Shotzoom Software

Looking for a quick last-minute gift? Not feeling up to fighting the holiday traffic, crowds and checkout lines? Just too lazy busy to shop? Then you may want to consider giving the gift of an iOS app. You can gift any paid app from iTunes on your computer or from the app’s description page on your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. Just scroll down past the screenshot and look for the “gift this app” button. All you’ll need is the recipient’s email address to complete the transaction. This app list includes both new releases and old favorites. It’s entirely subjective! Note that some of this year’s best apps are free, so they aren’t on here. (Waving to Instagram, Path, Spotify, Flipboard, Pinterest, HBO GO, etc.) Also, everyone already has Angry Birds (the original). It’s not on here, either. 1. iMovie ($4.99) Everyone should have this app from Apple, the fun moviemaking app for iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. Designed for multi-touch, iMovie puts everything you need to tell your story at your fingertips. Make a movie in minutes by adding video, photos, music and sound effects. Then give it the Hollywood treatment by adding a theme, titles and transitions. 2. Camera+ ($0.99 sale) Whether you’re a seasoned photographer or someone who’s barely touched a camera, Camera+ will make you love taking photos. Offers exposure, lighting controls, stabilizer, high quality zoom, scene modes, digital flash, cropping tools, effects, borders, sharing features and more. 3. Snapseed ($4.99) iPad App of the Year Snapseed makes any photograph extraordinary with a fun, high-quality photo experience right at your fingertips. Anyone can enhance, transform, and share their photos with ease. 4. SkyView – Explore the Universe ($1.99) Simply point the camera to the sky, tap on what you see and discover neat things about these sky objects. SkyView is unique as it blends the camera view with incredible 3D graphics of the sky objects to provide an Augmented Reality (AR) view of your sky. 5. Fahrenheit ($1.99) This super clever app is a weather application that shows you the current temperature of any location right on your iPhone/iPad homescreen using iOS’s push notifications (the red badges). Beyond the real-time temperature display, it also gives you detailed weather information from unlimited cities worldwide. 6. Numbers, Pages, Keynote ($9.99 each) From Apple’s iWork Suite, its own versions of Excel, Word and Powerpoint designed for iOS. All three work with iCloud, so your files stay up Read More

Looking for a quick last-minute gift? Not feeling up to fighting the holiday traffic, crowds and checkout lines? Just too lazy busy to shop? Then you may want to consider giving the gift of an iOS app. You can gift any paid app from iTunes on your computer or from the app’s description page on your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. Just scroll down past the screenshot and look for the “gift this app” button. All you’ll need is the recipient’s email address to complete the transaction. This app list includes both new releases and old favorites. It’s entirely subjective! Note that some of this year’s best apps are free, so they aren’t on here. (Waving to Instagram, Path, Spotify, Flipboard, Pinterest, HBO GO, etc.) Also, everyone already has Angry Birds (the original). It’s not on here, either. 1. iMovie ($4.99) Everyone should have this app from Apple, the fun moviemaking app for iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. Designed for multi-touch, iMovie puts everything you need to tell your story at your fingertips. Make a movie in minutes by adding video, photos, music and sound effects. Then give it the Hollywood treatment by adding a theme, titles and transitions. 2. Camera+ ($0.99 sale) Whether you’re a seasoned photographer or someone who’s barely touched a camera, Camera+ will make you love taking photos. Offers exposure, lighting controls, stabilizer, high quality zoom, scene modes, digital flash, cropping tools, effects, borders, sharing features and more. 3. Snapseed ($4.99) iPad App of the Year Snapseed makes any photograph extraordinary with a fun, high-quality photo experience right at your fingertips. Anyone can enhance, transform, and share their photos with ease. 4. SkyView – Explore the Universe ($1.99) Simply point the camera to the sky, tap on what you see and discover neat things about these sky objects. SkyView is unique as it blends the camera view with incredible 3D graphics of the sky objects to provide an Augmented Reality (AR) view of your sky. 5. Fahrenheit ($1.99) This super clever app is a weather application that shows you the current temperature of any location right on your iPhone/iPad homescreen using iOS’s push notifications (the red badges). Beyond the real-time temperature display, it also gives you detailed weather information from unlimited cities worldwide. 6. Numbers, Pages, Keynote ($9.99 each) From Apple’s iWork Suite, its own versions of Excel, Word and Powerpoint designed for iOS. All three work with iCloud, so your files stay up Read More

