Flipboard for iPhone Now Available →

The much awaited update to Flipboard — the one that was supposed to bring support for iPhone is now available in the App Store.

The update, v1.7 is now a universal app running on your iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. This update also brings along a feature exclusive to the iPhone (for now) called Cover Stories — a curated collection of content being shared with you.

With Flipboard for iPhone we’re introducing Cover Stories — one place to quickly catch up on some of the most interesting news, updates and photos being shared with you right now. The more you interact with your friends and the stories being shared, the smarter Cover Stories gets. You can refine what appears here by adding content to your Flipboard, muting anyone you’d rather not hear from, and connecting to your social networks. Cover Stories will be coming to your iPad in the near future.

Go ahead and grab Flipboard from the App Store. It’s Free.

Twitter Direct Messages have become the preferred mode of communication among startup/small organization employees and also among twitter folks in general as they are non-intrusive and convenient mode of conversation. Thus having a twitter client that exclusively handles Direct Messages has become more of a necessity than a luxury. If you are a twitter DM freak, Chirpy 2.0 is for you. High Order Bit developers have given Chirpy a full redesign over its predecessor and it now comes with an all new feature set.

Complete with retina graphics and Dropbox integration, Chirpy offers a lot of advantages over full-blown twitter clients. Dropbox functionality for one, is a big bonus that lets you you share images in a jiffy, while still keeping them private; unlike when using photo-sharing services like Twitpic or Lockerz. Chirpy creates a new folder in your Dropbox account without cluttering your public folder. The app also offers inline viewing of the images shared via Dropbox. Push notifications is the preferred way to get notified of incoming DMs. It now comes with a search feature that comes in real handy when you have umpteen number of conversations loaded up in your inbox and need to find a specific message you vaguely remember about. Ability to email conversations, copy-paste messages, mark all messages read are some of the other features Chirpy 2.0 comes bundled with. A neat and clean interface with customizable chat bubble colors makes for a pleasant reading experience. Fewer taps to access DMs from multiple accounts is essentially the USP of the app.

Chirpy lacks the ability to swipe to delete a conversation. It can only delete messages one at a time which is utterly painful if you want to get rid of a long conversation. I would’ve loved to see video sharing via Dropbox integrated within the app. The app isn’t universal and is restricted to the iPhone for now. Overall Chirpy is a perfect app for folks who rely heavily on twitter DMs and it works just as advertised. Its price recently dropped from $1.99 to $0.99, so now would be a perfect time to grab it from the App Store.

Everyday is a new app for the iPhone with a simple premise. Take a photo of yourself everyday and put those together to create a time-lapse-esque movie of your portraits. Sounds familiar? It should. There are a number of such videos on youtube already, the most notable being Noah Kalina’s Noah K. Everyday project and this video of a very pretty face.

Everyday app brings this very idea to your iPhone. The app itself is bare minimum in UI and makes it very easy for anyone to make their own videos. Using the front facing camera of the iPhone, Everyday either lays the previously taken portrait as an onion skin or you use a grid-overlay to align your eyes, nose and mouth for each photo you take. I found using the grid easier and better than the photo overlay. Once you have taken enough photos, you can see a preview of the movie before saving it to the camera roll. The app allows you to choose the speed of the video as well. The app also features daily reminders so you never forget to take your own photo. Once you’re done creating the movie, you can share it on Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr or Twitter.

The app is very simple in its core idea and has been put together extremely well. That’s not surprising since Noah himself is attached to the project, with developers William Wilkinson and Oliver White along with Adam Lisagor (more popularly known as lonelysandwich). If you just read that and went, “I wonder if Adam created a video for this..”, well, he sure has.

The app is now available on the App Store for $1.99.

I’m back yet again with another Twitter app review. You remember the last one? When I used a whole bunch of profanity in reviewing ChillTweet? The best iPhone app ever?! Well, this time, I won’t be so harsh because the app doesn’t suck entirely. Twitter was all aflutter about Weet the other day, and I bought it too. (I’m easily influenced by the Twattersphere.) But I was pleasantly surprised by Weet.

Weet is a pretty app. It doesn’t use standard iPhone UI elements, but the layout isn’t drastically different from most Twitter apps. Weet looks like a pregnant Tweetie. I mean, it seems to be glowing. There’s this slight shimmer to the menu bars and navigation buttons. It’s like fairies sprinkled magical fairy dust over everything. I also love that I haven’t found a low-res icon on my retina display. Lots of apps have the straggling low-res icon, but the amount of graphical polish in Weet is astounding.

