Macgasm

I’ve been looking for an app that allows me to track my spendings while I’m on the road, ever since I got my first iPhone. With Expenditure, I finally found what I was looking for! It has a beautiful interface, it’s easy to use and comes with almost every feature an app like this needs.

The first time you start Expenditure, you’ll get a guided tour through all the features. It gives you a good idea of what the interface looks like and what’s to come. I love it when developers provide assistance like this. It makes an app feel so much more well-engineered.

Expenditure’s main interface displays your current balance in a monochrome-like style. It looks very nice and reminds me of an old calculator. Below the balance is a list of various transactions, which you can filter based on criteria like “Top months,” “Top categories” and “Recent transactions.” It’s a shortcut to the most important information, which are your transactions. Tapping on an entry brings you to a beautifully detailed view of a transaction. It looks like a paper slip of an old calculator.

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If you have ever passed your iPad to other people, you know it feels like dropping the privacy curtain. Your personal email, Twitter and photos are on that device and potentially accessible to everyone you pass it on to. But maybe not everyone should be allowed to read your private emails or go through your browser history. Unfortunately, Apple has not built-in any mechanism to protect your personal data, although it became obvious that this could be a problem a couple of weeks after the iPad was released.

Switch comes to the rescue! Switch is an account-based browser, which associates your history, open tabs and bookmarks with your account. You can add an avatar to your account and protect it with a password. There’s even a guest account. That’s basically all there is to it! Everything else is almost like in Safari. Why almost? I’ll get back to that in a minute.

When you start Switch, the first thing to do is choose or setup an account. Unfortunately, you have to do that every time you leave the app, even if you switch to Mail and come back after a couple of seconds. It’s quite annoying, but I think there’s no other technical solution to solve this. Setting up an account is easy: type in a name, choose an avatar and optionally set a password. You’re good to go in no time.

After you choose an account, the browser user interface comes up, which looks very close to Safari. There’s the tab selection, history and bookmark icons, as well as the search and browser bar. You’ll feel at home instantly if you have used Safari on the iPad before.

Switch’s interface is great and the developers did an amazing job resembling Safari’s look. Unfortunately, Switch doesn’t feel like Safari. That’s really the only downside I have to mention. The app slows down dramatically after opening more than two or three tabs. Zooming and panning within a website suffers due to this lack of performance to the point where you don’t enjoy browsing anymore. Although Switch is a solid app, it can only solve part of the problem with your private data on an iPad. Due to the lack of native integration, it cannot compete with Apple’s implementation of Safari. If you need to hide your bookmarks or browser history and can live with the performance loss, you might want to consider taking a look at Switch.

Although still in beta, Reeder for Mac is already part of my Mac applications, which are open all day long. Silvia Rizzi is known for his well-designed iOS Reeder applications (read my review of the iPad App here), and he did a great job of bringing those over to the Mac. Please keep in mind that Reeder for Mac is still in an early development stage, and things could change daily. This review is based on the Version 1.0 Draft 3 (beta).

I use Google Reader daily. Until now, I had my Safari open all the time with the first tab pinned to the Google Reader website. I like its interface, and everything else I’ve tried didn’t even come close to the experience of reading feeds with Google Reader. One of the most important things for me as a developer are keyboard shortcuts, and in that respect, Google really knows what they are doing. There’s a shortcut for almost everything, and it is invaluable to my experience navigating and reading feeds.

Reeder for Mac picked up on all of the points mentioned above. It has a slick interface, which reminds me of the Twitter for iPad app. You have your folders on the left side of the window, and next to that, the items in the folder as a list. The space on the right side of the window is reserved for the content of the selected item. The interface is easy to understand and use. The top right corner of the window makes up a service toolbar, with features like share, tweet and read later. You can configure those features in the preferences. Unfortunately, the top right of a window is not an ideal position for a toolbar, since you quite often miss the button and hit one of the OS icons on top of the screen.

The keyboard shortcut support is my personal favorite in Reeder for Mac. It’s very close to the Google Reader’s shortcuts and that makes the transition for me quite easy. You can navigate through your folders and items, refresh your subscriptions and mark items as read or unread. I rarely have to use my trackpad to get something done in Reeder for Mac. Even scrolling through a website, which you can navigate to from within the application, can be done using the keyboard.

If you know Reeder for iPad or iPhone, you’ll instantly feel at home using the Mac version. The feature set is the same, although not fully implemented yet. The interface is similar and the attention to detail is hard to miss. You can download the free beta version and give it a try yourself.

Do you like listening to the radio? Thanks to TuneIn Radio by Synsion Radio Technologies, you can now do that with any of your iOS devices. It’s a solid app with thousands of radio stations available and lots of features.

