Peak Systems

If you’re an Instagram fan then you’ve probably seen the recent influx of images that are made up of multiple photographs, kind of like a storyboard or collage. They are a great way of showing off a group of photos that are of the same object or of the same theme. Our favorite iPhone and iPad app for creating such an affect is Diptic, a $0.99 app which comes as two apps for your iPhone and iPad rolled into one. Where Diptic excels is in its collection of options. Users are not simply left to add photos to a predefined template, but rather have complete control over every aspect of the final product. You don’t need to be a creative genius to get great results, either… Diptic sports 21 templates for you to work from, but that is just the starting point. After choosing which images you wish to use – these can either be taken in-app, imported from your Camera Roll, or even downloaded from Facebook or Flickr – you then have complete control over how your final image turns out. Want to change the location and size of the boarders? That’s cool. Want to change the color of those boarders? No problem! There are even controls for editing your imported images right inside the app, meaning you can turn that photo of your cat into a greyscale affair. The final results can then be emailed, sent back to your Camera Roll, or uploaded to various web services. If it will accept an image, the chances are Diptic will support it. If you are addicted to Instagram, then Diptic is a must-download. And for a dollar, why wouldn’t you want to spruce up your pictorial offerings? Read More

Ultimate Shuffleboard [$.99] is a boldly branded product for a good reason: it's definitely a cut or two above the rest out there. Peak Systems, a self-described "full service" firm based out in Seattle, have puzzled out a way to link multiple iPhones to a single game of its shuffleboard title. The end result, as shown in its demo trailer, is pretty hip. The story behind this is pretty cool, too. In a developer blog post, Peak said it wanted to figure out a way to get That One Guy in their real-life shuffleboard group off his phone and into the game. The easiest way to do that, apparently, was to make a game that required and included his or her phone. Utlimate Shuffleboard requires at least two phones and it seems pretty easy to set up. A host makes the match, others join, and then you put the phones together end-to-end. We've seen a developers dabbling in using multiple devices in their games, but sticks out to us as a really implementation of the technology. Plus, it practically requires its users to be social while using it, which is something we don't see a lot in this space in general. Neat!   #12   12-28-2011, 03:03 PM Moderator iPad, iOS 5.x Join Date: Feb 2009 Location: Redding, CA, USA Posts: 8,000 Quote: Originally Posted by The Morer Rockets!!! gives You additional bonus rockets for use. You start level with 3 rockets, but after buying more rockets You can have 3+25 rockets at startup. It should look like on this screenshot (2+3): When shooting rockets at first the primary rockets are used (the 3 You have at start) and then the bonus rockets are used. Doh! it makes perfect sense, I just assumed when I saw that "0" I was out! Let's just say I snagged that promo code at 04:22am and had to force myself to sleep, because at the rate I was going, I would have gone an hour before putting it down. There's not really much I can say as pluto6 basically covered it all, but there's some great level design here, great music, retina graphics and (considering I haven't finished the game yet and don't know what sort of replay value there is) best of all, you're guaranteed to want to reach the end (again, I'm not sure if there's an end yet ). If you're a Read More

By Leanna Lofte, Tuesday, Nov 1, 2011 | Every day, TiPb gets flooded with announcements for new and updated iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad apps and games. So every day we pick just a few of the most interesting, the most notable, and simply the most awesome to share with you! iLaugh: The seriousness of life needs to be broken up often by the ultimate health benefits found in iLaugh. The application iLaugh is the app needed when life gets you down. The app iLaugh is healthy, pleasurable, and available when a timely and positive new mind frame is needed. So when the chips are down, just say “iLaugh”! [$0.99 for iPhone - App Store link] Spotter 3D – Kids Army: Welcome to 3D world of the “Spot the Difference” game! Your mission is to find the differences between two amazing military scenes. Six differences are hidden carefully – so you should explore everything to find them all! Magic binocular may help you in a difficult moment. [$1.99 for iPhone and iPad - App Store link] Last Night…? The app works in the background and records your location and speed at regular intervals. You can then access your location, get precise details on each recorded location event, display where you were on a map, or even have a look at the route you followed that day directly in the app! [$1.99 for iPhone - App Store link] Ultimate Shuffleboard: Brings the classic tabletop experience to your iPhone. Start your game by connecting 2+ iPhones over WiFi or Bluetooth. Then unleash your wicked shuffleboard skills! [$0.99 for iPhone - App Store link] TriviaTogether: Play trivia against your friends! Every game consists of 10 questions answered in turns. You and your opponent have 30 seconds to answer each question. But be quick! [Free for iPhone - App Store link] Any other big apps or game releases or updates today? If you pick any of these up, let us know what you think! Read More