The most intriguing feature that Weet brings to Twitter clients is Cloudapp support. You can upload photos, videos and shorten links in the app. Problem is, uploading media erases the text you’ve already typed in. Also, should you media upload fail midway, the app locks up completely and you have to force quit the app. These two bugs seem really out of place given how polished the visual design of the app is. It makes me wonder about how much, if any testing was done by people other than the developer. The app is also lacking swipe gestures that Tweetie had on day one, when the timeline loads it pushes the tweets down to show you the “Loading…” area from the top; you can’t search for just a username, you can’t search your own timeline, no retweeting the traditional way, and at this point, why bother releasing a paid app when Twitter for iPhone is free and does more? I really want to like Weet, but there is a much better free option. And another app I like, TweetList, just got an update to make it pretty comparable to Twitter for iPhone. Weet has too much competition to rely solely on its looks.

There seems to be a lot of bugs that need to be fixed, but the developer said a bug fix update was on its way already. If the app wasn’t so cheap, I might have been miffed at the lack of QA testing, but at $0.99, Weet is extremely pretty and the Cloudapp support is very neat.
[/Brandon]

[Milind]
The question remains, of course, if there is a market for Twitter clients. The day the best twitter client — Tweetie — went free with Twitter’s branding, the need to buy a twitter client vanished save for those few enthusiasts who like to try out every new twitter client out there. Tweetie has got everything, and it looks pretty darn good, making it difficult to recommend a new twitter client which doesn’t do nearly as much. I quote Buzz Anderson:

My suspicion is that people will continue to make them [Twitter clients], but it seems to me that they’re already on the road to becoming increasingly uniform and commoditized as the Twitter experience is more sharply defined by Twitter itself (as my Birdfeed collaborator Neven Mrgan has suggested to me, Twitter clients are going the way of email clients). I also suspect that the inherent downward price pressure in the Twitter client market, which already made it very difficult for me to build a viable indie software business when Birdfeed was on the market, is only going to be more intense now that Twitter has its own formidable (and free) client offerings.

Twitter clients like Weet will have a userbase, or at least a market, among geeks who get bored with the same user interface and need something fresh. Weet certainly has a fresh look to it, and its timeline somehow looks cleaner than Tweetie’s (even though both display the same amount of information). Weet is a really nice looking app, and at just $0.99, I don’t think anyone would regret the purchase. There’s no rule that you need to have just one twitter client. Besides, they’re going to pad it with the missing features over time. They’ve even got a pretty looking Mac version in the pipeline.

But, for the vast majority of users, I think Tweetie (okay, Twitter for iPhone) has everything you need.

If you are a user of Taptaptap’s Camera+, then pay close attention. Since its release, Taptaptap has been trying to get Apple to allow them to use the volume buttons to snap photos. Their most recent version, 1.3, was shot down because of this.

Unfortunately, Apple decided to reject it. This doesn’t come as a complete surprise since it wasn’t our first time being rejected for that very feature. Their exact reason for the rejection is the following:

“Your application cannot be added to the App Store because it uses iPhone volume buttons in a non-standard way, potentially resulting in user confusion. Changing the behavior of iPhone external hardware buttons is a violation of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement. Applications must adhere to the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines as outlined in the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement section 3.3.7″

Image from Taptaptap

Now some of you may think that it’s not much of a big deal. It may sound like a small thing, but being able to use your volume buttons as a camera shutter will result in much better photos. No longer will you have to try to stabilize your phone with one hand, and hit the shutter button with the other. Now you would be able to use two hands to hold your phone and hit the shutter with one finger. Thanks to Chris Herbert, Camera+ users can use this, even though Apple hasn’t approved the app.

Safari.app » camplus://enablevolumesnap » enable volume snap in Camera+ » Get taptaptap banished from App Store.

A simple hack in Safari, just type “camplus://enablevolumesnap” in Safari’s address bar on your iPhone (no quotes) will enable the volume buttons to snap the shutter. I know this works in version 1.2.1 of Camera+, not sure about older versions. If you want to disable it, type “camplus://disablevolumesnap” in Safari (again with no quotes).

Before I heard of this, I was unsure about Camera+; I had never used it, and the screen shots in the App Store do it no justice. It truly is an amazing camera app. I’m shocked that we haven’t reviewed it before, so expect a full review of this awesome app soon. In the mean time, there is a very good chance that Camera+ will get pulled from the App Store, since it isn’t following Apple’s guidelines. So if you are on the edge, I’d recommend grabbing it while you have the chance, it is on sale for $1.99.

