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Twitter applications aren’t the most difficult ones to find on the App Store, but most people either stick to the official application or popular ones, such as Tweetbot or Twitterrific. There are, however, a certain number of alternative apps that can suit some people better. Examples include clients like Osfoora HD and Echofon, but also TweetCaster, a full-featured iOS Twitter application few people know about.
At $4.99, Articles is by far the most expensive Wikipedia option in the App Store. I approached it with a little bit of trepidation and a lot of doubt, wondering why on earth I would want to spend that kind of money on what’s basically a Wikipedia app. Up until this point, like many people I’m sure, I was using Wikipanion for my Wikipedia needs, which is great but I think that Articles is way better.
Articles is more or less a special interface for Wikipedia articles. The interface espouses a different philosophy than its competition. Articles is meant for long-form reading and learning, and it feels to me like the Instapaper or Pocket of Wikipedia. I’ve been looking for an app like this – one that treats Wikipedia like a real encyclopedia that should be read and enjoyed. And this app more than does the trick.
Browser bookmarks have long served as a way to keep track of useful sites. Many browsers allow bookmark syncing, but users who switch browsers may lose bookmarks amidst the shuffling. Apps like Instapaper offer archiving for blog posts and articles, but they simply aren’t meant for general bookmarking. Evernote can store HTML copies of websites, but this solution is clumsy, and large collections of bookmarks make the app unwieldy.
Pinboard is a simple bookmarking service that allows users to bookmark webpages and funnel in bookmarks from many other services and browsers. Pinboard is similar to Delicious, except significantly faster and less social. Bookmarks are stored in the cloud, so users can access them anywhere. The service features tag support and a read later queue, and bookmarks can be labelled as public or private. The service is available for a one-time fee, which currently sits around $10. The fee grows with each purchase, which serves as a way to prevent unsustainable growth.
Although Pinboard is an excellent service, there’s a lack of solid Pinboard applications in the App Store. The service has a mobile version, but it’s missing many of the perks that native apps take advantage of. Collin Donnell’s Pinbook is a universal Pinboard client that attempts to bring the best aspects of Pinboard to the iPhone and iPad.
Everything that we do nowadays is somehow connected to our social networks: we get new content from Twitter, we share things on Facebook, we reblog things from Tumblr; so why not just make our iPad web browsing experience a social network in itself?
That’s where Webnote comes in. It’s a brand new iPad app that parts from the concept that everything that we do around the web is social nowadays, so why not make your browsing experience sharing-enabled? Interesting, right? Let’s check it out!
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Apple’s dominant iPad platform does not have a shortage of web browsers. From Apple’s own excellent Safari to Google’s rising Chrome, the iPad enjoys quality web browsers that compete with each other for the use of consumers. While the previous two browsers are certainly among the more popular, there are other applications that compete in other ways. The Puffin Web Browser is on the forefront of these browsers, offering various features not found on any of the more popular choices.
In the past half a decade, there has been a tremendous shift in the way news is delivered to us. Twitter, as an Internet model, revolutionized the way we access information from all our favourite news sources. But there is still one huge problem with an Internet-based news model: There are too many news sources out there.
Enter the newest news delivery method: curation. Unlike an aggregator (like the Huffington Post or RSS feed, for example), news curators aren’t simply fetching articles from their favourite websites and posting them in one place. They hand-pick articles and deliver what they deem to be the most important news of the day into hand-picked packages of content.
Dave Pell is a news curator (or, as he pitches himself, a human algorithm). His universal app (and email newsletter) is called NextDraft. And his work is brilliant. (more…)
App.net is rapidly evolving from an ambitious concept into a flourishing reality. User registrations have exceeded the 25,000 mark, and the addition of Netbot, by Tapbots, to the App.net lineup lead to a boom in new user registrations.
AppNet Rhino was the first App.net iOS client to make it into the hands of users, but its lack of features resulted in a less-than-stellar experience. It’s hard to scoff at a free application, but App.net users are a technologically savvy bunch, and other free apps were trumping Rhino in both style and functionality. The AppNet Rhino team acknowledged this feature gap with an impressive update, which also made Rhino one of two App.net iPad clients currently available. Let’s take a look at this new iPad version, and examine just how well it holds up against the Tapbots juggernaut. (more…)
I read a statistic once that said that WordPress powers over 22% of all new websites, worldwide. Wow. That’s a staggering amount of data, and yet the platform that many bloggers know and love is still going strong after years in the business. I’ve been using it on my personal site for years, and we use it here at AppStorm, too. It’s about as solid as you can get.
Problem is, the WordPress app for the iPad has historically not been very good, turning off quite a few users. But now, we have Poster, an app that promises to make the process of writing and publishing blog posts to your WordPress site much easier. Does it hold up, or is it just another flash in the pan? Let’s discover together. (more…)
This won’t be the first time I geek out over Wikipedia or a related app. I’m a huge advocate for the repository of all human knowledge (I will go toe-to-toe with any high school teacher over the veracity of Wikipedia as a source), as both an academic utility and a great way for those of us who learn for fun to expand our knowledge. Wikipedia is a vast and powerful outlet of information, and lately it has been really exciting to see how app developers come up with new ways to navigate and grasp that information.
Today we’re going to take a look at Wikiweb, an iOS application from Friends of The Web whose unique approach to Wikipedia aims to help you visualize the relationships between various topics and pages. Grab some coffee, sit back with your iPad and get ready to learn something new after the jump. (more…)
When I first purchased my new iPad, I hoped that it would finally drop the bane of having to carry my laptop around with me on long trips just so I could do a bit of writing, and although there is a great choice of writing apps available for the iPad, I found it difficult to find one that would allow me to post directly to my blog. Then Posts came along, and how I blogged on my iPad was changed forever. (more…)
