Be Excellent To Each Other

Following discussion in the iPhone thread, we iOS users think we need a "software" thread that covers iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad equally. The older threads can then be more about hardware and stuff. Sound reasonable?

I'm going to go one further, and make two threads: one for games and one for apps. This is the apps thread.

As I mentioned in another thread somewhere, Photo Transfer App is an excellent way to copy photos and videos between iOS devices without resorting to cables. It works through your wifi LAN or over Bluetooth if you're out and about (though video transfer is currently limited to the former, presumably due to the much slower transfer rate). It's about £1.79 and is a combined iPhone and iPad app, so only one purchase is required. I guess it's an almost essential purchase if you want to shoot video on your iPhone then edit on your iPad without fucking around with iTunes or buying an expensive camera connection kit.

Why this still isn't built into iOS is beyond me. Maybe in the next major patch, but I've almost given up hope for some things.

DropBox lets you share files between practically every electrical device you own. I'm pretty sure it works on Casio Calculators nowadays.

Dropbox is no good if you're outside wifi with a wifi only iPad though, or if your 3G is slow or tightly capped.

Tweetbot is lovely. It's immediately become my twitter client of choice.

Textastic seems to be a great app, too. It's basically a text editor, but more geared towards coding. It supports syntax highlighting on quite a few languages, Dropbox syncing, a custom keyboard, and FTP/SFTP. It's a little pricey at £5.99, but seems pretty solid and useful.

ah read wrong
sorry

apparantly tweetbot is amazing

the best tab bar,

interesting blogpost by significant pixels
http://www.significantpixels.com/2011/0 ... e-tab-bar/

Which one?
http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/tweetbot/id418262183?mt=8
or
http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/tweetbot-a-twitter-client/id428851691?mt=8

I'm guessing that latter?

Yes, the latter.

Cheers. I shall buy on your twitter loving recommendation alone!

Mimi -- my all-time favourite camera app for iOS is Camera+, which is a do-it-all app with tons of great features. And my second favourite photography app is Instagram and I see you've already discovered that!

I've been trying the Subsonic app for ios (there are two, one called subsonic, one called isub, I got the former), it's pretty nice. The android version has the advantage of being free, and letting you access previously streamed music from the default music player, whereas on the ios version you can only access it through the app itself. The ios version is a bit prettier, and has an option to just see music in your cache (whereas in the android one you can only see everything in one long list). I'm probably going to mostly use the android one, since I have a bit more free space on that (I have an 8gb ipod touch full of games, and a 8gb microSD in my android phone just for music), and I have 3G on my phone.

Certainly something to consider if you want to do the streamy music thing, and having more devices I can listen to my music on is a good thing.

Edit: How easy ios app development to the uninitiated? I'd like a SavyGamer app, and was planning on paying someone else to make it, but I might give it a go myself.

How uninitiated are we talking?

I'm fairly familiar with HTML.

Edit: I was going to use Appmakr, but it looks really limited and basic.

I basically just want something that lets you view a few RSS feeds, and easily switch between them. Then ideally have search too.

Edit2: I guess a recommended guide/book/resource for starting is probably what I need.

You'll find anything written in native Objective C a struggle. You could consider something like http://www.phonegap.com/ which turns a website into a simple app, although the advantages to this approach over just offering an iPhone optimised website are quite slim.

I reckon I need to get my ios dev mate down the to the pub. Cheers.

Aye, I have Camera+, too - I found that in the app store on the first day, I think. The only think that seems to be missing from it is an option to post to Tumblr straight from the app - it posts to Twitter, FB, etc but not to Tumblr.

You can email photos to tumblr, which is quite handy. You put the caption in the subject line, attach the photo, and email it to a special address you can see on http://www.tumblr.com/goodies (down a bit and on the left)

The Tumblr app isn't too bad either, but it would be nice for Camera+ to have seamless posting as it has with other services such as twitter, etc, I think. The app itself is very handy and works well. I've been playing with some old photos from my computer with all the different apps, just to see what they can do. It'll be nice when I can get out and a bout a bit more to take a few snaps on the go.

anyone else jailbroken? I got a few good cydia apps.

I got:
Adblocker, and adblocker for safari.
Gridlock, lets you put icons anywhere, as opposed to making them bunch up at the top of the screen.
Icon renamer, lets you rename icons. Why on earth would anyone name an app something that is going to get truncated when there is a good obvious abbreviation for it.

