Apple's Apple's Senior Vice President of Design, Jonathan Ive deservedly became Sir Jonathan Ive on Wednesday when he received a knighthood for services to design and enterprise. The Princess Royal was on hand to perform the ceremony which hit news channels around the world. After the knighthood ceremony Sir Jonathan Ive attended another high profile function, the Royal Academy of the Arts alongside the Queen. Ive gave a short interview before going inside, telling of his delight at receiving the honor.

“I have always felt that I am extremely fortunate to have found what I love to do, and that’s essentially to be able to draw and make stuff.”  “So to actually be able to spend all of my time doing that, just that alone is fantastic but to then get some recognition for that is a wonderful affirmation of the craft and profession of design.”

Source: YouTube

Going to the supermarket has finally reached the 21st Century, thanks to the iPhone and Stop & Shop

If you live in New England, New York or New Jersey and shop at Stop & Shop, now you not only can you bring your own bags, but you can use your iPhone to scan your groceries and then check out of the store. When it works, it is a blast.

Now Shopping apps aren't new –- we highlight some in our recent best free apps post.  The nice thing about shopping apps is that they can really make our lives easier and allow us to see the iPhone for the productivity tool it can be.

I’m usually a pretty agreeable and social guy –- I like to talk and spend time interacting with friends and family; I just don’t enjoy interacting with most people who work at the grocery store or retail stores. When I shop (which I hate to do) I definitely employ the male stereotypical “hunter” mentality. I go in knowing what I want, I find it on my own, I buy it and I leave. Pretty simple.

Grocery shopping used to be a challenge for me – so I would make it a game with my kids. My goal would be to get in and out of the super-market without having forced human interaction with anyone. Usually I failed miserably.

Then, our local Stop & Shop introduced those little Scan it “guns” that you check out with your card, scan your stuff and then check out at a self check out. For the most part, this was a good solution – but you had to walk around with those dumb looking “wands” that inevitably ran out of charge or malfunctioned.

Stop & Shop has introduced the new SCAN IT! mobile app for iPhone and Android. The concept is pretty simple – download the app, input your loyalty card number and then connect to their special WiFi network in the store. Use the phone to scan your stuff and then scan an “exit code” and pay at a self-checkout. Sometimes, however, things in concept work better than they do in reality.

Once the app is downloaded, you will be prompted to input your Stop & Shop loyalty card number so that when you use the app –- it always knows who you are and credits your account with the loyalty points and coupons. Once the app is set up and ready to go, your phone will automatically connect to the Scan It mobile WiFi network in the store – you just need to make sure that you have WiFi turned on and have your phone set to discover available networks. .

Touch the Scan button to begin your shopping trip. Scanned item and any discounts are shown.

Once you are connected, just touch the Scan It icon along the bottom row. The screen changes and a yellow Scan   button appears. Touch the Scan button and simply point your iPhone screen at the bar code of the product you wish to buy. Any in-store promotions are automatically reflected in the price and the item gets scanned and put into your cart automatically. Just let the camera focus on its own on the bar code and it scans it, applies discounts and puts it in your cart – very simple and cool.

One of the more annoying features of the app is that occasionally as you walk by something that is on sale a loud cash register sound is played and a coupon for the sale item shows on the screen. You can always just ignore it – but clearly it tries to get your attention to things on sale and it does a pretty good job of that.

Promotional offers pop up when you walk in front of things that are on sale. Touch the Cart button to check and see what you have already scanned.

You can always touch the Check Cart button to see what you have in your cart, what your running total is and how much you have saved on this trip. There is also a button to tap to remove an item from your cart – just touch that button and scan the item you want to remove – so far, pretty simple and lots of fun.

Achilles was the classic Greek hero – part of the Trojan war and prominent figure in Homer’s the Iliad.  Achilles had that one weak spot, however –- an arrow to his heel did him in. The “Achilles Heel” of using the SCAN IT mobile app is the checkout.

In fairness, I had several successful checkouts using the SCAN IT! app.  There is one flaw in the system, however, and that is that when you scan the “end shopping trip” bar code with your iPhone, you are still then required to produce your physical loyalty card and scan that at the register. It makes much more sense – since they system already knows your card number – to have your final scanning using the phone accomplish that task – but, the extra step, and, thus, the need to still have your plastic loyalty card with you – makes this somewhat cumbersome at checkout.

I can live with all that – but one recent experience at the checkout was absolutely maddening. I scanned the “end shopping” code with my phone and I then got a code displayed on my screen.

The LCD screen on the register said “Assistance Needed” which is code word for the dreaded audit. An employee comes and has to manually scan five or six items to make sure you are not defrauding the system. I get it – but it happens every fourth or fifth trip to the store, which is annoying.

The dreaded secret code for "you have been audited". So much for getting out of the store without talking to any employees.

Using the iPhone and SCAN IT! app, however – the experience shows all the flaws in the system. First and employee came over and said “I don’t know what to do since you used your phone.” So, a second employee came over – now forcing me to interact with yet another grocery store employee – and said:” I need to take your card and go get a scanning wand and come back.” So, the iPhone app, which is supposed to eliminate the need for the card and the scanning wand, now created a situation where the card and the wand were necessary to check out. The employee scanned the requisite number of items with the wand – which is so 2011 – and then I had to rescan my plastic card and then I could check out. Essentially, for that trip, the app on the iPhone was almost useless.

The good

• Very convenient
• Easy to set up and use
• When it works, it makes shopping almost fun

The bad

• The checkout process is not well thought out
• When it works, it makes shopping almost fun

The conclusion

While SCAN IT! mobile shows lots of promise, there are still a few bugs to work out - especially the entire checkout process. This is a very usable app and really shows how stores are quickly understanding how consumers want to use their phones as productivity tools to make the little things in life easier - like grocery shopping.

Free - Download now

Do you use a grocery checkout app for your iPhone? We’d love to hear your experiences in our forums.

Instacast 2.0 is a significant update to one of the most popular iPhone podcast clients. It changes the user interface and user experience while lowering the entry price and adding an in-app purchase for additional functionality. Both of those things have caused some controversy. Our own Seth Clifford, co-host of iPhone & iPad Live and Iterate is clearly on the "ticked off" side of this particular equation. And he's clearly got his Hulk pants on for this one.

Instacast released its 2.0 update yesterday to some Twitter fanfare. As a regular user of the app, I updated immediately. Now, to be clear, I don't love Instacast. In fact, I have lots of personal issues with it. But as a regular listener of podcasts, it sucked the least of all the apps I've tried, and I've tried many. I wish so much that Apple would add even the most basic subscription support for podcasts to iOS within the native music app, but they haven't, and it doesn't look like they will any time soon.

What I found after updating was an interface that remained just as abstruse as the initial one, with the "added value" of reduced functionality. Most notably, the default behavior for podcasts downloaded within the app was altered. The original behavior of the app was that when podcasts were downloaded, they would stack up in a list, from oldest at the top to newest at the bottom. Now that order is reversed, to list the newest at the top. Which fundamentally changes the only way I listen to shows.

Read the rest of it via the link below. To be fair, there are some people who seem to really like the Instacast update. I haven't spent any real time with it yet, but plan to. The previous version, as Seth states in his article, had significant usability problems (as do all the iOS podcast clients I've tried).

Source: Seth Clifford

Microsoft SkyDrive, Dropbox, and the newly introduced Google Drive all focus on storing your data in "the cloud" (i.e. in massive data centers) instead of on a physical hard drive in your home or office. That means not only can you free up some valuable internal storage space, but enjoy the piece of mind that comes with solid off-site backup, and the convenience of accessing your files from all your computers, many of the your devices, and almost any web browser. While Dropbox, Skydrive, and Google Drive will all get the job done, which one is the best choice for most iPhone and iPad users?

SkyDrive vs. Dropbox vs. Google Drive: Interface and Experience

While you can access Dropbox, Skydrive, and Google Drive via the web, that's not usually not the best option for iPhone and iPad users. Apple severely limits what web browsers can do in iOS, so while web sites are great to view supported files, they're not much good for anything else. That means the first thing most iPhone and iPad owners will do when choosing a cloud storage service is to look at their native app offerings.

SkyDrive allows you to view files on your iPhone and iPad in either list view or as tiled icons.

SkyDrive is a universal app for iPhone and iPad users. The overall interface is incredibly straight forward and easy to use. Upon signing into SkyDrive, you'll be presented with your files and folders. You can choose to view them as a list or a grid. Tapping into a folder allows you to view the contents and open any documents inside that folder. You can also upload pictures to SkyDrive or create more folders.

If you need to edit a document, you can open it in a supported app by tapping the export button. Unfortunately you won't be able to sync changes back or save back to SkyDrive unless the individual app supports saving to SkyDrive. This is both a limitation of iOS and a product of SkyDrive's popularity relative to DropBox.

Dropbox's user interface is easy to navigate on both iPhone and iPad. Browse all your files via the main tab or star documents you frequently access for quick access from the favorites tab.

Dropbox functions in a very simliar way to SkyDrive and is also available for both iPhone and iPad. That's not surprising -- there are only so many ways to make a file browser. In the Dropbox app you can navigate through folders and mark things as favorites. Doing that stores a file locally for quick viewing later, even if offline. You can also pop into settings and set Dropbox to cache a certain storage amount locally for even quicker access to files you view regularly.

You can upload pictures and videos to Dropbox from within the app, but nothing else. (Again, that's an iOS restriction.) You will, however, be able to view many common files types from your iPhone or iPad such as Word, Excel, PDFs, and many image file types. You can also send supported files to other apps for editing or viewing.

Even though Google Drive doesn't have an iPhone or iPad app (yet), you can still access your Drive files via mobile Safari. Not the best solution for most but the up side is unlike others, you'll be able to actively sync and edit documents without using 3rd party applications.

Google Drive doesn't have a native iPhone or iPad app yet. (Google says they're working on it.) You can access your Google Drive files via mobile Safari though. It's not the most intuitive or functional solution and it has to make you wonder what exactly Google was thinking when they released Drive without an iOS companion app. (It's not like they lacked the time or resources to get it done for launch day.)

As a work around, you can use the Google Search app which provides access to Google Apps. It's not a full solution but it works. You could also add a homescreen bookmark to Google Drive for quicker access.

Until the iOS app arrives, iPhone and iPad users will probably shy away from Google Drive. Dropbox is easy to use but could definitely make do with an update. Right now, SkyDrive has the best design and interface.

SkyDrive vs. Dropbox vs. Google Drive: Features

While SkyDrive, Dropbox, and Google Drive are all cloud storage and sync services, they all work differently and offer a different set of features. Before you decide which one is for you, you need to figure out exactly which features you need most.

SkyDrive allows you to view most file formats and also supports media streaming. Sharing documents is easy. Open the document you'd like to share and you can send a link, view and edit permissions, and share with others.

SkyDrive boasts online file collaboration, public file sharing, and version tracking. You'll be able to edit files online via the Microsoft Office web apps, or from your computer via the traditional Microsoft Office suite, and have them all on your iPhone or iPad when you need them.

If your main purpose is to use a file storing service to free up space on your iPhone or iPad, SkyDrive can help you do that with built-in media streaming, which means you can upload music and video to SkyDrive and stream it into the app on your iPhone or iPad.

Dropbox allows you to easily upload video and audio content from your iPhone or iPad. It also supports media streaming and many other file types for easy access to the most common file types.

Dropbox also offers built-in media streaming in their iPhone and iPad app. You'll also be able to share files and folders online, create share folders publicly, and track document versions. However, Dropbox doesn't include the ability to edit documents via web-based apps, nor do they have their own desktop suite. You need to open any documents stored in Dropbox in a local editor on your desktop or mobile device.

Google Drive may not have a native app but the ability to edit documents and spreadsheets in mobile Safari may be a draw for some users. Some features are not supported in mobile view like spreadsheet view so you'll need to use the desktop version which is a bit clunky on an iPhone or iPad.

In addition to lacking an iOS app, Google Drive doesn't currently support media streaming. So, if you were hoping to unload some music and videos to Google Drive, that's not an option yet. You will, of course, be able to access everything on your iPhone or iPad via mobile Safari but that isn't an ideal solution. Google Drive does enjoy Google Docs support, however, but unlike SkyDrive it doesn't offer a native desktop document editing suite.

Google's lack of an iOS app hurts it again here. When it comes to features, Dropbox and SkyDrive are extremely comparable but Dropbox's inability to let users edit files on the web gives SkyDrive a slight edge.

Skydrive vs. Dropbox vs. Google Drive: Workflow and syncing

While mobile document creation has come a long way, most iPhone and iPad users will most likely still spend most of their time creating documents on their Windows or Mac PC, and will definitely need to access them there. So, a seamless workflow between desktop and mobile apps is a must.

SkyDrive's web interface, integrated with Microsoft Office Online

SkyDrive, Dropbox, and Google Drive all offer both a native app for Mac and Windows as well as a free web portal. When it comes to the native Mac and Windows apps, all three apps have almost identical interfaces and functionality. They seamlessly integrate with your file system. You'll just notice a new folder in your main tree of files. They'll also all add a system tray icon to your Mac or Windows PC for quick access.

Google Drive's online interface, integrated with Google Docs.

To use these services from your Windows or Mac PC, you simply drag and drop, or copy and paste your files into the folder, and then work them the same way you did previously. You won't notice any difference, but the files and folders are syncing your data constantly with each respective cloud service.

When you return to your iPhone or iPad to pull up a document, it'll just be there. And if you ever need to access your documents from someone's else's Windows or Mac PC, you can do so easily by accessing the web based version of SkyDrive, Dropbox, or Google Drive.

Dropbox's online interface, not integrated with anything.

Google has the better desktop clients but their lack of an iOS app kills the overall workflow model. Dropbox has great apps but once again doesn't have online editors like Microsoft or Google. That makes SkyDrive the winner.

SkyDrive vs. Dropbox vs. Google Drive: 3rd party app compatibility

Many iPhone and iPad apps integrate support for cloud storage. If you're looking to use text editors frequently, for example, it will matter a great deal which services are supported.

While SkyDrive and Google Drive are fully functional cloud services in their own right, neither enjoys anywhere near the support of Dropbox. Dropbox has simply been around a long time an many developers have chosen to embrace it. In fact, for many apps, you won't find support for many cloud services outside of Dropbox (and Apple's iCloud, which is not exactly the same).

Dropbox by far has the best support from other app developers.

SkyDrive vs. Dropbox vs. Google Drive: Storage space and pricing

Using SkyDrive, Dropbox, or Google Drive means you get online storage that can free up local drive space, you get online backup that can keep you files safe, and you get remote access that lets you get to your files no matter where you are. All of them offer some amount of free storage, and the ability to buy more to suit your needs.

SkyDrive gives you a generous 7GB for free. If you'd like to add more storage on top of that, this is what you'll pay:

• 20GB - $10 per year
• 50GB - $25 per year
• 100GB - $50 per year

Dropbox gives users the smallest amount of free storage, coming in at only 2GB for a free account. They do offer a referral program that'll allow you to rack up an additional 250MB for each individual you refer up to 8GB total. Otherwise, to buy additional storage, here's what you're looking at:

• 50GB - $9.99 a month or $99 per year
• 100GB - $20 a month or $199 per year
• 1TB+ team accounts - $795 per year for the first 5 users

Google Drive gives you 5GB of free storage from the start. After that, here's what you can expect to pay -

• 25GB - $2.49 a month
• 100GB - $4.99 a month
• 200GB - $9.99 a month

There are sometimes special promotions or cross promotions where you can get additional storage bonuses for free, sometimes for a limited time. It's hard to predict when these will happen or for whom they'll apply, but it's worth doing a web search before paying just to see if there are any special offers available.

Otherwise, Dropbox makes for the most expensive service by far and gives the least amount of free storage to new users. Conversely, SkyDrive offers both the highest amount of free storage and the cheapest price for additional storage. However, Google Drive is extremely competitive, so if you're already a Google user, there's no compelling difference.

SkyDrive vs. Dropbox vs. Google Drive: Conclusion

If you take each individual category and weigh them equally, it looks like SkyDrive is the winner here. But not all categories should be weighed equally. A lot of free storage is great. Cheap additional storage is great. Arguably better desktop apps and inarguably better online document editors are great. But none of that matters if you need your cloud service to be supported by your iOS apps and that support simply isn't there.

Until Google Drive gets a proper iOS app with streaming media support, it's impossible to recommend it as anything other than a secondary or tertiary backup service to drop extra copies of your files for extra safe keeping. If you're already a heavy Google user, especially a Google Docs user, the free service is there for the taking.

If you're brand new to cloud storage and all you want to do is offload some media and documents to free up space on your iPhone and iPad, SkyDrive's combination of free storage and low additional storage costs make it the best option.

If you need to have your docs and data available in your iOS apps, then even though it's more expensive and doesn't have an online editor built in, Dropbox is still the only way to go.

Everyone's individual needs and priorities will be different, but for right now, for most users, most of the time, especially if you don't need anything more than the free storage they offer, Dropbox remains the best cloud storage solution for iOS users. iPhones and iPads are app-centric devices, and that's still where Dropbox shines.

SkyDrive - Free - Download Now

Dropbox - Free - Download Now

Google Search - Free - Download Now

Additional resources:

• Dropbox for iPad review
• Instapaper vs. Pocket vs. Readability: Read later app for iPhone shootout
• Pandora vs. Slacker vs. Spotify: iPhone music streaming app shootout

AT&T has announced a new home security and automation service called Digital Life that comes with an iPad and iPhone app with a bunch of security and remote control options. With it, you can change the temperature, switch the lights, manage the alarm system, control the window blinds, shut off the water main, and even remotely unlock doors. Here's the full feature list:

• Professional installation of the platform, sensors and other devices
• Integrated, wirelessly enabled platform that combines home security and automation capabilities
• AT&T owned and operated 24/7 security monitoring centers
• A state-of-the-art user interface application, which allows customers to customize a solution based on individual needs, and the ability to manage and control their services from the U.S. or while traveling abroad
• The option to experience and purchase the service in AT&T’s distribution channels, including AT&T company-owned retail stores. The service will also be made available for purchase on att.com when available commercially.
• The ability to add more features and services after the initial installation, hassle free

Trials for the system are kicking off in Atlanta and Dallas over the summer. Want to sign up? Hit the link below.

Source: AT&T's Digital Life registration page

The widely popular twitter client for iPhone and iPad, Tweetbot, has been updated to version 2.3 and brings with it some great new features, including a new tweet detail view with both inline conversations and replies, the ability to stop retweets from individual users, new gestures, and more.

The new tweet detail view is very neat, but I admit that I actually very rarely look at tweet details. I'm more excited about the new conversation view that also includes replies. Many other Twitter apps mix all replies into the conversation stream making it hard to follow, but Tweetbot clearly labels which tweets are in the conversation at hand, and which ones are replies to the specific tweet you are looking at. Very nice.

The other extremely awesome feature is the ability to block retweets from individual users. That person you are following who has the tendency to retweet what seems like everything in their Twitter feed can now be silenced! If you block their retweets, you only see the original tweets from that user in your feed-- some of the people I'm following better watch out!

Tweetbot has also made some adjustments with regards to tweeted videos. Video thumbnails will now show a play button over it as a way to indicate that it's a video and not a photo. Thumbnail support for Vimeo links has also been added.

Some of the other new features include Droplr support, higher res image uploads when connected to wifi, support for $stock links, improved email format, reorganized tweet drawer, the timeline sync bookmark icon is now optional, and holding down the Compose Tweet button will quickly open last draft.

I've always been a huge fan of Tweetbot. Occasionally, I switch to a different client, but I always end up returning to Tweetbot. Fellow Tweetbot users, what's your favorite new feature in this update?

$2.99 for iPhone - Download Now

$2.99 for iPad - Download Now

Every week the editors at iMore carefully select some of our favorite, most useful, most extraordinary apps, accessories, gadgets, and websites. This week's selections include a utility, a unique Twitter client, a classic video game, a social networking iPad app, a fun photography app for creating comics, and an addicting puzzle game.

To see what we picked, and to tell us your pick, follow on after the break!

FileBrowser - Chris

This week’s pick is a little utility that helps me manage the files and folders on my NAS (Networked Attached Storage). I have just bought a D-Link NAS to store all my movies, TV shows and photographs and was looking for a way to access the content from my iPad or iPhone. FileBrowser does it all and more.

FileBrowser lets you enter the address of your NAS and then view all the files and folders right on your iPad iPhone or iPod touch. It lets you manages files, delete files, rename files and also download files and open them in apps installed on your device or even stream media in Apple approved formats.

$4.99 - Download Now

TweeTV - Chris Parsons

This week, I decided to go ahead and choose just a simple app that to me, really has no purpose yet I use it almost every day. TweeTV does nothing more than show a bunch of streaming tweets based on any number of things. It can be from a topic, a person or even just a word. I like to go ahead and airplay it to my TV while I'm working and looking for things to write. For example, set it to only pull in Apple tweets and you'll catch headlines and tweets from all over the world about Apple. It's not overly functional for collecting "up to date" info but it's fun to just watch tweets from everywhere on any chosen topic just roll by. It has themes built in just in case basic black isn't your thing but really, basic black looks the best. It's available for free in the iTunes App Store for free right now for iPhone or iPad.

Free - Download Now

Battlelog - Simon Sage

I'm a big fan of EA's Battlefield 3, so when they announced that their social network for virtual murderers was coming to iPhone, I was pretty excited. Through Battlelog for iOS, you can view the battle feed of your friends to see their latest achievements, launch directly into chat with friends online, drill down into player stats, and check your progress with various weapon and skill unlocks. There's a sub-section for checking out the latest stories on the Battlefield 3 news feed, but for the most part, this is just a good way to see which of your buddies are online and ready for a few rounds. I'd love to see some more advanced stuff like what's available in the Call of Duty: Elite app, like customizing your classes and tracking challenge progress, but this is a good start. If you're in BF3, definitely download this freebie, and feel free to add me to your buddies list.

Free - Download Now

LinkedIn for iPad - Gary Mazo

I spend a decent amount of time on various social networking sites – using my iPad as the primary tool. It is amazing that now, two years after the iPad was introduced, one of my most used social networking sites finally has an app. LinkedIn for the iPad just launched this week and while it is a bit late to the party – I am really enjoying this app.

First off, it is optimized for the retina display on the iPad – which is great. There are some new features that are very useful – one being the calendar feature. Say you have a meeting at two with someone important and you want to be prepared. With the calendar feature, you can see his/her LinkedIn profile and get set for the big meeting.

The home screen is very clean – just three large buttons to tap on the screen; All Updates, You and Inbox. Inside the All Updates section is where you find the new calendar, updates from your contacts and key news headlines from LinkedIn today.

Inside the “You” section is where you post your own updates, see who has viewed your profile and search all your LinkedIn contacts. You can also easily email your profile to a potential connection, which can be helpful, if you are searching for a new job.

Your inbox is simply where you LinkedIn messages are stored and where you will find pending invitations to connect.

All ion all, I really like the new interface and find it very useful, easy to navigate and uncluttered. It is too bad it took them so long to get this on the iPad – but, now that it is here - it is my pick of the week.

Have you tried the new LinkedIn app? Now that there is a dedicated, usable app, will you use it instead of whichever way you now access LinkedIn? Let us know in the forums!

Free - Download Now

Halftone - Rene Ritchie

When I was a kid, I'd buy comic books and read Sunday comics printed in four colors. Not four color process, mind you, but four colors and four colors only. Everything else had to be simulated by using dots of smaller or larger sizes. Looking back, it was horrible. Looking back, it was wonderful. Halftone is the name of the process used -- the smaller and bigger dots -- to make those old style comic books and Sunday comics. It's also the name of an iOS app that lets you convert photos into retro-looking comic images.

You can add filters, of course, and control the size of the dot patterns. You can also add captions, word bubbles, paper types, and special effect text.

It's not an every day app, but it's a fun one, especially for those of us who were once kids and deeply in love with halftone comics.

$0.99 - Download now

Polymer - Leanna Lofte

This week I've got yet another puzzle game! This one is called Polymer and it's a shape-creating puzzle game that is highly addicting. The goal is to slide the rows and columns around so that you create a complete, closed shape. It's very challenging.

Polymer also has really awesome, calming-like, music and sound effects. Be sure to check out my full review!

$0.99 - Download Now

Tell us your pick!

Those were our picks, iMore Nation, so now it's your turn! Tell us your pick of the week below. Give us the name of your favorite app, site, or accessory, and tell us why it made your life more productive, more informed, more entertaining, or just plain more fun. Jump into the comments and let us know your pick of the week!

Contacts Journal is a CRM (contacts relationship management) app for your iPhone and iPad. It allows you to log information about your contacts, add to-dos associated with them, and even attach documents to specific contacts. You can add contacts from the built in Contacts app (and keep information in sync between the two apps), or add contacts separately that you don't want in your main Contacts app.

Contacts Journal is available for the iPhone and iPad (separate purchases), but all screenshots in this review will be from an iPhone. Both versions have the exact same features.

Adding contacts to Contacts Journal is very easy. You just tap the plus sign and either manually add a contact, or select some or all of all the people stored in the built-in Contacts app. When you add contacts that were already stored on your iPhone or iPad, Contacts Journal and Contacts will stay in sync.

The contact screen shows the photo you have stored for that person as well as buttons to call, message, or email that contact from directly within the app. You will also find buttons that cycle between logs, to-do's, and documents that you have associated with that individual. To add an entry or document, simply tap the plus sign.

When adding a to-do, you can choose to sync it with the built-in Calendar app and also to receive a reminder notification. You can also choose specific locations for your logs and to-do's.

The easiest way to add a document to a contact is to browse to the document from somewhere else on your iPad, like email or Dropbox, and "Open In" Contacts Journal. You will immediately be prompted to select a contact to attach the document to. The other option is to directly send a document from your computer to the app by connecting both devices to the same Wi-Fi network and typing a special URL into your browser.

The Logs and To-do tabs are simply filled their respective lists. The Maps tab show a map filled with green, red, and purple pins. The green ones represent the addresses that you have stored for your contacts. The red pins indicated places that have to-dos, and purple pins are places associated with a log.

Contacts Journal let's you backup and sync your data with Dropbox. Unfortunately, Dropbox sync is not automatic and you must manually force Contacts Journal to send or receive data from Dropbox. When I expressed my concern about this to the folks at zaal, however, they let me know that the reason for this is because an automatic sync would take up a lot of data. The good news is that Contacts Journal does add a badge to the more tab of the app with the number of changes that I have not been synced with Dropbox. This works as a great reminder -- especially for people like me who must make sure all badges get cleared.

It's also unfortunate that Contacts Journal doesn't support iCloud sync, but the developers let me know that this is actually something they are diligently working on, but are running into issues due to bugs on Apple's end. Once those are worked out, iCloud sync will be available in an update.

The Good

• Add logs and to-tods to contacts
• Attach documents to contacts
• Create groups of contacts
• Keeps contacts synced between Contacts Journal and built-in Contacts app
• Keep devices synced with Dropbox

The Bad

• Dropbox syncing isn't automatic. Must manually send and retrieve data.
• iPad version has a boring UI
• No paid universal for iPhone and iPad version available, even though the lite version is universal

The Conclusion

Contacts Journal is a great way to manage important information about contacts, make notes about meetings and assign documents to them. I'll admit to approaching this app with a "when will I actually use this" attitude, but my thoughts changed as I started exploring the app. Personally, I will probably use Contacts Journal to manage photography clients and attach contracts and receipts to each client as well as make notes about the photo sessions and client requests.

It's somewhat annoying that the iPhone and iPad version are separate, rather expensive purchases. I'm willing to pay a premium price for premium software, but since the iPhone and iPad versions are virtually the exact same app with no UI differences, I would've liked to see a universal version available, even if at just a discounted price than if I were to buy them separately.

The good news is that there is a free, universal version of Contacts Manager available for the iPhone and iPad that restricts you to just 10 logs, to-dos, and documents. It's a great way to take the app for a test drive and see if it'll meet your needs.

$9.99, iPhone - Download Now

$9.99, iPad - Download Now

Free Lite universal version - Download Now

Twitter for iPhone isn't your early adopter, power user app. It's not designed for the gadget nerd with tons of followers who engages in non-stop repartees with like-minded friends, peers, and colleagues all day. It for the new mainstream Twitter user who has very few followers, follows tons of celebrities, and is looking for more and better ways to find something... anything... to do on Twitter. Like it or not, since the last redesign, that's the the official Twitter app's target user now. And that's who they're improving things for with this update.

Discover promises "more interesting and timely content that matters to you". Basically that means you see a paid placement on top (mine's a Yahoo! add I could not possibly care less about out), a hashtag (mine's #NewFront, which is impenetrable to me), a trending tweet (mine is something about an Ex-Liberian president that it says is trending but I've never expressed any interest in), a trio of recent friend activities, including their retweets, follows, and favorites, a trio of additional trending hashtags and terms, and a trio of people Twitter recommends you follow.

Activity appears below the redesigned stories in Discover. Now you can tap any story once to see Tweets about a particular trend or news article. You can then read the entire story or join the conversation by replying, retweeting or favoriting related Tweets.

Again, I'm not the Lady Gaga following nouveau Twitter type, I'm not their target user, but all of this is completely lost on me. This tab could disappear tomorrow and my enjoyment of the app would only increase.

Search has also been improved, and claims to be simpler and more error-proof with different spellings and related terms. The search box is present in both the Connect and Discover tabs, the former of which prioritizes @names and full names, the latter of which prioritizes #hashtags or keywords. You can also get a search history in the Discover tab.

We’ve also made a few improvements specifically for iPhone: when you tap the search box in Discover, you’ll see your most recent queries. You can also go directly to someone’s profile when searching for a username in Connect.

I usually prefer one search box to rule them all, Twitter optimizing different search boxes for different types of content works well, even if it adds extra cognitive load by making users choose the "proper" tab before they can query the system.

Notifications have also been made more robust, and you can now be alerted to tweets, retweets, and follows, in addition to the usual @mentions and direct messages (DMs). It brings Twitter for iPhone up to parity with some other clients, but is also a power user feature in what's clearly a mainstream targeted app. Unless Lady Gaga is retweeting and favoriting me left and right, this feature would have felt far more at home in the older version of Twitter.