The first time I started TuneIn Radio on my iPad, sitting on the couch, it presented me with the local radio station using my GPS location. After selecting the station, it started playing within seconds. A great song was on and I turned up the volume and was surprised to find that the quality was pretty good. Thanks to a top notch integration with iOS, I was able to tap the AirPlay button and select our Apple TV. Within a couple of seconds, the song continued playing on our home entertainment system. I switched to my iPad’s Mail App to check my emails, and all the while the music from TuneIn Radio was still playing on my Apple TV. Using the new iOS background audio controls (double press the home button and swipe right), I was able to redirect audio output back to my iPad.

That’s only a taste of what TuneIn Radio offers. Another really great feature is recording and playback of radio content. Anytime during streaming, you can simply press a record button and TuneIn Radio will start recording. Whenever you feel like listing to the content again, you can select it and enjoy the same iOS integration as if you’d listen to the streaming radio. However, you need to use TuneIn Radio to listen to the content and I couldn’t find a way to export recorded audio.

Another neat feature is the sleep timer, essentially an alarm clock that either streams the radio or plays your recorded content to wake you up. You can sync your bookmarked radio stations across devices with a RadioTime account. Depending on the radio station you get lots of metadata like the logo of the station, playlists, artists/song logos and Twitter streams.

TuneIn Radio’s user interface is awesome, mainly because it is simple and straightforward. There are lots of standard iOS components, so it’s easy for you to find your way around. Unfortunately, there are also some annoyances, e.g. the record button of the iPhone app is too small, but overall the user interface is great.

If you are a radio person, love your iOS device and want to listen to your favorite station at home on your Wi-Fi or even on the go over 3G, TuneIn Radio is the app you are looking for.

Photo Credit: ThiagoHenrique

Iconfactory’s new game is called Astronut. It’s available for free on the App Store and comes with 4 levels. You can buy an additional 20 levels through in-app purchases. It uses Apple’s Game Center to track highscores and achievements.

Knowing that Astronut is designed by Iconfactory was reason enough for me to download and try the game. Those guys are responsible for some of the greatest app designs out there, and Astronut is no different.

The attention to detail put into the game is stunning. The menus are simple and easy to use, with a Tron-like glowing design.

The goal of the game is to navigate your astronaut through 24 levels or “systems” as they are called in Astronut. You navigate by jumping from one planet to the next. The planets are spinning at different speeds and gravity levels. On your way through the system, you can collect “shards,” which are used to unlock bonus missions. Of course, you also face alien enemies while jumping from planet to planet.

Astronut uses a button based control for navigating through the main levels, which I personally like. You have a button to make your astronaut jump, thus giving up control to gravity. The only control left while your astronaut is floating is a “boost,”which you can use to destroy enemies. It takes a couple of seconds for it to recharge after usage.

In the bonus level I played, Astronut uses a tilt-based control, which is a good choice for speeding through the level, trying to collect stuff.

When you score a new highscore or unlock achievements, you can broadcast it on Twitter, Facebook, or send out an email. Unfortunately, the Twitter integration is a little flaky and didn’t work as smoothly as the rest of the game.

Overall, Astronut is a lot of fun and can be pretty addictive. Since it’s free, go and check it out yourself.

Reckless Racing by EA is one of those games where you go, “WOW!” On an iPhone 4 with Retina display, the graphics and visual details are awesome. In addition to that, the gameplay is fun and entertaining. An iPad only version is also available.

Reckless Racing features six different characters with different cars. From Cletus with his military vehicle to Floyd with his truck, it offers a lot of variety in terms of driving experience. There’s both a single and a multiplayer mode. When you are playing alone, you can choose between three different game modes: Dirty Ralley, Hot Lap and Delivery.

Dirty Ralley lets you race with the car you chose against those five other cars on six different tracks. It’s doesn’t get boring since you can choose between difficulty — bronze, silver and gold. In addition to that, you can also race those six tracks in reverse.

Hot Lap lets you race against the clock on a track with a car of your choice. The interesting part is that you will be also racing against a “ghost” car — the one that currently has the fastest time on that particular track.

In game mode Delivery, you have to pick up goods and deliver them to a destination as fast as possible. The faster you go, the more money you can earn. There’s traffic to keep an eye on and a trailer attached to your car. You can also choose between the six different cars and the length of the game in minutes.

Reckless racing comes with five interesting control options. From using the accelerometer, where you have to tilt to steer, accelerate, and break, to Tank mode, where you only have to tap left and right — there’s an option for everyone. However, I found only the Standard controls usable. I can imagine that other players might find the challenge of tilting their phone interesting.

