Writer, musician, and phone geek.
Find my iOS themes in Cydia: ClearHighNotifications, ClearLowNotifications, GmailSMS, LS Nimbus Wide, LS Frost for iPhone 5, ClearNotifications, and TypoClockClear.
Find my iOS themes in Cydia: ClearHighNotifications, ClearLowNotifications, GmailSMS, LS Nimbus Wide, LS Frost for iPhone 5, ClearNotifications, and TypoClockClear.
Featured Posts
Recent Tweets
@jackjbrown
Who I Follow
Recent Shots from
Instagram
Posts tagged "apps"
Well, that was fast. After the infamous piracy tool Installous went offline earlier this week, Zeusmos stepped in as a way to pirate software for Apple’s iOS devices without needing a jailbreak (usually required to sidestep the company’s security measures). Thankfully, that ended yesterday with this tweet.
Sweet relief! At long last, Google may be the company that gets people to stop recording video in portrait orientation—which looks ridiculous when viewed on anything besides a phone. Their new video capture and sharing app, out now, prompts users to switch to landscape before it will begin recording.
You can turn off the landscape lock, but not before the app tells you that doing so is a pretty dumb idea:
Google has made some dumb decisions lately, but this is not one of them.
As I wrote yesterday, Google has killed off the free version of its popular Google Apps suite, which means that small businesses or custom domain owners are now going to have to pay $50 per year, per user, to have Gmail and other Google offerings powering their operations. For small operators, it’s a huge shift.
Luckily, there are reports that it’s still possible to sign up for a free account—but only for a single user; if you need more than one email address, it won’t work. Bear in mind, this is probably a loophole that Google left open inadvertently, so it’s a good bet that it won’t last forever. But if you were kicking yourself over missing the Apps boat, it’s definitely worth a look.
For the step by step details, look here.
In the aftermath of Instagram turning off the ability to view their photos in your Twitter timeline comes the news that Twitter will be releasing their own photo-filtering feature. To me, this all screams of territorial pissing that will almost certainly end up in a worse experience for users.
Big picture: it’s almost always better when you make your user’s experience easier to manage across different apps. Forget that and you risk losing out to a company that hasn’t.
For photo-editing apps on iOS, it’s hard to beat Snapseed. Managing to balance a ton of features with an ease of use often missing in apps of this kind, the app has become my first stop for nearly any edit I need to make (including the quickly-edited image at the top of this post).
Originally produced by Nik Software, Google swept in and bought up the company earlier this year, leaving users to wonder what they had in mind for the app; the prevailing idea was that they would leverage it as a gateway to Google+ in the way that Facebook did with Instagram.
Today’s update does just that, bringing built-in Google+ sharing to the app’s Share menu. But it also brings a couple of other notable updates: a new icon, some new filters and frames, and, most notably, a new price: the $5 app is now free. If you haven’t used it before, now is the time.
Longtime users won’t notice much different about most features—Google has remained fairly hands-off there—but the new Frames section suffers a bit. The update has added some new features (including a 1x1 crop for an Instagram-like look) but removed the ability to resize the border, which leaves the result feeling much more generic. Each frame option can be tapped to cycle through several varieties, but the older system allowed much more individualized results.
Still, it’s a worthwhile update, and for new users it’s a great early holiday gift—if you do any kind of photo editing on your iDevices, you should be using this app. Go get it now.
(EDIT: I’ve noticed that there is a peculiarity that pops up when opening images in Dropbox from within Snapseed via the built-in app-sharing menu. For some reason it wants to name the image as an .ig file; simply changing the extension to .jpg allows you to view it in Dropbox.)