Overall, the user interface remains gorgeous, the functionality solid, the implementation silky smooth, and the focus on Twitter's new mainstream audience commendable. It's just not the good old Twitter many of us knew and loved, and it's a little sad there's no official Twitter Pro app that could have somehow melded the new experience with the old, more power-user centric functionality and layout.

Free - Download now

Source: Twitter blog

Here's another gem to add to your puzzle game collection - Polymer for iPhone. In Polymer, your goal is create shapes, called polymers, by sliding around the rows and columns. A polymer isn't complete unless all the ends (which are marked with black dots) are closed.

As I was playing polymer and thinking about what I was going to say in this review, my mind kept wandering into thoughts of a Rubik's Cube and the similarities it has with Polymer. I was pleased to discover Polymer's description in the App Store claims the game "combines the logic of Rubik’s Cube, the sliding mechanism of Chuzzle, and the creativity of Lego." Bingo - that's a perfect description.

Polymer has three game modes, but only one of them is initially available. It's called Two Minutes, and as its name implies, you are given two minutes to create as many polymers as you can. To create a polymer, you simply slide around the rows and columns to match up the pieces. All the black dots on the pieces must be connected for a polymer to be complete -- or, as I like to think of it, all the ends must be closed up. Larger polymers give more points.

The more you play, the more points you earn and the more features you can unlock, including additional shapes (which make game-play more difficult), and more game modes. If you're impatient, you can also unlock these features with in-app purchases, but it's not required.

The other two game modes are called One Polymer and Bombs. In One Polymer, you have as much time as you want to create the biggest, highest point-value polymer that you can. In Bombs, you must destroy the pieces that are bombs before they destroy you. Again, these game modes will be unlocked as you earn more points by playing the game, or you can unlock them for $0.99 each.

There is also an in-app store where you can purchase other color schemes for $0.99 each, or you can unlock all content, including all game modes and color schemes for $2.99.

The Good

• Very fun and challenging
• Great music and sound effects
• In-app purchases aren't required to gain content
• More color schemes available as in-app purchases

The Bad

• Two minutes is great, but would love to see longer time options

The Conclusion

Polymer is my new go-to puzzle game. It's a lot of fun and very challenging. Combined with the beautiful colors and awesome music and sound effects -- I'm hooked.

$0.99 - Download Now

Snapseed is a photo editing app for iPhone and iPad that not only offers tons of features, but is extremely easy to use. Not familiar with RGB Curves, histograms, and other professional editing tools? Not a problem! What makes Snapseed so great, is that anyone can pick it up and produce amazing results even if they aren't familiar with professional editing techniques.

Snapseed is a universal app for iPhone and iPad, but I will be sharing screenshots from the iPad version in this review. The iPhone version has the exact same features.

General layout

The layout of Snapseed is very straightforward and easy to navigate. In landscape orientation, you'll see a two-column sidebar of editing tools on the left and your photo on the right. In portrait orientation, the photos is on the top and a scrollable toolbar with your tools is on the bottom.

The editing tools are displayed as simple thumbnails with their names clearly labeled and an image that's related to the adjustment type. This is a refreshing approach as many photo editing apps use a bunch of icons who's meanings you have to memorize.

There are 13 different adjustment tools. With all of them, swiping up and down lets you chose the enhancement that you're editing and swiping left and right adjusts that chosen enhancement. This gives Snapseed a very clean UI that's free of sliders and other distractions.

Another feature of each tool's screen is the Compare button. Holding this down will show what your image looked like before applying the tool you're using. To compare with the original image, hold down the Compare button on the main screen.

Auto Correct

The first and most basic available tool in Snapseed is called Auto Correct. It consists of two enhancements: contrast correction and color correction.

Selective Adjust

Selective Adjust is a fantastic tool that lets you focus your adjustments to a specific area, called a control point, of the photo. You can add as many control points as you wish. Pinching and zooming will adjust the size of the control point and while you do so, Snapseed will show a red mask over your image so you can see exactly where the adjustments will take place.

If you look closely, you'll see that this mask is actually bigger than the circle. This is because the circle designates where the photo will receive the adjustments at full strength and where the fading will begin. Without a good fade, the images would look terrible with a focused editing region. Snapseed does a fantastic job of fading so that your image looks good.

The adjustments you can apply to each focus point are brightness, contrast, and saturation.

Tune Image

Snapseed's Tune Image tool lets you adjust the brightness, ambiance, contrast, saturation, and white balance of your photo.

Straighten & Rotate

The Straighten & Rotate editing tool let's you, well, straighten and rotate your image. You simply swipe up and down or left and right to straighten. The new cropped region will be kept straight and your image will tilt behind it. Unfortunately, you cannot fine tune the final crop by moving the image around. Sometimes there's room to shift the crop left or right, but you can't.

Crop

Snapseed comes with 7 different crop ratios -- 14 if you count landscape and portrait orientation of each ratio separately like many apps do. You can also constrain the crop to the original ratio or use free transform.

Detail

The Detail tool is where you go to adjust sharpening and structure of your photo. What's extra special about this tool, however, is that it comes with a loupe that lets you zoom in on a section of the photo so that you can get a good look at the pixels and how sharp they are.

Black & White

As expected, the Black & White section of Snapseed lets you convert your photo to a black and white image. It has six different presets: neutral, contrast, bright, dar, film, and darken sky, and five different color filters: neutral, red, orange, yellow, and green. You can also make adjustments to the brightness, contrast, and grain.

Vintage Films

The Vintage Films tool in Snapseed is basically 9 different vintage filters that you can apply to your photo as well as 5 different textures. The adjustments that can be made are brightness, saturation, texture strength, center size, and style strength. The center size adjustment is Snapseed's way of referring to the strength of the vignette.

Drama

Drama is yet another set of filters: two each for drama, bright, and dark. The adjustments that can be made are saturation and filter strength.

Grunge

The last set of filters is Grunge -- and grunge is the perfect description for them. Instead of a popup of filter options like the previous filter packs, the Grunge tool actually uses a slider to change the style. This lets you fine tune it to the exact color that you want. It also comes with 5 different grungy textures that make your photo looks like it's been through quite a beating. The other adjustments you can make are to brightness, contrast, texture strength, and saturation.

Center Focus

The Center Focus tool is similar to Selective Adjust in that you have a center point with an adjustable radius around it. The difference is that the things are you are adjust about this point are blur strength and outer and inner brightness. Snapseed also includes 6 different presets if you don't want to spend time find the perfect combination of adjustments: portrait 1, portait 2, vignette, blur, old lens, and foggy.

Organic Frames

In the Organic Frames section of Snapseed, you'll find 8 different frame styles with the ability to adjust their width and offset.

Tilt-shift

The final tool in Snapseed is Tilt-Shift. People love adding fake blur to their photos and Snapseed definitely does not disappoint in this department. In fact, since this section includes a radial (circular) blur, there is a lot of similarities between this and blurring effects you can do with the Center Focus tool. The linear tilt-shift is different though. With both types, you can adjust the transition, blur strength, brightness, saturation, and contrast.

The Good

• 13 different editing tools, most of which include many different adjustment options
• Share to email, Flickr, Facebook Twitter, printer, or "Open In" another photography app
• Compare button lets you quickly and easily see how your edits compare with the original photo
• Universal for iPhone and iPad
• Supports the new iPad's Retina display

The Bad

• Can't move the cropping region when straightening
• Blurring with Center Focus and Tilt-Shift are very similar

The Conclusion

Snapseed is a fantastic photo editor that's powerful, yet easy to use. Snapseed is best for users who want to play around with adjustments, but who don't understand (nor care to understand) how to use more advanced and professional tools. Snapseed makes it easy for anyone to beautifully and artistically edit their photos on their iPhone or iPad.

$4.99 - Download Now

OneReceipt is an iPhone app that gives you a very organized way of keeping track of and saving receipts. It will automatically grab emailed receipts (from, say, Amazon or iTunes) from your Gmail account and add them to your OneReciept account or you can take a photo of a physical receipt.

When you sign up for a free OneReceipt account, you get to store your receipts in the cloud and access them from the web on the OneReceipt app. This service is technically still in beta, but it's off to a great start. You will also be given an @onereceipt.com email address for you to forward receipts that were sent to a different email account than your Gmail. OneReceipt will then automatically add them to your collection of receipts. Unfortunately, Gmail is the only email service that can be synced with OnceReceipt.

The personal @onereceipt.com account is a great idea, but it still needs some work. I forwarded an iTunes receipt from my iCloud email to my personal OneReceipt account, but it's showing up in the receipt list as being "unparsed". This is strange, because the iTunes receipts that were already in my Gmail account when I performed the initial sync were parsed perfectly. So it seems that OneReceipt is just not correctly handling the quote syntax that is commonly associated with email forwards. I imagine this is something that OneReceipt can easily fix. Even though these receipts are unparsed, I can still view the forwarded email receipt with OneReceipt.

For in-person shopping, you can take a photo of your receipt and send it to OneReceipt and they'll process it for you. I tested this out with a two different receipts, but they are currently still processing. The strange thing is that even though I did this only a few hours ago, the date on my iPhone that is being shown is "yesterday", but on the web, it's "today". Just another little bug that needs to be worked out. Processing take about a full day to complete.

If taking a photo of a receipt isn't an option, or you just don't like that option, you can also manually enter a receipt. The disadvantage to this method is that you are not able to add each item on your receipt. If all you care about is the total, then a manual entry works just fine, but sometimes you also need to save the prices of each individual item on the receipt. Those are the times that photos are the superior option.

After a receipt has been added to OneReceipt, you can categorize and tag it so that it's easily searchable. OneReceipt will also create spending summaries that you can view on the web that breaks down your monthly spending amounts by totals and category.

The Good

• Automatically retrieves receipts from your Gmail
• Receipts stored in the cloud and accessible from the web
• Personalized @onereceipt.com email address to forward receipts to
• Spending summaries
• Take photos of receipts and OneReceipt adds it automatically
• Manually add receipts

The Bad

• Only supports Gmail
• Not all forwarded receipts are recognized by OneReceipt
• Can't force a sync to look at past emails again

The Conclusion

Even though OneReceipt has a few kinks to work out, I'm still impressed with it. The app and service is completely free, so it's not like you've got anything to lose. Keeping track of receipts is something I'm terrible at, yet need to do for many of my jobs, but I expect to be much more organized with them now that I have OneReceipt.

Free - Download Now

If you're planning a trip to a national park or want to learn more about one, National Parks by National Geographic is a gorgeous guide for your iPhone that offers beautiful photography and loads of information, including photo tips, park secrets, must-see attractions, and things to do.

Included with National Parks is one free guide to the national park of your choice. Additional guides can be downloaded for $0.99 or $1.99 each. Park info, camping and lodging information, maps, weather, stats, and a few photos are included with each national park without purchasing its guide. Included with each guide is photo tips, park secrets, what to see, and what to do sections as well as many addition photos. These photos will also be added to the photos section of the app.

When viewing a national park's page, you will find a photo gallery at the top that can be scrolled though. Tapping on the photo will strip away the distractions by opening it on a black background and also give more information about the photograph in a caption underneath it.

Back on the main screen national park screen, the photo gallery is overlaid with a weather icon and a stats icon. Tapping on these will pop up their respective information. The weather section shows the current conditions and a 5-day forecast. The stats section shows the number of visitors, the park size, and the local time.

The Photo Tips section of National Parks is very cool. The Yosemite guide includes 5 photos with the photographer of each photo giving information about the shot, including GPS coordinates, time of day, camera details (camera, ISO, focal length, shutter speed, aperture), and difficulty. Following this information is the photographer's write-up about the overview of the setup and a list of bullet points for getting the shot. It's extremely helpful and I suddenly have a huge urge to go to Yosemite to take photos.

The Parks Secrets section is simply a list of random fact about the national park. For example, one of the nine secrets for Yosemite is that the giant sequoia trees can live to be more than 3,000 years old.

The What To See section is a basically the same photos in the initial gallery presented as a list and location's name. Tapping the photo will, again, open it up on a black background and include a button that lets you see it on a map.

In the What To Do section of National Parks, you'll find a list of common hikes and places to visit in the park. Tapping one will provide a nice write-up of why it is something you should do.

The parks included in National Parks are Acadia, Arches, Bryce Canyon, Death Valley, Everglades, Glacier, Grand Canyon, Grand Teton, Great Smoky Mountains, Haleakala, Hawai'i Volcanoes, Joshua Tree, Mount Rainier, Olympic, Rocky Mountain, Sequoia and Kings Canyon, Shenanadoah, Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Zion.

The Good

• Gorgeous UI
• Stunning photography
• Photo tips are awesome
• One free guide, each additional guide only $0.99 or $1.99
• Add attractions to your itinerary
• Works offline

The Bad

• Photo gallery and What To See sections are basically the exact same thing, just presented differently

The Conclusion

National Parks by National Geographic is a must-have app for anyone planning to visit any of the park included in the app. The guides will help you plan your trip and makes sure you don't miss any of the must-see and must-do attractions.

Free - Download Now

Every week the editors at iMore carefully select some of our favorite, most useful, most extraordinary apps, accessories, gadgets, and websites. This week's selections include an iPad note taking app, a utility for toggling Bluetooth on your iPhone, an app for relaxation, an app for knitters, a tower defense game, an alternative to cable television, a great iPad drawing app, and an addicting iPhone puzzle game.

To see what we picked, and to tell us your pick, follow on after the break!

Notability - Alli Flowers

If you want to use your iPad instead of carrying around a clipboard or pad of paper, you have quite a few choices, but Notability is right at the top of the list of available apps. Notability's latest update includes Dropbox sync, so there's not much missing.

You can write, you can type, you can add in shapes. You can change the color and size of anything you've done if you change your mind. Of course, you can import .pdf files and take notes on them - particularly useful for, well, anyone who uses .pdf's! You can import your .pdf's email attachments, Safari, other apps that take advantage of "open in," and Dropbox.

Writing is super smooth, and there are even plenty of options within the pen tips you choose. Not only is Notability one of the best in its class, at $.99 it is also the least expensive. In plain English - you can't go wrong buying Notability.

$0.99 - Download Now

BluetoothOnOff - Chris Oldroyd

This week’s pick is a little utility that came out this week. It is called Bluetooth OnOff and was somehow approved by Apple and is still available. All it does is put a Bluetooth icon on your homescreen and it then allows you to use it in two ways.

The stock way, when you click on it, a screen loads with a Bluetooth toggle switch, you can then turn Bluetooth on. If Bluetooth is already turned on then loading the app will give you the option to turn it off. The best way of using the app is to go into the apps settings and turn the OnOff switch to on. This enables you to now toggle Bluetooth On / Off from your home screen with one tap of the app icon. There is no delay or intermediate screens just a straight on/off.

This sort of feature should be standard in iOS 5 but it's not; so if you want a quick Bluetooth toggle you have to either jailbreak or pay extra for an app. This one does what it says on the tin!

$0.99 - Download Now

Serenity - Seth Clifford

"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."

-- Ferris Bueller

Of course, Ferris was talking about actual life, not life's quieter moments viewed through the lens of your iPhone or iPad screen. But if that's all you've got for the moment, then by all means, revel in the peace and tranquility that Serenity can offer you. It's an app by the venerable developers tap tap tap, and displays the usual level of visual polish as their other apps. It's basically a series of really pleasant, relaxing video clips that loop over and over again. You just stare at them and feel your blood pressure drop as the soft sounds wash over you.

If you're snickering and thinking this is really dumb, believe me, I get it. At first I was skeptical too. But there is something profoundly nice about watching flames just dance in front of you, or flowers swaying in a calm breeze, or a little sleeping kitty. You can set sleep timers if you want to zone out at the end of your day, and the apps support AirPlay if you'd rather let a giant version of the videos blanket your entire room. I think good headphones are probably the way to go, though, for the full experience. And since the interface has an easygoing 70s woodgrain feel, they should probably be big over-the-ear cans.

The iPhone and iPad apps are two separate versions, presumably for the reason that combined, the video clips would total about 700 MB. So keep that in mind before you purchase, but at $1.99, you'd hardly regret it if you grabbed both. Relax wherever you are, with whatever you're holding. I think Ferris can close this one out, too.

"It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up."

$1.99 - Download Now - iPhone

$1.99 - Download Now - iPad

Knit Handy - Jessica Moss

Knit Handy is handy! This app gives you an estimate of yarn requirements for your projects. It has many project categories from which to choose. Using this app couldn't be easier. Choose your project category, gauge, and size and you are set. Before Knit Handy became an app it was first a pamphlet called Knitter's Handy Guide to Yarn Requirements. I have the pamphlet and I can honestly say I like the app better. It's way more convenient to have it on my iPhone than it is to carry the pamphlet around while planning and shopping for a project. I have a knack for either forgetting to bring the pamphlet with me or losing it all together. I never lose my iPhone. I really have no issues with the app except I wish it gave a wider range of gauges to pick from.

$0.99 - Download Now

iBomber Defense Pacific - Chris Vitek

For my pick of the week, I am going with one of my standby game types - a tower defense game. Yes, there are many of them out there, but each one has it's own flavor and interesting game twists. The tower defense game iBomber Defense Pacific is a great new game that add some of it's own ideas to the tower defense genre. You have multiple upgrade options that you need to spend victory points on. You get special power ups. You even have secondary objectives (such as protecting a airplane hanger or destroying an enemy base). I have been playing the game on the iPad, and it looks great. The graphics are crisp, and on the retina display the game is beautiful. It is a universal app, but I found that after playing on the iPad, the iPhone screen is just too small to work with. If you enjoy tower defense games, iBomber Defense Pacific should definitely be on your short list of game to try.

2.99 - Download Now

Paper by FiftyThree - Gary Mazo

I have spent a good part of this week testing our various stylus pens for the iPad, iPhone or, really, any touch screen phone or tablet. The best way for me to try these all out was to use the best apps available for both writing and drawing/painting.

That brings me to Paper by FiftyThree. This week I really dove into this app and was just amazed by what I found.

Paper is a “freemium” app; it comes with one tool and all the colors, but to really take advantage of this app you need to buy more tools. You can individually purchase the color, sketch, write and outline tools for $1.99 a piece – but it makes sense to just spend the $7.99 to buy the whole “essentials” package with all the tools.

When paired with the right stylus, this is as close to actually “drawing” on your iPad as you can get. If I moved the stylus quickly – the line was thinner. If I drew a line from top to bottom and lifted up, you could see a small ink deposit at the bottom of the line – just like using a fountain pen.

I loved using the Color tool – it was sort of like using a watercolor brush. Colors actually blended when combined on screen. Once the masterpiece is completed, just pinch to reduce the image and then you can easily send it to Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter or via Email.

One function that is a killer feature in this app is the rewind tool. Just use two fingers and make a counter-clockwise motion on the screen to undo what you last did. Keep doing that to undo more. This is a great idea and avoids the need to continually use the eraser and possibly erase more than you might want to.

Have you used Paper? Do you have any of your drawings posted? Let us know in the forums!

Free, with in-app purchases - Download Now

Global Video for iPad - Rene Ritchie

I cut the cable cord months ago. We have pretty much a-la-carte cable channel selection where I live. You need to get a base package of channels, then you can get 10, 20, etc. channels a-la-carte on top of those. So it wasn't a matter of choice, it was a matter of technology. Cable still runs on a schedule. You can only watch what it's showing at the moment. Sure, PVR/DVR can let you time-shift, but that's a horrible, high maintenance, error-prone solution. The real solution is on-demand.

And that's what I'm getting with iPad (and iPhone) apps.

Global Video lets me watch most of the programs on the Global television network (a Canadian network that re-broadcasts a lot of U.S. network programming), on demand. No daytime, no primetime, no late-night windows to contend with. Just the show I want to watch, when and where I want to watch it.

To their credit, Global has also left AirPlay intact so I can, if I want, stream the video to my big screen HDTV in the living room via AirPlay and the Apple TV. (The other major Canadian network apps, CityTV and CTV shamefully disable AirPlay due to "licensing conditions" -- to which I respond, "negotiate modern licenses".)

Their in-program ads are also decent, the kind of stuff you see during regular network broadcasts. They're highly repetitive, however, which means they may not have a lot of advertisers buying in to this model yet. That's a shame. This is the near-future of content presentation and more advertisers should be getting behind it. At least if they want our attention. (And Global, and other companies doing it right, should reap the rewards.)

Global Video isn't perfect -- it hasn't updated to Retina yet, and while some new shows post almost immediately after they're broadcast over-the-air, others take a few days. But at least they seem to get it, and they're getting there.

Free - Download now

(It's Canadian only, but search the App Store for the networks in your country and you should find quite a few.)

Addidoku - Leanna Lofte

I cannot get over how addicted I am to Addidoku right now! It's a simple number puzzle game that I reviewed earlier this week that's in the same genre as Sudoku, but totally different. The goal is to group all the numbers so that one of the numbers is the sum of all the other numbers. For example, the number 3, 5, and 2 form a group because 3 plus 2 equal 5. The premise of Addidoku is very straightforward, but solving the puzzles can be quite challenging -- and it's super addicting!

Free - Download Now

Tell us your pick!

Those were our picks, iMore Nation, so now it's your turn! Tell us your pick of the week below. Give us the name of your favorite app, site, or accessory, and tell us why it made your life more productive, more informed, more entertaining, or just plain more fun. Jump into the comments and let us know your pick of the week!

Dock is an iPhone app that acts as as screensaver of information when your iPhone is not in use. While your iPhone is docked at your desk, Dock will scroll through weather, RSS, Twitter, Facebook, Clock and Stock widgets.

Dock is a very simple and easy to use app. You can either have Dock scroll through the information in one widget (like tweets from Twitter), or you can have Dock randomly scroll through information from all the widgets you've selected. If you are interested in something that scrolls by, tapping it will give you more options. For example, you can enlarge photos, reply to tweets, "like" Facebook photos and comment on them, and more.

In Settings, you can choose to have the information scroll by every 2, 4, 6, 8, or 10 seconds and mark which widgets you want active. You can also adjust the refresh rate of each widget, but unfortunately, the fastest refresh rate for Facebook and Twitter is 5 minutes. I'd like to see that reduced down to at least a minute.

My other little complaint is that Dock doesn't include a light colored theme. I have never been a fan of light-on-dark color schemes because it hurts my eyes and makes me squint (I have very sensitive eyes).

The Good

• A great way to use your iPhone when you're not really using it
• Information is displayed big and is easy to read
• Can post status to Facebook and tweets to Twitter

The Bad

• No light colored theme. Only white-on-black.
• Slow refresh rates

The Conclusion

Dock turns your iPhone into a fantastic little utility while it's docked. It runs great and displays information nice and big so that it's easy to read.

$1.99 - Download Now

Addidoku is new puzzle game that has some similarities to Sudoku, but is also very different. In each level, you are presented with a several numbers set in a broken up grid. The goal is to group the numbers so that they add up according to the rules of the game. Each number can only be in one group and each puzzle has only one solution.

So what exactly are these rules? Well, in each group of numbers, all of the numbers (except for the biggest number) must add up to the biggest number. For example, the numbers 3, 2, 6, 1, form a group because the sum of 3, 2, and 1 is 6. You can also pair numbers, like two 5's, because 5 equals 5. The numbers 4, 3, 5 do not form a valid group because 4 plus 3 does not equal 5.

Only numbers that are adjacent to each other can form a group. This means that if a number is diagonal to your group or separated from your group by a space, it cannot be added to your group.

That's it! The rules are simple, but the levels are challenging. Even though they're challenging, they're completely doable which makes the game extremely addicting. Because each level can be completed in a reasonable amount of time, you are always willing to play "just one more".

The Good

• Challenging
• Addictive
• 60 puzzles for free
• 140 additional puzzles available as in-app purchase

The Bad

• None

The Conclusion

Addidoku is such a fun and addicting puzzle game! The object is both familiar and unique at the same time. It's also challenging -- something I find essential in a good puzzle game. It took a lot of self control to pry my hands off my iPhone to write this review.

Now excuse me while I play "just one more level" of Addidoku.

Free - Download Now

The Bible is the most read book in the world, and tiny Bibles with microscopic text have always been popular because of their portability. But, now, today, thanks to ultra-portable devices like the iPhone and iPad with their awesome Retina displays, and apps like Olive Tree's BibleReader, the Bible is more portable and easier to read than ever.

If you search for Bible in the App Store, you will be flooded with an overwhelming amount of app choices, from good to bad to just plain different. There are so many that it's almost impossible to figure out which one to get. So I went on the hunt for the perfect Bible app. It had to gorgeously rendered, packed with features, highly customizable, and run perfectly smooth. And I kept coming back to Olive Tree's BibleReader for iPhone and iPad.

Olive Tree BibleReader is a universal app for the iPhone and iPad, but I will be using screenshots of the iPad for this review. The iPhone version has the exact same features as the iPad version.

The integrated in-app store

Included in all of the Olive Tree Bible apps is an integrated store where you can buy more books including other version of the Bible, commentary, reference materials, devotionals, and more.

All books that you purchase will be synced to your Olive Tree account so that you can download them to another device at no additional cost or re-download them if you accidentally delete them or need to restore your iPhone or iPad.

Split screen UI

One of the really neat features of BibleReader is that you can split your screen into two panels. If you're using BibleReader in portrait, the screen will split horizontally, and when in landscape, it will split vertically. In each panel, you can have any of the books you have in your Olive Tree Library.

Here's a few different situations that one may find the split screen to be useful:

• While at church, your pastor has one main passage that he's covering, but also references other verses. You can use one panel for the main passage, and the other to browse to the other verses.
• You want to compare two different versions of the Bible side-by-side -- basically converting BibleReader into a parallel Bible.
• You want to read another book, like a devotional, while having your Bible open to reference at the same time. Or maybe the Bible is the main book you want open, and you want to have easy access to a reference book.

If you don't want the split screen, you can simply slide the one you don't want off the the screen. This is also nice in case you want the split screen, but not the entire time. You can keep your secondary book open in the second panel, but keep it hidden until the moments you need it.

You also have control of where on the screen you want the split to take place -- it doesn't have to be directly down the middle.

Navigation

It's no secret that Bibles are huge and that people don't typically read them from front to back like other books. Often times, someone is looking for a specific book, chapter, or even verse in the giant book, so having a good navigational system is extremely important for a Bible app -- and Olive Tree has nailed it with BibleReader.

The "Go To" button at the upper-left of the screen is how you navigate to a specific section of the Bible. Tapping it will pop up a menu that lists all the books of the Bible in chronological order. You can also pull it down to discover a search field that allows you to type in the verse. It does recognize abbreviations, so, for example, "1 Cor 13:4" will take you to 1 Corinthians 13:4. You can also choose to see the books of the Bible displayed as a grid with their abbreviations.

Another trait that most Bible's have are superscripts that reference other relevant verses. In a printed version, you would check the bottom of the page to check the reference, then flip to the verse. With BibleReader, you simply tap the superscript and a list of all the verses associated with the nearby superscripts will appear. Tapping on one of the verse references will navigate to that verse right inside of the popup. It's very cool. You can then either read it in the popup, or choose to have it opened in the main or split window.

Highlights, underlines, and notes

People love marking up their Bible with highlighters, underlinings, and notes -- BibleReader lets you do all these things.

To select a verse, you simply tap on the verse number. Or if you want more or less than one verse, tap your finger on a word to select it, then drag the handles to extend your selection. You then see a popup of choices: copy, highlight, note, bookmark, or share. These choices are pretty self explanatory.

Highlights in BibleReader are so much cooler than with physical highlighters. You can choose for your highlights to have a traditional look, or you can customize the intensity, color, and highlighter style. For underlining, you can have the underline look like it was made with either a thin highlighter or with a pen. You can do this every time you add a highlight, or you can create your favorite looks and save them for quick access.

When you create a note, a little note icon will be placed in front of your selection as an indicator of there being a note present. Tapping the icon will popup the note.

Customizations

One of the great features of Olive Tree's BibleReader is that its look is very customizable. The default look is very traditional and easy to read, but if you want to change the font type, size, color, or background, you can. Want the words of Jesus to be in something fun like pink or green? Not a problem!

You can set different customizations for each of the three different window types: main screen, split screen, and popup.

Which version?

Olive Tree has many different Bible versions available in the App Store and making a decision on which one to buy can be a big overwhelming if you don't know which version you want, or if you're interested in more than one version. The good news is that since each app allows you to sync your Olive Tree library, it ultimately doesn't matter which one you choose.

If you are only interested in a specific version, I recommend just buying that one as it will be the quickest way to get it on your iPhone or iPad.

The most confusing part of the available apps is that it isn't clear what the difference is between the free Bible+ version and $0.99 BibleReader version. BibleReader includes the ASV, KJV, Matthew Henry’s Concise Commentary, and Jamieson, Faucett, and Brown Commentary. Bible+ comes with ASV and KJV and the Matthew Henry’s concise commentary is available for free in the integrated store. The Jamieson, Faucett, and Brown Commentary is also available, but not free. So, to sum it up, the main difference is that BibleReader comes with The Jamieson, Faucett, and Brown Commentary.

The other difference is, of course, what it will be named on your Home screen. For example, since I purchased NIV BibleReader, the icon on my Home screen is called NIV BR.

The fact that there are so many apps is confusing and overwhelming. If you're at a loss, I recommend just downloading the free version and browsing the in-app store for what you want to purchase.

The Good

• Content is stored locally to your iPhone or iPad, so an internet connection is not required
• Highly customizable
• Lots of highlighter and underlining options
• Two pane UI is very convenient.
• Keep notes and customizations synced between devices
• Universal for iPhone and iPad

The Bad

• Too many apps to choose from. Would be less confusing for users if there was only one app.

The Conclusion

Olive Tree's BibleReader is a fantastic Bible for your iPhone and iPad. The Bible has always been one of those books that I wanted to continue to read in print because of how much marking-up I like to do and I always thought it felt more personal. Since discovering BibleReader, it's the only Bible I ever read. I even bring my iPad to church and make notes and highlights into the app while my pastor gives his sermon. And not to brag or anything, but I can also navigate to verses faster than anyone else with BibleReader on my iPad.

Bible+, Free - Download Now

BibleReader, $0.99 - Download Now

NIV BibleReader, $9.99 - Download Now

All Olive Tree Bible Apps - App Store dev page

It's Wednesday, which means it's time to announce this week's photo contest -- and the winner of last week's macro photography contest. Before I do, I want to congratulate everyone on their awesome entries. We've got some talented iPhoneographer readers here at iMore and it wasn't an easy decision!

