SpeakingPhoto is a new social photography app that lets you connect in real-time with anyone you like, using photos and recorded audio to share your special moments. Competing with Vine, Snapchat, and Digisocial, SpeakingPhoto aims to be a nicer place to be; instead of the party-atmosphere of the latter two apps, this one wants to let you record and archive the “memories, notes, and stories behind milestone moments in your personal and professional lives.”

Pretty heady stuff for a photo sharing app, right?

Instead of Vine’s six seconds of video, SpeakingPhoto has you record your voice and ambient audio and pair it with a still photo. You can share these mixed media messages on Facebook, via YouTube, to email, or to SpeakingPhoto’s own curated Gallery on the web. You can also string up to five narrated photos together to tell a story or record an entire event, using either photos in your Camera Roll or taking new ones as you go.

The team isn’t interested in growing a new social network like other photo sharing apps, but rather wants to help communities of parents, families, working groups, and colleagues share information-rich moments and ideas with both image and sound. The inspiration for the app came from seeing families watch a multi-media art presentation of the kids in a kindergarten class, and the emotional connection to the work that resulted.

“SpeakingPhoto grew out of a desire to capture the sweet and fleeting sound of children’s voices – something home videos tend to diminish,” said CEO Dawn Davis in a statement. “From there, we realized that capturing stories, and the emotions behind them, was extremely meaningful. It quickly became apparent that this App can be used in many creative, fun and compelling ways, by people all over the world.”

There are three separate versions of the SpeakingPhoto app, from a free Lite version, an iPhone version for $0.99, and an iPad version for $2.99.

Source: App Store

This post was written by Rob LeFebvre from Cult of Mac.
You can view the original post by clicking here.

I don’t know if you have kids or not, but one of the more difficult things to keep track of, at least for me, is their allowance. Yeah, you might say, just write it down on a piece of paper or something. While that may seem to have merit, it rarely works out in my family. Let’s say my son gets $5 every two weeks for allowance. That’s a $5 bill I need to have each and every week.

Honestly? It never works out that way. So we tried using a calendar, on which I created a repeating event, set for every two weeks, figuring we could just count it up when he needed something. Well, that didn’t really work out, either. We’d be at a store, and he’d want something, and it’d be some non-multiple of five, and we’d try to remember to write it down, and so on.

Suffice it to say that I am doing a poor job at helping my kid keep track of his allowance, and an equally poor job of prepping him for real life money management.

So imagine my joy when I saw Allowance Manager for iOS, a Universal app that basically does what we need: tracks allowance on the iPhone or iPad. Win!

Created by a father, Dan Meador, with a similar issue, Allowance Manager lets kids and parents work together to keep track of what each child has been given for allowance, as well as any extra gift cash for birthdays or holidays. It also syncs up to the Allowance Manager website, for some seriously cloud-based money management for the whole darn family.

“Just log into our secure AllowanceManager.com website or open up our iPhone / iPad app and just a few minutes a week, parents can set and track their children’s allowance,” said Meador, in a statement. “It really makes it easy for parents to track and remember what money they’re giving their kids while empowering their kids to learn the value of money – why not get a computer to do most of the work for you?”

I can’t wait to get this into my own kids’ hands, as they move from dependent little ones to more and more independent pre-teens and teenagers. The more I can help them manage their own money now, the better off they’ll be in the future when they have to do it for real.

“We want to help make managing your family allowance simple and fun,” said Meador, “while at the same time helping kids learn how to correctly use money. The problem is learning how to be good with money is a skill that can only be done with practice. You cannot learn to ski by reading a book on skiing.”

True enough, I think, to warrant trying out this free app right now.

Source: App Store

This post was written by Rob LeFebvre from Cult of Mac.
You can view the original post by clicking here.