UPDATE: The app has been pulled from the App Store. We’ll see if it returns anytime soon.

Most good applications feel like they’ve been designed the right way. Everything is where you expect it to be, and all of its functionality works as advertised. Depending on the kind of application, there are usually several different developers making a similar product, and you basically choose between feature sets and colour schemes. But every product category has this one application, that takes the bar to the next level. It makes you see that while the others aren’t wrong in their design, they certainly aren’t right.

In the category of digital calculators, Soulver is that application.

It started off its humble beginnings on the Mac. Zac Cohen of Acqualia software, the guy who brings you Picturesque, decided to reinvent the calculator. Instead of mimicking the device you see on your desk, Cohen decided to not just have the ability to simulate a physical calculator on the computer, but to make something better.

The Mac version of Soulver looks nothing like your desk calculator. It’s a two pane window, with buttons on the toolbar. Where did all that chrome go? Turns out, you don’t need to have buttons arranged in a 3×4 grid. You have your keyboard to do that. Enter in your calculations as you would, and Soulver will display the solution to the right. You can enter basic sums, calculate percentages, perform advanced algebraic and binary operations, and even compute currencies.

The beauty of Soulver, is that it’s human in its operations. Say for instance making a tally of your shopping list. Instead of entering a series of numbers and then wondering how you ended up with the total, you could enter “20 for the carrots + 25 for the Fish and 5 tunafish at 200 each”. In the above example, Soulver prints 1045 in its calculations tab. “$20 for the carrots + £25 for the Fish and 5 tunafish at 200EUR each in Rs.” will print Rs. 59,664 instead. You can go back and edit those numbers if you find you’ve made a mistake, copy paste the entire strip and send it via email, or save it to disk to come back to it at a later date.

Let me assert that I’m not a mathematician. I hated the subject in school, and for most part have forgotten all the algebra I learnt. I do however know that Soulver is that application which would fit in perfectly for doing complex calculations; I know of many professionals who use this app every day. It’s got everything. Terms like COS, SIN, TAN can be entered using your keyboard. It’s got support for binary, so programmers can do their calculations, and it’s got variables, so you don’t have to enter the same thing over and over again. Soulver even won the Ars Design Award for Best Mac OS X app for Education.

But Cohen didn’t stop at creating a Mac app. While he first introduced Soulver for the iPhone, it’s the iPad app that really shines. Soulver is hands down the best way to do calculations on the iPad. You get access to a brilliantly laid out keyboard, the same dual pane UI, and might I add it looks very pretty to the eye. Switch to the regular keyboard and you can enter regular text strings along with numbers. And since entering things using the onscreen keyboard can be a little troublesome, there’s full support for variables, so you can easily enter repeated expressions.

Soulver for iPad will automatically save your math strips to its scratch, and you can save them permanently by assigning a name to one of them. The iPad app though is not as robust as the Mac version. For one, the keyboard will be a hindrance, unless of course you’re using a hardware keyboard with it. Second, it doesn’t support all of the expressions from the desktop, so stuff like currencies, time, bits and bytes. There’s also no syntax highlighting, so you can’t tell when the expressions you’ve entered are valid in that calculation. I do suppose they’ll be included as the application matures.

The iPhone version is a mixed bag. Since Soulver’s functionality requires a little space in the keyboard area, things aren’t quite as accessible. You can’t use the full keyboard for natural language expressions, there are no variables, and the lines don’t wrap, so you have to deal with panning back and forth (and tiny numbers). In terms of functionality, it’s got even less than the iPad version. I suppose it would be of use to those who’re addicted to the Soulver way of doing things, but as a casual user I’m much more comfortable with the regular calculator.

Soulver is $25 for the Mac, $5.99 for the iPad, and $2.99 for the iPhone. While Soulver is definitely not reserved for the professional, it’s highly unlikely a casual user would want to spend $25 on a calculator. Especially when Spotlight can do simple calculations pretty well, and Google Bing is always around when you need to convert dollars into pounds. Even the iPhone comes with a built in calculator for occasional conversions, and you probably already have Convertbot in your arsenal of apps. But if you’re looking for something more than just an occasional calculation of how much you owe aunt Jane, Soulver is the best there is.

Oh, and the iPad version is a must have no matter what your needs are.