And the winning entry is...

...this awesome photo of a quarter by BuhdeeBoy! What made this photo stand out to me was strong focus on "In God We Trust". He also did an awesome job of using the rule of thirds on this focus point. BuhdeeBoy used an iPhone 4S and his brother's Olloclip to take the photo and edited it with Snapseed for iPhone. The black and white conversion was also a nice touch. Great work BuhdeeBoy! Now that you won your own Olloclip, you can stop stealing borrowing your brother's!

• Snapseed for iPhone - $4.99 - Download Now

This week's contest: Panoramas!

With the end of one photo contest, comes the beginning of new one -- this week we're going to completely shift gears and take panoramic photographs! There is no restriction on the subject. However, we expect a lot of entries to be landscapes, so it may help you stand out from the crowd if you get a creative and produce a truly unique image.

Apps for panoramic photography

The iPhone is does not come with the required software for panoramic photography, so to enter this contest, you'll need to head to the App Store and pick up an app for taking panos. Here's a couple popular ones:

• AutoStitch Panorama (my personal favorite) - $1.99 - Download Now
• Photosynth - Free - Download Now

If you prefer a different app for taking panoramas, please share it with us in the forums!

The prize: a Glif!

In addition to a thumbs up from the iMore crew and all of us yelling about how great of a photo star you are, the winner of this week's photography contest will have their photo converted into an official iMore wallpaper and we'll showcase it on the front page of iMore! But that’s not all! The winner will also receive a Glif tripod mount and stand!

The rules

The rules of entry are very simple. The photo must have been taken with an iPhone or iPad (we'll check the EXIF data of the original file to verify) and any edits must have been done with an iPhone or iPad app. No Photoshop CS6! If you have external lens accessories you are more than welcome to use them. You can submit as many photos as you'd like, but remember, this is a contest, so make sure you submit your best work!

Resources

Now, before you run off to take your panoramas photos, remember that it's not technical skill alone that will claim this prize. Even if you're not the best photographer (yet!), a great eye and a great subject can still get you the win. However, a little help can never hurt, so make sure you check out these articles from our iPhone photography series for some tips.

• How to create stunning panoramic photographs with your iPhone
• How to make your iPhone photography more striking with the “rule of thirds”

How to submit

Submitting your photos is easy. Just head over to the iMore Photography Forum and post your photos to the official contest thread. Don't forget to state which apps, if any, you used to edit your photo!

That's it! Now go out and get those beautiful panos!

ENTER NOW

If you've been on the hunt for an app to replace Apple's Clock app, Timegg for iPhone is a beautiful choice. It features a very stylish, easy to use UI and allows you to set up to 8 custom alarms, 8 custom timers (with intervals), due date reminders, and interval reminders.

When you first open Timegg, the interface is overlaid with help on how to use the app. It's very informative and is easily accessible for future reference.

At the top of the screen, you'll see the settings for the currently selected timer or alarm. Below that, you'll see a big dial with all the cost alarms, timers, or reminders inside. In each corner, you'll see an icon that represents each of the alarm types: Reminder, Alarm, Timer, and D-Day. You can also swipe along the top to switch between categories, if you prefer. In the center of the dial is a giant ON/OFF button that lets you enable/disable the currently selected alarm. If an alarm is set to off, holding your finger down on the circle associated with it will pop up options to edit or delete the alarm.

The alarm in Timegg can be customized to go off on any combination of days of the week. For example, I have one alarm for Monday-Thursday, one for Friday, and a third one for Saturday and Sunday. With each alarm, you can also choose if you want to have the ability to hit snooze. You may want to turn snooze off for alarm that are not intended to wake you up.

The sound options include with Timegg are nothing amazing. Most of them are really annoying. I prefer to wake up to something that doesn't want to make me throw my iPhone against the wall, but Timegg doesn't provide many such options. The makers of Timegg must really like animal sounds, because out of 16 provided sounds, 6 of them are of birds, cows, dogs, and ducks. As far as I'm concerned, all 6 of these sounds are worthless. Every alarm is also required to have a sound. There isn't a vibrate-only option.

The timer options in Timegg are very nice. You can set up to 8 presets for the things you time often. For example, I have one timer created and labeled for coffee, and another for laundry. With each timer, you can give it a label and also set an interval timer. For example, you can set an timer to go off in 1 hour, followed by 4 more timers every 10 minutes.

Timegg uses the term "D-Day" to refer to due date alarms, so don't confuse this with the Invasion of Normandy during WWII. A D-Day alarm is simply an alarm that reminds you of an important date (like your anniversary) one, seven or fifteen days before it arrives. Unfortunately, you can only set one alert for each D-Day.

Reminders in Timegg are actually rather disappointing. The reason is because you can't set a reminder for a specific time or day. The way that reminders work is that you set it up to remind you about something in intervals of 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, 1 month. The countdown will start as soon as you set the reminder. You're better off using Apple's Reminders app, instead.

The Good

• Stylish
• Set up to 8 alarms
• Preset up to 8 timers
• Set alarms for important dates 15 days, a week, or a day in advance
• Can disable/enable snooze for each individual alarm

The Bad

• Reminders must be set as a countdown. Reminders in general could us a lot of work.
• Not a wide variety of alarm sounds
• Sound effects (navigational) are audible even when iPhone is on silent
• Alarm, due date, timer, or reminder must be set to OFF in order to edit or delete
• Every alarm must have a sound. No vibrate-only option.

The Conclusion

Timegg is a great iPhone app for setting alarms and timers. The UI is gorgeous and very easy to use. Unfortunately, the reminders are essentially useless and have less features than Apple's Reminders app. Due date options are also very limited. But if you're looking for great alarm and timer settings that are better than Apple's Clock app, Timegg does a satisfactory job at just a buck.

I should also mention that Timegg must be running in the background in order to work. So if you want to rely on Timegg to wake you up in the morning, double check that it's running. If you have to turn off your iPhone for any reason (including resets), you must re-open Timegg. This is a condition of the iOS SDK and is out of the developers' control.

$0.99 - Download Now

Debt Snowball+ for iPhone utilizes the snowball method of paying off debts to help eliminate them faster and cut down on the amount of interest paid over the life of a loan. If you need a quicker way to pay things down, or feel as if you're paying on loans and just aren't getting anywhere, apps like Snowball+ like this can help you set attainable goals within your budget.

Choose which method of debt snowballing you'd like to use. You can also view how applying additional payments will affect the life of the loan and how much money you can save.

For those not familiar with how debt snowballing works, it is based on the concept of paying something off and using that payment amount to apply towards another debt once it is paid off. You start by choosing whether you'd like to pay large debts off first or smaller ones. Typically, paying off smaller debts first will free up money quicker to apply towards larger debts but paying off larger debts first tends to save you more money as you're most likely not paying as much interest. Whatever method is right for you is what you should use.

Choose a category of debt you'd like to track and pay off - then enter the details of the debt in order for Debt Snowball+ to track it and help you pay it off quicker.

Debt Snowball+ allows you to enter your debt information into the app and categorize each one accordingly. You can set up payment reminders and record additional payments you decide to make. Once all your information is input you can tap on your total debt amount at the top to receive some interesting information. Move the slider up and down or key in amounts to see how much making an additional payment will save you money and time wise.

Once a debt is paid off in full, the concept is that you will then apply the amount you were paying towards the debt that is now paid off to the next debt in line. In essence, you can just pretend you still have the same amount of debts to pay, you're just applying more to each debt as you knock other debts out.

Use the app to determine how much money you can save if you add additional payments. Also record and track payments to see how snowballing your debt is helping you pay things off faster and more efficiently.

I've found Debt Snowball+ to be a great way to track debts on an ongoing basis as well as an easy way to calculate how much to apply in extra payments if you've got some extra coin laying around. I don't really use the reminders within the app as I've already got calendar alerts set up for bills in the default calendar app. I'm assuming most other people will too so that feature seems a bit redundant.

The good

• Great way to track debts
• Easily calculate extra payments

The bad

• Reminders may be redundant

Conclusion

If you're looking for a good way to pay off debts quickly and need something that'll help you be a bit more conscious about your debt to income situation, Debt Snowball+ is a nice way of getting an overall picture of your situation so you can make an educated decision of what snowballing method will work best for you.

$0.99 - Download Now

Put all the articles, videos, and pictures that you can't get to now, right into your Pocket so you can enjoy them later

The service formerly known as Read It Later has been updated with a new look, a new name, and a new price -- it's called Pocket, and it's free! With Pocket, you can save articles, photos, videos, and just about anything you encounter on the web and social networks for offline viewing at your leisure and convenience, on your iPhone, iPad, or other devices.

The new layout on the iPad has a collage-sytle interface that gives spotlight to the images associated with the articles you save. It's very pretty and especially nice for users who plan to save a lot of images (from, say, Flickr) to their Pocket account. But this layout comes at the expense of informational density. Images take up more space than words, after all. So, Pocket also has a list view. This list view also displays small thumbnail images with each item, but it's a lot more condense than the other view. It's also the only view available on the iPhone. Personally, I really like seeing the images, but I'm sure there are users that would prefer a concise, text-only list -- which is not available.

You can sort your saved items in Pocket by articles, videos, or images, and you can also choose to allow Pocket to decided the best view to download for each item. In Article View, all the ads and sidebars of the original website are stripped away, leaving just the content of the article. It looks very nice.

If the saved item is not an article, Pocket will display the content in its original web view. Unfortunately, not all website articles are correctly being registered as articles by Pocket and default to Web View.

When viewing an article, there are options to adjust the font size and type, screen brightness, and toggle night time reading mode. Unfortunately, there are only two fonts to toggle at this time.

The Good

• Beautiful design
• New layout displays images and short excerpts of saved items
• Condensed list view with thumbnails available
• Sort by articles, videos, images, or all items
• Adjust font size
• Night reading mode
• Supported by hundreds of apps

The Bad

• Only two fonts
• There isn't a simple list view without images available
• Doesn't always recognize articles as articles

The Conclusion

Pocket is a great way to save content from the web for viewing at a later time. The interface is both functional and pretty while still being extremely simple to use. It is also already supported by hundreds of apps (most of which still refer to the service as "Read It Later", but that should change quickly). Now that it's free, there's no reason to at least give it a try!

Free - Download Now

SpellTower for iPhone and iPad is a fun word game that adds a fun twist to the classic word search game. Instead of being limited to spelling words vertically, horizontally, and diagonally, you can choose your letters in any direction.

Specifically, if the next letter in your word is in one of the 8 surrounding letters, then it's fair game. Perhaps an easier way to explain it is -- any word that is able to be spelled by sliding over each letter, in order, without lifting your finger, is playable in SpellTower.

There are other little rules for scoring and clearing rows, but SpellTower does an excellent job of explaining them in the tutorial.

SpellTower has 5 different game modes. Tower Mode the most relaxing and pressure-free. You are simply given 150 letters and it's your goal to spell as many words as you can.

Puzzle Mode reminds me of Tetris. Each time you make a word, a new row is added and your goal is to prevent any of the columns from reaching the top.

If a letter has a small letter in its tile, the number represents the shortest length your word must be in order to use that letter. In Ex Puzzle Mode, there are a lot more of these letters than in Puzzle Mode.

Rush Mode has the same overall objective as the Puzzle Modes, except that instead of adding rows every time you make a word, SpellTower adds a new row after a set amount of time. This is by no means a leisurely game mode!

The Good

• Fun
• 4 levels of difficulty
• Challenging
• Includes helpful tutorial
• Multiplayer over bluetooth
• Night mode

The Bad

• No online multiplayer

The Conclusion

SpellTower is a very fun game. I've always had a slight aversion to word games, because I'm typically very terrible at them, but I actually really enjoy playing this one. SpellTower is the best word game I've ever played.

$1.99 - Download Now

Cards is Apple's iPhone app that allows you to create custom cards to be printed and mailed to friends and family. The recent update includes some cute templates for Mother's Day. Apple has added new cards in many of the other categories as well.

Creating a card is super easy and only take a few minutes to do. Once you decided on a template, just tap the photo field to insert a photo. You can edit text in a similar manner. Once you make your personal adjustment to the inside and outside of the card, you can add addresses from your address book. Then tap the price of the card ($2.99), enter your password, and your card is on its way!

Well, in theory.

I've tried sending a card twice now with no luck. Both times, I've added the recipient address from my contacts and then tapped to edit it because I wanted to change the name of the recipient. After I made my changes and tapped done, Cards prompted me to select what country the recipient is from. Then it crashed. Both times.

I'm actually pretty sad about this. I've sent personalized greeting cards with Cards in the past and the quality is great. I hope Apple fixes this before Mother's Day, because I was planning to send my mom a Mother's Day card with this app.

It's also ironic that Apple claims that this update "improves accuracy of envelope address verification" and "simplifies and improves the checkout process".

And while I'm griping about Cards, anyway, can I just say -- where's the iPad version, Apple?!

Free - Download Now

iMore's authoritative guide to the very best, absolutely free apps for iPhone and iPod touch

Looking for great free apps for your iPhone or iPod touch? The App Store is home to over half a million apps and games, and a surprising number of them are available for free. That's free as in free of charge to buy, free of subscriptions to use, and free of any crippling or time-bombing to make you pay later. They're just free. But which free apps are the best? Which are the top free apps you just absolutely have to download right now?

That's where iMore comes in! Here's your ultimate, authoritative guide to the top, 100% free iPhone and iPod touch apps for social networking, IM and communications, education, entertainment, finance, fun and games, health and fitness, kids, music, navigation and location, news, photography, productivity, reading, shopping, sports, travel, and general utility.

Whether you're new to iPhone or iPod touch and looking for a fast, free way to get started with apps, or you're just bored and looking for a little free fun, check out the apps below. And hey, since they're free, you can download them all!

(Also, be sure to check out our best free games for iPhone rundown for even more great free iPhone apps!)

iMore app

What better way than to keep up-to-date with all the latest free iPhone app and game news than with iMore's own, absolutely free iPhone app! Not only that, you'll also get breaking news, helpful how-tos, app and accessory reviews, instant access to our podcasts, and more! This is the very best way to enjoy the best of iMore right on your iPhone!

• Download Now

Best free social networking apps for iPhone

Facebook

Facebook is the most popular social network on the planet, and it's always been one of the most popular free apps on the iPhone. Inside the free Facebook app, you can update your status, view photos, and check into your location. You can also keep up with your news feed, messages, events, pages, chat, as well as upload your photos and videos, and much, much more. (And if you're looking for more friends, check out our Facebook name swap thread!)

• Download Now

Twitter

Twitter and the iPhone go together like chocolate and peanut butter, and the free, official Twitter app for iPhone is the best way to get started finding cool celebrities and interesting internet personalities to follow, and trending topics to get involved with. (And be sure to check out our Twitter name swap thread to find other iMore members to tweet with!)

• Download Now

Pinterest

Pinterest is the new, rapidly growing, free social network that lets you pin photos, articles, recipes, or anything you think is cool, to your virtual pinboard. With the free Pinterest for iPhone app, you can view the pins of your friends, repin, like, and comment on your favorite pins, and pin directly from your camera.

• Download Now

More free social networking apps

• Best free social networking apps for iPhone

Best free IM and communications apps for iPhone

Skype

The free Skype app for iPhone lets you make free audio and video calls and exchange text chats from your iPhone to other iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad users, as well as Android, Mac, Windows, and millions more Skype users around the world. You can also buy Skype credits to call conventional phone numbers at really low prices.

• Download Now

imo instant messenger

imo is a great, free iPhone app for those who love traditional instant messaging (IM). imo supports Facebook Chat, Google Talk, Skype, MSN, ICQ/AIM, Yahoo, Jabber, Hyves, VKontakte, Myspace, and Steam. You can send text, images, and voice as well.

• Download now

GroupMe

GroupMe is an excellent free group messaging app for iPhone that communicates over both data and SMS. GroupMe perfect for coordinating big events with friends that aren't all using smartphones. GroupMe generates a phone number which collects and forwards free messages to those authorized to be a part of the group. Those that do will be able to take advantage of a few extra features, like location and picture sharing.

• Download Now

Best free educational apps for iPhone

iTunes U

The free iTunes U app for iPhone gives you access to courses from universities and schools. These courses are completely free and even include assignments. iTunes U and the instructors provide course materials, including audio, video, books, documents & presentations, apps, and books. iTunes U includes over 500,000 free lectures, videos, books, and other resources on thousands of subjects from Algebra to Zoology.

• Download Now

SparkNotes

SparkNotes is one of the most popular study guides for literature, Shakespeare, poetry, philosophy, drama and short stories. With the free SparkNotes for iPhone app you can access 50 pre-installed study guides in your library and hundreds of study guides online. You can also check-in at the place you're studying and indicate what subject your studying which could then result in impromptu study sessions with other SparkNotes users studying the same subject at the same place at the same time.

• Download Now

Flashcards+

With school comes lots of studying. One of the most common studying techniques is to use flashcards. With the free Flashcards+ app for iPhone, you can say goodbye to the stacks and stacks of flashcards that accumulate over the course of a semester and use electronic flashcards on your iPhone instead. The beauty of Flashcards+ is that you have your flash cards with you wherever you go, which means you'll likely squeeze in more mini study lessons throughout your day and end up with better grades as a result!

• Download Now

Best free entertainment apps for iPhone

Crackle

While apps like Netflix are free, you still have to pay for a subscription to actually use them. Not so with Crackle! The free Crackle app for iPhone lets you watch hours and hours of Hollywood movies, from Resident Evil to A Few Good Men, and TV Shows from I Dream of Jennie to the Tick, absolutely free. And it supports AirPlay so you can watch on your big screen TV.

• Download Now

IMDB

IMDB's free iPhone app means you're always only a few taps away from the latest show times, trailers, movie and TV rations, and cast and episode lists. It's the perfect couch-side companion for any serious entertainment buff, and the perfect mobile app for cinema buffs!

• Download now

TED

The free TED app for iPhone blurs the lines between education and entertainment, showcasing riveting talks from experts in the fields of technology, entertainment, and design. With the TED app, you can browse their complete catalog of talks, bookmark and download your favorites, and share individual talks and playlists with your friends. It's like holding genius in the palm of your hand. For free.

• Download now

Best free financial apps for iPhone

Paypal

Love it or hate it, Paypal is the internet's default currency and the free Paypal for iPhone app is the best way to manage your Paypal account on the go. Whether you're sending or requesting money, checking your balance or reviewing your past transactions, or looking for a local retailer who takes PayPal, it's right here, right when you want.

• Download Now

Bloomberg

Bloomberg for iPhone is a great way for casual traders and investors to interact with their stocks and stay up to date with world news. Whether you need to casually monitor stocks on your iPhone or just find the urge to check out financial news, the free Bloomberg app has you covered -- for free!

• Download Now

Mint.com

The free Mint.com for iPhone app gives everything you love about the web site on the go and in the palm of your hand. You can track, manage, and budget your money, connect your bank, credit, and other financial accounts, and safely, securely keep it with you wherever you are. It also syncs with the Mint.com website so you're always up-to-date.

• Download now

Best free games for iPhone

For dozens of additional free iPhone games, check out our best free iPhone games special feature!

Angry Birds Free

The free Angry Birds app lets you play one of the most popular games in the world right on your iPhone -- for free. Yes, it is supported by adds, but you'll be too busy catapulting birds and destroying pigs to even notice them!

• Download Now

Draw Something Free

Draw Something is a sensation and you can play it on your iPhone for free with Draw Something Free. In Draw Something, you have a partner and you take turns drawing pictures with the goal of getting each other to guess the correct word. Just like Angry Birds Free, Draw something Free is supported by ads.

• Download Now

Hero Academy

Hero Academy is a great turn-based free iPhone game where you and a friend (or random partner) take turns moving and attacking each other with various army pieces on a checked board. You have a set number of action points with which to move your pieces, bring in fresh ones from your stash, upgrade your pieces, and, of course, attack. The main goal is to either whittle down a few crystals on your opponent's side of the board, or run them out of troops.

• Download Now

More free games

• best free games for iPhone

Best free health and fitness apps for iPhone

RunKeeper

The free RunKeeper for iPhone app uses your iPhone's built in GPS technology to track your running, walking, cycling and other exercise activities. RunKeeper also syncs up to its own web portal where you can view your history and stats in more detail. Integration with Facebook and Twitter means you can even show off your fitness prowess to your friends!

• Download Now

WebMD

WebMD is a reputable and accurate online source for medical facts and advice, and with the free WebMD iPhone app you'll have complete access to mobile-optimized health information and decision-support tools including WebMD’s Symptom Checker, Drugs & Treatments, First Aid Information and Local Health Listings.

• Download Now

Fooducate

The free Fooducate for iPhone app contains a wealth of information and user reviews about many of the foods we consume on a daily basis. Fooducate stresses the importance of eating foods that are good for your body as a whole. Sure, a calorie is a calorie, but if you give your body calories from better quality foods, you get the benefits of vitamins, minerals, and nutrients that artificially processed foods with lots of additives, high fructose corn syrup, and other “empty” calories just can’t match.

• Download Now

Best free kids apps for iPhone

PBS KIDS Video

The free PBS KIDS Video app brings all your child's favorite shows right to the iPhone or iPod touch. Curious George, The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That, Dinosaur Train, SUPER WHY!, Sesame Street and Wild Kratts and are all here and ready to entertain and educate.

• Download now

Curious George at the Zoo

If your child is interested in animals, then Curious George at the Zoo is a great free iPhone app to educate and entertain them. Explore an interactive 3D zoo, learn about and interact with the animals, watch videos and play games, all on the iPhone or iPod touch.

• Download now

ABC Letter Tracing

The free ABC Letter Tracing app for iPhone is perfect for pre-schoolers just learning to write. It has both upper and lowercase letters, along with helpful voice-overs and illustrations of items that begin with each letter.

• Download now

Best free music apps for iPhone

Shazam

How many times have you been listening to the radio, or attending a party, or watching TV when you hear a song that you like but have no idea what the name of the song is or even who the artist is? With the free Shazam app for iPhone, all have to do is let your mic listen to the song for about 30 seconds, and Shazam will tell you exactly which song it is!

• Download Now

Slacker Radio

Don't have much music stored on your iPhone? Don't fret! With the free Slacker Radio iPhone app you can stream radio to your iPhone for free. The Slacker music library features millions of songs from thousands of artists and you can customize your own radio stations with your favorite artists and songs. In addition to music, you can also listen to ESPN Radio, ABC News, comedy and more.

• Download Now

TuneIn Radio

The free TuneIn Radio app for iPhone gives you on-the-go access to over 50,000 radio stations worldwide. From the local station where you may live now to the far away station where you may have grown up or simply visited and always remembered, TuneIn radio has over 120,000 free shows for you to choose from, right on your iPhone.

• Download now

Best free navigation and location apps for iPhone

Waze social GPS & traffic

The free Waze app for iPhone uses Open Street Map data, which means you're contributing to building a map as you drive, and you also get to view the things added by others. The crowdsourced nature of Waze lets users share information about traffic jams, accidents, speed traps, and other pertinent data. It includes standard turn-by-turn navigation, but the accuracy can vary depending on the quality of the maps in your area.

• Download Now

Foursquare

Foursquare is free app for iPhone that lets you check into the places you go, and see which friends are there now, or may have been there in the past. It's a great way to keep track of trips and photos of the places you've visited, and a fun way to earn badges and share and receive recommendations for where to go next.

• Download Now

Poynt

Poynt is a free location-based search app for iPhone with dedicated channels to a variety of different kinds of content. What makes it better than just a Google Maps search is that each experience is very closely tailored, so searching for a movie will immediately bring up options to buy tickets from your phone or view a trailer, while restaurant listings will include reviews and the option to reserve a table.

• Download Now

Best free news apps for iPhone

Flipboard

The free Flipboard for iPhone app shows you the news that matters to you, along with recommendations from your Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram friends. That makes it a dynamic, up-to-date, but highly personalized magazine, right in the palm of your hand! It's also makes it easy to share the stuff you like most back with your friends and social circles.

• Download Now

Pulse News

Pulse News, from Alphonso Labs is an awesome free newsreader for iPhone that brings all your news together into one place. With Pulse News, you choose the categories you want to display and the specific content for each section. For example, you might want to add a Gaming, Sports, News, Tech, Science, Art and Design any number of additional categories.

• Download Now

AP Mobile

The free AP Mobile app brings the Associated Press right to your iPhone. With comprehensive, timely coverage of local and global news it's not like having a newspaper or TV station in the palm of your hands -- it's like having their news sources. Plus, if you find yourself in the middle of the news, you can even send the AP your tip!

• Download Now

Best free photo apps for iPhone

Instagram

Instagram isn't just a free iPhone app, it's one of the most popular social photo sharing networks on the planet. It features a large selection of vintage, hip, and fun filters as well as the ability to add the tilt-shift effect to your photos. You can also follow friends and photographers, "like" photos, and leave comments on them. (If you're looking for more great iPhoneographers to share with, check out our Instragram name swap thread!)

• Download Now

Pic Stitch

There are a lot of collage apps in the App Store, but what's great about Pic Stitch is that it's free! With Pic Stitch for iPhone, you can create beautiful collages that tell a story in just a few taps. It features 32 different layouts and after you've finished your masterpiece, you can share it to your favorite social network or another photography app.

• Download Now

Camera Awesome

If you're looking for a free app that offers more than the built-in iOS Camera app, look no further than Camera Awesome. This fantastic free iPhone app not only gives you a lot of powerful editing tools and filters, but it also gives more control while taking photos as well by allowing you to select separate points for focus and exposure.

• Download Now

Best free productivity apps for iPhone

Adobe Reader

With the free Adobe Reader app for iPhone, you can have all your PDFs in your pocket. What's more, you aren't limited to just viewing PDFs, but you can annotated them with text, handwriting, strikethroughs, highlights, and more. You can also fill out forms and add your signature.

• Download Now

Evernote

Evernote isn't just a great free note-taking app for iPhone. It's a great free note-taking app on almost every platform. That means no matter where you are, or what device you have access to, your notes are always there for you. You can also add pictures and search for text in the images, add voice notes, and easily share what you've collected.

• Download Now

Dropbox

The free Dropbox for iPhone app gives you access to all your files stored in your Dropbox account (free up to 2GB). You can mark items as favorites to store them locally on your iPhone for offline viewing, save photos and videos to your Dropbox account, and easily share them with family, friends and colleagues.

• Download Now

Best free reading apps for iPhone

iBooks

iBooks is Apple's free ebook and PDF reading app for iPhone. It's a stylish way to read not only books purchased from the iBookstore, but all the free books from the massive Project Gutenberg library as well as any of your own ePub or PDF files.

• Download Now

Readability

Readability offers a gorgeous way to read articles from your favorite website without the distraction of ads and other fluff -- for free! You simply set up your free account and add articles with a bookmarklet . A lot of other apps, like Twitter, off Readability support so that you can add articles directly from those apps.

• Download Now

Kindle

The free Kindle App for iPhone is Amazon's ebook reader. Unlike Apple's iBooks, Kindle is cross-platform. If you already have a large Kindle book collection, free or otherwise, or you just want to keep your options open for the future, Kindle is a great choice.

Best free shopping apps for iPhone

Apple Store

The free Apple Store app not only lets you shop Apple's online store from the comfort of your iPhone, but it actually lets you purchase accessories via your iPhone, iTunes account, and EasyPay at the Apple retail store. You can also make an appointment at the Genius Bar an automatically check in when you arrive.

• Download now

Etsy

Etsy for iPhone is a free app that gives you access to 11 million items from some of the internets most eclectic, most astonishing artisans and craftspeople. You can browse, you can buy, and if you're a seller, you can manage your Etsy account right from your iPhone.

• Download now

RedLaser

With the free RedLaser app your iPhone transforms into a powerful barcode and QR code scanner. If you see an item at the store, simply scan it and get instant results from Google, TheFind, eBay, Milo, American Express, and many more. It's one of the easiest ways to compare real-world prices online -- and it's free!

• Download now

Best free sports apps for iPhone

ESPN ScoreCenter

ESPN ScoreCenter is a free iPhone app that brings you the latest scores, standings, and news for dozens of sports and hundreds of teams around the world. If you have a free myESPN account, you get automatic access to all your favorites. If you don't, you can choose baseball, basketball, cricket, football, hockey, rugby and soccer teams to follow right on your iPhone.

• Download Now

MLB.com At Bat

Although it has premium options, the free or “lite” version of MLB at Bat for iPhone still gives you access to lots of great content. You can watch the scoreboard during every game, see news and highlights from recent games, buy tickets to upcoming games and check in around the league for other scores and highlights. While diehard baseball fans will want to buy the full app, the Lite version is great for casual fans on the go.

• Download Now

NBA Game Time

NBA Game Time is sort of like MLB.com At Bat – but for basketball. During games, you can follow along practically play by play, seeing who is on the court at every moment and who is scoring plays. You can also check the scores around the league, watch video highlights, check the standings, look at the schedule for every team and get information on each arena, right from the free iPhone app!

• Download Now

Best free travel apps for iPhone

Yelp

If you're searching for a place to eat, shop, drink, relax and play, the free Yelp for iPhone app will provide you with a map or list of exactly what you're looking for. Each location is also filled with reviews by users who have been to that place before. When you decide on a place and have finished your visit, you can leave a review of your own for other users to read when in the same predicament that you were in.

• Download Now

TripIt

The free TripIt app for iPhone, when paired with a free TripIt account, becomes your virtual travel assistant. Simply email any flight or hotel confirmations to TripIt and they'll automagically get logged and displayed on your iPhone, along with helpful maps and additional information to make your travel safer and easier.

• Download Now

Google Translate

While there are a lot of language courses and travel references available for the iPhone, the free Google Translate app lets you find the right phrase, in the right language, right when you need it. Text translation is available in 64 languages and voice translation in 17. Yup, you can talk instead of type! Fantastique! Hen hao!

• Download now

Best free utilities for iPhone

Find my iPhone

The free Find my iPhone app by Apple will help you locate your iPhone in the unfortunate event that you misplace it or it gets stolen. You can track your iPhone from another iOS device or from the iCloud website. You can also send a message and alert to your iPhone to help you find it or to provide contact information in the even that someone found your iPhone. If you're concerned about the security of your data, you can remotely lock your iPhone or even wipe it with the free Find my iPhone app.