Here’s a little something that might get you formatted-text nerds excited: Rich Notes, yet another new text-editing app, lets you write on the iPad in rich text. That is, you can italicize and embolden your words right there on the page. Yes, this works with some other apps, but Rich Notes lets you use keyboard shortcuts to do it. If you have an external keyboard hooked up, CMD-B and CMD-I will do just what they do in every desktop app.

Rich notes comes from the developer DenVog, who also makes the excellent Index Card app for iPhone and iPad. It’s due to launch on February 20th. Let’s take a look:

First, what Rich Notes is not. It’s not a Markdown editor, and therefore doesn’t come with a Markdown keyboard row. You can of course write in Markdown, just as you can anywhere that text is supported (hell, you could even write it on paper with a Sharpie, although conversion to HTMinL might be a little trickier than usual).

Neither is it meant for writing for the web. There’s no built-in browser, no export to [chosen format here], and no preview. Rich Notes is a nuts-and-bolts text editor with formatting, and it does that job pretty well.

Formatting

While the app is free, you’ll have to pay to get all the fonts and formats using the in-app store. The best bet is to just spend the $2 for the Format Pack, which gets everything at once. I have mixed feelings on in-app purchases. On the one hand, they let you try an app before you buy, and even then you only need to pay for the features you want. It also keeps things simple, as there is only ever one download. It’s like shareware for iOS.

On the other hand, you can’t just buy the app and be done. And if you have multiple devices, you need to “restore” your purchases on each one, even as the download is pushed automatically to all of them. This is a pain.

Anyhow, you’ve bought the Format Pack for $2 instead of buying the Fonts, Highlighting, Strikethrough and Text Color packs for a buck apiece. What do you get? Here’s the official list:

• Format text – bold, italic, underline (Free).
• Strikethrough, text color, highlight (In-App Purchase).

The app ships with Georgia and Verdana, but your purchase gets you the following:

• AvenirNext
• AvenirNextCondensed
• Baskerville
• Cochin
• Courier
• Georgia
• GillSans
• Helvetica
• HelveticaNeue
• Optima
• Verdana

This is a little cheeky as pretty much all of these are built into iOS. Still, that’s a problem with in-app purchases: if the app itself cost $2, I wouldn’t even have mentioned it.

It’s Meant For Notes

Rich Notes uses a similar note-taking metaphor to apps like Plain Text and Simplenote, with a list of your notes on the left and a search bar at the top of the column for winnowing down long lists. And like any good note-taking app, it syncs. Rich Notes doesn’t use Dropbox, though. It uses iCloud, which means that you’ll be in sync with other instances of Rich Notes, but nothing else.

On the other hand, that’s perfect for taking notes. And you can always choose to export via Mail.

Import and Export

Export is limited but simple. You tap the little sharing arrow (the arrow bursting forth from the mundane confines of a box) and choose from Mail RTF, Mail Plain Text, Copy Clipboard and Duplicate. Would it be nice to open in other apps? Sure, but the clipboard’ll work just fine.

Import is a little more annoying. Rich Notes doesn’t show up in the standard “Open in…” popover in other apps, neither for RTF files nor even TXT files. The only way to get files in is to copy and paste them, and then you lose all RTF formatting. To be fair to Rich Notes, you can’t even copy formatted text from Mail into Pages, or vice versa. It’s a limitation of iOS’ pasteboard, it seems, rather than of the app.

The Interface

Rich Notes does the job of “distraction free” writing admirably.

The Rich Notes’ environment is pleasant, and easy to use. Sorting notes by date or by title is done by tapping little ABC or calendar icons at the bottom of the list, and the source list gets out of your way when you edit. In fact, if you wanted a “distraction free” writing app, then this one could do that job admirably. It also uses a kind of two-mode model: viewing and editing. When you’re viewing, there’s no keyboard. When you’re editing, the keyboard pops up. This lets you use the full screen for reading, and entering editing mode is as easy as tapping in the text to get started.

