If you’re using the Chrome browser on your Mac, then you might like to take a look at Backtick, an extension which lets you fire off bookmarklets with a few keystrokes. Like Alfred, Launchbar or Quicksilver on the Mac, Backtick lets you hit a key combo and type in a couple of letters to trigger a command. Only instead of launching apps and so on, it launches bookmarklets.
One of the essential parts in my RSS-BitTorrent-iPad TV-watching setup is iFlicks, a Mac app from Jendrik Bertram that takes a video file, adds cover art and movie/show metadata and then converts the file into an iTunes or iPad-friendly format. It even adds in subtitles if you have them in the same folder as the video file.
Now v2.0 has launched its public beta stage, so you can try out the faster, better and more powerful-er next version.
Wow, the Evernote folks are on a real roll these days. Not only does the iOS app now not suck enough to use it every day, but the new Safari web clipper is good enough to make me use my Mac for browsing the web again. It’s like a combination of Skitch, Instapaper and, well, Evernote.
I said that the original Mattebox may be “the best iPhone camera app around, but then I went back to using the iPhone’s built-in camera for everything and doing the edits in post.
But Mattebox 2 has just launched, and it is certainly good enough to tempt me back. It keeps the same super-simple interface, and adds Lightroom filter export and exposure compensation.
Runtime stands out above other run-tracking iPhone apps thanks to its great design: it’s not – like most other apps – fugly as hell. It also use the iPhone 5S’s M7 MoCoPro to track you even when you’re walking.
It’s hard to describe Curator for iPad as anything other than a digital scrapbook… In a good way. It lets you pull in snippets and content from pretty much anywhere, presenting them in a clean grid layout. If you ever used Evernote to collect a stuff together on one place for a project, you might consider Curator instead.
HopTo is a great version of Microsoft Word for the iPad. And that’s because it is MS Word, up in the cloud, driving a native iPad app. And you know what? If Microsoft just made the exact same app only with the Word part running locally on the iPad, I’d be happy. It really is nice enough to let you forget you’re using Word.
Coffitivity is an app that turns your too-quiet (and frankly pretty creepy) home office into a buzzing coffee shop, only without the jerk who’s hogging the single power outlet all frikkin’ morning after buying one measly coffee. And not even a real coffee. It’s one of those lame-o frappa-latte-chinos or something.
Anyhow, Coffitivity adds a backing track to your office, via a Mac or iOS app.
Everpix’s servers are probably going to hate this, but users will love it. Picturelife (my favorite of the Everpix alternatives I tested, has made an Everpix-to-Picturelife importer. If you received a link to your Everpix archive, you can just plug it in to the importer and walk away.
Best of all, the entire archive won’t count towards your storage quota. And the Picturelife team managed to put this all together in less than 24 hours.
Day One, the beautiful journaling app for Mac and iOS, has just gotten even more beautiful on iOS 7, and added features to boot. I roll my own nerd journal, but if I used a journaling app it’d be Day One. Especially now it has M7 support.
After the recent Everpix shutdown, I moved all my photos to Flickr. If you read my roundup of Everpix alternatives, you’ll know that Flickr wasn’t my first choice, but it turns out that neither is it my only choice. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Everpix was great because it just sucked in all your photos, whether you kept them in iPhoto, on your iPhone, in a weird beardo folder structure on your Mac, or even if you took all of your photos using Instagram. It was far from perfect, but it was the best. And then it went away.
Unbound for Mac has finally reached v1.0, and you’re probably going to love it. Point Unbound at a folder on your Mac and it’ll turn any folders inside into beautiful, browsable photos albums. It’s like what iPhoto would be if iPhoto had grown up in an alternate universe where bloated software was a bad thing.
Forget 3-D printing. The future of personal manufacturing is now 2-D printing – when you’re making iPhone keyboards that it. Using nothing but a keyboard printed onto a sheet of regular paper, along with Gyorgyi Kerekes’s new Paper Keyboard app, you can type and play games as if you’d dropped cash money on a real 3-D metal and plastic keyboard.