• Download Now

Remote

Apple's free Remote app lets you control your iTunes or Apple TV right from your iPhone over your local Wi-Fi network. Browse or search your iTunes library or Apple TV content, choose songs, TV shows, or movies to listen to or watch, and control playback, skipping, and more.

• Download now

The Weather Channel

Apple's built-in weather app is great and all, but sometimes you're looking for more information about the weather than this app can provide. The Weather Channel app is a great alternative. It features interactive maps and radar, severe weather alerts, and hourly and 10 day forecasts. You can also watch videos of breaking news and weather coverage and upload and view photos of the weather taken by other users. And you get all of this for free!

• Download Now

Your favorite free iPhone apps?

Did we miss any of your favorite free iPhone and iPod touch apps? If so, head on over to our iPhone apps and games forum and add yours to the favorite free iPhone apps list! We'll be updating this post often, so your pick could be next!

Rene Ritchie, Ally Kazmucha, Gary Mazo, and Simon Sage contributed to this article

Babies equal photos. It's really just that simple. Nothing sells more camera gear or generates more images than a newborn baby. Whether it's yours, your family's, or your friend's, the moment a newborn baby appears our fingers fly to the shutter. Babies are the celebrities of our lives and we all want the best possible photos of them we can get. Now you may seen especially dreamy photos of babies in galleries or on the web and wished you could capture similar images of the baby in your life. Well, you can! All you need is your iPhone, the right tools, and the proper techniques!

Before we jump in, I should mention that the best age to get the types of images you'll see in this article is between 5 and 14 days old. This is when a newborn baby is most sleepy, flexible, and tolerant of being touched when sleeping.

Note: Every newborn image used in this article was taken with an iPhone and edited with iPhoto for iPhone and iPad. There will be a follow up article on how to edit newborn photos with iPhoto.

Get the right tools: Beanbag, blankets, heat, light, white noise

First things first, let's talk about what tools you need to get great images. The most important element is light. You could make things work without anything else, but light is a requirement. My favorite source of light is simply a window. Avoid direct sunlight, however. If sunlight is shining through the window, you may want to wait until a different time of day.

Most of the images of newborns taken by professional photographers are of sleeping, naked babies curled up in adorable little poses. So the question on your mind is probably "how?" The first trick is heat.

The general rule of thumb is to dress newborns in 1-2 more layers than yourself, so stripping down your newborn for a photo shoot may make you feel a little uneasy -- as it should. If you do want those naked baby photos, you're going to need to crank up the heat. And when I say crank up the heat, I'm talking 75-80 degrees Fahrenheit. Personally, I typically have parents turn up their heater to 75 degrees and I bring along a space heater that I have pointing towards the baby at all times. (Don't put the heat too close!).

Ok, now that you have a warm newborn, where do you put him? I recommend a beanbag. Many photographers use huge, expensive beanbags for newborns, but you can get by just fine with a cheap-y from Target. The trick is to make sure the beanbag isn't too soft. You can either buy extra beanbag filler, or simply tie up the excess material with a hair-tie. You need the beanbag to be nice and firm.

Combine your beanbag with a big blanket, and you've got yourself a little studio. Place the blanket on the beanbag and use the excess as your back drop. You can either find some furniture, like chairs, to drape the blanket over, or you can have some hold it up for you.

In the image above, the blankets are clamped onto a professional backdrop stand. This is by no means a necessary tool. Also notice, that in the image above, there's a couple blankets layered on top of each other. This makes it quick and easy to switch between your backdrops.

Now, sometimes heat and a comfy beanbag is not enough to keep a newborn asleep. The secret ingredient may be white noise. I use an app called White Noise Lite to produce loud, calming noise. More often than not, this app does the trick and keeps the babies in a nice slumber.

The Lite version of White Noise will not run in the background, so if there isn't another iPhone around, you may want to look into the full version, as it will let you use your camera while emitting audio from the app.

• White Noise Lite - Download Now
• White Noise, $1.99 - Download Now

Lastly, you need to patient. You are at the mercy of the baby when it comes to newborn photography and you need to embrace that fact and be patient. Do not rush the process. Make sure the baby is completely asleep before attempting to put him or her in any poses. If that means rocking the newborn in your arms and singing lullabies for an hour, then so be it.

(Pro tip: wait until the baby is sound asleep and on the beanbag before taking off the diaper. It lessens your chance of being peed or pooped on. It doesn't guarantee anything, though. If you want naked baby shots, be prepared for pee and poop.)

Don't photograph up the baby's nose

The most common thing to photograph on a baby is, of course, his or her face. This comes as a given, so by all means, snap away at that adorable face, just make sure you're not shooting up the baby's nose. The dark (and usually red), unattractive nostrils will end up dominating the shot.

Add some tilt

When we were little kids, our parents taught us to hold the camera strait when taking a photo, but with newborns, tilting the camera adds a great impact. Just make sure the baby's head is composed higher than his or her body. You don't want it to look like the baby is falling down hill! The image above demonstrates tilt nicely, as does the photo in the section before this one.

Use props

When a baby is naked, introducing props like beanies and headbands can have an adorable impact on your photos. Wrapping the newborn up nice and tight in a blanket is also commonly done, and if the baby isn't happy about being naked, this is a great alternative.

If you're looking for the types of beanies, headbands and wraps that professional photographers use, check out ETSY. You can often times find adorable stuff at a great price.

Objects that emphasize the small size of the newborn are also great. For example, I've seen wedding rings around tiny toes or an itty bitty hand grasping Daddy's finger.

Don't forget the details

Speaking of the tininess of a newborn, don't forget to capture those tiny details! The iPhone does a great job at macro photography, so don't be afraid to get up close and take images of little hands, feet, toes, ears, nose, and lips.

When taking these close up photos, don't forget about what's happening in the background. If you're able to have other parts of the baby out of focus in a different area of the photograph, it gives more of an "aww"-factor to your image. For example, in the photo above, I used the rule of thirds when composing the feet and made sure the baby's head and face was still in the frame to the left.

Leave the complex poses to the professionals

If you head to Google or Flickr for inspiration on newborn poses, you will discover photos of very complex (and beautiful) poses with babies holding up their head in their hands, hanging from trees, and resting their heads over the edges of baskets. Do not, I repeat, do not attempt these types of photos.

The secret to these images is that advanced software, like Photoshop, is used to compose multiple images into one photograph. The safety of the newborn always comes first. Do not hang your baby from a tree branch. Do not make your baby support his own head. Do not have someone hold your baby up over their head. Do not pose a baby on a guitar. Do not put a newborn in danger.

Now go get some beautiful photos of that precious baby!

Now what are you waiting for? That precious newborn of yours is only going to get older, so go get those beautiful photos! When you're done, share them with us in the iMore photography forum! (Please do not share images of another person's child without their permission).

(Huge thanks to Baby Kannon for being such an amazingly adorable model for this post. And thank you to his parents for giving me permission to use his modeling skills).

Every week the editors at iMore carefully select some of our favorite, most useful, most extraordinary apps, accessories, gadgets, and websites. This week's selections include apps a beautiful iPad weather app, apps for sports and politics, a fun camera app, an app filled with inspirations, a puzzle game, a music app, and an alternative to Instagram.

To see what we picked, and to tell us your pick, follow on after the break!

Living Earth HD - Seth Clifford

It's been a crazy week, so I'm going simple with my pick - simple and beautiful. Leanna reviewed a weather app called Living Earth recently and after reading her post, my need to see just how great this app really was took over immediately and I downloaded it. You might find a weather app that does more or has more geeky weather options for meteorology nerds, but with the possible exception of Weather HD, I've yet to see a weather app this cool.

It's a universal binary, so you get apps for both your phone and your iPad. The app has a nice forecast view as well as a cool alarm clock feature, but the interactive globe that loads live cloud and sunlight information from real-time satellite data is my favorite part. Sometimes just marveling at nature is all I've got the energy for.

You can read Leanna's review for all the gritty details, of which there are plenty. I'm just going to sit and spin the Earth and hypnotize myself for a while...

$1.99 - Download Now

FCB Mobile - Chris Oldroyd

This week’s pic is all about the beautiful game and the team that play's it in the most beautiful way. My first love is my local football team Newcastle United. My second love belongs well and truly with the most famous football club in the world FC Barcelona.

Barcelona play the game the way it should be played, one touch passing, instant control but most importantly they play it offensively with open attacking football that is an absolute joy to watch week in and week out. Anyway back to the app, I have a great app on my iPhone that keeps me up to date with all the goings on at Camp Nou and its caled FCB Mobile.

FCB Mobile is the official app for FC Barcelona and includes all the latest news, match previews, reviews, player profiles, audio, video and much much more. If you are a fan of Barcelona you need this app.

$0.99 - Download Now

Contact Congress - Gary Mazo

For years, I have been preaching to my kids (as they one by one turn 18) that one of the great things about this country is that we all do get a say; that voting is both a privilege and an obligation. I also try to impart that even if the candidate we want doesn’t get elected – we all have an obligation to still be part of the process and let them know how we feel about important issues.

Now, this is always easier said than done. Fortunately, there are some great apps to make being part of the process easier and more fun. I use Contact Congress by airship Software.

When you start up Contact Congress, it asks to either use your location or for you to input your home zip and then it finds your Senators and your Representative in Congress. Their political party is indicated by a little elephant or donkey and their picture and name is displayed in a tab.

Touch the tab with their name on it and you immediately have links to follow him/her on Twitter, go to his/her official Facebook page, Call Their Office or send them an email. It couldn’t be easier or more convenient. Because of this app, I follow all three of my elected officials on Twitter and I have fired off a few emails and even made a phone call or two along the way when something is important to me.

And there is a very fun opportunity for an in-app purchase; you can, for $.99 “Dress up Congress” by purchasing Google eyes or Horns to put on the images of the elected officials. I actually think this is sort of demeaning and takes away from the app, but I understand the need to try to “monetize” the app some how.

All in all, this perhaps the easiest way to stay involved in our political process, and, as I tell my kids, to become part of the solution.

Have you used Contact Congress? Do you use other apps to stay politically active and involved? Sound off in the iMore forum thread.

Free - Download Now

Videoscope - Alli Flowers

Back when I had my iPhone 3GS, I found a nifty little app that let me use the iPhone camera like a kaleidoscope. KaleidoVid cased to function when Apple released iOS 4, and the dev never updated it. I was disappointed, because although it wasn't a great productivity app, it kept me entertained for hours.

While browsing through the App store recently, I discovered several new kaleidoscope type apps, and one of them had much of the same functionality as that original app. Videoscope allows you to turn your iPhone camera into a kaleidoscope. You can increase or decrease the number of prisms by pinching the screen, and once you see the kaleidoscopic view you like, you can capture that view to your camera roll to use as wallpaper.

Videoscope has a feature that I recommend you not use if you've been drinking heavily or are on medication - it leverages the video camera of your iPhone and allows you to video the complete moving spectrum of the kaleidoscope. I shot some video through Videoscope while riding in the car the other night, and the results are breathtaking - and triply!

Videoscope also offers some alternate "scopes" including Pinscreen, Impressionist, and Brickbreaker. The Brckbreaker mode is particularly cool because you get to "break the bricks" by tapping on them and watching them fall away.

You are not limited to the rear camera with Videoscope. You can aim the front camera at yourself and become the Pinscreen image, or you can choose a picture from your photo library to turn into some awesome abstract art.

$0.99 - Download Now

Quotes! - Chris Parsons

Lots of people look for inspiration and motivation in different ways and one way that I enjoy is by reading quotes from others. Luckily, there is a beautiful iOS app available that offers plenty of quotes no matter what the topic may be. The app carries an obvious name, just simply -- Quotes. Love, Happiness, Motivation, Inspiration. All are covered in quotes with the ability to share and save your favourites all from within the app itself. It does cost $.99 but it's beautifully simple and enjoyable if you're into reading quotes from others.

$0.99 - Download Now

Lawnmower Challenge - Simon Sage

This week I tried out Lawnmower Challenge, a simple puzzle game launched by a Boston indie developer at PAX East 2012. The premise is simple enough: cut all the grass in the level in as few moves as possible. Things get complicated when you throw in rocks, reeds, tall grass that you can't walk through, mud you can't mow through, locked gates that require keys, and impassable rocks.

It's not fancy, but with 144 levels, you definitely won't be left wanting for a challenge.

$1.99 - Download Now

Spotify for iPhone - Ally Kazmucha

I've long been looking for a way to free up some physical space on my iOS devices. While streaming services are great, what about times where you don't want to eat up your data plan? I've found Spotify to be a great compromise. I've found most streaming services to be rather lacking or they don't let you choose want you want to listen to. Neither is the case with Spotify. You can search through millions of tracks, create your own custom playlists, and listen in seconds.

With a premium account for $9.99/month you can stream music as well as download it to your device for offline use so you aren't eating away at precious data. The free version is ad-supported and allows you to stream online, the unlimited version for $4.99 will allow you to stream with the iPhone or Android app in addition to removing ads. The premium version is the only subscription that adds offline mode. I've found that I can stream when I'm at home and just choose offline mode for the playlists I want to listen to while traveling or not near wifi. I'm saving tons of space on my iPhone by using the service.

Spotify comes with a full trial for 48 hours. Check it out and see what you think.

Free - Download Now

Tadaa - Leanna Lofte

With all the threatening on Twitter and comments to leave Instagram after Facebook acquired it, I went on a hunt for a decent alternative to Instagram. My favorite one so far is tadaa.

tadaa has a lot of what Instagram offers -- only more. It's a social network where other members can like and add comments to photos. There's a photo feed for all the friends you follow, as well as feeds for popular photos and new members.

What I really like about tadaa is that it has a lot of built-in editing tools in addition to filters. You can crop, adjust brightness, contrast, and saturation, add a tilt-shift effect, and when adding a filter, you can adjust how strong the affect appears on your photo. You also aren't restricted to square crops.

Free - Download Now

Tell us your pick!

Those were our picks, iMore Nation, so now it's your turn! Tell us your pick of the week below. Give us the name of your favorite app, site, or accessory, and tell us why it made your life more productive, more informed, more entertaining, or just plain more fun. Jump into the comments and let us know your pick of the week!

Infinity Blade 2 for iPhone and iPad has been updated with a new content pack called ClashMobs that lets you complete challenges in Infinity Blade 2 with your Facebook friends. Interestingly, even your Facebook friends who don't play Infinity Blade 2 can help you complete your challenges by "liking" your posts.

After connecting Infinity Blade 2 to your Facebook account, you will have a set of new challenges called ClashMobs to choose from. Each challenge will need help from your friends, but the good news is that even though these challenges are scheduled, you don't have to play with your friends at the exact same time. For example, a ClashMob may only require 30 seconds from each participant, but each player can contribute during any time between Monday and Wednesday.

To get your friends to contribute to your ClashMobs, you simply post to your Facebook page with Infinity Blade 2. Most challenges only require a few friends or offer better rewards for more participants, but some challenges may need the help of as many as 500,000 players. With some ClashMob's, your non-Infinity Blade 2 playing friends can also help you out by liking your post. For example, each like received may inflict damage on the boss you're fighting.

Now, that last part sounds cool and all, but I'm willing to bet that most of these likes will be coming from Infinity Blade 2 players since Facebook users who don't play Infinity Blade 2 will likely be hiding all posts by Infinity Blade 2 from their Facebook feed (I sure will be).

For Infinity Blade 2 players who don't use Facebook or are put off by the idea of posting Infinity Blade ClashMobs to their wall, they can simply choose to ignore ClashMobs all together. Or they can participate in ClashMobs posted by their friends without a trace of their activity on Facebook. Infinity Blade 2 will not force players to post to Facebook.

So who's excited about ClashMobs? I'm sure you're looking for more Infinity Blade 2 Facebook friends, so head on over to the iMore forums and share your Facebook page with other Infinity Blade 2 players!

$4.99 - Download Now

One of the advantages of having a camera on your iPhone and iPad is that you can you use it with great apps like Scanner Pro that let you take photos of documents to "scan" them and store as PDFs. The result looks just as if you used a physical scanner to do the job.

To use Scanner Pro, you simply take a photo of the document you wish to scan, or upload a photo that you took at an early time from your Camera Roll. After you take the photo, Scanner Pro will automatically detect the edges and put a box around it. If it needs adjusting, you can simply drag the edges and corners to where they should be. In my experience, the detection has been very good. Even when I intentionally did a terrible job at taking the photo, Scanner Pro found a way to make it work.

Even though I took a terrible photo, Scanner Pro did a great job detecting the edges and produced a "good enough" result.

Scannner Pro also allows you to choose the document size before accepting the scan. Choosing an accurate paper size and border for your page is important for having the best looking scanned document for your result.

Tapping Done will bring you into the next stage of the scanning process. This is where you can decide if the document will be in color, black and white, or simply look just like the photo. You can also adjust the brightness and contrast to make sure the final documents looks good. Tapping Done at this stage will finish the scan.

After you've scanned your documents, you can share them to Dropbox, Evernote, or GoogleDocs. Scanner Pro also includes the "Open in" button so that you can open you scanned documents in any other apps that support PDFs.

The Good

• Easy way to scan documents on the go
• Does a fantastic job
• Auto edge detection is pretty accurate
• Set page size
• Support for multi-pate documents
• Option for password protection
• Sync with Dropbox, Evernote, and GoogleDocs
• Universal for iPhone and iPad

The Bad

• Edges can't go off the screen, so make sure your document is completely visible in your photo

The Conclusion

Scanner Pro does a great job at scanning documents into electronic form. It's a perfect solution for people who don't have access to scanner or for those time they're away from their scanner. I'm beginning to think I didn't need to purchase that all-in-one printer I bought last month.

$6.99 - Download Now

The most popular photo sharing website is Facebook, yet uploading more than one photo at once is a repetitive process -- you must select each photo one at a time. PixUploader for iPhone does a much better job at streamlining the selection process and will even automatically select your most recent photos when you launch the app.

PixUploader is extremely easy to use. You can set up PixUploader to automatically add the most recent 1-8 photos in your Camera Roll when you launch the app. If you decide against uploading a selected image, you simply flick it away. To select more photos, just tap Add Photos.

Before starting the upload, you can select which Facebook album to upload the photos to, add cations, and tag your friends. If you tap on one of the thumbnails of the photos you've selected to upload, the image will open full size with a caption field to fill in. If you tap on the image, a list of your Facebook friends will slide up so that you can tag them in your photo. PixUploader will show a gray square on the area you can expect the tag to appear. Tapping this square will give you the option to delete the tag.

When your photos are ready to upload, just simply tap Upload and PixUploader will immediately start uploading them. They'll be uploaded one at a time at an acceptable rate. Eight photos will take more than a few seconds, however, but the good news is that PixUploader will continue uploading in the background if you want to switch over to another app.

The Good

• Easy to use
• Fast
• Upload up to 8 photos
• Add captions
• Tag friends
• Select which album to upload to
• Uploads in the background
• Choose to have PixUploader to automatically select your most recent 1-8 photos at launch
• Has two color schemes: blue and orange

The Bad

• Why limit to only 8 photos?

The Conclusion

PixUploader is a great way to share multiple photos to Facebook at once. The ability to add captions and tag friends makes it so you don't have to make any changes to Facebook after the photos have been uploaded. There have been many times that I only shared one photo to Facebook because it takes too long with the Facebook app. Now, I'll just use PixUploader.

There is also a free version of PixUploader that has a max limit of 4 images at a time and does not allow you to tag your friends and it's ad supported. The free version is a great way to test out PixUploader before you commit to buying it, though.

$0.99 - Download Now

Free - Download Now

After the big news that Facebook acquired Instagram, some users rushed to delete their Instagram accounts because they were unhappy about the deal and don't trust Facebook with their photos. But where are these users to go? I set out on a hunt for a good alternative to Instagram for these users and found picplz.

Like Instagram, picplz is a social photo sharing app that includes several filters that can be applied to your photos. You can follow your friends from Facebook and Twitter, "like" photos, and leave comments.

One of the things I like about picplz is that you are not restricted to square crops. In fact, picplz includes a slew of editing tools, including cropping. Additionally, you can rotate, add memes, draw, adjust brightness, contrast, saturation, and colors, add text, repair redeye and blemishes, whiten teeth, blur, sharpen and flip. There are 9 different filters to choose from, either with or without a frame. picplz displays them as 18 different filters though, instead of just have an option to trigger the frame on and off for each filter. This is annoying and gives you the false impression of having more filters to choose from than you do.

The Interesting tab in picplz is similar to Instagram's Popular tab and displays the photos as thumbnails. Tapping on an image will display a larger version of the photo with the caption above it. The font size of the caption is rather large, and with long captions, it's not very visually appealing. Underneath the photo, you'll see the buttons to "like" the photo and add it to a collection. If you keep scrolling, you can leave a comment at the end of the list of usernames have liked the photo. As you can imagine, sometimes this list can get rather long.

When you're ready to share your photo, in addition to the picplz network, you can share your photos to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Posterous, Foursquare, and Dropbox and check-in to Foursquare.

Another thing I really like about picplz, is that when someone clicks on your link from a computer, the browser window that it opens in allows picplz users to "like" and leave comments on your photo without having to use the app.

The Good

• Lots of editing tools
• 9 filters
• Can include location with photo uploads
• Can create collections
• My Network, Interesting, and Activity tabs
• Check into Foursquare

The Bad

• Captions have too large of font
• List of "likes" has the potential of being very long and annoying to scroll through
• Cannot select a photo from camera mode. You must instead navigate to your Camera Roll from the more tab. It's unintuitive.
• Filters aren't clearly labeled unless selected

The Conclusion

picplz is not Instagram. It's not as good as Instagram. But it has great potential as an Instagram alternative. In fact, it has some features about it that are better than Instagram. The UI needs a little work, but it's still a great app, and if you're an ex-Instagram user who is not happy with their deal with Facebook, you should give picplz a try.

Free - Download Now

The Calculator app is one of those iPhone apps that didn't make it's way onto the iPad. It's a shame, because a lot of people, including students, travelers, and home book keepers would get a lot of use out of it. The most popular type of calculator is a scientific calculator -- it can do more than the basic operations (adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing), but isn't as different in approach as an RPN (reverse Polish notation) or as advanced as a graphing calculator or CAS (computer algebra system). So which iPad app is the best scientific calculator? Calcbot by Tapbots.

One of the great features of Calcbot is that it has large buttons, making it very easy to make entries. In portrait mode, the calculator takes up the whole screen. Along the top is the output screen of the calculator. Under that, you'll find the positive/negative, parentheses, and EE buttons. These are the elements that remain static.

The area of the calculator that contains all the numbers and operations is scrollable. Swiping to the left will reveal all the scientific functions. The up-arrow button on the scientific page will replace the trigonometic functions with their inverses, and the logarithm and exponential functions that are base e change to base 2. Visually, these are all the buttons that are light blue in color.

As you press buttons on the calculator, their symbols will appear in small, light blue letters at the bottom of the calculator's screen. This is extremely helpful for keeping track of which button you've pressed last. The tracking will reset every time you press enter, when it then gets transferred to the tape.

To see the tape, rotate your iPad to landscape. The calculator will become slightly smaller and the tape will slide in from the right. The tape keeps track of all your calculations, including all the buttons that were pressed to get the results. Holding your finger down on an entry pops up a menu to either Use Result, Use Expression, Copy, Send as Email, or Delete. Using the result or expression will automatically add your choice into the calculator. You can also paste into the screen of the calculator or into another app.

The Good

• Large buttons
• Keeps track of buttons pressed
• Beautiful UI
• Landscape orientation reveals the tape
• Every button emits a subtle sound -- true to Tapbots style (can be disabled)
• Option to round for currency
• Universal for iPhone and iPad

The Bad

• Must sacrifice having all the buttons on one screen for the larger buttons

The Conclusion

Calcbot by Tapbots has been my favorite calculator on both the iPhone and iPad for quite some time. It does what I need and does it well. Unfortunately for students, Calcbot likely will not be able to replace a physical calculator because most teachers will not allow the use of iPads during exams.

$1.99 - Download Now

I want to watch something on TV but I can't. PVR. Boom. I can watch it when I want. I want to read something on the web but I can't. Read later. Boom. I can read it when I want. I have an idea but am in no position to leverage it at the moment... Go to anyone of a dozen note-taking or mind mapping or sketching apps that are generally far too feature-filled and cumbersome to get into, out of, and triage things in just exactly the way you need to triage them. This is still a problem that needs better solving.

Enter Drafts for iPhone by Agile Tortoise, which aims to be a staging ground for singular thoughts, an incubator for moments of insight, a way to capture ephemera. It's a new riff on old jazz. I used Birdhouse for this type of thing for a long time, then switched to Simplenote, then a variety of Dropbox-enabled text editors. Now I often use Siri to quickly add items to an "Ideas" list in Reminders. But Drafts makes a compelling (use) case.

Drafts is no easier to get stuff into than any of my previous solutions, and is actually slightly more difficult than Reminders thanks to Apple not yet providing a mechanism for Siri to inject content into App Store apps (though you can certainly use Dictation once you manually tap into Drafts and the appropriate or new draft). However, it's quite a bit more powerful to get stuff out of.

Open Drafts and start typing. It shows you the word count and letter count, and at the touch of the page icon, shows you a list of previous drafts.

At a touch of the Action button, anything in the current draft can be tweeted using any account already set up on your iPhone, or sent to some of the Twitter apps installed on your iPhone (Twitter and Tweetbot show up for me, Twitterrific and Twitterlator Neue do not), or it can be emailed or copied to the clipboard. It also supports John Gruber's Markdown syntax, and can preview it or convert it to HTML and email it or copy the converted text to the clipboard.

With the tap of an action button, drafts can work wonders like sharing to Twitter, emailing, and converting from Markdown to HTML

Granted, when all I want to do is jot down an idea, plain text is king, but having Markdown built-in is a nice bonus. So is having both a character and word counter visible.

You can choose between several themes including the default light brown, a darker sepia, a grayscale variant, and an inverse night variant. You also have a bakers dozen of fonts to chose from, in small, medium, and large sizes. It's the usual suspects, but that doesn't make them any less welcome.

Drafts comes with 4 themes and a selection of 13 fonts so you can craft your environment as meticulously as your ideas.

Drafts isn't perfect. While the user experience is excellent the user interface could stand another round or two of polish. There's an oddness to the weighting and alignment of elements in the tool bar, and the contrast of the texture behind it. The Markdown icons, challenging as they may be, suffer from an awkward text overlay. And the app icon itself could do a much better job conveying just how well thought out an app this is.

There's no iCloud and no sync yet, so outside of sharing via the action items detailed above, Drafts is a silo unto itself. There's also no hint as to whether or not Draft's actions will be extensible via URL scheme, the way Launch Center's are. It would be great to be able to send Draft text to other editors, note-takers, task-managers, etc.

The good

• Easy in, easy out.
• Powerful action options.
• Markdown support.

The bad

• No sync options
• Actions not extensible

The conclusion

Drafts is fast and crisp and solid where it counts. There's no sync or extensibility yet but Markdown and excellent sharing actions make it a powerful idea pad for thoughts you don't have a chance to collect right now. Just jot them down in Drafts and they're time-shifted for you to collect later.

$0.99 - Download now

Every week the editors at iMore carefully select some of our favorite, most useful, most extraordinary apps, accessories, gadgets, and websites. This weeks selections includes a music app, a couple baseball apps, a photo app, an app for DIY-ers, an app for Canadian hockey followers, and more.

To see what we picked, and to tell us your pick, follow on after the break!

TuneIn Radio Pro - Seth Clifford

I'm a big fan of internet radio, and have been for a long time. I've tried so many different radio streaming apps throughout my tenure as a smartphone user, going all the way back to my Windows Mobile days. I first got into it with my Treo 700wx (ah, memories) and have been hooked ever since. There are a wide variety of apps in the App Store that let you stream seemingly innumerable radio stations from around the world, but the best one I've found is TuneIn Radio, specifically the Pro version. It's an App Store favorite that I've been aware of for a while, but only now am I rediscovering how great it is.

First off, it's a universal app - big win there. Second, it allows you to not only stream internet stations, but can use your location to provide access to local radio as well. Lastly (and most importantly for me), you can create a TuneIn account, save your favorites and sync them between the web and your devices. I can't tell you how great this is, because one of the biggest headaches I faced when trying different radio apps was always searching for and re-adding all the stations I like to listen to over and over again. This makes things so easy, it's beautiful.

The app is nicely designed, with tons of options. You can browse stations (over 50,000) based on location, genre, language, and a few other criteria, or you can just search on an artist or song that you like and get results more tailored to what you're looking for. It's a cool feature that I have yet to fully enjoy as I've just been listening to my handful of stations that I usually do. The nice thing about the Pro version of the app is that you can also record stations and set timed recordings for yourself, which is helpful if you always want to make sure you've got what you want, when you want it. I use recordings as a kind of audio bookmark, to follow up and research artists later if I hear something I like. Finally, one of the coolest features of the app is Car Mode, in which the app interface changes to large, easy-to-hit button targets. So simple, and what a nice touch.

If you're not sure if the app is your cup of tea, grab the free version and give it a spin. If you're anything like me, you've read this far and it hasn't even crossed your mind. The Pro version is a buck, and well worth every cent.

$0.99 - Download Now

NFL '11 - Alli Flowers

It's not exactly football season, but that doesn't mean football is not on the minds of true football fans. And just because the app's name is NFL 11, doesn't mean it ended in 2011. It is keeping us up to date on all things NFL right into the 2012 season, with all the news and gossip that you'd want. (Not that my poor heart can bear any more news or gossip.)

A recent update gave us a tab titled Free Agency. Here, you can track who's available, who's interested, and who's likely going somewhere. It even includes a great glossary of the types of free agency. I must confess, I had no idea there were more than two. I'm ashamed of myself! You can click on many of the players listed, and get all their stats.

Another feature available now is the Combine news. Lists of players, their schools, and their stats. This is a great lead up to the draft. We may have a while until the season starts, but NFL 11 is right there with us!

Free - Download Now]

PicFrame - Chris Oldroyd

This week’s pic has been inspired by the amazing Leanna Lofte series on iPhone photography. If you haven’t read any of these fantastic articles yet, get onto it now! They are awesome!

