App reviews

[fbhjr]

I have a lot of apps on my iDevices.  But, when it comes down to it, there
are really only a few I really like.  Many of these are both iPhone and
iPad.  Some are just one or the other.

Zite is one of my all time favorites.  It is a news magazine app that
gathers things from across the web for you to read.  As you read it you
tell it if you liked or disliked a story and you’ll get more of the ones
you like and less of the ones you don’t.  You also tell it what categories
to pull from and can chance that at any time.  As it does pull stories from
all over, sometimes you do get different versions of the same story.  When
the faster than light neutrinos turned out to be a loose cable, I got that
from about 10 sources.  But, it still brings in really cool things I don’t
hear from other places.

Photogene is my favorite photo editing program.  My needs are simple.  It
can crop, tune, and upload photos all from the app, and that’s all I really
need.  I’ve got a few other photo apps, but this is the one I use the most.
I used to use FTPOnTheGo to upload my photos.  Now, right from Photogene.

The uTalk language series is good.  I’ve got the German and Irish.  They
are only the basic words, but they have games and such which are fun to do
with them.

Planetary is a great music playing app.  It displays music like the galaxy
where groups are stars, albums are planets and songs are moons.  You can
change tracks by touching different moons, zoom out, in or rotate the
galaxy.  It really only gives you cool planets and stars to look at while
you listen to music, but that’s still fun.

Shazam is a great app for figuring out what a song is.  You hold your
iDevice up to the radio, or whatever, it listens and tells you what the
song is, the lyrics and where you can buy it.

I am, like my father, clock obsessed.  So, I’ve got a whole bunch of clock
apps.
My two favorites are Observatory and Living Earth.
Observatory gives you the time, location of the sun, moon and visible
planets, phase of the moon, sun rise, sun set, and several other cool
things.  And, you can set it for a time and place.  So if I want to know
when sunset will be on a day we’re doing a fire show, easy to find out.
Living Earth gives time and weather.  But, it does it by displaying the
globe and showing the cloud patterns over the whole world while giving you
the time and temp in the corners.  So, you can not only see the time and
such, but look for clouds coming your way.  I particularly like that as the
world turns about, you can see the sun rise and set in different parts of
the world.  The night time is shown with the city lights, so you can watch
the change as the day goes by.

For reading I’ve got the basic book reader and the Kindle app.  I’ve also
got the National Geographic magazine app in the “Newsstand”.  I’ve got to
say that National Geographic app is great!  It is like the magazine, but
with advantages of my iPad.  You can zoom things, click on some things for
extra information or videos, some of the story headlines change or fade in
as you watch.  Some objects you can rotate.  It is really very cool.  Much
nicer than just a PDF copy of the magazine.

Comments

[ravena-kade.livejournal.com]

Zite sounds really cool. I could use it to find ocean articles =D

and I was looking into the kindle Nat Geo, but the app sounds great.

[fbhjr.livejournal.com]

The nice thing about Zite is that it is free.

The Nat Geo app is MUCH better than the kindle version. But, it is huge. It's about 1/4 gig per issue. So, make sure you've got the storage space. It isn't free, but it is reasonable for what you get.