The rich text tools are arranged as an extra keyboard row, and this also contains a forward-delete key (yes!), plus keys to move the cursor’s position left and right by in increments of one letter or one word.You’ll also find a dedicated undo button plus keys for single quotes (or apostrophe), double quotes and a single dash (’ ” and -).

The rub (isn’t there always a rub?) is that the app nags the hell out of you. Every time you hit one of the non-purchased options from the extra keyboard row, or from a popover menu, you are whisked off to the in-app store. This is fine the first time, but for an app designed for writing, it’s pretty annoying to be forced to dismiss a dialog box every time you hit the wrong key. It’d be much better if you could switch the extra, non-purchased functions off after the first showing.

What’s Missing

• Dropbox
• TextExpander
• Mixed fonts

The developer seems to be taking the approach that built-in is better for most people, so we get iCloud and iOS keyboard shortcuts instead of Dropbox and TextExpander. Denvog:

Rich Notes does not support the TextExpander app. While it’s popular, I’ve decided to stick with iOS shortcuts which are free and available to all the apps on your device.

TextExpander is so much more powerful than the built-in shortcuts that I’d say it’s essential for any iOS writing app. In fact, it’s probably not a stretch to say that anyone nerdy enough to want an RTF editor for their iPad is probably already a TextExpander Touch user. Still, this is V1.0, and many great apps shipped without TextExpander support at launch.

The lack of TextExpander support might turn many people off.

And given the lack of import/export options, maybe Dropbox syncing would just lead to frustration every time you want to open an RTF file in Rich Notes.

More annoying is that you can only use one font in a note. Want to put your headers in Helvetica but use a serif face for body text? Tough. Rich Text only lets you use one font at a time. Again, no real big deal for a notes app, but it is called Rich Text, after all.

Tips

Rich Notes has some neat little gestures to help speed things up.

• When in “reading mode,” you can swipe left and right to switch between notes. When you get to the end, a cute little turned-up page shows the words “The End,” to let you know there’s nothing more to see.
• Pinching in and out will change the font size of the note.
• Like in any other app, tapping the status bar scrolls you to the top of the note list. But in Rich Notes, tapping the bottom toolbar scrolls you to the end of the list. Handy.
• Long-press on the text-color or text-highlight buttons to bring up a picker to change the color.
• You can protect the entire app with a passcode. Just switch it on in the apps’s preferences.
• ICloud syncing can be toggled on and off in the Settings App.

Conclusion

Rich Notes is a pretty good v1.0 release, and does a great job of letting you take formatted notes. The lack of import and export options makes it almost useless for anything else, though, including the writing of long-form articles which could really benefit from a little RTF polishing.

For now, I’ll stick with the majestic Writing Kit, which allows RTF as one of it’s many export options (although you need to write in Markdown). But as a long-time user of Denvog’s excellent Index Card, I know that he iterates constantly, and also listens to the requests of his users, which should mean that many of the currently “missing” features might soon be incorporated.

The App Store encourages the release of very raw apps, and rewards the “freemium” model.

As it is, Rich Text is a great lens through which to see both iOS and the App Store. It really pays to release an app in a very raw state and — if it gains traction — put the work in to add new features. Otherwise you could work for a year only to see the app disappear into nothingness on launch day.

It also pays to use the in-app purchase “freemium” model, as people are seemingly too cheap to pay $2 for an app, even from a known-good developer.

And two additions to iOS would make everything better. First, rich-text support. It works in Mail, so why not everywhere? Second, a less annoying way to restore in-app purchases. When I reinstall an app I previously paid to upgrade, those upgrades should be unlocked automatically. I can;t see any reason not to do this.

So, go check out Rich Notes. It’s free after all (and Universal).

Source: DenVog

This post was written by Charlie Sorrel from Cult of Mac.
You can view the original post by clicking here.

Earlier today, Google announced and released Google Chrome for iPhone and iPad, leaving many of us screaming "finally!" Google Chrome is a very popular web browser for Mac and PC that lets you keep bookmarks, tabs, logins and more synced between computers. With Google Chrome for iOS, you can now bring that same personalized experience to your iPhone and iPad.