Anyway, back to my pic, PicFrame is a very simple yet powerful universal app that provides you with a huge selection of picture frames. You simple insert your pictures from your camera roll into the frames and you can show off your photos in style. The app has over sixty different frames to choose from and it is so easy to use.

Once you have created your masterpiece, you can save it in your camera roll, print it, share to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr or simply email it to friends or family. A lovely app and one that I am using all the time!

$0.99 - Download Now

MLB.com At Bat - Gary Mazo

Yesterday I did a feature on all the ways baseball fans can use their iPhone/iPad to follow America’s pastime – Major League Baseball.

This was opening week for MLB, which meant that I started using one app more than just about any other– MLB.com At Bat. Each year at this time, I pay for my subscription and enjoy following each and every game of the season (at least those in which the Red Sox are playing!)

MLB.com At Bat is free for the “Lite” version – but if you are a real baseball fan, pay the $14.99 for the full season pass.

The options in this app are amazing. I can follow every pitch of every game. I get this very cool visual of the batter and can see the pitches (in real time) wiz by his head. I can look at the plays of the game or the box score at the same time on the right hand side of the screen and follow the scores from other games at the top of the screen.

I can find out the stats of every player - seeing their baseball card with last season’s info and how they are doing this year.

When you pay the subscription fee, you can follow pitch by pitch, see in game video highlights and post game videos. You can also listen to every game live via the radio broadcasts from each of the teams playing. So, while I usually listen to the local Boston station, if the Red Sox are playing the Yankees and one of our guys hits a grand slam, I like to turn to the NY station and listen to them cry.

As the season progresses, and the playoffs get close, I like having the ability to follow other division rivals and even catch their games on Red Sox travel days.

All in all, this is one of my absolute favorite apps for my iPad and iPhone. This year it is a universal app – which is amazing. Last year I paid the $14.95 for each device – this year I just pay once and log in and restore my purchases on my other iOS devices.

Do you use the MLB.com At Bat app or do you have another favorite app for following you team? – Just jump to this forum thread to share your thoughts.

Free - Download Now

CBC Hockey Night In Canada - Bla1ze

With the Stanley Cup playoffs soon-to-be underway it's time to start loading up on apps that help you keep track of all the games happening. Even if you're not a hockey fan you can still follow along with the CBC Hockey Night in Canada app, fan or not it's a basic app that will help you keep up-to-date on scores and schedules plus, it has news and video features built-in. Yes, there is much more feature rich applications available in the iTunes App Store but this one will certainly fill basic needs for free.

Free - Download Now

Sid Meier’s Pirates! – Chris Vitek

Sid Meier’s Pirates game is one that has been out for a while, and is based on a PC game of the same name. I was just looking through some old game lists, however, and I decided to give it a shot. It turns out to be a fun, RPG style game that took up much more time than I anticipated. Basically…you are a pirate. Between attacking other ships, forging alliances, plundering, and trying to woo the women (as any pirate scoundrel may want to do) you try to build up you gold, crew, and collection of ships to become the terror of the sea! It makes good use of the iPad controls, using motion controls (for things like dancing and fighting), and piloting your ship around through tapping the screen. You can complete quests and tasks, attack enemies, or just engage in barter and sale to try to build your gold hoard. While the graphics are a little dates, it is an engaging game that I sat and played for about 2 hours before I realized how long I was playing.

$4.99 – Download Now

Snapguide for iPhone - iMuggle

I recently reviewed Snapguide for iPhone and I have to say I've been addicted to it ever since. While I haven't had time to upload any guides yet, I've enjoyed weeding through other user's guides and I've found a lot of cool projects that I'd like to try myself. Not only tech projects but home projects and recipes that I probably never would have found out about without the help of Snapguide.

I'm really surprised an application like this hadn't been thought of before now. It really is ingenious. While it reminds me somewhat of the idea behind Pinterest, it seems to take it one step further and provides us with an outlet to express creativity in a whole new way and share it with the world. Every type of project from creating your own iPod dock to making Easter Egg pops, to how to fix other home gadgets can be found on Snapguide. I can see it becoming one of my most used apps as I've always had a strong interest for DIY projects and finding new ways to occupy my free time.

If you haven't checked it out already, make sure you do.

Free - Download Now

Official iMore for iPhone app - llofte

In case you missed the news, the official iMore app has hit the App Store! It's gorgeous and the perfect way to keep up with iMore news on your iPhone. So make sure to pick it up if you haven't already! Trust me -- it's way cool.

Free - Download now

Marvel - Rene Ritchie

The Marvel Comics app for iPhone and iPad -- made my comiXology who also make the awesome multi-publisher Comics as well as the DC, Image, and other apps -- has once again been updated and now offers sharing via Twitter, Facebook, and email, but more interestingly -- Infinite Comics.

Up until now the Marvel app has featured fairly straight forward ports of the traditional print comics, though an optional, guided, panel view took some advantage of the digital medium. Infinite Comics attempts to be an even more authentically digital experience. It's not animation and it's not motion comics. There are transitions but not actions, staged dialog but no spoken words.

I'm not sure if Infinite Comics are the next step in the evolution of sequential art or just an experiment, but I like that Marvel is experimenting and trying to evolve. It took them a while to turn their big ship towards the mobile technology, but now that ship seems to have engines on full.

If you want to try it out, grab the Marvel app and buy the $3.99 Avengers vs. X-Men debut issue. (Yeah, pricing is still an issue they're trying hard not to address, but this is about the format, not the business model.)

Free - Download now

Tell us your pick!

Those were our picks, iMore Nation, so now it's your turn! Tell us your pick of the week below. Give us the name of your favorite app, site, or accessory, and tell us why it made your life more productive, more informed, more entertaining, or just plain more fun. Jump into the comments and let us know your pick of the week!

Figure is a great new app that puts music creation into the hands of everyone, even non-musicians. It has a very unique interface that's easy to use and makes creating music a lot of fun. You slide your finger around a pad to play bass and lead, and tap columns to play the drums.

What makes Figure so great for non-musicians is that you will always be in the correct key and play to the beat. You get to be creative with the pitch and tones, but Figure will always make sure that your choices are "correct" musically.

For base and lead, you can choose from many different rhythm styles and timing, specify the range of notes you want the pad to represent, and select how many steps you want in an octive. Switching into landscape will remove all the distractions of the controls and give you more room to move your finger precisely where you want it on the pad.

For drums, you get to play kick, snare, hats, and cowbell and choose how many of each are played in a measure if you hold your finger down.

Hitting record will let you layer the three different instrument types and it will automatically loop your song. You can make adjustments in real time so that you're fully away of how your changes affect your song. The types of changes you can do include the tempo and key. You can also add pump so that your song sounds like club music.

This is an app that you need to see in action, so make sure you check out the video below!

The Good

• Puts music making in the hands of everyone, even non-musicians
• Musicians will still enjoy it
• Landscape mode lets you focus on your pattern
• Always in key and on beat
• Bass & lead parts use Reason’s Thor synthesizer
• Drums powered by Reason’s Kong drum machine

The Bad

• Can't save music
• Can't share music

The Conclusion

Figure is a really fun and surprisingly addicting app. Creating music has never been so easy, and it's a great way for non-musicians to get a feel for creating music and beats.

$0.99 - Download Now

If you've been looking for a way to keep your Twitter timeline synced between your iPhone and iPad, you'll be happy to know that Tweetbot has been updated with the ability to do just that with the help of iCloud sync.

Before, many users were using the service called Tweet Marker that aided in keeping your Twitter timeline synced between different devices and clients. What it couldn't do, was sync the read status of direct messages. With iCloud sync, you can read a DM in Tweetbot for iPad, and when you switch to Tweetbot on your iPhone, that DM will already be marked as read there as well. You no longer have to "mark all as read" when switching devices!

In addition to your timeline and direct messages, iCloud sync in Tweetbot will also keep your mute filters synced across devices.

Some other improvements include thumbnail previews for YouTube and iTunes links, and the ability to pinch to close an image on the iPad.

Now, if only there was Tweetbot for Mac...

$2.99 for iPhone - Download Now

$2.99 for iPad - Download Now

The bases are loaded, the pitchers are on the mounds, and Major League Baseball season has begun! So now it's time to take me -- and my iPhone -- out to the ballgame!

Ok, the season officially opened the other day, but the Red Sox play their first game today so that makes it the real opening day. Thankfully, baseball fans are never far away from the action if they have their trusty iPad or iPhone by their side. There are apps for watching baseball, scoring baseball, finding food at the ballpark, playing casual games, and managing the ever-important fantasy baseball team.

Here are the home runs...

Following the game

As I write this, the season has just started and the Red Sox and Tigers are scoreless after the top of the second inning. I know this, because today, and most days during the season I have one of my all time favorite apps fired up – MLB.com At Bat.

MLB.com At Bat

MLB.com At Bat 2012 gives you an amazing amount of options for following the game

MLB.com At Bat is free for the “Lite” version – but if you are a real baseball fan, pony up the $14.95  for the full season pass available as an in-app purchase. The information in this app is really staggering. I can follow every pitch of every game. I get this very cool visual of the batter and can see the pitches (in real time) wiz by his head. I can look at the plays of the game or the box score at the same time on the right hand side of the screen and follow the scores from other games at the top of the screen. Throw in video highlights, MLB TV (if you are a subscriber) and free game-day audio and this is the ultimate baseball app.

Free - Download Now

If I am not using MLB.com At Bat, I am usually using Safari loaded on www.redsox.com. I am told that each major league team has their own web site that is formatted beautifully for the iPhone or iPad, but why would anyone go anywhere else?

Local networks

Most local markets have a sports app similar to the NESN app in Boston

Most cable providers have an app for following local sports teams. In New England we have NESN – the New England Sports Network which has a free app for following local teams.

Free - Download Now

At the Ballpark

Order food, buy ticket or check out the ballparks from every MLB team

MLB.com has a new app out this year called At the Ballpark.  When you fire up this app, you can then choose your local ballpark or any of the Major League ballparks and start exploring.  You can see the ballpark map, get directions, look at schedules of events and even order food and drinks if the ballpark supports it.

Free - Download Now

Managing your Fantasy Baseball team

Fantasy Baseball may not be as popular as Fantasy Football, but it is still popular and important to many baseball fans.  The original fantasy baseball provider was Yahoo and Yahoo sports is still the most popular fantasy baseball service.

Yahoo Fantasy Baseball '12

Manage your fantasy baseball teams from the Yahoo Fantasy Baseball app

Fortunately, there is a free Yahoo Fantasy Baseball 12 app that allows you to login, adjust your teams and manage the full fantasy baseball experience.

Free - Download Now

ESPN Fantasy Baseball 2012

The other huge Fantasy Baseball site is ESPN. Like Yahoo, ESPN has its own Fantasy Baseball app as well.

Free - Download Now

It is hard to say which of these is better – it really comes down to which leagues you participate in and who hosts them.

Playing a quick baseball game

This is where iOS seems to strike out –- there are not many real quality baseball games to play on iOS at this point. Hopefully with more powerful devices like the iPhone 4S and the new iPad, we get more in-depth games soon!

Baseball Superstars 2012

Baseball Superstars is "cartoony" but fun

Probably the most popular baseball game for iOS is Baseball Superstars 2012 from Gemevil. This has a definite Asian/anime feel to it. Gameplay reminds me of my old Atari, but people seem to love it.

Free - Download Now

Chevy Baseball

There is lots of product placement, but Chevy Baseball is a fun game

New this year is Chevy Baseball from Small Planet Digital. This game is sponsored by Chevy, so it has adds and lots of product placement. The game was developed by Freeverse and the graphics are pretty good. The home team is the Camaros and the visiting team the Silverados, but aside from that, it was fun.

Free - Download Now

Homerun Battle 2

Knock it out of the park with Homerun Battle 2

For a quick game to play, I like Homerun Battle 2 from Com2US.  The goal of this game is very simple – just hit home runs. You can play in Arcade or Matchup modes and occasionally you are asked to try to hit the ball in a specific spot – but basically, you try to hit the ball out of the park. It is simple, quick and fun and uses the accelerometer to guide where to swing.

$0.99 - Download Now

Whether you want to follow the Red Sox (or perhaps, some other team) or catch the latest news, score a game at the ballpark or play a casual arcade game – it is a great time to be a baseball fan. There are options for literally countless hours of fun and action on your iOS device.

Download an app or two, follow your favorite team and enjoy springtime with America’s favorite pastime.

Game time!

Let us know how you follow baseball on your iOS device – just jump to this forum thread to share your thoughts.

If you just bought a new iPad and have searched in vain for the built-in Apple Voice Memos app, here’s some bad news — there isn’t one. Apple chose not to include it on the iPad. Luckily for us, however, App Store developers are here to fill that void. In fact, the developers of Audio Memos for iPhone and iPad know exactly how to do it right.

Multiple versions

There are three different version of Audio Memos, a free version that offers not much more than the ability to record a basic memo, a $0.99 version that give a couple more features and the ability to buy extensions as in-app purchases, and a Pro, $9.99 version that includes all the available extensions.

This chart compares the features of the three versions available and also lists the price of each extension.

Notice that if you choose to purchase all the extensions of the $0.99 version, you get all the features of the Pro version, but ultimately pay $1 more for it. So think carefully about whether or not you're going to want all the extensions or not before making a purchase.

With that said, the $0.99 version does allow you to try all the extensions for free for 15 days. So if you're not sure if you want them all, you can think of it as a $1 trial.

Since a lot of the commonly desired extensions are only $0.99 (like trimming and markers), grabbing a few of them still keeps the price of the app at an acceptable amount. It can potentially get rather expensive, though.

Recording audio

The Pro version of Audio Memos and the $0.99 Voice Activation extension gives you have three different options for recording your audio. You can do it by simply pressing a button to start and end your recording (the option that comes free), set a threshold, that when reached, will start your recording, or set a timer for when you want the recording to begin and end.

There are three different quality levels to choose from: 11025 Hz, 22050 Hz and 44100 Hz. You can also adjust the volume of the audio, but be careful with this as it can easily sound very distorted. In my experience, as long as you're near your iPad or using a headset, you shouldn't have a problem with the audio level.

If you want to use a bluetooth mic for your recordings, there's an option that lets you do so.

Trimming audio

Available in the Pro version or as a $0.99 extension, you can trim the beginning and end of your recordings. Doing so is very easy to do and is similar to trimming videos with the Camera and Photos apps. Simply drag the handles at the ends of the clip to the desired location. As you do, the time location will pop up. You can also slide the whole clip around which is great for those times you need a clip that is an exact length.

You can also lower the quality of the clip to reduce the files size and choose to save as .wav or .aac. The saving can be done as a new file or as a replacement for the clip you've edited.

Inserting markers

The ability to insert and navigate between markers is available in the Pro version or as a $0.99 extension. It provides four additional buttons to jump between markers, add a new marker, and select a marker from a list. Markers can be added either during the recording or after and a description can be associated with each one. For another $0.99 you can insert photos as well. (The pictures extension is available as a standalone that works like a marker without a description, but the markers extension is required to easy navigate between markers).

The Good

• Free version available that does the basics
• Great UI
• Good quality
• Potential of being fully feature-packed
• Having extensions available as in-app purchases can potentially save you money if you only want a few of them
• Universal for iPhone and iPad

The Bad

• Doesn't support the new iPad's Retina display. Yet.
• A bit pricey once you start adding up all the extensions.
• "All extensions" in-app purchase should not be $9.99. It should be $8.99 so that the total cost of the app and extension is the same as if you purchased the pro version.
• Should have more features included in each extension. For example, the markers and photos extensions should be grouped as one extension. Multiple selection and Voice activation shouldn't even be extensions - they should be included in the $0.99 version.
• Doesn't support the new iPad's Retina display, yet

The Conclusion

Although I'm rather annoyed with how many of the features of Audio Memos come at an additional cost, I cant deny how well the app is made. If you're looking for a powerful voice recorder for your iPad, Audio Memos will not disappoint -- often times great software comes at a price.

Free - Download Now

$1.99 - Download Now

$9.99 - Download Now

Just like at the first Passover Seder, Jews around the world will gather with their iPads around the traditional festive meal and retell the miracle of our freedom from Egyptian slavery.

OK, maybe they didn’t have iPads at the first Seder, but you can be sure that lots of Jews will have their iPads out at this year’s Seder. Thankfully, there are plenty of apps this year that can keep you connected to the action and otherwise engaged during some of the “less” interesting parts.

The Passover Seder is the meal that involves the telling of the story of the Biblical Exodus from Egypt.  The narrative of the journey from slavery to freedom is called the Haggadah and it is filled with stories, traditional food and blessings and sometimes regional or familial customs.

Passover: The Journey to Freedom

If you have lots of kids around the Passover table, you might want to download Story Chimes’ Passover: The Journey to Freedom – a free interactive book about the Exodus. This app tells the Passover story, has matching games for the kids, had beautiful illustrations and music.

Free - Download now

Read along or have your child read from Journey to Freedom

Ultimate Digital Haggadah

If you want to be “green” this Passover, consider using a digital Haggadah. There are several versions in the App store:

The Ultimate Digital Haggadah, from Downhill Publishing  is really a work of art.  Pages look they came out of a rare illuminated Haggadah (probably because they did) and the Hebrew is magnificent. This one is a bit “traditional” in translations and not exactly “gender neutral” in its God references – but it is beautiful to behold.

$4.99 - Download now

The Ultimate Digital Haggadah is visually stunning and interactive

The Haggadah

“The Haggadah” from Melcher Media is a more contemporary Haggadah. Text and illustrations are also beautiful in this edition and there are recipes and activities to engage the kids during the Seder.

$7.99 - Download now

Haggadah for Passover

The “Haggadah for Passover” from Kosher Penguin is much less expensive and is a little more like the bare bones approach found in the old Maxwell House Haggadahs. It can certainly get the job done – without the fancy illustrations and games.

$0.99 - Download now

While pretty bare bones, the Passover Haggadah is very functional

In my house, I wrote a family Haggadah and update it each year. I then email it to all those in attendance (and those who are far away) as a PDF file. I then encourage everyone to use their favorite PDF viewer on their iPad or other device and follow along – being careful not to spill any of the meal on their iPad!

Sometimes, kids can get a little fidgety at the Seder, so good thing there are some fun Passover apps that can keep kids entertained both before, during and after the Seder and throughout the holiday of Passover.

Passover Matzah Ball Builder

Passover Matzah Ball Builder by Captain Mustache  is sort of like Mr. Potato Head meets Passover. You add arms and legs and ears and stuff and build a Matzah ball character.

$0.99 - Download now

Happy Matza

Matzah Ball Builder is just like Mr. Potato Head but with Matzah balls

Now, Matzah is not exactly the tastiest holiday delicacy. If you have ever eaten chalk, cardboard and dirt together – you have a pretty good idea of what matzah tastes like. There is an actual app that lets you digitally “dress up” your matzah – adding chocolate, jam or other tasty spreads.

$0.99 - Download now

The Kosher Cookbook

Food is certainly a big part of the holiday and there is no shortage of Passover related cookbooks and food apps in the App store.

The Kosher Cookbook from Appsolute Media provides great Kosher recipes for Passover and all the holidays. One great review of this app says: “if your grandmother could build iPhone apps, she might produce something like the Kosher Cookbook.”

$1.99 - Download now

the Kosher Cookbook has a holiday meal planner built in

Passover Food Street

Passover Food Street, by FeelSocial offers a nice interface with lots or recipes and tips and trips. You can also take pictures of your Passover creations and save them for future reference at Seders yet to be.

$0.99 - Download now

Jewish Radio

And What would a Seder be without music? Thankfully, the good folks at Rusty Brick have produced Jewish Radio to help you liven up the meal with some Jewish music streaming from stations around the globe.

$2.99 - Download now

Don't forget the family and friends!

So, bring your iPads to the table, load them up with these great apps and be prepared for a fun time at the Seder.

At my family Seder, we use our family Haggadah in PDF form (as mentioned above) and we set places for our kids who are grown and out of the house (some traveling the world.)  This year, in those empty places will be iPads and iPhones connected via Skype and FaceTime so our kids can be with us. Since they each have an electronic edition of the Haggadah, I can call on them to participate and we can see their expressions and they can see us around the Passover table.

Do you have any Passover traditions? Are you using digital media or technology in a creative way this Passover? Let us know in this forum thread.

Easter Sunday is less than a week away, which means it's time to start coloring some eggs! Egg Dyeing 101 from Martha Stewart Living for iPhone will help you create the most beautiful eggs on the block.

Egg Dying 101 is organized into 4 tabs: Home, Gallery, Basics, and Favorites. The home tab is basically worthless -- it's just a photo (albeit, a beautiful photo) that says "Egg Dying" over it. The information button is also on this page, but that could've easily been put somewhere else.

The Gallery tab is where the fun starts. It's here that you'll find 20 different categories of 101 egg designs with step by step directions and sometimes video on how to achieve the look. The categories include basic dipping techniques, various masking techniques, embossing, embellishing, and even creating egg creatures. For each egg creature, Egg Dyeing 101 includes a template that can be printed with AirPrint or emailed. Each of the egg designs can also be emailed.

The basics tab is where you'll learn, well, the basics for egg coloring. This tab is broken down into 5 categories: Basic Recipe & Color Wheel, Egg Glossary, Blowing Out an Egg, Drying Pin-Board, and Sources.

The Basic Recipe & Color Wheel section includes three charts for light, dark, and neon hue colors. Each chart includes 12 colors, the number of drops of dye needed for each color, and the number of minutes you need to let the egg soak to achieve the desired color.

Blowing an egg is a technique for removing the contents of an egg so that you can save your creations for the years to come. This section of the app teaches you how to do it and includes a video.

The best way to dry your eggs in on a pin-board, so the Drying Pin-Board section is where you go to learn how to make one.

My only real complaint is that Egg Dyeing 101 is not universal for the iPhone and iPad. I'd rather have my iPad setup as a reference while coloring eggs than my iPhone. It's also easier to share the iPad's larger screen with the family.

The Good

• Gorgeous photos
• Clear instructions
• Well done videos
• 101 different egg designs
• Lots of dye recipes for every color in the light, dark, and neon hues categories

The Bad

• Home tab is pointless
• Not available for iPad

The Conclusion

My daughter is still a little too young to take part in the whole egg coloring experience, so I wasn't planning to color eggs this year, but Egg Dyeing 101 from Martha Stewart Living for iPhone is making me seriously reconsider that decision.

$0.99 - Download Now

The iMore for iPhone app is here and while thousands upon thousands of you have downloaded it already, we wanted to take a moment to show it off, and show off some great features you might have missed!

iMore for iPhone was meticulously crafted to provide the absolute best reading and listening experience possible for our community. We specifically chose to focus on doing a few things really well at first, so that we had a solid foundation on which to add more and better things later. I think we accomplished that and the way I can tell is simple -- the iMore app is the only way I read iMore on my iPhone now (and a lot of you have told us the very same thing.)

If you haven't already, go ahead and download iMore for iPhone now. I'll wait. It's totally FREE and, if I do say so myself, totally awesome.

Once you're done, check out the video above for a quick guided tour from yours truly.

You'll see how to browse articles and categories, and how to re-order tabs so you get what you want, where you want, when you want it. You'll see the podcatcher, which gives you access to not only iPhone & iPad live but all the Mobile Nations shows, including Iterate and ZEN and TECH, Android Central and CrackBerry.com, and much more. And you'll see how to send us YOUR tips, so if you come across breaking news, you can instantly let us know all about it.

We want you to get the most out of your iMore experience and this app. And we want you to share your thoughts -- what you love, what you hate, and what you want to see in the upcoming version 2. (Yes, the universal iPad version!) Once you've had a chance to use iMore for iPad, leave a comment in our official iMore for iPad feature request thread and let us know what else you want to see!

Free - Download now

Sparrow for iPhone, the replacement mail app that shames Google's half-assed Gmail for iOS app and gives Apple's built-in Mail app a run for its money has been updated to version 1.1 and it brings a lot of great stuff... though sadly still no push. Now, when you tap on a hyperlink in Sparrow for iPhone, you will not be taken out of the app and into Safari, but, instead, a nice built-in WebView will slide in. When you're done looking at the website, your mail is just a tap away. Some of the other new features of Sparrow 1.1 include the ability to Send & Archive and to show/hide the dock badge for specific accounts. What's notability missing from Sparrow's update is push notifications.

However, the folks at Sparrow promise the feature is coming. They believe that Apple will change their position on the matter. We believe Apple won't -- Sparrow was misusing the VoIP API and Apple would (and arguably should) offer a new, specific multitasking API for persistent internet apps. Either way, Sparrow has a backup plan.

Thanks to your amazing support, we feel confident that Apple might revise its position on the Push API. We’ll submit a first version of Sparrow 1.2 including it. This might delay Sparrow 1.2 validation but we’re already working with some partners to include Push in future versions of Sparrow without needing Apple clearance.

Push is coming. With or without Apple.

So in the meantime, you can enjoy the new features of Sparrow, just without push. Personally, I've been using Sparrow when I have a moment to just sit back and browse through my email. Apple's mail app is still my main client, but only because Sparrow doesn't support push notifications, yet. Once Push becomes available for Sparrow, it's very likely that it'll take the place of Apple's mail app on my dock. It's a great mail app.

$2.99 - Download Now

Source: Sparrow

Kaleidoscope Camera is an iPhone app that will turn your iPhone's camera into a machine that transforms your environment into a geometric work of art. We usually only think of using the iPhone's camera for taking photos and recording video, so it's cool to find another fun use for it.

Kaleidoscope Camera is actually a very basic app. All of the UI elements appear on a single screen. When you open the app, the camera is immediately put to work and the geometric video immediately starts. In the corner, you'll see a little box that shows what your camera is actually looking at with a white triangle spinning inside of it. This area inside the triangle is the area that Kaleidoscope Camera is actually using to produce the image. Tapping the main view will toggle preview on and off and tapping the preview will switch between the rear and front-facing cameras.

If you were using a physical kaleidoscope, you would spin it around while holding it up to your eye to watch the shapes spin and change. To mimic this effect with Kaleidoscope Camera, you simply use your finger to "spin" the camera. You have control of the speed and the zoom.

On the bottom of the screen, you'll see the four different modes and a camera button. Tapping the camera will capture a still shot of what you currently see on the screen and pop up a menu to save to your Camera Roll or to send to Facebook, Twitter, or email.

I was very impressed that even at night with only one light on in my living room, Kaleidoscope Camera was still able to produce great results.

The Good

• Four different modes
• Interactive
• Sharing to Facebook and Twitter

The Bad

• None

The Conclusion

Kaleidoscope Camera reminds me the days of being a kid and running around playing with a cheap $1 kaleidoscope -- only it's better.

$1.99 - Download Now

LockScreen Lab is an iPhone app that lets you design custom Lock screens that can include important information like a calendar, contact info, to-do list, and your blood type. This is great for people who have a passcode setup on their iPhone, or if you just want to make it easy for someone to contact you when they find your iPhone.

There are four different types of objects you can add to your design: contact information, to-do list, calendar, and text box. For all objects you can adjust the color and opacity.

For contact information, there are 4 different styles to choose from -- two horizontal ones (one with one line, another with two), one that's a corner banner, and the fourth is actually a way to display your blood type and looks like a red liquid drop.

Text boxes allow you to adjust the font size, alignment and opacity. The todo lists are kind of neat, but you have no control over their size. There are 4 different looks for your lists: check boxes (that can be checked/unchecked), bullets, stars, dashes, and Apple symbols.

Lastly, there a four different calendars to add to your lock screen backdrop: two vertical ones and two horizontal ones.

One thing I noticed about the objects is that you cannot adjust their size. For example, in my Lock screen, I have my email address on the bottom and a calendar on the left. They are both designed to be full length/width, so the banner with my email address overlaps with calendar making it so I can't see one of the days. I'm a little OCD with stuff like this, so the overlap is drying me nuts.

The Good

• Easy to use
• Includes great little objects
• Customization for colors and opacity
• Access to Photo albums

The Bad

• Can't adjust the size of objects

The Conclusion

LockScreen Lab is great app for creating custom wallpapers for your Lock screen. I had never considered including information like my blood type and an emergency contact, before, but since I have my iPhone setup with a passcode lock, I'm going to always make sure I include this information from now on. LockScreen lab makes this easy to do.

$1.99 - Download Now

Facebook for iPhone and iPad had been updated and now allows users to go offline in chat. Before, you would have to go offline from the web if you wanted to be offline on you iPhone or iPad (seriously). Many of us have been asking for this improvement for quite some time, so it's great to see Facebook respond.

Facebook has also fixed several of the most annoying bugs that have been rampant in the app, and instead of the mysterious "bug fixes" that Facebook typically includes in their update notes, they've actually listed which bugs have been addressed in this update:

• The right profile picture appears for everyone
• Your list of friends always includes all your friends
• In sets of photos, your name is displayed correctly
• Photos of people who like Facebook Pages load correctly
• Your friend-request notification only lights up if you have a request

That's not April Fool's mind you. Those were genuine bugs. So all I can say is -- thank you, Facebook! The profile picture bug was the one that was driving me the most crazy, so I'm happy to see this fix. (Well, the time that my profile picture was Steve Wozniak for a the day was actually kind of cool). One of the most annoying Facebook bugs, however, is the one that doesn't initially display all the likes and comments on a photo when navigating to it from notifications, and it looks like that one wasn't addressed. Maybe next time.

For International users, Facebook has added language support for Czech, Danish, Greek, Indonesian, Malaysian, Norwegian (Bokmal), Portuguese (Portugal) and Thai.

Lastly, the iPad version of the Facebook app now supports the new iPad's Retina display.

How are you liking this update so far? Are you still experiencing any of the bugs that Facebook claimed to fix? Have you encountered any new bugs? Let us know in the comments below!

Free - Download Now

Every week the editors at iMore carefully select some of our favorite, most useful, most extraordinary apps, accessories, gadgets, and websites. This week's selections include a unique photography app, a solution for reading sheet music on the iPad, an alternative to iBooks, an awesome flying game, a web app alternative for a popular native iPhone application, a new way to view your Instagram feed, and the best way to get comic books onto your iPad.

To see what we picked, and to tell us your pick, follow on after the break!

