideshows. When you’re editing the Exposure, Saturation or Tint, just drag your finger left or right across your photo to make the adjustment! Cool!

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Get the Photoshop.com App here from the App Store. It’s FREE Photoshop.com Mobile

 

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Tweetie 2

Tweetie 2 is a complete rewrite of the popular Tweetie app and Tweetie was my app of choice for doing Twitter. So of course I was interested in upgrading to Tweetie 2. There’s a lot to like here with lots of new options including access to ALL of Twitter’s features and great multiple account support.

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Follow me on Twitter

Get Tweetie 2 here from the App Store for $2.99 Tweetie 2

 Expect more complete reviews of these apps in the not to distant future via my iPhone App of the Week feature each Friday.

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iPhone App of the Week – Camera Genius

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CameraGenius aims to give you more options for using your iPhone’s built-in camera. When you think about it the iPhone’s camera is OK, but limited in features. If you bought a stand alone point and shoot camera you would be able to do things like Zoom, set a timer, use image stabilization, etc.

 

More features for your iPhone camera

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Camera Genius adds some pretty useful features to the iPhone’s built-in camera. The first one that caught my eye was Zoom. This digital zoom feature allows you to Zoom in on the shot you’re taking with an interactive on screen slider. 

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TomTom, $120 for your car kit? REALLY!!?

 

It wasn’t long ago that I reviewed the TomTom Navigation App for the iPhone. At the time the only other app that I had to compare it with was the Navigon app, which came out first. When the TomTom app came out it really wasn’t any better than the Navigon app. Sure there are some things that were nicer like more POIs, but overall the app had basically the same major limitations as the Navigon app. Well Navigon has released two updates since then and in the latest update they gave us TTS (Text to Speech) so that when you’re approaching a turn it says the name of the street that you’re about to turn on. This plus integrated iPod controls an automatic day/night mode and a few other fixes plus a cheaper retail price makes Navigon my app of choice. Check out the Navigon app here on the App Store: 

MobileNavigator North America

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iPhone App of the Week – Occasions

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One of the things that really bugs me about the iPhone’s built-in calendar is that there is no way to set an alert/alarm for Birthdays. They are already present in most of my Contacts. They appear automatically on the "Birthdays" Calendar, yet Apple doesn’t allow you to set reminders for this calendar without going through some workarounds. It wasn’t even until iPhone OS 3.0 that I had a way of subscribing to my Birthdays calendar on my IPhone directly. So there is still a LOT of room for improvement in this area. 

 

Occasions

Occasions is an iPhone app that is designed to overcome this shortcoming. It automatically picks up the birthdays and anniversaries in your Contacts. You can also enter events manually if you need to. It then keeps a running list in chronological order of upcoming occasions. While there are many iPhone apps that do this including the app I was using before "Upcoming Events", this app supports the iPhone 3.0 Push Notifications feature. This means that the app can pop up alerts and sounds without being open! My old app still hasn’t been updated with this important feature so I’ve moved on.

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iPhone App of the Week – PhotoScatter

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I share a lot of pictures on various services. The ones I use the most are Facebook and Flickr. Sure I use Smugmug, MobileMe, Photoshop.com, Twitter, my own blog and others, but Facebook and Flickr are the ones I use the most often. Although I love the features of MobileMe, Smugmug and the others, the people that I share the most with are all on Facebook or Flickr. 

 

Shoot it once, upload it to many

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Photoscatter aims to be the only photo uploading app you’ll need. With Photoscatter you can upload to:

  • Facebook
  • Flickr
  • ShutterFly
  • PhotoBucket
  • Picasa
  • Twitter

all at the same time! Of course you can choose which services you want to upload to on an image by image basis. 

 

This app is ideal for me. If I’m at an event and want to share a quick snapshot from my iPhone with all my friends, I can shoot it and upload it to Facebook, Flickr and even Twitter all at once.

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iPhone App of the Week – Taxi Magic

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I’ve spent the better part of this week doing a 3 part series on some of my favorite travel tips and accessories (see Part 1, 2 and 3). So I thought I would wrap things up this week with one of my new favorite Apps: Taxi Magic.

 

True Story

I was in a meeting in San Jose and during one of the breaks I checked my Genius App Recommendations and one of them was Taxi Magic. So out of curiosity I decided to take a look. First off, this app was getting hammered in the reviews. However, I didn’t let that stop me since the app was free and also one of the biggest complaints was the $1.50 charge if you pay for your Taxi with your credit card. I wasn’t too worried about that, so I downloaded the app.

At the end of the day I needed to go from the office in San Jose to the San Jose airport and I was going to go by Taxi. So I decided that this would be as good of a test as I could give it. I didn’t have much time and quite frankly if the app didn’t work, I may have been late/missed my flight. Risky, I know. 

 

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iPhone App of the Week – Facebook 3.0.2

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Although I’m a frequent user of Facebook, I was never a fan of their iPhone app. I don’t know how else to say it, but the previous version sucked. There, I got that out! The app worked, but it was very limited. It didn’t support many of the new features of Facebook and in most cases I ended up just doing things either on my computer in Safari or using the mobile version of Facebook in Safari on my iPhone.

 

3.0 changes all of that

The highly anticipated 3.0 release is finally here. There were pictures of the new interface and teasers for months, but a couple of weeks ago while checking the App Store for updates, it was there! I couldn’t click the update button fast enough. 

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The Newly designed Facebook home screen has nice easy to read/identify icons navigate your way around. 

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Navigon Updates Their iPhone App With TTS

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One of the things that I had originally dinged Navigon for in their GPS turn-by-turn navigation app was the lack of Text-to-Speech (TTS). This is the feature that tells you the name of the street you’re about to turn on. ie. "Turn right on Maple Street". Well to keep the pressure on TomTom and others, Navigon just released their update as promised. They also added an Automatic Day/Night adjustment for adjusting the display for the time of day. 

Now let’s have Traffic Support and we’ll be really good to go!

 

NavigonCarKit

Navigon also recently announced that they were developing their own "car kit." Although the TomTom car kit seems that it will do more and offer the much needed GPS signal boost. Not to mention that the TomTom one will work with other apps besides TomTom (like the Navigon app). Both car kits are slated to ship in October. In the meantime I’m using this iPhone Vent Mount.

The Navigon app is now $89.99 and available here from the App Store.

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iPhone App of the Week – DSLR Camera Remote Professional Edition

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As a portrait photographer I’m very used to shooting in a controlled environment like my studio. I’m also used to shooting tethered into my laptop. So when onOne announced that their DSLR Camera Remote Professional Edition app for the iPhone was now compatible with Nikon DSLR’s, I was intrigued and wanted to try it out.

 

Before we go any further

Before I get into this app let me first tell you what it does AND what’s required to use it. First off you’ll need a compatible Canon or Nikon DSLR camera. Here’s the list of the ones that this app works with. Next you’re going to need to plug that camera into your Mac or PC using a USB cable and you’re going to need to run the onOne DSLR Camera Remote Server app (free download here.) Lastly you’re going to need a Wi-Fi connection between your iPhone/iPod touch and your laptop so that the app can control your tethered camera.

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