Editor’s note: Contributor Brad Spirrison is the managing editor of mobile app discovery services Appolicious, AndroidApps.com and AppVee. With this post, he continues an annual tradition of picking the best iOS apps of the year. It’s telling that Apple chose an app that debuted more than 14 months ago, Instagram, as its “iPhone App of the Year” for 2011. This should not imply that there was a shortage of quality and groundbreaking apps released this year. Far from it. From social magazines to music discovery apps to console-quality games that players can hold in the palms of their hands, there are hundreds of new titles in the iTunes App Store that will inform, organize, and entertain virtually anyone who owns an iOS device. As more choices become available to different kinds of consumers, however, it’s difficult to identify the undisputed champions of the app world. We picked 20 of the best iOS applications that came out or received significant updates in 2011. The list is a healthy mix of free and paid titles that can run on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. (We will follow up with a separate top 20 list just for games, which are not included in this list). There are hundreds of additional titles worthy of mention, and we selected our favorites based on the production value of an app more than its popularity on the Top Seller charts. You might take issue with some of the apps included here as well. But with about 600,000 apps available for iOS devices, everyone is entitled to their own favorites. Here are ours. After launching exclusively on iPads last year, this pioneering social magazine expanded to all iOS devices in December. Significant updates to the app — including LinkedIn integration and the inclusion of many more third-party publishers like Conde Nast — make Flipboard the best iOS app of 2011. The new iPhone-specific Cover Stories feature that showcases what users are most interested in is also a game-changer. Who would have thought that one of the most enjoyable and innovative iPhone apps of the year would be developed by Microsoft. That’s the case with Photosynth, which lets users quickly and reliably capture panoramic 360-degree gyroscopic images simply by moving their cameras. This next-generation music detection app lets users not only identify what song they are listening to, but also seamlessly share the track with friends and followers from Read More

Posted 07/14/2011 at 9:13am | by J Keirn-Swanson We're rounding the midseason right about now with a crushing defeat of the American League at the hands of the National League at this year's All Star Game. What's that? You didn't realize you could follow and play baseball games on your iOS devices? Well, get yourself some peanuts and cracker jack and a heaping helping of apps to get your game on. 1 of 12 MLB At BatIf you really need your baseball fix, this is the king daddy of them all. Our advice, though, is buy it and buy it now, but choose wisely between iPhone & iPad versions. Otherwise, you're gonna drop $9.99 for each version with MLB's highlights, scores, and Game Day audio feeds. Get it today, too, because after midnight tonight, the price goes up. Hit the Deck BaseballSimple and addictive, Hit the Deck Baseball is like those old pitch-and-hit games from the '80s. The concept for this game is simple: someone pitches and someone takes a swing and an hour later, you're surprised you're still playing. Awesome fun for only $0.99, in either iPad or iPhone flavors. XLARGE X-BaseballIf the high-tech graphics of Hit the Deck too much for you, universal X-Baseball relives the glory days of 8-bit graphics. The game's simple: hit all the pitches, don't strike out, score points. And that's all there is to it. What's not to love? Baseball CardsThis universal app for $0.99 is a must for fans of the old-timey baseball cards of yore, with 2,100 early baseball cards from the Library of Congress. Cy Young, Ty Cobb, Connie Mack, and all the old legends are here, plus some great kitschy retro art. MLB.com Beat the StreakHere's how it works: pick a hitter who you think will make a hit in an upcoming game, then pick one for every day after that. If you're right more than once, you're on a streak. How long can you go? Break baseball's 56-game streak record and you'll win $5,600,000. Not too shabby! And it's free for iPhone, so all it costs you is time. Pro Baseball LiveThis iPhone app is free and you get what you pay for: a Twitter feed following #MLB, what appears to be a baseball RSS feed, scores presented with no flair, and a schedule of games harder to read than any other. If you really just need data without Read More