Paper Camera -- Alli

This is another one of those apps that's available on both Android and iOS. Of course, it has a few more options for iOS right now, but that could change at any time in the continual game of cat and mouse between iOS and Android.

Paper Camera gives you new views of your world. View it in pastels, black and white, or as a cartoon. The filter above is called Comic Boom, and makes everything look hand drawn. There are bunches of filters, and half the fun is just looking at things through the different filters.

One of the really nice things with Paper Camera is that you're not limited to taking new photos through the Paper Camera filters. You can put a filter on an existing photo from your album.

I should mention the big feature that the iOS version has that Android hasn't caught up with yet - you can shoot video through these filters on iOS. Sweet, eh?

$0.99 - Download Now

GoodReader -- Gary Mazo

I find that I use my iPad more and more in ways I would not imagined just a couple of years ago. One of my favorite uses of my iPad is as a repository for all my sheet music.

I am an avid piano player and have amassed literally thousands of pieces of sheet music over the years. Most was in loose-leaf format or in old piano books from when I was younger and lots was through digital music delivery or scans of music I had borrowed from friends.

I needed a way to get it all in one place and the iPad was going to be that place. Enter GoodReader from Good.iWare.

GoodReader is an app that supports PDF files, all Office files, iWord files, web archives and high-resolution images. Files are transferred either via iTunes document transfer or (and this is my favorite way to do it) via wireless transfer. Just touch the wireless transfer button and it finds your computer (if you are on the same Wi-Fi network) and you use the computer as a server. Select a file on your computer and – like magic – it shows up on GoodReader.

Once in the app, I can adjust the sort order, annotate PDF files (which is great for music) change the orientation, layout, jump around, search and more. I just swipe to the left to advance pages - which is so nice in a long piece of music – and can even pinch to zoom in on hard to read sections.

The only downside to GoodReader is that when I go to visit friends with pianos in their homes and they say “too bad we didn’t ask you to bring music with you” I can no longer say “that is too bad” if I have my iPad around!

Are you using GoodReader? Do you have other ways of viewing sheet music on your iPad? Join in the discussion in the forums!

$4.99 - Download Now

Kindle for iPad -- iMuggle

My new iPad has really gotten me more interested in reading on it than any other device has. The iPhone is just too small and I've always had some type of vendetta against eBooks. That's starting to change and I've been enjoying sitting back with my iPad and reading.

The Kindle and iBooks apps are both great for reading. I've found myself using the Kindle app a lot more often for some reason. I think I just prefer the interface. It's easy to use and since it was updated to support the new iPad's retina display, it's better than ever.

I still find myself using iBooks for PDFs but switching over to the Kindle app to read actual books. I like the idea of being able to read Kindle books on multiple devices on more than one platform. If I ever decided to purchase another type of device, I'd most likely be able to use my books on that device too.

If you haven't checked out the Kindle app or what they have available for purchase, I'd highly recommend it.

Free - Download Now

Air Wings -- Bla1ze

Looking for a pretty awesome flying game? Air Wings is where it's at. The concept is to fly around gathering up coins and weaponry to use against other players as it is a multiplayer game. You have multiple planes you can choose from to purchase, it offers in game voice chat with 6 multiplayer levels to play through. In addition to all that, it was recently updated with new graphics for the new iPad as well, so it looks great. Air Wings is available for free in the iTunes store with in-app purchases starting at $.99 -- I make this clear because you'll want to grab at least one additional airplane pack in order to really get into the game.

Free - Download Now

SoundBest Player -- SimonSage

A non-game iOS app caught my eye for a change this week. Rather, it caught my ear. SoundBest Player is a sharp, simple music player that mostly replicates the native music player in both layout and function, with one significant difference: within it is built a custom equalizer. When you first start up the app, it takes you through a short hearing test, and builds a a custom listening profile which changes the way your songs sound. You can save multiple custom profiles, and turn the equalizer off and on very easily. There are also presets for different genres of music, but aside from that, you have access to your usual library of playlists and songs sorted by album, artist, or by individual track. There's full compatibility with playback control from the dock, lock screen, and headphones with in-line hardware.

SoundBest just came out this week, but there are a few alternatives already available that I haven't tried out, like EQ 10 and Equalizer; the latter actually looks pretty good. It's hard to describe the difference between music played through SoundBest versus the vanilla music app, but if you've ever played around with the equalizer in iTunes on your Mac, you'll know what to expect.

$2.99 - Download Now

The YouTube Web App -- JorjLim

As a frequent vlogger, Youtube is my second home; and the built in Youtube app, is quite frankly, rubbish! It lacks simple functionality, like autocomplete, and replying to comments, it doesn’t offer any functionality that a video creator would want, like editing video info or checking channel stats and its really slow!

An alternative is the Youtube web app, and if offers all the functionality that the native app is missing, and so much more.

As a viewer, you get all the standard functionality of ‘liking’ and ‘disliking’, adding to favourites and commenting. The search even has autocomplete! You can also reply to other comments directly, share on more social networks like Facebook and Google+, and you can select to play the video in high quality or low quality regardless if you’re on 3G or Wifi.

As a content creator, you can view, and respond to your mail, edit video details and remove videos on the go.

One of the greatest features that I found in the web app, is the leanback remote. You can connect the iPhone to the youtube leanback experience, and ‘airplay’ your Youtube videos and playlists to your TV or computer without the need for an AppleTV.

I’ve switched totally from the native app to the web app, and I have never looked back!

Gramory -- llofte

I love Instagram, but the native Instagram app isn't exactly awesome. The scrollable timeline is cool and all, but sometimes I'm forced to scroll through a lot of "meh" photos that I'm not particularly interested in. I love Gramory because it lets me see 20 photos at once as thumbnails so that I can pick and choose which ones I want to see bigger. It also has a very nice multi-plane UI.

The other feature that a lot users like is that you can filter photos by trends -- something that the official Instagram app doesn't allow.

Free - Download Now

Comics - Rene Ritchie

Comics was the best way to buy new comic books for iPhone and iPad, and now that the new iPad is out with it's killer Retina display, Comics has updated to take advantage of it. Comics hasn't just updated their own user interface, mind you, they've launched CMX-HD, a new format to best show off the content as well. What's more, since Comics' developer, ComiXology also makes the official Marvel, DC, Image, and other apps, all of them benefit from the new technology. Win. Win. Win. (You get the idea.)

And yeah, this stuff looks fantastic on the new iPad.

FREE - Download

• Marvel version
• DC version

Tell us your pick!

Those were our picks, iMore Nation, so now it's your turn! Tell us your pick of the week below. Give us the name of your favorite app, site, or accessory, and tell us why it made your life more productive, more informed, more entertaining, or just plain more fun. Jump into the comments and let us know your pick of the week!

The extremely popular social photo sharing service Instagram now has a very serious competitor to it's own app -- it's called Gramory. Gramory offers a superb way to browse through Instagram photos. One of the huge features that is not present in Instagram's official app is the ability to browse by trends.

Gramory has a very nice, multi-panel UI. The left panel is where you'll be able to choose how to filter the photos that you're browsing though. You can look through your own photos or feed, the popular photos, photos that you've liked, or even see what tags are trending and browse through those images. Regardless of which view you choose, you'll see them all presented as thumbnails. This is awesome because it lets you see 20 photos at once on a single page so that you can select which ones you'd like to see larger.

When viewing a photo, you'll see a large version of the photo as well as all the comments that have been made on that photo. If you pull the screen down, you'll see the hidden icons that let you share the photo to Twitter, Facebook, Messages, or Mail. You can also like the photo or leave a comment. If you tap the little thumbnail icon in the upper righthand corner, a right panel will slide out that displays thumbnails of that user's Instagram photos.

Despite how awesome Gramory is, it's still not a replacement for the official Instagram app. It doesn't allow you to post photos, nor can you see a nice list of recent comments and likes made to your photos.

The Good

• Multi-plane UI
• Browse photos by "me", popular, feed, liked, or trends
• Search users and tags
• Thumbnail view

The Bad

• Cannot post photos to Instagram
• Cannot view a list of recent comments and likes made to your photos

The Conclusion

If you're a big Instagram user, you must start using Gramory. It's offers a new and better way to browse photos posted to Instgram.

Free - Download Now

I came across Joining Hands when browsing through the "Great apps for the new iPad" section of the App Store because I was hoping to find some great apps that support the new iPad's Retina display. I'm happy I decided to download this little game. It's a cute and fun puzzle game that's both easy to understand and to play.

The story behind the game is that the little creatures, called Peablins, that you encounter in the Whispering Woods need your help grouping them up so that they're all holding hands. You see, they believe that the only way the Boogyman won't take you is if you're holding hands with a friend.

So that's your goal, make sure every hand of every Peablin is joined with the hand of another Peablin. There are different types of Peablins, though. For example, the common Peablin can have anywhere from 1 to 3 hands and just needs to be in a hexagon next to another Peablin to join hands -- the hands will automatically move the correct position. The Brufflin has two inflexible hands, but can be rotated by tapping. The Gooblin doesn't have hands, only tentacles, and can only be joined by other Gooblins. There's three other types of Peablins that I haven't discovered yet.

The Peablins are sad because they don't have all their hands/tentacles joined with another Peablin.

When the Peablins don't have all their hands joined, they looks sad and scared. When all their hands are paired up with another Peablin, they light up and get happy. It's actually pretty cute.

In addition to the goal of joining all the Peablins' hands, each level has one or more stars placed somewhere on the hexagonal board giving you the additional challenge of placing one of your Peablins on the hexagon with a star. Sometimes you may also find several hearts on a cell. This is called a "Comfort Zone" and any Peablin placed in a Comfort Zone will be happy and unafraid of the Boogyman even if all of his hands aren't joined with other Peablins.

The Peablins are happy because all their hands/tentacles are joined with another Peablin. Level complete!

I've found Joining Hands to be a very relaxing game. It's definitely a puzzle game, but not a super challenging one. For a child, though, it could be very challenging. The levels do get more difficult as you progress and are introduced to new Peablins.

The Good

• Easy to learn
• Great for kids
• Universal for iPhone and iPad
• Retina graphics looks awesome on the new iPad

The Bad

• Takes a while to become challenging

The Conclusion

Joining Hands is a great casual puzzle game that is more relaxing than it is challenging. I think older kids will find it to be acceptably challenging, though, making it a great game to add to the family iPad.

$2.99 - Download Now

As if using Facebook wasn't stalker-ish enough, now you can track your friends' exact locations with Find my Facebook Friends. This app is very similar to Apple's Find my Friends app that was released last year alongside iOS 5.

The main difference between Find my Facebook Friends and Apple's app is that, you guessed it, the people you share your location with are from Facebook. Both you and your friend need to have Find My Facebook Friends installed in order for it to work.

If you're concerned about privacy, you can rest knowing that Find my Facebook Friends gives you a lot of options when it comes to sharing your location. You can choose to only share with certain groups you have set up on Facebook or with specific friends. You can also take the opposite approach and choose to share with everyone except the groups and people that you specify. You can similarly set up Find My Facebook Friends to notify you when someone is nearby.

Another difference between Find My Facebook Friends and Apple's Find My Friends is that in this new Facebook version, you can actually watch your friend travel on the map - you have to refresh Apple's app to see an updated location. While stalking checking Rene's location, I was able to see that he was driving down a road and the dot for his location was moving along the road quickly and smoothly. My biggest complaint was that if I wanted Rene's name to pop up over his bubble, the app would force me to zoom in really close to his location. I could zoom out afterwards, but then it would automatically zoom back in. This was rather annoying.

There seems to be a few complaints of the app crashing or freezing, but that has not been my experience on my iPhone 4S and new iPad. It's actually running pretty good on both devices for me.

$0.99 - Download Now

The popular photo filter iPhone app, FX Photo Studio, has recently partnered with Sincerely to include the ability to send physical postcards from directly within the app. For today only, they're allowing users to order one card for free!

FX Photo Studio has always been one of my favorite apps for adding filters to my photos because with 194 filters and effects, plus the ability to mask and layer the filters, there's a countless number of possibilities for each photo.

To mask an effect, you simply tap the paintbrush icon and start painting with your finger. To adjust the brush size you zoom in and out of the photo -- the brush size will always be relative to your finger. Although it isn't the default, you can easily turn on the outline of the brush so that you know exactly how big the brush is. You can also elect to show a small square in the corner that shows exactly where your are applying the effect. This is a great feature for those fine details since your finger is making it so you can't see.

FX Photo Studio also include a selective coloring tool called Color Splash that lets your convert parts of your image to black and white. Again, this is done by painting in the color with your finger.

Also included is 9 stylish text labels for adding personalized text to your photos. Although these labels are very nice, I do wish there was a plain text option that didn't include a label behind the text.

When you're done editing your photo, you can share it to Facebook Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Instagram, open in another app, or send to Sincerely to make a 4x6 postcard. Postcards are $1.99 each and very easy to send. You can add your own personal message to the back as well as a profile picture.

The Good

• 194 filters and effects
• Color Splash tool for selective coloring
• Filters can be masked on and off specific areas of the photo
• Text labels

The Bad

• Can't add text by itself without a label
• Cannot make traditional adjustments (like exposure and white balance)

The Conclusion

FX Photo Studio is a great app for adding effects and filters to your photos with endless possibilities. The ability to send affordable postcards through Sincerely is a great new addition that, even though you may not use regularly, is nice to have as an option when someone's birthday is approaching or for those random times you want to send a smile to someone's doorstep.

Today is Free Card Day!

If you decide to pick up FX Photo Studio, today is Free Card Day and each user is allowed to send one postcard for free! The number of free cards is limited to 50,000, so if you're planning to take advantage of Free Card Day, you better act fast!

$1.99 - Download Now

Only days following Zynga's purchase of OMGPOP and Draw Something, comes an announcement with an impressive list of features that are coming soon to Draw Something.

Included in this list is the ability to save and share your drawings on Twitter and Facebook, an increase of the max streak from 99 to 999, the ability to pull down to refresh the game, an undo button for your last brush stoke, more words, and improved performance.

They've also acknowledged issues with coins, colors, and bombs not displaying, crashes, and bugs that keep you from completing your turn -- with a promise to fix them all.

Additionally, the ability to chat with your partner will be coming in the future, though not in the next update.

This announcement comes as an email from OMGPOP, so it looks like Zynga plans to continue with the OMGPOP branding. This is probably a smart move since many people, like myself, are not huge fans of Zynga and how they conduct business. There's no denying how they already seem to be positively impacting the game, though.

So who's excited for this next update? If you haven't already, head to the iMore forums and share your Draw Something username with other Draw Something players from our community!

Free (ad supported) -- Download Now

$0.99 -- Download Now

Every week the editors at iMore carefully select some of our favorite, most useful, most extraordinary apps, accessories, gadgets, and websites. This week's selections include a Twitter app, several games, an app for DirecTV subscribers, an app for taking handwritten notes with your iPad, and a great interactive children's app.

To see what we picked, and to tell us your pick, follow on after the break!

Tweetbot for iPad - @sethclifford

This week's pick is one that's been featured before, so I won't need to say too much about it, but it's worth bringing up again for a few new reasons. Tweetbot for iPad obviously has a lot of fans, and many of us were clamoring for this app for a long time before its release. When it finally arrived, I was sans iPad for a period of time, while waiting on the release of the new model. Those were dark times, and I'm happy to have made it through them mostly unscathed. Mostly.

Well, I've got that new iPad now, and I am really enjoying Tweetbot on it. It's my favorite client on the iPhone because of its great design and functionality, and the iPad version is no different - it's stellar. I'm weeks behind everyone gushing over it because I purposely waited to even look at it on a device until I had the new iPad, and man, it is something special. In addition to just loving it in general, I think it goes without saying that the update to the app to add retina graphics is nothing short of mind-blowing. It's so smooth and so crisp on that new screen, I sometimes tear up a little, remembering how our collective eyes as a culture suffered with smartphones from a bygone era.

Listen, without wandering too far into wistful hyperbole, I'll just say this: if you want the best Twitter experience on the iPad, with exceptional design and usability, this is your client. End of line.

$2.99 - Download Now

Contre Jour HD - @iMuggle

While looking for a game to test out the overheating new iPad theory, I wandered across Contre Jour HD. I'd never played it before and after reading the description, I decided I'd give it a go. I am completely addicted. It's probably one of the best games I've played on my iPad in a while. And it looks absolutely gorgeous on the new retina display.

The premise of the game is pretty simple. You play Petit, a tiny blob of a creature who needs help roaming around his world. You'll have to move the landscape and make him grab on to other objects to propel him towards the goal in each level - a shining orb of light. Along the way, you'll want to pick up as many light particles as you can for a better score. You also get more points for completing the level quickly.

While the game is dead simple, it's completely addicting. I'd almost describe it as a fusion of Angry Birds and Cut the Rope in some ways. If you haven't checked it out yet, I'd highly recommend it. It's available for both iPhone and iPad in HD. If you have a new iPad, it's a gorgeous game to play. (As a side note, my iPad didn't overheat while playing it.) : )

$2.99 - Download Now

DirecTV app for iPad - @Alli_Flowers

I will confess up front, that being able to pause my husband's television before I even walk into the room gives me a feeling of power. But it's super nice to have his attention without having to compete with whatever program is on, whether he's paying attention or not.

The DirecTV app for iPad lets you control any tv in the house, whether it's connected to your wireless network, or hardwired. I've found that it works even more reliably than the DirecTV remote that came with my receiver, and has a much more convenient UI.

Not only can I control all the tv sets in the house, I can watch some live shows, which gets me around my 2 show limit, providing my third show is on one of the channels in their list. Fortunately, since my 3rd channel is usually SyFy, I'm in business.

Live tv is not only limited to the lineup offered by DTV, but limited to your being connected to your home network. In other words - no watching live tv from work. You can, however, watch On Demand shows and movies from outside of your home network.

If you have DirecTV, and haven't tried this free app, go get it now. If nothing else, imagine the look on your spouse's face when you change the channel from another room!

Free - Download Now

Noteshelf - @gmazo1

I used to think that using a stylus with a touch screen was the future. I remember my original Palm Pilot and all my Treos with great affection. Then, the stylus gave way to the finger and styluses seemed so “90’s” in their implementation.

For that reason, I shied away from handwriting apps for my iPad – like Noteshelf. After spending a week with colleagues who swear by it and after reading Leanna’s great review: http://www.imore.com/2012/03/19/noteshelf-remarks-notability-ipad-handwriting-app-shootout/ I decided to give it a try.

What was I waiting for? This is an awesome app and my favorite new app on my iPad. I love being able to be creative with my notes. Noteshelf allows me to use different colors, highlight, erase, add emoticons and pictures and more.

I can customize my paper, the cover of my notebook and share notes to Twitter or Facebook or via email.

If that doesn’t offer me enough creativity, I can go to the Noteshelf store and buy more papers, covers, stationery, planners and more.

All in all, this is a very powerful, fun and useful app.

Are you using Noteshelf? Do you have a favorite stylus to go with it? Join in the discussion in the forums!

$5.99 - Download Now

Pix: Pixel Mixer - @Bla1ze

There is a lot of photo filter apps in the iTunes App Store. Some are great, some -- not so much. Pix: Pixel Maker is a fairly new entrant having been submitted only a little while ago but it has quickly warmed my heart (and my iPad -- see what I did there?!?) with its filter options. Rather then sticking to allowing folks to only add one filter to their images, you can actually mix and match filters to get the exact image settings you want. It's available for free in the iTunes App Store and is a universal application.

Free - Download Now

Modern Combat 3 - @simonsage

Since Modern Combat 3 went on sale this week for $0.99, I decided to give it a shot. (Pun intended.) It's Gameloft's latest "homage" to modern console and PC first-person shooters, complete with achievements, multiplayer, weapon customization, unlockables, a single-player campaign mode, and a whole lotta action.

I put a fair bit of time into the campaign mode, and despite being chocked-full of chest-thumping American bravado, the action was good, and the graphics, even on the iPhone 4, are smooth and sharp. I'm still trying to get the hang of using the accelerometer for control, but I think over time, it will become a lot more intuitive to use than the clunky dual-stick layout. You earn separate kinds of coins for playing multiplayer matches and single-player, but the abilities, weapons, and attachments you unlock carry over, which is great. In that way, I was able to gear up a little bit before getting into the multiplayer arena.

Much like PC games like Call of Duty and Battlefield, the competition online is intense. I felt the familiar pang of frustration when being taken down consistently before I could even pull up my reticle, but so far this has only served to steel my determination. With the wealth of unlockables, high production value, and competitive multiplayer, I could see myself playing this a lot, especially if I'm packing the new iPad.

$6.99 - Download Now

Angry Birds Space - @jorjlim

Angry Birds Space, completely reinvents the Angry Birds franchise. There’s not many things you can do with a simple gravity slingshot game, however Rovio have completely rewritten the franchise, by... removing gravity.

Angry Birds Space sees the birds travel through a portal to chase the pigs who are still going after those eggs.

The classic characters you knew and loved have all returned with the same abilities. (with the exception of the yellow bird who can now fly in any direction, since there is no gravity) They have even introduced a new character called ‘Ice Bird’ who can freeze structures to make them easier to break.

You now have to fling the birds around the centre of gravity of astroids and planets, or through the vacuum of deep space. There are even added ‘boss’ level, to change things up even more.

If you were a fan of the originals, you’ll definitely enjoy this sequel, and even if you weren’t a fan of the originals, give this a go anyway because its got some completely new gameplay, and is nothing like the original ‘earth-bound’ games.

$0.99 - iPhone - Download now

$2.99 - iPad - Download now

Pinterest - @phishgirl3

Social networks are a dime a dozen these days, so it takes an interesting concept to make a new one stand out above the rest. Pinterest is still fairly new on the scene but it's gaining popularity and becoming more mainstream pretty quickly. The concept behind Pinterest is kind of hard to explain; I look at it as the place to go if you hoard things on the internet. You can use it to save pictures for design ideas, recipes, images of things you want to create… there is no limit. If you see it on the internet, you can pin it to your boards, which are basically how you keep your pins organized. They're like files for the images! Other people can browse your pins and re-pin comment and favorite them.

I was super happy when I saw there was a Pinterest app for iOS, and installed it on my iPhone right away. The app is well made, giving you access to your Profile, Activity on your pins/boards, your list of Followers/Following, and Explore, which offers you a list of categories to look through. While exploring you can re-pin, like and comment on your favorite things. A couple of neat options are also included, such as a bookmarklet you can install to be able to pin things to your boards while browsing the internet. You can even access your iPhone's camera from within the app so you can pin things in the world around you. If you are signed up on Pinterest and enjoy using it, I highly recommend downloading the free app to go with it.

Free - Download Now

Little Fox Music Box - @llofte

My 18 month old daughter loves Little Fox Music Box. I am truly amazed with how long she can sit still and engage with this app. It's literally the only thing that will keep her still for longer than about 90 seconds.

Little Fox Music Box has 3 songs: London Bridge, Evening Song, and Old Mac Donald, and with each song there is a scene that's related to the theme of the song. Each of these scenes is filled with artwork and animations that your child can interact with. There are very little things on the screen that don't react to touch. My daughter loves playing by herself or with an adult who identifies everything that can be touched.

For kids learning to read, the words to the songs are displayed at the top of the screen as they are sung. In Karaoke mode, the words highlight when it's time to sing them.

Seriously, this is an awesome app for little kids and totally worth the $5 even though there's only 3 songs.

$4.99 - Download Now

Tell us your pick!

Those were our picks, iMore Nation, so now it's your turn! Tell us your pick of the week below. Give us the name of your favorite app, site, or accessory, and tell us why it made your life more productive, more informed, more entertaining, or just plain more fun. Jump into the comments and let us know your pick of the week!

This week our iPhone Photography series is going to be a little different. Instead of exploring a new technique for taking better photos, we're going to dive into the digital darkroom of iPhoto to improve an image we've already taken. It's always worth capturing the best possible photo you can with your camera. Thanks to photo editing apps like iPhoto, however, when and if something goes wrong -- the framing is a little off, the white balance or exposure isn't perfect, the levels just don't look right -- there's a lot you can do to fix it.

Perhaps you recall seeing this image in our lesson about negative space. I admitted to editing it a bit. What I didn't admit to was how much editing I did. Sure, I did crop to a square and apply an Instagram filter like I mentioned, but I also fired up Photoshop to darken parts of the image even more.

Well, this is an iPhoneography series, so instead of using Photoshop for our edits, we're going to use Apple's new iPhoto app for iPhone and iPad. I'm going to use the iPad because I enjoy using the larger screen, but the same process can also be done on the iPhone.

• iPhoto for iPhone and iPad, $4.99 - Download Now

Before we get started, download the full resolution version of the original image so that you can do the edits with me. (Hold down your finger on the image and tap Save Image. This will save it to your Camera Roll.) Here's what it should look like.

Huge difference from the final image I used, isn't it? This is why learning how to edit your photos is also an important part of photography, especially for iPhoneographers who don't have the luxuries and control that come with shooting with a DSLR.

Critique your image

When you decide you want to edit an image, the first thing you should do is sit back and critique it. What do you want it to look like? Why does it even need to be edited in the first place? You don't just want to start blindly editing photos with a "we'll see what happens" approach. This will result in images that look processed and overdone. This shouldn't be your goal. (Side note: that type of look does have its place, but it's not what we're going to focus on and, it too, should also be planned and deliberate).

When I look at my original image, I see a lot of flaws. First, the orientation is wrong. To bring the viewer's attention to the flame, my intended subject, it would be better cropped either horizontally, or as a square. Notice that I said my subject is the flame, not the candle. This is important. Know your subject.

Second, there's a lot of distracting elements in the frame -- especially the people and balloons. Note, however, that I intentionally composed the shot so that the flame, itself, didn't have a person behind it.

Now that we've determined what's wrong with the photo, we know what we want to fix. We need to crop the image with a landscape orientation and get rid of the distracting elements. The most natural way to do that is by darkening those areas.

Crop

We're going to start by cropping the photo so that it has a horizontal orientation. There are many different ratios to choose from, and for this image, the important thing is to make sure that the ratio you choose doesn't cut off the dripping wax as this is an interesting element of the photograph. The best choice for this image was 10x8.

To crop the image, tap the crop icon in the lower left corner. Then tap the settings icon on the bottom right and swipe to the 2nd page to select 10x8. To make sure the image is straight, adjust the dial at the bottom until the grid lines are perfectly lined up with the candle. I went about two degrees in the positive direction.

Adjust contrast and shadows

Next up, we're going to adjust the contrast and shadows. This will darken the background a bit before we jump into using the darken tool.

To adjust the contrast, tap the exposure icon. It's the one directly to the right of the crop icon. This will show you a line with some icons across the bottom of the screen. The first and last icons adjust the shadows and highlights, the middle icon adjusts the exposure, and the other two adjust the contrast.

Now let's make our adjustment. Tap either one of the contrast icons and slide it away from the center. This will increase the contrast. You'll notice that this will darken the background and make the flame and candle "pop" a bit more. Adjust this to taste. I went about a third of the way between the shadows icon and the exposure icon. I recommend moving it to where you think it looks good, then going a little bit less than that.

Finally, we'll adjust the shadows. Again, adjust to to where you think it looks good. I went about halfway between the zone on the left. This edit made my background even darker.

At this point, our image has already greatly improved. Trigger the button next to the Edit button in the upper right hand corner to compare with the original. Already a great improvement! But we can do even better. Specifically, I want to get rid of the remaining evidence of someone sitting on the right and darken that white shirt on the left as much as I can.

Darken

Now we're going to eliminate the remaining distracting elements by darkening those areas of the photo. To do this, select the Darken brush from the Brushes menu (4th icon in the bottom left corner). Next, tap the Settings icon in the lower right corner and toggle Show Strokes to ON. This will allow you to see exactly where you're applying the brush.

Start painting the areas around the flame with your finger. Your strokes will show up in red and you'll notice that the opacity increases the more times you go over an area. Make sure you go over the areas that are far away from the candle as much as possible. Also do your best to blend the opacity level of your strokes as you get closer to the candle. Otherwise, there will be an obvious line where you stopped applying the brush. Be patient. Take your time. Tap the undo button if you make a mistake. You can also use the eraser tool to erase your strokes.

Pay special attention to the area to the left of the candle and pinch to zoom into the photo to make sure you're precise. Also make sure you cover the area with the shirt good since it's so light.

When you're done, trigger Show Strokes to off and take a look at your results. Then adjust the slider all the way to the right to make the area you painted even darker. If you notice any areas that need to be fixed, turn Show Stokes back on and make your adjustments. Turn the stokes back off and compare with the original photo again.

Looking much better! But notice that you can still still the shirt on the left side of the candle and the windows are also a bit distracting. Unfortunately, the Darken tool couldn't completely take care of it. That's why we're going to see if there's a filter that'll help us out.

Filter

Feel free to experiment with the different filters, but I have narrowed it down to the two I think are best.

The third choice in the Artistic category does a great job of dimming the windows without drastically changing the look of the candle. However, the white shirt on the left is still fairly visible.

The third choice in the Vintage category almost eliminates the shirt entirely and also dims the windows a little bit. But it also reddens the already very red candle.

I think both of these filters make very fine choices. However, I wasn't completely satisfied with either, so I went with the one in the Artistic category, saved it to my Camera Roll, then edited the saved image by just darkening the area with the white shirt.

Final result

Look at the difference! To see a larger comparison, just tap/click the image.

Now, that wasn't too hard, was it? Usually, a few small edits can have a major impact on your images.

Assignment

Your assignment for this week is to edit your photos! Remember, the first thing you want to do is critique your image and decide on the changes that need to be made. If you need help, feel free to ask the iMore community for some suggestions. After you've made your edits, head to the iMore Photography forum and share your results! Make sure to include both the before and after shots!

English Country Tune for iPhone and iPad has got to be both the best and most challenging puzzle game I've come across on the iPhone or iPad to date. There are 17 different worlds, each with their own objectives and filled with 3-dimensional levels.

So far, I've mainly spent my time in two worlds: Larve and Adv Larva. The objective in both of these worlds is to move the spheres, called larve, into the cubes, called incubators, by directing the flat square along the world to push the larve to where they need to be. The levels start out easy and primarily 2-dimenional, but quickly turn into challenging 3-dimensional puzzles that really makes you think. When pushing a larve over an edge, the direction it moves is dependent on how your square is positioned when it pushes it. It's hard to explain, and the way the game described this rule was a bit confusing, but after some experimentation, I was able to figure it out. Some may find this irritating, but it honestly didn't bother me because, to me, figuring out the rules and patterns is part of the puzzle.