I really like the look of Google Chrome on the iPhone and iPad. It's very clean and well designed. You are allowed an infinite number of tabs that you can easily scroll through. On the iPad, the tabs will just start piling up on one end of the tool bar and scrolling through the tab bar will reveal more tabs, moving the pile to the other end. On the iPhone, You have to tap on the windows button which will show all your tabs like stacks of folders on top of each other that you can scroll up and down through.

While viewing a webpage, you can also switch between tabs by swiping left or right to the next/previous one.

If you select a tab that needs to be refreshed, it will first be displayed in black and white before quickly being automatically refreshed by Google Chrome.

Just like with Google Chrome for desktop, the search and web address field are the same. You can either type in a term that you want to search and watch suggestions appear as you type, or you can enter a full web address before hitting Go. Google Chrome is smart enough to figure out when you want to go to specific website or perform a search.

Overall, I'm very impressed with Google Chrome for iPhone and iPad. It's fast, pretty, and functional. My only complaint is that with data heavy websites, scrolling isn't buttery smooth like with Safari.

The other advantage that Safari has over Chrome is that is that it's the default browser for iPhone and iPad. Unfortunately, Apple does not allow users to change their default browser to something other than Safari which means if you click on a link in Mail, Twitter, or anywhere, your iPhone or iPad will automatically launch Safari even if you would rather use Chrome. This isn't Chrome's fault, but is still something to consider when deciding if you're going to switch to using Chrome.

The good

• Nice design
• Fast
• Syncs with Google Chrome for desktop
• Infinite number of tabs allowed
• Scroll though tabs
• Incognito mode

The bad

• Scrolling isn't buttery smooth

The conclusion

If you use Google Chrome on your Mac or PC, you definitely want to start using Google Chrome on your iPad and iPhone. It's an awesome browser and the synced personalizations is priceless. If you don't use Google Chrome, you may want to start.

Free - Download Now

This post was written by Leanna Lofte from iMore - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch blog.
You can view the original post by clicking here.

Bag It! is a game that Rene and I checked out while at Macworld 2012 where the goal is to efficiently bag your groceries while optimizing space and not crushing items by overloading them with weight. For example, placing a watermelon on top of a loaf of bread is a surefire way to smash the bread.

Bag It! is available for the iPhone and iPad, but I will be using screenshots from the iPhone version. The iPad version is exactly the same, just built specifically for the iPad.

The objective of Bag It! is to place all the groceries that pass along the conveyer belt into your grocery bag. Typical bagging rules apply, however. In general, this means that you want your heavy items on the bottom and light, soft items on the top -- or at least in a separate section of the bag.

In addition to getting all the items to fit without crushing anything, there are also mini goals you'll encounter during the game that will reward you with more points if accomplished. For example, some pairs of items, like orange juice and milk, are sweethearts and bagging them next to each other will award extra points. Other times you may get extra points for grouping multiples of the same item, or even putting "enemies" next to each other. These little extras in the game not only add a lot of character to the game, but competitiveness as well. I find myself not being content with just successfully bagging my groceries, but striving to achieve as many bonuses as possible.

That really is Bag It! in a nutshell. It features over 60 levels with the ability to get up to 3 stars and 2 medals at each level.

The good

• Great (and cute) graphics
• Fun
• Challenging
• Addicting
• Mini goals

The bad

• No complaints

The conclusion

Bag It! is a great little casual puzzle game that anyone can enjoy. I love that in addition to the main goal of bagging the groceries, there are lots of mini goals like grouping up items who love (or hate) each other or other little random missions like "well bread". Bag It! is a very fun, cute, and easy to play game for the whole family.

$0.99 for iPhone - Download Now

$2.99 for iPad - Download Now

This post was written by Leanna Lofte from iMore - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch blog.
You can view the original post by clicking here.