Oft nachgefragt: ein Beitrags-Update über meine ‘Homescreens‘. Seit März 2011, als die letzte Aktualisierung dieser Artikel-Serie erfolgte, hat sich die eine oder andere App verschoben, geändert und aussortiert. Der derzeit aktuellen Stand ist an dieser Stelle festgehalten. Vielleicht finden an diesem Montag ja speziell frische 4S-Käufer, die einen ersten Grundbedarf an Software benötigen, die eine oder andere Anregung. Ich persönlich ziehe jede individuelle Empfehlungen allen generischen ‘Hitlisten’ vor. Genau deshalb soll mein privater Einblick auch nicht alleine bleiben: Wer Screenshots oder Tipps von seinen verwendeten Apps in den Kommentaren kundtun möchte, ist dazu herzlich eingeladen. Zwei Anmerkungen noch: Die zwei benutzten Hintergrundbilder gibt es hier und hier. Auf meinem Standby-Screen befinden sich dieses und dieses Bild. Außerdem führe ich zwei Ordner mit ‘Review’-Software, die ich mir für dieses Blog noch genauer anschauen möchte. Da diese Programme (noch) keine Empfehlungen sind, verbleiben sie für diesen Artikel ohne Erwähnung. Außerdem verstecken sich in den iPhone-Ordnern: Delivery Status touch (3.99 €); Dropbox (kostenlos); eBay (kostenlos); iCab Mobile (1.59 €); Skype (kostenlos); WeatherPro (2.99 €); Tumblr (kostenlos); Verbs (0.79 €); WhatsApp (kostenlos); PayPal (kostenlos); Analytics Pro (4.99 €); Boxcar (kostenlos); Articles (2.39 €); Instapaper (3.99 €); Facebook (kostenlos); Kicktipp (kostenlos); Flickit Pro (3.99 €); 360 Panorama (0.79 €); Lab (0.79 €); Halftone (0.79 €); Instagram (kostenlos); Finnish English (2.39 €); Evernote (kostenlos); Reeder (2.39 €); CrashPlan (kostenlos); Meine Freunde suchen (kostenlos); Shazam (kostenlos); Synonymwörterbuch (19.99 €); iSSH (7.99 €); Handoff (1.59 €); Screens (15.99 €); Google+ (kostenlos) und AirPort Dienstprogramm (kostenlos). Außerdem verstecken sich in den Ordnern: Evernote (kostenlos); iOutBank (9.99 €); Pages (7.99 €); iSSH (7.99 €); Dropbox (kostenlos); iMovie (3.99 €); Skype (kostenlos); Numbers (7.99 €); Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery (3.99 €); Bumpy Road (2.39 €); Cut the Rope (1.59 €); Emberwind HD (1.59 €); Groove Coaster (2.39 €); The Last Rocket (2.39 €); Contre Jour HD (2.39 €); ShadowGun (3.99 €); Comic Zeal (5.99 €); Flipboard (kostenlos); Kindle (kostenlos); Tagesschau (kostenlos); Wired (2.99 €); Zeit Online (kostenlos); Big Picture (2.39 €); Color Splash (1.59 €); Instagallery (1.59 €); Instamap (1.59 €); PhotoSync (1.59 €); Remote (kostenlos); Boxee (kostenlos); iCab Mobile (1.59 €); Simplenote (kostenlos); Air Display (7.99 €) und PDF Expert (7.99 €). * Alle Affiliate-Links (Danke!) führen direkt in den App Store. Read More