It's hard to describe in words what the gameplay of English Country Tune is like, so please check out the video of the game in action below. I've only seen a small part of what this game can offer, yet already know that English Country Tune is a game I will enjoy playing for a very long time. It requires an immense amount of analytical skills -- and as a mathematician, I really appreciate this attribute. But I did warn you -- it's hard.

The Good

• Unique gameplay
• Challenging
• A lot of levels
• Many times, there is more than one level available for play

The Bad

• Borderline too difficult
• Directions are vague

The Conclusion

You don't play English Country Tune to have fun. You play English Country Tune to be challenged. To exercise your brain. To feel that immeasurable amount of satisfaction and pride when you do complete a level.

4.99 - Download Now

Two of the most popular iPhone photography apps, Hipstamatic and Instagram, have unveiled a partnership that is meant to please their users: you can now share your photos taken with Hipstamatic directly to Instagram. Note that this is different than how some apps let you open photos in Instagram. Hipstamatic is now the first app that lists Instagram as a social network (right between Twitter and Tumblr) and publishes them to the service with the just the tap of a button.

Hipstamatic is a photography app that focuses on creating images that mimic the look of analog, toy cameras. It comes with different lenses, films, and flashes that work together to make unique, vintage looking photos. After "developing" your photos, you can then share them to other social networks -- now including Instagram.

Instagram is an iPhone app that not only works as a camera, has a wide selection of filters to add to your filters, and lets you share to services like Twitter and Facebook, but it's also a social network in and of itself. You can make friends and leave comments and "likes" on photos that appear in your stream.

Sure, there's some overlap between the functions of the two apps and many have viewed them as competitors, but the truth is that there's a lot of users that use both Hipstamatic and Instagram on a regular basis and with the same photos. It's not uncommon for someone to take a photo with Hipstamatic, then upload to Instagram without applying one of Instagram's filters simply because they like the social network aspect of Instagram.

It's great to see Instagram and Hipstamatic work together for the benefit of their users. As part of the agreement, any photos that are published to Instagram via Hipstamatic are marked as being "taken with Hipstamatic" and users can choose to include hashtags indicating which hipstamatic equipment they used.

It's so refreshing to see two companies work together in a way the compliments each other rather than just competing against each other. It shows that they truly have their users in mind.

Hipstamatic, $1.99 - Download Now

Instagram, Free - Download Now

Every week the editors at iMore carefully select some of our favorite, most useful, most extraordinary apps, accessories, gadgets, and websites. This week's selections include a Dropbox-based plain text editor, a camera app that's bound to capture any action, a strategy game, a photo editing app, and a couple new Apple devices.

To see what we picked, and to tell us your pick, follow on after the break!

PlainText - @sethclifford

It's been a while since I've talked about one directly, so yes, it's time for another Dropbox-based plain text editor. This one, appropriately enough, is called PlainText. Currently, this is my go-to text editor on iOS for a very simple reason.

Apple has shown us the value in unifying its multiple platforms visually with the preview release of Mountain Lion, incorporating both aesthetic influences and applications from iOS into OS X. Something I've tried to do for a while, well in advance of the official declaration of this agenda has been to unify my computing experience as seamlessly as possible in all places. On the desktop, I use NValt for writing notes and long form text. In fact I'm using it to write this pick right now ("You're soaking in it"). NValt is a fork of the excellent note program Notational Velocity, and is provided by Brett Terpstra of TUAW fame as well as other cool projects. The reason I like Notational Velocity is because it provides a super-clean and ultra-fast note taking interface. NValt adds some nice tweaks like Markdown support baked right in. It's quick, simple, and highly effective.

I realized I was looking for a similar experience on iOS, and although I've tried many editors, I came back to PlainText because of one major feature that accurately mimicked the most excellent part of NValt and Notational Velocity - a search field that drills through your notes like a bullet. I realized that after all my searching, what I need most on my phone is speedy access to the information I'm looking through, above all else. PlainText has a really cool search UI that works in almost exactly the same fashion, providing an experience that matches the one I like so much on my MBP.

Ultimately, PlainText doesn't have most of the bells and whistles of some of the other text editors we've discussed in the past, but it has the most important one: pure, blistering speed. And a nice, clean UI. Okay, two important ones. It's a great free app, and for two bucks, you can drop the ads and support great development.

Free - Download Now

Fast Camera - @Alli_Flowers

If you ever missed a great action shot because your iPhone camera lens didn't refresh fast enough - this app's for you. According to the iTunes description, you can take up to 800 pictures per minute! I've only taken 178 at a pop, so I can't prove it, but 178 is impressive in a few seconds.

Once you take your series of photos, you can review them and save the ones you want - delete the rest. No need to take up space with what you're not keeping. But what you're keeping are full resolution (can you say 8 megapixels?) photos. This is not like taking a video and then doing a screen capture of the good part.

You can adjust the settings so that your photos are not full resolution, but why would you do that? Settings include starting your series when you open the app for instant picture taking, or letting you press the start button.

This app is worth way more than the $.99 price tag, and should be a must for active people.

$0.99 - Download Now

Hero Academy - @simonsage

I've spent a lot of time playing Hero Academy this week. It's a free turn-based strategy game with a high fantasy theme. Either side is trying to destroy the other's other's crystal placed on a square grid. Each turn consists of five actions, which can involve playing various units, powers and upgrades held in your hand, or moving and attacking with the pieces on the board. The only army available in the free version are the humans, but if you want to give the dark elves or dwarves a shot, they're $1.99 each, and they wipe out the inter-turn ads.

I do have a few niggles. For one, you can only get the new armies through microtransactions - there's no way to unlock them through standard gameplay. Secondly, it feels like the premium armies are a little overpowered; a fully-upgraded dwarven Annihilator doesn't feel remotely equivalent to a tweaked-out Council Ninja. Pay-to-win is never a great policy.

Free - Download Now

iPhoto for iPhone and iPad - @iMuggle

Ever since I have started to take a liking to photography (mostly thanks to our own Leanna and her iPhoneography series), I've been filling up my iPhone and iPad with tons of pictures from both my iPhone 4S and my DSLR.

iPhoto has a lot of really nice editing tools that allows me to make quick edits to photos on the go without having to load them to my computer first. Of course it'll never be a replacement for tools like Photoshop but it's definitely good enough for basic editing.

Paired with a camera kit, I've been bringing both my camera and iPad with me when taking photos and loading them straight into iPhoto to view them with friends, family, and clients.

Let's also not forget the new iPad. I am blown away with how good high quality images look on the retina display. Absolutely amazing. I still wish Apple would sync albums and events back and forth. That is my biggest complaint at this point. If I create an event on my iPad I want it on my iMac too. Hopefully we will see this functionality added in an update. If you're debating picking iPhoto up you can check out our review first.

$4.99 - Download Now

NCAA March Madness Live - @gmazo1

If you are a sports fan like me, March means one thing - March Madness. For those non-sports fans among us, that is the NCAA college basketball tournament.

The Tournament is known for the “Bracket” – the seeding and schedule of the 64-team road to the final four.

This year, there is a great app called NCAA March Madness Live, which lets me follow all the action. I can see the scores and plays in real time, follow tweets about the games, listen to game day audio and watch video highlights.

If that’s not enough, I can pay a once time fee of $3.99 and watch every single second of every game right on my iPad or iPhone. This app is just amazing for the college basketball lover.

The feature I like the best is that when you first set up the app (provided you did it before the tournament started) you can “fill in your bracket” and it keeps track of your winning percentage. So far, I’m doing OK – the four teams I picked for the Final Four are still in the tournament.

I’d be curious to know if you are using this app and how your bracket is doing, so please head to our forums and join in on the discussion!

Free - Download Now

Apple TV 1080p (2012) - Rene Ritchie

Last week I picked the new iPad. This week I'm rounding that pick out with something that combines with it, like Devastator or Voltron, to be more than the sum of its parts. The new Apple TV.

Apple didn't make many changes to the new Apple TV. Design-wise it's the same black, rounded rectangle they released in the fall of 2010. Inside, however, they've made some great changes. RAM is increased, if you follow the tear-downs, but more importantly it now supports 1080p content. While that doesn't sound impressive in a 1080p HDTV and BluRay soaked society, Apple is streaming 1080p content to it, both via AirPlay from the iPhone 4S, iPad 2, and the new iPad, and from iTunes in the cloud.

They've improved the look of the video without excessive file size increases by supporting higher quality H.264 encoding, but that's just a technical detail. They've made a peripheral that lets you take the absolutely stunning looking video the new iPad can play natively and beam it right to your 1080p TV to share with friends, families, or colleagues.

Apple also released an updated interface for both the new and the previous Apple TV, which I like in concept if not in individual icon-level rendering or organization. There's a lot of content there now though, and you can subscribe to Netflix or MLB right on the Apple TV, right with your iTunes account.

We're not there yet, not to where Apple TV can replace cable television for most people, most of the time, but we're getting closer.

iPad - @llofte

Turning on my new iPad for the first time was just like turning on my iPhone 4 for the first time. A-mazing. Those claiming that the new iPad is only a incremental upgrade from the iPad 2 clearly haven't actually looked at the screen on the new iPad. I literally can't stop staring at it.

I can rant and rave all night about the new iPad, but I'm sure you'll just roll your eyes at me and scream "fangirl", so instead, I'm just going to answer the question that I'm repeatedly being asked on Twitter -- yes, the new iPad is worth it.

Tell us your pick!

Those were our picks, iMore Nation, so now it's your turn! Tell us your pick of the week below. Give us the name of your favorite app, site, or accessory, and tell us why it made your life more productive, more informed, more entertaining, or just plain more fun. Jump into the comments and let us know your pick of the week!

iMovie is an excellent video editing application that is easy and fun to use, but are the new trailers really enough to take the spot as the best video editing app for the iPhone and iPad?

iMovie is part of the Apple's iLife suite for iPhone and iPad. While iPhoto allows you to re-touch and sort your photos and GarageBand aims to give users the ability to edit audio and create music on their devices, iMovie completes the series with tools to help you create, edit, and share beautiful movies and trailers without ever having to touch a computer.

Editing

The editing screen is set up similar to iMovie on the Mac and split into 3 different screens. On the bottom of the screen, you find the timeline for your movie, on the top left, you find available media, and video preview is located in the top right. The “My Projects” screen is beautifully designed to look like a vintage movie theater.

The types of media that you can add to your movie are videos, photos, and music. However, the videos must be what's available in the Photos app, so if you have homemade videos that you imported into the Videos app of your iPad with iTunes, you cannot access them from iMovie.

Editing movies is very easy with iMovie. You can preview clips by simply dragging your finger across them. You can then trim the edges before adding them to your project. To move clips around in your timeline, simply drag it to where you want. If you want to split a clip, position the cursor, select the clip, and swipe down along the cursor. To adjust the length of time that a video clip (or photo) appears in your movie, just drag the ends of the clip appropriately. You can also easily record audio and video directly into the timeline.

A recently added feature of iMovie is the ability freeze a frame. You do it exactly like splitting a clip, just instead of swiping down, you swipe up.

Music audio tracks are limiting in that you cannot add more than one song to your movie unless your movie is long enough to play an entire song. You can then have a new song start after the first one is finished, but you cannot control the length of the clip nor choose when you want the song to start. Your song must start at the beginning of the movie and it must play until the song or movie is over, whichever comes first.

iMovie comes with a lot of sound effects pre-installed. The good news is that these effects are stackable and you can have up to 3 audio tracks playing at a time (including background music). Choosing when they play in your movie is as simple as dragging them along the timeline. Double tapping any audio clip with give you option to adjust the volume or delete the clip.

Inserting photos is achieved in the same manner as adding videos and audio. Double tapping an inserted photo gives you options to give the photo a title style (opening, middle, ending) and to add a location.

iMovie will automatically add transitions between clips and photos. Tapping on the transition icon will allow you to specify the length of the transition (0.5s, 1.0s, 1.5s, 2.0s) and select between your theme's special transition - a tradition cross dissolve, or no transition at all.

iMovie is stocked with 8 different themes, each of which comes with its own title screen format, transitions, and theme music.

Trailers

The newest and biggest addition to iMove for iPhone and iPad is the ability to make trailers -- credits and all! iMovie comes with 9 different themes: Bollywood, Expedition, Fairy Tale, Narrative, Retro, Romance, Scary, Superhero, and Swashbuckler. Each template comes with a nice example of what it will look like.

Once you select a theme you're ready to jump right into editing your trailer. On the Outline tab, you can edit your name, studio, and credit info. Although a little boring to fill out, it's this information that gives your project the appearance of a real movie trailer.

The Storyboard tab is where the real creation happens. The template will have phrases filled out for you but you need to tap them to edit them to say whatever you want. iMovie also provides thumbnails for each part of the trailer. These thumbnails actually contain recommendations regarding the type of video clip you want (closeup, medium, action, wide, group, etc).

Inserting a clip is very easy to do yet hard to be precise. The length of each clip has been predetermined by iMovie so dragging your finger along a potential clip shows a yellow frame around the area of the clip that will actually be inserted into the movie. What's frustrating about this is that there isn't a way to preview that little chunk of video all by itself which makes being precise difficult.

Sharing

Sharing your movies is a breeze and iMovie is equipped the the ability to send directly to YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, and CNN iReport. Just tap the familiar sharing arrow from the projects screen and make your selection.

It's not unreasonable to suspect iMovie on the iPhone and iPad to sync, ideally through iCloud, with iMovie on the Mac or other iOS devices. Well, it doesn't. Not even over a cable. This is a shame because it would be very nice if you could start a project on your iPhone or iPad, then finish it up with on your Mac. Maybe next year?

The Good

• Very easy to use due to the great user interface
• Themes are well designed, simple, and fun
• Trailers are easy to edit and fun to create -- a great addition
• Ability to freeze frames and split clips
• Lots of preinstalled sound effects

The Bad

• Song clips must be played in the background of your entire movie and the length of the song cannot be adjusted
• No way to sync with iMovie on another iOS device or Mac
• Cannot use movies that were imported onto the iPhone or iPad with iTunes. All video clips must come from the albums that appear in the Photos app.
• Choosing small chunks of video for trailers is not very precise

The Conclusion

iMovie is a great application for making movies and trailers on your iPhone and iPad. It has plenty of features that will please most users. The themes and trailers set it apart from other video editing apps. However, even since the most recent update, Avid Studio is still a more powerful video editing app. I was hoping that Apple was going to wow us with an amazing update, but they didn't quite deliver this time around.

$4.99 - Download Now

Pages for iPhone and iPad is a great way to do word processing on the go, but iCloud may not keep your documents as seamlessly synced as you expected.

Apple’s Pages is the word processing component of their iWork productivity suite of software, and a companion app to Numbers for spreadsheets and Keynote for presentations. Universal apps that work on iPhone and iPad, all three have proven to be popular choices for document management on the go and have just recently been updated to support iOS 5.1 and the new iPad‘s Retina display.

If you’re a new iPad or iPhone owner and need a way to create and edit documents on the go, Pages is Apple’s iCloud integrated solution.

Document organization

Documents can be grouped together into folders.

The documents screen of Pages displays your documents as a grid. You can create folders that contain multiple documents, similar to how you create folders of apps on your home screen. From here you can also delete, rearrange, and duplicate documents, add documents from iTunes, iDisk, or WebDAV, and create new document.

Templates

There are 16 predesigned templates included with Pages.

Pages comes with 16 different templates to help you get started with your project.

• Modern Photo, Classic, Formal, and Personal Photo letters
• Modern Photo and Classic Resume
• Project Proposal and Visual Report
• Poster and Flyer
• Term Paper and Syllabus
• Party Invite and Thank You Card
• Recipe

All of them are fully customizable so that you can make them your own.

Formatting

Pages offers an ample amount of formatting options.

When creating a document, you'll find a bar with formatting options you use most often: font type and size, bold, italics, underline, justification, and tabs. You can also easily adjust your margins and paragraph indent by dragging the arrows on the ruler at the top of the screen.

Tapping the paintbrush icon will give you more formatting options like paragraph and list styles, font color, columns, and line spacing.

Inserting media, tables, charts, and shapes

You can easy insert and edit photos, tables, charts, and shapes into your documents with Pages.

To insert media, tables, charts, and shapes into your document, just tap the + sign and choose what you'd like to insert. From the media tab, you can select photos from your Camera Roll, Photo Stream, or albums. The Tables tab has 24 different table designs to choose from. In the Charts tab, you'll find 9 different 2D and 8 different 3D charts, each in 6 different colors, and in the Shapes tab, you'll find 15 different shapes available in 6 different colors.

When inserting your media, you can scale it and move it around your document. If you drag it to an edge, the text will wrap around it, and if you put it in the middle somewhere, the text will separate above and below it.

Tables can be easily editable by just tapping on them. You can type information into each cell (even copy/paste from a spreadsheet app like Numbers) and adjust how many rows and columns your table is made up of.

Charts are treated the same way, except that you can rotate 3D ones around a little bit. Since charts require a set of data to have any sort of value, Pages allows you to edit the chart data (similar to a table) and select if you want to plot the rows or columns as a series.

Shapes are actually pretty fun to add to a Pages document because they are also adjustable. For example, if you select a star, you can add more points to it and adjust how skinny the points are.

Document Setup

The Document Setup section of Pages is where you design the background of your document.

If you tap the Tools button, you'll find options for sharing, searching your document, settings, help, and Document Setup.

Tapping Document Setup will bring you to a new screen that shows a blank document page with a header, a footer, and margins. Dragging the margin lines will adjust the margins and tapping the header or footer allows you to edit them with page numbers, line breaks, or with your own pasted information.

If you take a look at the bottom right corner of the page, you'll notice that's it's turned up a little. Tapping here will fold up the bottom of the paper and reveal two different paper size choices: US Letter and A4. Unfortunately, those are the only sizes available.

In the upper right corner, you'll find a + sign. From here, you can add media, tables, charts, and shapes, similarly to how you enter them into your actual document. The difference is that if you add these items from the document setup screen, they actually work as the background of your document so that text will appear over them. This is how you can change the color of your page, add borders, and get creative when designing things like posters and flyers. Each item you add can be further edited by tapping the paintbrush icon.

Sharing

You can share your documents with iCloud, iTunes, iWork.com, iDisk, WebDAV, and email.

Once you're done creating your document, you can email it, print it, share to iWork.com, send to iTunes, or copy to iDisk or WebDAV. Surprisingly, you cannot share (or "Open in") iBooks. Although, if you email it yourself, you can then "Open in" iBooks from the email.

Pages also has support for iCloud so that you can keep all your documents synced between iPhone, iPad, and Mac. This works fabulously for iPhone and iPad, but the experience is a bit clunky for the Mac - it doesn't "just work". To get your document onto your Mac, one would think you'd just have to launch Pages and be able to find it under the File menu. No such luck. Instead, you have to go to iCloud.com and download your document from the iWork section. This is very inelegant to say the least. Most 3rd party apps with iCloud support handle syncing to the Mac better than this. Apple should be embarrassed.

The Good

• Easy to use
• 16 nice templates to choose from
• Photos, graphs, charts, and shapes are very easy to edit, customize, and insert
• Document Setup is a great way to design the background of your project and is great for posters and flyers
• iCloud between iOS devices works great

The Bad

• Syncing with iCloud to your Mac is, for lack of a better word -- lame
• Can't "Open in" iBooks without emailing it yourself first
• Only US Letter and A4 paper sizes
• No Dropbox support

The Conclusion

If you're looking for an easy to use, well designed word processor for you iPad, Pages is an excellent choice. But if you are a big Dropbox user or want to sync with MS Word, you're going to want to look elsewhere. Personally, I'm happy with Pages and I've never felt the need to shop for a different word processing app.

$9.99 - Download Now

Many of you have been anxiously awaiting the arrival of Sparrow for iPhone, myself included, so I'm excited to report that it's here! Sparrow is a popular mail client for the Mac that focuses on providing the perfect email experience. That experience is now available on your iPhone.

Sparrow is particularly great for Gmail users because it handles labels extremely well. You are not restricted to Gmail, though. Sparrow offers full iMAP support including Gmail, Google Apps, iCloud, Yahoo, AOL, Mobile Me and custom IMAP accounts. It does not support POP or Exchange accounts.

Some of the favorite features of Sparrow include using Facebook to assign avatars to your friends, ability to add attachments while composing a message, a very well designed pane navigation layout, pull to refresh, alias support, and custom signatures for each email account.

Unfortunately, Sparrow does not support push. Not by choice, however; Apple made them remove it. At least for now.

I've been using Sparrow for Mac over Apple's Mail client for over a month now and have been extremely happy with it. I'm very excited about Sparrow on my iPhone and even though I've only spent a moment with it, I'm already impressed. Without push, however, it may be hard for me to make the switch from the native Mail app. We'll see.

2.99 - Download Now

Sparrow iPhone from domleca on Vimeo.

Hot on the heals of the release of iA Writer for iPhone and iPad comes a mighty fine competitor, Byword for iPhone and iPad. Byword is a text and Markdown editor that focuses on being simple, distraction free, and beautiful.

The keyboard features a single, light, scrollable bar where you'll find a word count, commonly used symbols, and arrows that work just like the arrow keys on a physical keyboard.

If you are easily distracted by things like auto capitalization, auto correction, and spell check, these features can be disabled and Byword also has support for TextExpander. You can choose between four fonts, but you cannot change the font size.

Since Byword is available for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, there's a good chance you'll want to divide up your writing time between multiple devices, so Byword lets you keep your documents in sync with either iCloud or Dropbox. The process is very simple and works like a charm.

If you use Markdown for your writing, you'll be happy to know that Byword has a Markdown preview mode that allows you see exactly how your writing will look when converted HTML.

When you're done with your writing and ready to share (to, say, your blog) you can export or copy the text as HTML. Even though the Mac version supports rich text export, the iOS version does not.

The Good

• Simple, clean, and beautiful environment
• Supports Markdown and Markdown preview
• Can export/copy as html
• A single, scrollable bar above the keyboard contains special, commonly used characters and the ability to insert photos and links
• Can choose between 4 fonts and toggle features like autocapitalization, autocorrection, and spell check
• TextExpander support

The Bad

• Light colored UI may be difficult for people to see
• iPhone and iPad version does not support rich text export -- Mac version does
• Can't change font size

The Conclusion

I'm using Byword to write this article in Markdown and have enjoyed the process. I've switched between the iPhone, iPad, and Mac during my writing and all devices have been treating me well and iCloud syncing has been instantaneous. Byword is fantastic app for all writers, especially those who write in Markdown. The clean, simple environment will have a positive impact on your productivity -- guaranteed.

$2.99 for iPhone and iPad - Download Now

$9.99 for Mac- Download Now

Have you ever envisioned one of your photos looking absolutely stunning as a black and white photograph only to have it come out looking dull and boring after doing the conversion? That's because not all black and white photo conversions are created equal and Simply B&W for iPhone and iPad understands just that.

Simply B&W holds true to its name by being extremely simple to use, yes it still produces high quality results. With each conversion, you can you choose to use a red, green, blue, yellow, or orange filter. Why would we use as colored filter when converting to black and white, you ask? Because back in the film days, photographers would put colored filters on their lenses to control how the colors in the real world looked on the black and white film.

For example, a red filter will lighten the reds that were originally in your color photo and darken the blues and greens. Simply B&W does a great job of explaining how each color will affect your images so that it's not just a guessing game of trying all the filters and see which one looks best. Sure, you can do that if you want, but you can also train yourself to predict how each filter will change your photo. This will help you grow as a black and white photographer.

In addition to these filters, Simply B&W also lets you adjust brightness, contrast, and grain as well as add a black or white vignette and border. When you're done perfecting your image, you can save to your Camera Roll, email it, or share it to Twitter.

The Good

• Easy to use
• Includes 5 color filters: red, green, blue, yellow, orange
• Each filter clearly explains the affect it has on your photo
• Provides basic editing tool: brightness, contrast, grain, vignette, border
• Universal for iPhone and iPad

The Bad

• The only social sharing is with Twitter
• More in-depth editing tools would be nice

The Conclusion

Simply B&W is a great app for getting started with black and white photography and provides information that has the potential to help you envision what your photos will look like when converted to black and white. It's very easy to use and doesn't have an overwhelming amount of features. Simply B&W has just the perfect amount of features to produce amazing results.

$0.99 for iPhone and iPad - Download Now

If you've been looking to upgrade your iPhoneography from the built-in iPhone Camera app to something a little more flexible and powerful, then check out the just released Camera+ 3. Built by photographers for photographers, the latest update not only continues Camera+'s great features and filter sets, but adds the ability to lock focus and exposure, mulit-photo imports, improved social sharing, app integration (so you can get to Camera+ from within other apps), and more.

Camera+ has long had the ability to set your exposure and focus separately while taking a photo, but today's update now allows you to lock these settings in place, independently of each other so that you can fine-tune your composition without fear of these settings changing.

The update now also allows you to important multiple photos from your library at once versus just one at a time. Also related to workflow, Camera+ now gives you the option to edit a photo immediately after capturing it, or to take many photos in a row and decide on your own when you wish to start editing.

Sharing to Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr has also been greatly improved. You can now share to all services at once -- even multiple accounts of any service at once.

The folks at tap tap tap have also released new app integration API's that allows developers to integrate Camera+ into their apps. For example, when choosing to upload a photo in Tweetbot, there is now an option to take the photo with Camera+. After you're done taking and editing the photo in Camera+, it will automatically take you back to Tweetbot and insert the photo into your tweet. Other apps that utilize Camera+ integration include WordPress, Twitterrific, Foodspotting, and Twittelator Neue.

I'm very impressed with the update so far and will spend more time with Camera+ over the coming weeks. Camera+ has always been one of those apps that was great in theory, but the UI and workflow never really clicked with me. With these added improvements, I'm willing to give Camera+ another shot.

$0.99 -Download Now

There's a plethora of photo collage apps in the App Store, but Fuzel is one of the best one's I've ever come across. One of its defining features is that you can design your own layouts by placing the separators precisely where you want. It also has a gorgeous design.

The home screen of Fuzel looks like a photo album with the square cut out to preview one of the photos inside. Tapping on the album (or swiping it) will open the album to the first page -- your latest collage. From each page, you can quickly edit, share, delete, or access a thumbnail view to browse all your collages. Swiping left or right will navigate to your other projects.

When creating a new collage, you can design the layout exactly how you want from the Cut screen. Placing your finger on the screen will bring up a straight line that you can move around and angle exactly how you want. Using two fingers will give you more precision. Once you've added all the lines you want, you can further customize their placement by moving the intersection points which allows you to be creative with the shapes of the cutouts.

Once you're done with your cuts, each space becomes a place to put a photo, which you can grab directly from your camera, or select from Facebook or your albums and Camera Roll. The width of your outlines can be adjusted and you can choose from 27 colors for your base.

Each photo that you add to your collage can be given one of 18 filters, allowing you to be creative with out you mix and match the filters between your photos. There are also 17 photo frames and captions that you can place around your collage.

If you're in the mood to just quickly create a collage without spending time designing a layout, there are also 36 preset layouts available in square, 2:3 and 4:3 ratios. These layout are also adjustable so that you can tweak them to your liking.

Once you're done with your collage, you can share to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, email, or save to your Camera Roll. Save as high-res is an option.

Like I said, Fuzel has got to be the best collage apps I've come across, yet. However, it does have some limitations. For example, the 2:3 layouts are in portrait and the 4:3 are in landscape, and you can't rotate them to change orientation. The other annoying feature is that when you add a photo that's stored on your iPhone, you can't sort by albums -- they're just all grouped together as a single album which is rather annoying for someone with a couple thousand photos stored on her iPhone.

Those are the only two things that really bother my, though, and still find Fuzel to be an excellent app. The possibilities are endless with Fuzel, and that's a very important trait for an art-creation app to have.

If you pick this one up, share your collages with us in the iMore Photography Forum!

$1.99 - Download Now

Twirl! is a refreshing approach to the world of puzzle games. It has a classic goal -- matching colors -- but a unique method -- twirling a block of 9 squares around the center square. Moving 8 blocks in single move is what makes Twirl! for iPhone and iPad so challenging.

The main goal of Twirl! is to create 3x3 squares of the same color. To play, tap on a small square. When you do, the 8 squares around it will rotate in either the clockwise or counterclockwise direction. You are allowed to specify which direction the twirl will go. You are also allowed to undo any of your moves.

There are three game modes: Classic, Separator, and Survival. In Classic mode, you are given 50, 100, or 200 twirls to make as many matches as possible. You have the same goal in Survival mode, only the number of twirls you have is not fixed. The more squares you make, the more twirls you get, and the amount of twirls you gain per square is dependent on which level you are in. In Separator mode, the goal is not to create these 3x3 squares like in Classic and Survival, but to group all the squares of the same color together. You can choose to play with two or three colors.

I recommend playing in Survival mode first because it doesn't have a limit on the number of moves you get. This allows you to really learn how to control your twirls and pick up techniques that will give you an advantage for Classic and Survival modes.

I'll admit to first being a little overwhelmed with Twirl! because of how much was happening in a single move, but once I relaxed and focused, I actually became hooked to the game. It's definitely a challenging game, but not so difficult that all fun is lost.

Check out the fun little trailer for Twirl! below!

$0.99 - Download Now

Every week the editors at iMore carefully select some of our favorite, most useful, most extraordinary apps, accessories, gadgets, and websites. This weeks selections includes a musical game, a jailbreak tweak, an accessory and app to accept credit card payments, a music identifier, a news readers, and a photo editor.

To see what we picked, and to tell us your pick, follow on after the break!

Guess Your Songs - @Alli_Flowers

Remember the old game show "Name that tune?" Remember how if they told you enough about the song, you could guess it in a single note? Well what if you only had a single note and no background information? What if that tune came from your own iTunes library?

Guess Your Songs is a great new game that you can play on your iPhone, iPad, Facebook, or directly through www.guessyoursongs.com. It uses your iTunes library, and plays you a snippet of a song. It could be a single note, it could be 10 notes - depends on the song - whatever fits into the two seconds you get to listen. Oh, and it's not the beginning of the song, either. This can be a challenge.