It's close to Father's Day here in the US. Hopefully you've got the perfect gift planned. Perhaps you splurged on the ideal man cave, or you went less extreme and bought an iPhone, iPad or new Mac for the awesome father in your life. If, however, you're still scrambling for gift ideas, here are a few of our suggestions. There are several apps and accessories geared toward outdoor sports. The GPS Kit iPhone App (US$19.99) was just featured in Time Magazine and has a number of excellent outdoor uses, especially if Dad's into hiking, biking or geocaching. Bikers can pair it with an iPhone bike mount, such as this one from Bracketron ($39.95). For the golfer, pair a golf bag mount with Golfscape GPS Rangefinder (currently on sale for $9.99). Golfscape just won an Apple Design Award and allows you to view distances on more than 37,000 golf courses around the world. You can see the distance to the front, center and back of the green and up to 40 mapped targets per hole. The golf bag mount ($29.95) is coming soon, so you'll have to give Dad an I.O.U. for that part of the gift. If you've got a new father on your list (or know a busy parent), pzizz sleep is now a very affordable $5.99. Our own Dave Caolo swears by it. "Software like pzizz can let you take a restful nap that you know you'll wake from in a timely manner," he said. "That's important (re: bus pickups). Short naps can be effective stress relievers and re-energizers. pzizz is a tool that helps you achieve that." There is also pzizz energizer to provide said energy boost. My father-in-law, like my husband, prefers to stay at home as much as he can. And while the women in their lives can coax them out shopping, both would probably prefer one of the many catalog apps that have sprung up for the iPad. We reviewed Catalog Spree and Catalogue for iPad recently, and both are worth adding to see which one your father prefers. In the retro gaming world, ThinkGeek has both the $99.99 iCade arcade cabinet or the just-released iPad Arcade Stick ($24.99 for one, $39.99 for two). You can't go wrong with a good digital photo frame, and we like The Kodak Pulse frame, which allows you to add photos to the frame wirelessly. The 7-inch model is Read More

The 2011 Apple Design Award winners have been announced at WWDC. Although the Mac got left off the radar last year, in 2011 Apple's chosen to recognize greatness in all of its platforms. Winners get a MacBook Air, iPad 2, iPod touch and a snazzy trophy. They also get heaps of free coverage from sites like us, which means all of these apps can likely look forward to massive upticks in sales over the next week. The winners are below. For apps we've covered before at TUAW, we've got links to our reviews/first looks. For the few apps we haven't covered yet, we've linked you directly to the App Store. Many thanks to Steve Streza, who live-tweeted the results from the event. Congratulations to all the winners! Enjoy your well-deserved spoils. Read More

Golfers with mobile devices have an edge on those without, at least if those devices are loaded with the apps mentioned in this week’s App Smart column. Tiger Woods: My Swing ($10 on Apple), iSwing Golf ($3 on Android and Apple) and Golfplan with Paul Azinger $1 on Apple) are the category stalwarts, but a new app from Jack Nicklaus, ShotView ($25 on Apple), could challenge them. Unlike other golf apps that offer rangefinders, scorecards, statistical tracking or swing tutorials, for instance, ShotView includes all of these features. The Stats feature is best suited to those with the energy to record their shot after every stroke. Their diligence will be rewarded with graphics showing their fairway accuracy off the tee, among other things. The app’s most valuable asset, though, is the video tutorial section, which includes 26 segments from Mr. Nicklaus’s “Golf My Way” video series from 1983. The videos look dated but the instruction is timeless. As a rangefinder, ShotView is playing catch-up to apps like Shotzoom’s Golfshot: Golf GPS ($30), which covers more than 35,000 courses (including many outside of the United States.). ShotView has 18,000 courses. But given the app’s other features, it is well worth considering. Read More