Diptic (0.79 €; Universal; App Store-Link) erstellt Fotocollagen – seit Sommer 2010. In der neusten Version für iPhone und iPad können diese Bildkompositionen auch zu Instagram geschickt werden. Das vielbeschriebene Start-up, an dem angeblich auch Facebook Interesse zeigte, bekommt von seinen sieben Millionen Nutzern im Moment 15 Bilder pro Sekunde – einige entstammen dabei bereits dem neuen ‘Diptic‘-Export. Die App erzählt in 19 Rahmenmodellen, die zwei bis vier Schnappschüsse umfassen, ganz individuell formatierte Bildgeschichten – manchmal bedarf es einfach mehr als nur ein Foto… Wer die Trennbalken flexibel strecken und dehnen möchte, kann dies per In-App-Kauf freischalten. Zur Veröffentlichung des Updates ist Diptic noch bis zum morgigen Mittwoch im Preis reduziert. Read More

by on 16. Aug, 2011 in Lets face it, 80% of the apps out there are garbage. They either don’t solve a problem well, they were poorly built, or just don’t work at all. These apps deserve bad public ratings and don’t belong anywhere on the app store charts. Then there’s the other 20% that are backed by passionate designers and developers changing how we interact with technology. People like Mobile Orchard readers These apps deserve recognition. Even great apps get negative feedback, and that’s OK. Feedback is a great thing when we can learn and improve from it. What’s broken is that when someone leaves a negative review in the app store, it scars your app for life, you can’t respond to it, and you can’t learn more about the problem in order to fix it quickly. Most of the developers I know building great apps tell me how app users are so quick to make a harsh review without much use or thought. I can only imagine how frustrating this is to deal with if you’ve put a lot of time and effort into creating something useful. This is human nature though. When we’re frustrated with something, we want to vent, and in the heat of the moment we usually say things we don’t mean and without much forethought. As an app developer you want feedback (especially heated negative feedback) to come directly to you and never find it’s way into the app store. When the feedback comes to you instead of the app store, you control your destiny: It’s a win/win. One of my personal favorite apps for taking and sharing panoramas, 360 Panorama by Occipital, does a really good job at keeping negative feedback out of the app store while helping disgruntled customers. They have two buttons, “Send Feedback”, and “Send Love”. Send Feedback opens up a screen which looks and feels like a review, but sends an email directly to the developer. Send love takes you to the app store for a review. As you can see they have quite a good rating, which is well deserved, but it wasn’t always that good. Crittercism is a handy framework for quickly incorporating a feedback mechanism into your app. Shacked Software recently incorporated this into Flickpad and has reported good results so far. Crittercism loads a support forum where users can submit bugs, ask questions, suggest feedback, and Read More

It's nice to revisit an app that was updated and check out some of the new features. We first looked at Diptic about a year ago and liked it quite a bit. The app takes your photos and lets you arrange them in pre-selected frames. You can chose from different layouts including a top and bottom split, a three-way split and more. While the basic controls for image and layout editing have stayed the same, Diptic has added support for the import of photos from Facebook or Flickr and the export of your work to the same online services. It also supports exporting to Posterous so you can share your creations on your blog. The import from Flickr and Facebook is easy. You login to the service and authorize Diptic to connect to your account. After you authorize the app once, you can add and remove images without logging in again. The same applies to the export option. One or two clicks to export and your framed photos are sent to Facebook or Flickr, your choice. You can also add in a title, caption and/or tags before you upload. When you upload to Posterous, Diptic lets you add a title, body and tags. You can also toggle auto post on/off so you can decide to post right away or save the post in drafts for review later. The export feature works great. In a click or two, my framed photo was on my blog. If you have Posterous connected to Twitter or Facebook, your photo will be shared with those beyond your blog. Diptic is available for US$1.99 from iTunes. A 99-cent in-app purchase can be used to buy more layouts. It's a universal app that works on the iPhone and the iPad. Read More

By Leanna Lofte, Saturday, Jul 23, 2011 | Every week a few of us from team TiPb will bring you our current favorite, most fun and useful App Store apps, WebApps, jailbreak apps, even the occasional accessory, web site, or desktop app if the mood strikes us. As long as they’re iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch related, they’re fair game. To see what we picked, and to tell us your pick, follow on after the break! As most of you know, I’m a huge fan of Dropbox and apps that capitalize on it by tying into the APIs to create interesting new services. I also find Apple’s own Voice Memos app lacking in that there’s no easy way to get those recordings off my iPhone short of syncing (for now). DropVox is a little app that solves this problem simply. All it does it record audio and throw it into your Dropbox for you. Using compressed .m4a files, the app fires up quickly and sends faster than you might expect. It’s not the kind of thing you’d use to record a full album in the studio, but it’s super handy for quick thoughts. You can also set it up to record immediately on launch, which makes the flow even faster (this is how I have it set up because when I’m using something like this, time is of the essence). It’s a clean-looking app, with a singular function, and it does it well. Check it out. My little girl loves singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star so she absolutely loves this app. “Twinkle Twinkle” tells the story of a friendship between a restless owl and a little star that watches over the forest. The simple touch animations are designed to help children relax. Touch the screen to watch the owl’s wing’s flap and hear the owl hoot. See the star spin around. Help the owl and the star fly across the sky with a flick of your finger! It comes with different reading options as well as two videos showing the content of the book all beautifully rendered. It also includes a simple counting the stars game. If you have young children, they will love this app and story. Great for bedtimes! Really, did you expect anything else? After OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, whose changes were as profound as they invisible to end users, OS X Lion finally brings some user Read More

