Recent App Reviews
Since I had so much fun writing my last post about AppsGoneFree, I thought I’d follow up with a quick look at a few other places to find great free apps. After all, there are about 750,000 live apps on iTunes and it gets harder and harder every day to find what you need. I know it frustrates me, and it probably frustrates you too. The good news is certain websites and apps are specifically designed to narrow your choices and help you find quality apps that are free or on sale for a limited time. Here are some of the best I found:
A fairly new entry onto the iOS media-player scene is iMPlayer 1.3.0 ($2.99). While the player has some useful features — which I will elaborate on — in a word: I do not recommend this player, unless you need its bookmarks feature. Otherwise, its performance is just too weak for its price point.
The new Mailbox app is receiving a phenomenal response, with wide coverage in major media, including a highlight in this week's issue of in Time Magazine. The goal of Mailbox is to help you deal with the daily onslaught of e-mail to achieve an inbox with zero messages. Both the app and the service are free.
As I pointed out in my previous article, iMedia Player is an excellent free multimedia player. And now its developers have announced the debut of a separate, commercial app, MPlayer ($2.99) officially licensing the (E-)AC3 audio codec.
Like many information technology professionals, I've had to become somewhat proficient in basic Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) coding. As a blogger, that basic knowledge often pays off, particularly when one of my iPhone Life blog posts doesn't look right. I have gathered several great tools throughout the years that help me write and test HTML, the fundamental code that tells your web browser how to present content. If you’re looking for an iPad/iPhone app that can teach you the basics of HTML, check out L2Code HTML ($2.99). This intuitive tutorial app teaches you the fundamentals and also handily provides a color-coded text editor to make creating your own pages (or even formatting blog posts) as easy as pie!
We decided to go to breakfast at Norma’s, a famous New York brunching institution in midtown at Le Parker Meridien. It wasn’t just around the corner. We used Yelp (Free), which set us off on our hunt. As the rain poured down we approached the quarry. We knew we were close, but the scaffolding obscured our view and rain continued to cascade down like a wet veil.
Originally slated for release Friday in the United States, the highly anticipated Real Racing 3 (free) is making its debut one day early, available today in the App Store. The new version of the hit franchise racing game was first announced Aug. 2, 2012, and Apple used it to demonstrate the iPhone 5’s awesome gaming capabilities at the game’s unveiling back in September.
I love that in this day and age, a great idea can go from relative obscurity to overnight success thanks to the power of the Internet and the funding of the general public. Crowd-funding resource Indiegogo is one of the top websites where great ideas get brought to life, and the Amiigo Fitness Bracelet ($99) is one of its latest success stories.
It's fascinating to see the new approaches to managing e-mail cropping up. We recently covered Mailbox, which is receiving a huge amount of attention and has nearly 1 million people in the rollout queue. Also newly available is Cloze (free), which the developer characterizes as "The noise-cancelling inbox for e-mail and social."
iDevices make great video playback machines thanks to their (in most cases) excellent screen and built-in hardware support for video decoding and playback. Tons of third-party multimedia player apps have sprung up to meet demand, and their developers update them frequently. These recent updates are great news for multimedia enthusiasts. I will review major updates of two of the best players, AVPlayerHD and It's Playing, and will report on new versions of some other players as well. Let's start with AVPlayerHD.
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