The music and sounds of the game are great as well. It’s fun listening to the country style banjo music, while racing the dirty tracks. Of course there are sound effects, for instance when you collide with another car or run over a cliff. The details put into the game are amazing: you can hit garden fences, rocks and drive through puddles. The cars behave differently, depending on the surface — you slide more in turns on sand than on asphalt.

After all the positives, there are downsides: Multiplayer mode and leaderboards! Reckless Racing doesn’t feature bluetooth or WiFi multiplayer. You need to go through EA’s servers in order to race your friends. That’s a real pain, because those servers are overloaded and lagging, basically making multiplayer not an option. In order to share your racing results online, you need to setup an account with EA — another account! Why not integrate Game Center or one of the other solutions out there? It might not seem like such a big deal, but it would be nice to offer an alternative for sharing your results.

Overall Reckless Racing is an amazing game, which offers fun and entertainment in those ten minutes when you are waiting for your bus. Although EA could improve on the multiplayer implementation and leaderboard integration, it’s still a must-have!

Pano for iPhone by Debacle Software lets you make panoramic photos with your iPhone camera. It requires iOS 3.1 or later and is iOS 4.x compatible. Pano works with iPhone 4 and iPhone 3Gs. I haven’t tested it on the iPhone 3G, but I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t work. It’s a solid app and available for $1.99 on the App Store.

Pano works just the way you would expect it to work, if you have used other panoramic software before. You take a set of pictures, which will be stitched together at the end of the process. Pano lets you take up to 16 pictures, although I only tried it with 11 myself. When you start the App it takes over your camera and you can begin taking the first picture right away. There’s no setup required. The only thing you have to choose is the orientation that you want to take pictures in — landscape or portrait.

After you take your first picture, Pano shows you an overlay of the previous shot at the side of the screen. You should try matching that with the next picture you take, in order for Pano to be able to stitch it up smoothly afterwards. The matching is a little tricky, since the iphone is quite small and doesn’t have a camera friendly shape. However, Pano does a great job smoothing out your mistakes in the end.

When you are done taking all your pictures you send Pano off to do its magic. It’ll merge all the shots taken into one panoramic photo:

For Pano, stitching photos together is a three-step process. First, it uses pattern-matching techniques to find out exactly how each pair of adjacent photos overlaps, and then it finds the best way to align them. Second, Pano applies a colour-correction gradient across each pair of photos to correct for the iPhone camera’s autoexposure and white balancing. Finally, all the photos are blended together and the image is cropped to a neat rectangle. Voilà! All in a matter of seconds.

The photos that Pano creates are quite stunning. You can see that Debacle put a lot of effort into creating a great App. It supports mulitasking, which comes in handy, when you are interrupted in the middle of taking your panoramic pictures or having them merged. The user interface is easy to use and looks awesome.

If you are in need of a panoramic photo App, Pano for iPhone definitely is what you are looking for. The price is reasonable, considering that you get an amazing app, which does exactly what it promises.

FolioBook calls itself a customizable portfolio for the iPad for all image professionals. It’s available on the App Store for $7.99. FolioBook is a great way to show off your photography work; however, you need to cut back on usability when creating your portfolio.

FolioBook uses your stored photos to create a portfolio. You can choose which photos go into one of your FolioBook galleries and are accessible through the portfolio cover. Creating such a gallery is simple, once you’ve mastered the little quirks that Foliobook’s user interface comes with. An example of one of these quirks is adding a picture to the gallery: FolioBook uses iPad’s Popover to display a photo picker. Once you’ve tapped a photo, it’s added to your gallery. If you have a rather large photo, it can take a couple of seconds.

Once you’ve created your gallery, you can configure it with pretty standard settings that you would expect from a photo application. There’s a slideshow feature with different timings and three different transitions. In manual mode, you can swipe through the gallery, as you know it from the Photos App of your iPad. Unfortunately, there are some minor annoyances with the user interface here as well: if you tap a presented picture, a configuration bar fades in, which in my opinion is rather small. It’s quite hard to hit the buttons, and most of the time I had to try a couple of times.

The home screen is customizable in terms of title, background and galleries. In editing mode, you can drag the various elements on the screen to position them, which works smoothly. The backgrounds can be configured to be one of the built-in textures or videos. You can even select one of your own photos.

Unfortunately, the user interface annoyances continue with this feature of FolioBook: if you edit the title of a gallery, you can’t leave the editing mode unless you dismiss the keyboard or go back. I would expect a tap outside the text field to dismiss the keyboard. However, this is only one example of quite a few.

It’s the little things that distinguish a good iPad app from a great iPad app. Although FolioBook is a great idea, it’s far from being a great App. The little annoyances prevail, especially considering the price. Keep in mind that most of the annoyances appear when editing your portfolio. In case this is a one time job for you, FolioBook could be what you were looking for.