The pro golf season has kicked off with the heralded Masters Tournament in Augusta. Golf enthusiasts can rejoice in another season of watching the best players drive, chip, pitch and putt their way to victory. Golfing is one of those addictive yet highly frustrating sports that can leave you feeling like a PGA pro one day and a novice the next. In golf, practice sometimes makes perfect, but any round can have a mind of its own regardless of how many hours you’ve put into the range. If anything though, true golfers are dedicated to the craft and will doggedly continue on their quest for the perfect swing. These eight mobile apps might not get you to the Masters, but they may at least make you feel like you’re worthy of playing at Augusta. FORE! This app acts like your virtual golf instructor and provides a whole slew of practice drills for your full swing and short game. Designed by PGA Tour pros, it also provides specific solutions and drills to address common swing faults like hooking, pulling, pushing and slicing. You can use the customization features to pick and choose which drills you’d like to focus on and then create your own personalized practice routine. It’s also available for BlackBerry phones. Cost: $0.99 (on sale for a limited time from $2.99) U.S. Golf Courses is a basic but useful app that provides a directory of major courses in every state in the country. More than 13,500 courses are listed. In addition to a breakout by state, this app also provides information on each, such as grass/bunker information, contact details, facilities available, food options and more. You can also use the GPS function on the app to search for the nearest course. Cost: $0.99 Knowing the layout of the course and each hole is essential for every golfer’s game. With a GPS-enabled app like Golfshot, which tracks more than 35,000 courses worldwide, you have immediate access to aerial views, distances to the hole from any spot and exact placement of the pin for better accuracy. The app comes with a handicap calculator, and once stroke information is inputted, it automatically creates statistical graphs that map your performance and makes it easy to track for improvement on future rounds. Yes, it’s a hefty price tag, but it’s cheaper than a single round of golf and will certainly put you on the right Read More

Browsing the App Store this weekend?  If so, here are fifteen applications released recently.  Enjoy! Google’s location app finally gets an update and now includes check-ins and improved performance for background running.  Free. Improve your golf game with the help of Tiger Woods’ new iPhone app, with side-by-side swing comparison, analysis, helpful videos and a lot more.  $9.99/£5.99. A highly anticipated game which is as much audio and video experience as it is video game.  $4.99/£2.99. An online version of the classic Battleships game, with a pirate theme.  An in-app purchase is required to play the full game.  Free. A word search game with definitions of all words included, plus 23 different categories with thousands of words to find.  $1.99/£1.19. Take a picture with your iPhone’s camera and add your own notes right on to it.  Then share it via Facebook, Twitter or email.  $1.99/£1.19. The latest set of pinball tables from Gameprom, in both iPhone and iPad form.  This time the tables are inspired by three war movies, Platoon, Navy Seals and Missing in Action.  $0.99/£0.59. A game which needs little introduction.  Square Enix continue to release their original series of Final Fantasy games, but you’ll need to be a real fan to pay the price they’re asking.  $15.99/£9.99. A variation on the established Traffic Rush model.  It’s a universal app fr the iPhone and iPad, plus ther’s Game Center support too.  $0.99/£0.59. A voice-controlled shoot ‘em up, where you shout ‘Pah!’ to make your ship fire.  Yes, really.  $0.99/£0.59. A word completion app to make typing documents a faster process on your iPhone.  There are 10 supported dictionaries and the ability to send email inside the app.  $0.99/£0.59. A free-for-30-days iPhone 4 navigation app, with a further 30 costing $2.99 or a year for $21.99.  Free, US-only. An ocean navigation tool that appears to have just about every feature you could want.  $49.99/£29.99. A racing game set in actual locations around the world.  $3.99/£2.39. An unusual physics-based platform-like puzzle game where you draw items on the screen to use in the game.  An HD iPad version is also available.  $1.99/£1.19. Read More

...Woods: My Swing app allows someone to record your swing using your iPhone and for Tiger to give you virtual feedback by comparing your swing to one of his swings. CBS talked to Tiger about the idea and the execution. The app cost $9.99 with all of the proceeds going directly to Woods charity to impact kids... Read More