+ Universal App $0.99 Our Review By Jason Wadsworth on June 6th, 2011 Rating: :: GREAT PHOTO APP This superb app allows users to frame several photos into one stunning photo. Developer: Price: $1.99 Version Reviewed: 3.0 Device Reviewed On: iPhone 3GS iPhone Integration Rating: User Interface Rating: Re-use Value Rating: Overall Rating: Take the number of great photos in your device’s photo library, multiply that by the number of frame layout options in Diptic, and then multiply that by the number of photos you can fit in each framing option and what do you get? A big number, right? Depending on how much of a shutterbug you are, that number could be quite high. With so many possible creations at your fingertips, it’s easy to spend hours arranging and framing photos to create gorgeous images in this super simple app. With Diptic, users can take several photos from their photo library and arrange them into one of two dozen predefined layouts. Expandable layouts are available through a $0.99 in app purchase. The default layouts are square layouts and the expandable layouts can be adjusted to any aspect ratio. Each of these layouts is comprised of two to four sections, each of which can be filled with a separate (or the same) photo. Once a photo is chosen for each section of the layout it can be stretched and rotated to fit just right. From there, Diptic offers several ways in which each photo can be manipulated. The saturation, contrast, and brightness can all be individually adjusted in order to achieve any number of looks. The thickness and color of the borders framing each layout can also be adjusted. Diptic’s interface is smooth and it’s easy to edit photos and get them looking great. Pinch and zoom controls and sliders make the editing simple, but the lack of number values on the sliders can make it hard to get exactly the same settings on multiple photos. This is hardly an issue though because the sliders work well enough to get fairly subtle results. Once that perfect image has been created it can be saved to the device’s photo library or shared via email, Facebook, Flickr, or Posterous. Images can also be exported as normal or high-res. Diptic offers so many options and enough flexibility that users can really let loose creatively and never have to worry about running out of things Read More

It’s hard for me to talk about Instagram without gushing about its deceptively appealing attributes and sweetly addictive nature. After 2 weeks of compulsive pointing, shooting, sharing pics, I am no longer capable of reporting objectively about it. However, I invite you to read on for my take on why it’s unique and why it’s set to establish itself as a must-have app. Instagram made its debut just weeks ago on 6 October 2010 and is rumoured to have gained close to one million avid users in that short time. Available only for iPhone at the moment, this is a decidedly astonishing number. The already countless number of great photography, cameras, filters and effects apps notwithstanding, Instagram has merged photography and iPhone to form a special kind of love affair. One where ease and aesthetics rule. The best way to describe it is to say that it’s like twitter for photos. A pic is your 140 characters. Choose or take a photo, use one of the app’s built-in filters and share with others around the world, as well as on your choice of social network (facebook, twitter, flickr) or email. Post something and you get instant gratification in the form of comments, likes from others who view what you post instantly. I find myself checking my Instagram feed several times daily, to see what others have posted, comment on the ones I like and just to marvel at the ideas and snapshots posted. Most share what they are doing at the moment (hence the similarity with twitter or facebook) so it’s like getting a visual tweet. Sweet! Others post pics from their personal archives. So if you’re like me, you’ve spent the past weeks scanning old images to find something worthy of instagramming, like this pic I took using the Lomo-fi filter. The built-in filters are quite gorgeous, ranging from contrast-enriching or sepia-inducing filters to the classic black and white and 70s retro. Here’s another example – the Lord Kelvin filter. The app works exactly like it’s supposed to. The UI is easy on the eyes, uncluttered and intuitive. Sending feedback is in-app and painless. You can quickly build of your cred within the community. The obvious way is to post stunning pics – these will get noticed, liked and then with a bit of luck get on the “Popular“ page – which is a real honour! Instagrammers are quick to Read More