BitTorrent Sync is one of the best Dropbox alternatives out there. Drawing upon the power of BitTorrent, BitTorrent Sync allows you to keep folders synced between multiple Macs easily, but without storing them in the cloud or having to pay for things like storage.
If you’re a BitTorrent Sync user — and you really should at least consider being one — great news. BitTorrent Sync just got an iPad app.
ThisLife is a new(ly resurrected) online photo-storage service from Shutterfly, the photo-book-printing people. It’s similar to other services like Picturelife and the now-dead Everpix, letting you pull in your photos from other popular photo sites like Flickr and Instagram. But it comes with one unique feature: face recognition.
Before I got lazy and did everything in Snapseed and Instagram, Filterstorm was one of my favorite iOS apps, and now it’s back, bigger, faster and, uh, neuer than before. Developer Tai Shimizu started over and came up with a whole new take on his powerful photo-editing app, which is appropriately called Filterstorm Neue.
Last month, Facebook released an update that allowed iPhone users to edit posts and comments and even preview all of their changes. It was a small, but welcome update. Unfortunately, it was also exclusive to the iPhone, but now users of Facebook for iPad can avail themselves of the same trick.
Do you ever grab screenshots of websites on your iPhone, then struggle to transfer them to you Mac for further editing, or for – say – putting them into a blog post? Now you can do the exact same thing, only without ever having to touch your iPhone. How? Pixa’s new mobile Web Snapper, that’s how.
When Everpix announced its shutdown this week, the Internet Sadness Factor spun the dial up to its highest point since the original demise of Del.icio.us, and the euthanization of Loren Brichter’s Tweetie for iPad. I was a lover of the service, and now I, like you, am searching for an alternative.
The good news is that there are plenty of services trying to solve the same problem as Everpix: how to organize your overwhelming mountain of digital photos. The bad news is that none of them is as easy to use as Everpix.
If you want a great head-to-head comparison of the alternatives, take a look at The Verge’s article from the end of August. This article won’t be a feature-for-feature rundown. Instead I’m going to look at some of the good and bad points of the remaining competition. Hopefully I can help you to find something you’ll like.
IFTTT has gotten a big update today in the form of proper Reminders and Photos integration for iOS. Before, you could have it do some clever automatic thing when you added a new photo or reminder to the respective iPhone apps, but now IFTTT can create reminders and add pictures to any album. It’s pretty sweet, and would be awesome but for one big gotcha.
Instapaper was once the king of the read later services, but was usurped by fuller-featured upstarts with better features and more liberal sharing policies (Instapaper, unlike Pocket, has no IFTTT triggers for instance). But it is slowly pulling itself back into the future, and this latest iPad update adds support for video and a new Browse function.
Is this enough to pull me back to Instapaper from Pocket? Actually yes, but not for the reason you think.
Drawing apps on the iPad are pretty neat, but it always seemed to me that they cleaved to strongly to the limitations of the physical world. Why, for example, should your piece of virtual paper be limited in size and shape like a piece of paper paper? It shouldn’t. And that’s the premise of Sketchology, a vector app with an almost infinite canvas.
I just moved to Germany, which means that I get a lot more weather than when I lived in Spain. There, a quick once-a-week check was plenty to know whether you should get the umbrella from the attic. In Germany, I check every time I want to leave the house.
And now there’s a great app which will will let you customize your own weather notifications, right there on your iPhone.
Editorially is a web-based text editor that I wish I used. It has a gorgeous interface, lots of great collaborative features, and now it even exports to Dropbox and WordPress, which would let me write pretty much anything I ever need to write in it.
Sadly, I have no need for collaboration, and I swore of writing anything but an email address in the browser years ago after losing work to crashes.
Get your silver bullets and holy water ready dear friends, because our new CultCast: some Dell laptops are emitting a mysteriously pungent smell; iPad Air gets benchmarked, is murderously speedy; our fave photo app brings darkness… out of the shadows; Apple says some 5S batteries are dieing… faster than they should; Tim Cook says upcoming Apple products will blow… your mind; and we chant… aloud our favorite apps so you can vote on which is best… it’s an all new Faves N Graves!
Put down that candy and join us for this week’s best Apple stories! Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast now on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing on iTunes, or hit play below and let the spookiness begin.