Any recommendations? I saw one that lets you sync over wifi, and one that lets you use apps (except for music) whilst syncing.

I was jailbroken and went back to factory settings, but noSpot is a good one for stopping you swiping to spotlight search if you don't use it, and BiteSMS is great for letting you text over the top of other apps and also scheduling text messages for the future.

Nice, I don't use spotlight search.

In that case also turn off all of the options under settings for a real/perceived? speed boost.

Camera+ is amazing! Do not hesitate to spend the 59p!

Tiny Planet works fine after I updated the os, it didn't work in 4.0.1. Fun thing.

Is Camera+ any quicker to launch to a usable state that the built-in Camera app? It can be frustratingly, disgustingly slow at times.

No.

Boo-urns.

On what device? My editor at Tap! swears Camera+ is way faster to get to a working state on his iPhone 4.

I'm using Malabar's old 3GS. + is slightly slower if anything!

On my 3GS, I don't see much difference. I guess it's an iPhone 4 thing then, for speed.

I'll check it out. I may have already bought it; is Camera+ the app that sneakily turned your volume buttons into shutter releases, or was that another one?

I can't remember exactly what it's called, but Discover (or maybe Discovery) lets you read Wikipedia like a magazine.
It's rather nice.

It's Discover, and I'll check it out, cheers. Free, too.

I bought an app called 8mm Vintage Camera, just for little videos to add to blogs, etc.

It's actually quite good. There are various lenses which can be used in conjunction with different film stock and microphones and there's also a frame hold to give the film a jitter for added authenticity. Mostly it's a bit of fun, though.

I can't embed videos here, but you can see a very short example video on monkey's blog: http://worldofmonkey.com/blog/2011/04/w ... giantmonk/

Sorry for the thread cross-over, but i wasn't sure f this is an app thing or an in-built thing, but is there a way of emailing more than one picture at a time from the iTouch Mimi?

I can't seem to work out a way to attach files in the mail app and selecting them from the camera roll only seems to allow me to attach them one at a time.

Just had a look, and there may be a better way (since I only just got this I am not sure).

If you hit "email photo", then when you are in the draft, you can copy the photo (I just did a long press and "select all"), then you can cancel that email, pick a new photo, hit "send email", and then paste the previous photo into this email too.

I presume you could keep doing that until you had all the ones you need.

I noticed this the other day. The only sharing option available when selecting more than one photo is MMS, which will obviously be limited to the iPhone only. It's a bit daft, to say the least.

Doc G and my little brother both found a way.

In the camera roll, top right hand corner is a folder icon with an arrow coming out of it. Select that and then you can click 1-5 pictures to email.

Wha'?

What the? Mine totally wasn't like that when I tried the other day.

edit: ah-ha! I was obviously selecting more than five photos. That'll explain it.

does that pro tip still works?

Yes, Camera+ is the volume-button-as-shutter app; no, it doesn't work any more.

Craster, I think this might have been written specifically for you: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/photosyn ... 50124?mt=8

Interesting. That may be better than Photo Transfer.

Interesting. I wonder if it does the iPad optimisation piece.

Adobe's new iPad apps are really, really nice.

Color Lava is a tool for creating colour palettes from smudging core colours together and selecting parts of the creation. It links straight into Photoshop CS5 over your network for exporting the palettes for real use.

Eazel is a waterpainting app with a weird, but strangely effective five-finger interface; holding down on the screen with five fingers brings up the various controls, one under each finger. To select a control, you lift all fingers other than the one over the desired control. Sounds awkward, works pretty well.

There's a new version of the Opera Mini web browser available and it's a universal app now. I've given it a quick spin on the iPhone 4 and it's a vast, monumental improvement over the original version. So much so that I'd actually say it has the potential for replacing Safari - but I'll reserve judgement until I've had time to spend more than a couple of minutes with it.

It's still a free download too, so worth trying at any rate.

True love always does.

I thought Apple were very against non-Safari web browsers?

Not at all, but it is against any form of interpreter. This means that anything that has an embedded Javascript library is right out. That rules out alternative browser engines, which means you are left with two types of alternative browser: third party browsers that use the Safari rendering engine in UIWebKit (which can still do all sorts of things like tabs and whatnot, and there are many of these like iCab), or Opera Mini, which has no Javascript in it because of the weird-assed way it works.