Once you listen to your two seconds of music, you get three choices. Guess Your Songs will display the album art (if you have it), and give you three song titles. All you have to do is tap the correct song. This can sometimes be tricky. For instance, I played one round, where I got two seconds of silence. When I looked at my choices, two were classical pieces, and the third had a lengthy bridge with spots that were so quiet they could have been silence. Very difficult to make that call!

The more eclectic your collection, the easier it is to guess correctly. If you have a large collection of music from the same genre, it could prove very challenging!

So challenge yourself to see how well you know your own music collection, and give this a try!

Free - Download Now

Zeppelin (jailbreak) - @JorjLim

Zeppelin is a very simple jailbreak tweak that allows you to change your carrier icon. Instead of reading "O2" or "AT&T" you can actually customise it to show the actual logo of the company, or even something completely different like the batman symbol, the Apple logo, or even the logo of your favourite sporting team.

When you initially download it it comes with some basic icons; from popular sci-fi series, video games as well as popular brands. However there are endless numbers of bonus packs to download in the Cydia store for free. (It even has their own category in Cydia)

If you want to really have simplicity, you can even set it to "none" to have nothing there at all.

One of the good things about this tweak is that you don't even have to respring when you change an icon, so you can switch between them on the fly without having to worry respringing your phone.

You can download this fun little tweak from Cydia for free.

Square Register for iPad - @iMuggle

I've been using Square as the main method for taking credit card payments for PXLFIX since last summer. I love the ease of use, idiot proof interface, and low fees. As much as I've always enjoyed being able to take a credit card wherever I was, whether in the office or on a consult, I've felt like Square could add a bit more customization.

Square Register is exactly what I'd been wanting to see them do. I can now have a beautiful virtual shelf showing all our services and repairs, I can favorite certain items that get used more than others, and add photos for each item. I also like the fact that I can choose whether or not an item is taxable. In the state where my business is located, we don't yet have to charge tax on labor so we have to break that out on invoices. Square makes it easier than ever. Just toggle tax on or off for any individual item.

I've been playing around with Square Register since it came out and I have to say that it's one of the best options for small businesses that don't want to be anchored to one point of sale or commit to several monthly fees. You can sign up for Square for free and receive a reader for free as well. Square Register is also a free download via the App Store.

Free - Download Now

USA Today - @Gmazo1

I'm a News junkie - I always have been. First thing in the morning - after I read my emails and check tweets from the night, i fire up two or three news apps to see what's going on in the world. I have vacillated between my iPad and iPhone - but usually turn to the iPad for one app - USA Today. AFter checking the front page of the New York Times, this has been my go to app.

Now, USA Today has been updated for the iPhone and it is awesome. They did a complete redesign of the iPhone app; the sections are in big, bold colorful letters on the left hand side. In each "category" you can choose from lots of options. Being a sports nut, I really appreciate the ability to see Top Stories, Scores and each sporting league right there for easy perusal.

I also like that the settings menu is built into the app. I can manage my alerts, choose display options and get support via email or twitter. There is even a handy weather widget on the front page that can be set to multiple locations. All in all, this is a great upgrade and has made this my new "go to" news app when I am just looking for quick stories - not in depth analysis.

Free - Download Now

Shazam - @Bla1ze

I'm getting old. My memory for the names of songs and tunes I like is no longer as good as it once used to be. For example, watching the iPad announcement I sat there wondering what the name of the song they played while showing off the new stores was pretty much for hours, even though I knew I had heard it before. I gave up though, and headed off to the app store to find an app that would know instantly. I found Shazam, played a few seconds of the song, Shazam sent it to the cloud and immediately gave me the answer I was looking for -- We are young by Fun featuring Janelle Monae. Shazam is free and available in the app store, right now.

Free - Download Now

iPhoto for iPhone and iPad - @llofte

One of the announcements during Apple's iPad event was iPhoto for iPhone and Mac. When rumors first started surfacing about this, I'll admit that I wasn't too thrilled because I've never been a fan of iPhoto for Mac. I'm happy to report that I'm actually very impressed with iPhoto for iPhone and iPad.

I don't want to repeat myself, so please take a look at my full review.

$4.99 - Download Now

The new iPad - @reneritchie

What? Stop looking at me like that. It had to be done! The new iPad packs an ridiculous amount of technology into a sleek, sexy package for an unbelievably low price. It's such a design, engineering, and logistical achievement that I'm guessing Apple's competitors likely went into collective apoplexy after watching the event on Wednesday and are probably still on pure oxygen.

2048x1536 Retina display pixels in a 9.7-inch display is crazy. It's more than your 1080p television at a tiny fraction of the size. 4G LTE networking is fantastic for those with coverage, and the Apple A5X chipset looks to be quad-core graphical monster. It's even got a 5mp version of the iPhone 4S' fantastic iSight camera built in.

And it's almost the same size as the iPad 2, and the same price. If you haven't gotten a tablet yet, it's a great time to start. If you have an original iPad, it's a great time to upgrade. If you have an iPad 2, it's a good upgrade provided one or more of the features fixes a real problem you've been having.

I'll be lining up to get the fully loaded version on launch day, but if you haven't made up your mind yet, we've got everything you need to help you decide right here:

• 2012 iPad buyers guide

Tell us your pick!

Those were our picks, iMore Nation, so now it's your turn! Tell us your pick of the week below. Give us the name of your favorite app, site, or accessory, and tell us why it made your life more productive, more informed, more entertaining, or just plain more fun. Jump into the comments and let us know your pick of the week!

iA Writer is distraction-free writing app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. It features an extremely simple UI whose sole intent is to help you focus on your writing. There isn't any fancy formatting options or an overwhelming amount of features. It's just a simple screen with a nice font and a keyboard.

This is exactly what makes it so awesome.

One of the cool features on the iPad (and Mac) is Focus Mode. When turned on, everything except the sentence you are writing fades so that you aren't distracted by something you've already written. For me, I know my eyes tend to wander, so if I notice a missing comma while writing, my thoughts get interrupted until I fix it. Focus Mode removes that distraction -- instead, I'll catch that missing comma when I proofread.

It also includes iCloud and Dropbox integration, so switching between your devices is seamless. Start writing your Mac, continue on your iPhone during your lunch break at work, and finish up on your couch with your iPad.

I've been using iA Writer for a couple months now for writing longer articles and editorials for iMore. It really helps me focus without the distracting UI of WordPress, where I used to do all my writing. Admittedly, I normally use it on my MacBook Air because I like using the physical keyboard; however, there have definitely been times where I've decided to continue working on my article while curled up on the couch with my iPad.

If you do any sort of writing that's not just emails, Facebook messages, and Twitter - I highly recommend iA Writer. You'll be amazed at your increased level of productivity.

$0.99 for iPhone and iPad - Download Now

$8.99 for Mac - Download Now

Spring is in the air which means it's the season for March Madness. With NCAA March Madness Live for iPhone and iPad, you don't have to worry about missing a game or losing track of the bracket.

NCAA March Madness Live is available for free and let's you listen to live game radio of all 67 games and has a live social chatter for teams in every game. You can also track the bracket, follow scores and player stats, get alerts for game highlights, and fil out your official NCAA Bracket Challenge bracket.

But that's not all, an in-app purchase of $3.99 will let you watch live streaming of all 67 tournament games, the CBS NCAA Basketball Championship Selection Show, live stream of of team practices from the Final Four. Miss a game? No problem, immediately after each game you'll be able to watch all the highlights.

Free - Download Now

Pop Camera is a collection of unique and funky camera types that will give you photos an analog, toy camera look to your photos. The really fun part? You can take anywhere from one to 16 photos at a time to be displayed at once as a collage. There is also a camera that takes double exposure shots, bringing in a whole new level of creativity.

Pop camera is equipped with 8 different cameras that take either 1, 2, 4, 8, 9, 12, or 16 photos, or one double exposed shot. Each camera has it's own funky design to add to give the illusion of using a real toy camera. For each camera, you have the choice of 14 different film types.

In addition to the fun photo stories I can produce with Pop Camera, I also love the layout of the app. They could've been boring by just putting a row of filters at the bottom of the screen and used the entire screen as a viewfinder, but they made it funky, instead. Sure, a larger view finder has its benefits, but the experience that Pop Camera's UI gives is more fun. You actually get to see the design of the camera your choose -- as in, it's outer design. When choosing film, again, it's not just a boring list. Each film type gets it's own page that shows a roll of film and a sample photo taken with that film.

I'm really having a lot of fun with Pop Camera. If you decided to pick this one up, please share your photos in the iMore Photography Forum!

$1.99 - Download Now

Firemint has announced evolution to their classic game Flight Control -- Flight Control Rocket. It's scheduled to release later this month, just in time for the new iPad.

Leave the terrestrial skies of Earth and venture into a whole new galaxy of adventure, action and addictive, path-drawing gameplay! Relish compelling yet intuitive touch screen controls; soak in the retro Sci-Fi visuals and original music score and unlock a cast of quirky Robots to grant your mothership a competitive edge.

Check out the teaser video below!

Source: Firemint

iPhoto is a fantastic photo editing tool, in some ways better than it is on the Mac, but suffers from an inexplicable lack of useful sync.

Apple has brought iPhoto to iOS. Announced alongside the new iPad, but available as a universal app for the iPhone as well, iPhoto completes Apple's mobile iLife suite and once again challenges the misconception that multitouch is better geared for content consumption than creation. iPhoto took the longest to arrive on iOS, despite being the most popular of the iLife apps. So... was it worth the wait?

Photo Editing

I'm am very impressed with the editing power of iPhoto. It's better then iPhoto for the Mac, that's for sure. It's jam packed with options, so it's nice that Apple included an info button that pops up a bunch of helpful notes about what each button does and what each filter or brush is named. (Not as nice as if they'd made the user interface more intuitive, but nicer than having to poke around and get frustrated.) If you tap the arrow on one of these tabs, a help screen will pop up with more info on the specific feature.

Color adjustments

The basic editing tools include cropping, auto enhance, and exposure. Included in the color adjustments tab is options to adjust saturation, white balance, and skin tones as well as smarter adjustments for blue skies and greenery. Be careful with these two, though. If you don't have greenery or blue skies in your photo, it produces horrific results.

This is the perfect time to mention that iPhoto does not support layers or masking, so you cannot exclude a portion of your photo from an effect or adjustment taking place. There is an option to preserve skin tones when making color adjustments, but it's mediocre at best.

To make color adjustments, you can move sliders provided at the bottom of the editing screen, or you can just drag your finger directly on the parts of the photo that correspond wit the color type. For example, holding your finger on the sky will pop up the Blue Skies tool and sliding your finger left or right will adjust the slider. Doing the same thing anywhere on your photo, but vertically, will adjust the saturation.

You can also adjust white balance with the typical presets that come with most apps and cameras: sun, cloudy, flash, shade, incandescent, and fluorescent. There is also a Face Balance tool that lets you choose a person's face and iPhoto will automatically choose a good white balance for the skin tone. Lastly, you can make select a white point on your photo with the custom white balance tool.

Brushes

The best editing feature of iPhoto is the brushes. There are 8 of them: Repair, Red Eye, Saturate, Desaturate, Lighten, Darken, Sharpen, and Soften. The Repair brush will removes things like blemishes, dust marks, and scratches. The other Brushes are self explanatory.

To use a brush, you simply use your finger to "paint" the areas of your photo you the affect applied to. My biggest complaint is that iPhoto doesn't use a circle to show where you're touching -- the only visual cue is to see the results of the brush. But if you're making subtle changes, it's very hard to notice. However, the alternative that's available is the option to show your strokes. Turning this on displays all your strokes in red. When you're done applying the brush, just turn the strokes off to see the results.

My other gripe with brushes is that you cannot adjust the brush size - well, not directly anyway. The brush size is always the size of your fingertip, so to adjust it, you need to zoom in and out of the photo. This is just terrible. It's hard to be precise.

Now, I started out by saying that the brushes are the best editing feature of iPhoto, but have done nothing but complain about it. That's because, despite these two flaws, brushes are actually very powerful tools. The opacity of the brushes are fairly light, so you have control over how drastic you want the change to be -- just paint multiple strokes over one spot to create a thicker layer, so to speak. Showing your strokes is very helpful in this regard.

Effects

iPhoto has a set of filters that Apple calls Effects. The categories are Artistic, Vintage, Aura, Black & White, Duotone, and Warm & Cool. Honestly, there isn't really anything special about them in comparison to other apps, they're filters that change the look of your photos. End of story. Well, I guess the fact that you can adjust the vignetting intensity makes it a little bit more interesting?

Example of final edit

Here's the before and after comparison of a photo that I edited fairly quickly. I think it's a great example of a nice edit job that isn't overdone. I cropped and rotated, used the Face Balance tool, increased the Greenery slider, applied the repair, sharpen, and soften brushes, and added the Saturated Film filter from the Vintage category.

You can see a larger version here.

Sharing , Beaming, and syncing (or lack thereof)

You can share you photo from iPhoto directly to your Camera Roll, iTunes, email, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, and an AirPrint compatible printer. There is also a new feature called Beam that lets you share photos from one device running iPhoto to another device on the same Wifi network also running iPhoto. It's really easy to use and a great way to share photos between devices. Unfortunately, it's also the easiest way to share photos between even your own devices.

I was really hoping that with the introduction of iPhoto on the iPhone and iPad that my iPhoto libraries would stay in sync between iPhone, iPad, and Mac, but this is not the case. It's not even the case within iOS. Each devices has their own library. Having photos and the non-destructive edits that go with them seamlessly sync between all devices would have been the single most useful feature a platform owner like Apple could implement. I expected more from the maker's of iCloud. Maybe in a future update.

Journals

iPhoto has this fun new way to display your photos called Journals. It's basically a collage of your photos with the ability of adding captions, blocks of text, notes, map, weather widgets to your collage. You can resize your photos and drag and drop them to place them exactly how you wish. Unfortunately, you cannot adjust the size of the widgets, so even if your sticky note only has one small phrase, it must still take up just as much space as four small photos.

Journals are pretty fun to play with and can be shared online through iCloud. This will give your Journal its own web address that can be shared with whoever you want. All your photos are also downloadable from your online journal - a "feature" that cannot be disabled.

I was very disappointed to learn that this was the only real way to share a Journal. I was really hoping for an export that would allow me to then share my Journal to my personal blog.

You can see an example of a journal that I shared through iCloud here.

The good

• Very powerful editing tools
• Journals are pretty cool
• Easy to use
• Integrated user manual is awesome
• Beam is a great and easy way to share to other iOS devices

The bad

• iPhoto libraries don't sync
• Brushes don't have visual indication of brush size
• Must zoom in and out of photo to adjust brush size, which isn't very precise
• No support for layers
• Can't adjust size of inserted widgets in a Journal
• Can only share Journals online through iCloud

The conclusion

iPhoto is a fantastic addition to the iLife family on iOS with very powerful editing tools. Sure, there are some things that could be changed to make it better, but at just $4.99, it's quite a steal. Minus the creation of books, cards, and calendars, it's better than iPhoto on the Mac.

$4.99 - Download Now

The social networking app Path recieved a significant update, today, that allows users to journal their Nike+ runs, identify music that's playing around them, and when taking a photo, they can adjust the focus and exposure separately.

To journal your runs, you must connect Path to your Nike+ account directly within the Nike+ GPS app. When you start your run, Path will post on your behalf, letting your friends know so that they can cheer you on. Once you've completed your run, Path will display a map that shows where friends cheered you on and where you hit your best pace.

In addition to the welcomed upgrade to the camera that lets you choose separate focus and exposure points, Path has also debuted a new filter called Pow! that created a comic book effect. The Pro, Ansel, Instant, Diana, and Lomo lenses have also been greatly improved.

Music Match is an unexpected addition to the Path. It's like Shazam -- just let your iPhone listen to the music that's playing around you and it will identify the song for you.

There's a lot of significant feature additions in this update to Path that make the app more desirable. I'm still not entirely sold on the service, however. It does have a lot of potential, so I look forward to the continued development and growth of Path. Personally, I'm gonna give it another shot.

Free - Download Now

Smugmug, the professional digital photo sharing service, has released a powerful new camera and photo editing app for iPhone called Awesome Camera that literally "awesomizes" your photos.

Smugmug defines "awesomize" as being able "to trick your friends into thinking you're a famous photographer", and although I wouldn't go quite that far, Awesome Photo's awesomize feature does a great job of improving the look of your photos.

In addition to the awesomize filter, Awesome Camera is also filled with presets and filters (most of which need to be download as an in-app purchase). But photo editing is not the only thing the Camera Awesome does great. While taking a photo, Camera awesome will let you separate the focus and exposure of your shots, but the awesomeness doesn't stop there.

How many times have you missed a scene because you started your video recording just a few seconds too late? Camera Awesome has camera mode that records video 5 seconds before you even hit the button! Now you can stop recording an unnecessary amount of video and not hit record until the desired action starts happening -- Camera Awesome lets you travel back in time!

Lastly, and just as awesome, Camera Awesome is available for free!

Free - Download Now

Now you can watch all your favorite ABC Family shows on your iPhone or iPad with the new ABC Family app. Available shows include Switched at Birth, Secret Life of the American Teenager, Jane by Design, and The Lying Game, Make It or Break It, and Pretty Little Liars.

Additional features include a schedule of air dates, viewing history, and closed captioning.

ABC Family has a great UI and runs smoothly. My only complaint is that if you accidentally start playing a show, you cannot go back until the commercial finishes playing.

Free - Download Now

Are the instruments in GarageBand for iPad just not good enough for you? Amidio is in the process of making a universal iPad/iPhone case with Bluetooth connectivity and... wait for it... a dedicated ukele synthesizer app. Futulele will support 12 chords for each song, with the ability to switch chord sets easily. Sharing, recording, and effects from their previous app, OMGuitar, will be ported over to the app.

Of course, we've seen accessories like this before, such as Guitar Apprentice, which is built to be more of a faithful reproduction of the real instrument, and honestly, this seems like overkill given that ukeleles are really inexpensive -- you can get one for $30 or so. If iPad connectivity is really that important for sharing or editing, why not just  use it to record your performance on a real instrument?

Futulele is still in the prototype stages, and Amidio is hoping a manufacturing partner will be able to squeeze in some dedicated speakers into the case as well. Anyone interested in this sort of thing?

Source: Mashable

YouTube link for mobile viewing

Do you have a desire to journal but get writer's block every time you stare at that blank page or screen? Getting started can often be the hardest part of journaling. Roller Journal knows this and guides you through your journalling journey by asking you simple, effective questions to get you started.

When creating an entry with Roller Journal, you are immediately asked one of twenty questions, including, "What are you looking forward to?", "If you could be anywhere right now, where would you be", and "What's one thing you'd like to change about today?"

After answering a question, you can have Roller Journal continue to ask you more questions until you're done. If you don't want to answer a particular question, you can delete it and move on to the next one. You can also set up Roller Journal to always ask you a predetermined set of questions every time you journal for those one or two particular questions you want to keep track of and see how your answer changes.

Speaking of which, if you want to track a specific question, Roller Journal offers a way of looking up all the answers you've given to a particular question so you can see how it's changed and hopefully get some insight about yourself. Unfortunately, you cannot create custom questions.

For the private types, Roller Journal has the option to be passcode protected, and for the public types, you can share your entries with Facebook and Twitter. You can also backup all your entries with Dropbox so that you can relax knowing that your journal will never be lost.

This is such a great way to get started with keeping a journal. The hardest part is starting, but Roller Journal takes that burden away from you by asking questions that hopefully provoke more than just one word answers -- and if you do give short answers, that's ok too -- everyone's gotta start out somewhere.

$1.99 - Download Now!

Halftone is a fun little photo editing app that creates comics out of photos by adding add paper styles, captions, speech balloons, graphic stamps, and fonts (including built-in comic fonts).

When you first import or capture a photo, Halftone gives you options to add effects, crop and rotate the photos, and make adjustments to brightness, contrast, saturation, colors, and sharpening. Once these edits are complete, the photo gets imported into the comic editing mode and the real fun begins.

It's here that Halftone lets you choose between 25 paper styles and 9 layouts. If you add speech bubbles, Halftone will even recognize faces in your photo for automatic balloon placement. Next, you can choose between 15 different color-customizable stamps such as "Arrrggh!", "Blam!", "Sploosh" and other shapes like stars, hearts, and fireworks. Lastly, you can choose between an expansive list of fonts including 3 licensed comic fonts: Digital Strip, Alter Ego, and Billy the Flying Robot.

Once your masterpiece is complete, you can send it as a postcard, save to your camera roll, email, print, or send to other photo editing apps like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Photogene.

$0.99 - Download Now!

800 photos a minute -- this an insane amount of photos and Fast Camera for iPhone accomplishes this without skipping a beat.

Fast Camera is one of the more interesting apps I've come across lately. The second the app launches, it opens the camera and a little ticker starts rolling. There is no visual cue that photos are being taken except for this ticker, and I'll admit, I was a little confused. Once I realized what was happening, I tapped stop, then preview, and boom, there was 200 photos of my MacBook Air, in only about 15 seconds.

Then I thought out loud -- "holy crap."

After further investigation, it turns out that if you want photos to be taken at this rate, you must have it set to VGA quality, even from the rear camera. At 8 megapixel sized photos, the rate is closer to 140 photos per minute - which is still pretty darn fast. (Take a look at the larger version of the above photo to see the stopwatch times while taking 8 megapixel sized photos).

Situations where Fast Camera will be helpful could include trying to capture a series of photos to tell a story, wanting to catch an exact moment (like your dog catching his ball mid-air), or even for group photos -- prop up your iPhone, set the built-in timer in Fast Camera, then press start and run into the group. After the photos are taken, you can scroll through to find the best shot.

Fast Camera is normally $0.99, but for today only, it's free! So go grab it!

Free - Download Now!

Following their 25 Billion app download, Apple has updated their list of all-time top App Store apps in both the free and paid categories. The original list was launched back when Apple celebrated 10 billion app download.

This time around, they've gone ahead and increased the section sizes from 10 to 25 for both iPhone and iPad apps, making them rather long.

Federico Viticci from MacStories did some heroic work parsing out the trends.

• 17 apps from Top Paid for iPhone chart are from the Games category.
• There are no Apple apps in the Top Paid for iPhone chart.
• There are no Apple apps in the Top Free for iPad chart.
• There are 4 Apple apps in the Top Paid for iPad chart.
• There are two Google apps in the Top Free for iPhone chart, no Apple apps.

Check out their full analysis via the link below. For a full list of the apps (and an easy way to get any you may be missing) hit the iTunes link.

Source: Top App Store apps on iTunes via MacStories

Every week the editors at iMore carefully select some of our favorite, most useful, most extraordinary apps, accessories, gadgets, and websites. This weeks selections include a few games, a fun children's book, an app for writers, and an interesting photography app.

To see what we picked, and to tell us your pick, follow on after the break!

Draw Something -- @Alli_Flowers

Did you ever play Pictionary? Great party game. This is basically the same game on your phone or tablet. Notice how nonspecific I was there? That's because you can play on your iPhone, iPad, or Android phone or tablet - so you can play against your friends, no matter what they use.

You're given a choice of 3 words, easy, medium, or hard. You choose the one you think you can draw, and you draw. So far so good. When your opponent's turn comes, he sees a video playback of you drawing. Beneath the drawing are some letter tiles, so he has a good chance of figuring out what you've drawn, regardless of your talent. You tap the letter and pop it into the spaces to spell out the word.

You get "coins" for guessing your words, 1 for the easy word, 2 for the medium, and 3 for the hard ones. There are a few opportunities to get help. For instance, you can choose a different set of words if you can't draw any of the words you initially pull. If you can't guess the drawing, you can get rid of some of the letters so that you have a smaller pool of letters from which to choose. But your second chances are not unlimited, so use them wisely.

There are two versions of Draw Something. One is ad sponsored and free, the other is currently on sale (on all platforms) for $.99. This is a great game that's fun for all ages. (My youngest opponent is 8!)

Free - Download Now, $0.99 - Download Now

Ladybird Classic Me Books –- @chrisoldroyd

I have a real soft spot for classic children's books as I remember them fondly from my childhood. Luckily Ladybird Classic Me Books is available in the App Store and it brings back the magic of these wonderful books.

The App is a little buggy but the way the books are reproduced to look and feel like the original hard backed books I read is very impressive and you soon forgive the bugs. The titles available are excellent and includes classics like The Gingerbread Man and The Three Little Pigs. My little girl absolutely loves this app.

The app costs $0.99 and for that you get one book included, the other books are all available through an in-app purchase at an additional $0.99 per book. I can't recommend this app enough if you have young children and enjoy reading to them!

$0.99 – Download Now

Elements for iPad - @iMuggle

I've tried several writing apps on my iPad and always find myself coming back to Elements. Sometimes I just don't want to carry around my MacBook Pro but have a need to write or take notes on the go.

Given I do a fair amount of writing with Markdown for iMore, I've found Elements to be a perfect combination of writing on the go and from my computer. Since it syncs all my notes with Dropbox, I can pick up right where I left off when I get back home or to the office.

When you're done writing you can export to PDF or HTML, print, or email the file. Elements also gives you the option to publish directly to Facebook or tumblr is either one of those services are important to you.

If you're looking for a lightweight client for anything from shared notes to lengthy articles, I highly recommend checking out Elements. I don't do much writing from my iPhone but for those that do, Elements is available as a universal binary for both iPhone and iPad.

$4.99 - Download Now

WordFoto -- @andrewwray

WordFoto is a neat little photography app that lets you turn iPhone photos into typographic masterpieces. It features a smart algorithm that inserts preselected words or user input phrases into any photo you've taken on your iPhone, or any image you've imported from your iTunes library. By letting you create your own unique word sets, the possibilites are quite literally endless, and the results are superb.

By offering up a number of fine-tuning options like Color Tolerance, Edge Threshold and more, you can really drill down to make your photo enhanced to perfection and the word set will perfectly integrate into the image without a hitch thanks to the algorithm they've come up with. You can also choose from a number of built-in styles, including classic Gray, Comic, Black Label, Howling, Prankzter, Romance and Blocky. If you're not partial to the included styles that comes with the app, you can create your own custom style to personalize the image with absolute detail. Adjust shadowing, highlights, color saturation and image contrast, padding and even font selection.

Of course, the app wouldn't be complete without social integration, so WordFoto lets you share all of your creations on Facebook or send it off to friends or family via email. Additional adjustments let you crop the image and inspect everything in great detail using zoom functionality so you get everything just the way you want it. Create amazing typographic images with WordFoto and wow your friends like never before!

$1.99 -- Download Now

Treasure Trouble - @reneritchie

We had the pleasure of speaking to Michael Flarup of Robocat on the last episode of our Iterate podcast, and during the show I downloaded their Treasure Trouble for iPad game. It looked gorgeous but I couldn't exactly launch it and start playing in the middle of the show. Things got busy, as they usually do, and I didn't have a chance to check it out until last week. And yeahbutwow is it a lot of fun. The core idea is simple -- you trace paths on a treasure maps. It starts slow but builds up fast. More paths. More complicated paths. It'll challenge your eye-hand-coordination, and your multitouch gesturing skills both. And this being a pirate themed game, there might just be some drinking involved.

Yo. Ho. Ho.

$2.99 - Download now

Circadia - @llofte

Circadia is such a fantastic puzzle game. Each level has both colored dots and a white dot. Tapping a colored dot will emit a tone and circle who's radius grows a specific rate. Each color emits a different tone and the circles for the lower tones grow slower than the higher tones. The goal is to tap the colored dots in the right timing so that they converge on the white dot at the same time.

It may sound easy, but it's actually very challenging.

The levels start out pretty easy with just two colored dots and a stationary white dot. The level I'm on now (level 41) has 3 colored dots and the white dot is moving. Crazy. I know.

The other thing I really like about Circadia is that it's just so incredibly gorgeous. The bright, vivid colors against a black backdrop is pure eye candy. That, and Circadia is geometric, so as a math nerd, I was instantly drawn in.

$0.99 - Download Now

Tell us your pick!

Those were our picks, iMore Nation, so now it's your turn! Tell us your pick of the week below. Give us the name of your favorite app, site, or accessory, and tell us why it made your life more productive, more informed, more entertaining, or just plain more fun. Jump into the comments and let us know your pick of the week!

The countdown is over. The 25 billionth app has been download from the App Store and one lucky person (hopefully an iMore reader!) has won a $10,000 iTunes gift card. This milestone has been reached just shy of 4 years after the App Store's launch on June 10, 2008. Not bad!

No word on who the winner is yet -- if it's you, what do you plan to spend all that iTunes cash on?

Learning the alphabet is a big milestone for every child and My A-Z for iPhone is one of the many options out there to aid in your child's learning. What makes My A-Z unique is that you can customize the alphabet to contain photos of things your child already knows.

For example, one of our family dogs' name is Ally, so for the "A" card, I have personalized it to spell Ally, show a picture of Ally, and recorded audio of my voice saying "A is for Ally". Even though my daughter is a bit young for learning her ABCs, she still lit up when she saw a picture of her dog on the screen and said "ruff ruff!"

You aren't just limited to a single photo, however. My A-Z let's you create as many cards as you want for each letter and swiping up and down will cycle through the cards. Swiping left and right will cycle through the letters.

I think My A-Z is a fantastic app to aid in teaching your children the alphabet and adds a fun, personal element to the process. The only thing that would make it better is if it was a universal app for the iPhone and iPad.

$1.99 - Download Now

When I decided that I wanted to learn how to play the guitar, I wasn’t sure where to start –- so I turned, as I always do, to my trusty iPad.

I’m not the most spontaneous person in the world – my wife and kids would say that is a huge understatement. I am a bit programmed and disciplined and really work on “trying new things.”

So, in my disciplined way, I decided that at 48 years of age, it was time for a mid-life crisis. Since I’m not terribly spontaneous, I have an amazing, beautiful wife and six great kids, my mid-life crisis needed to be something out of the norm.

I thought about getting a motorcycle, but my family seems to think I lack the proper coordination and that it might end very badly for me if I tried that. Then it dawned on me – what I wanted to learn how to do was play the guitar. I have been playing the piano since I was about six, I knew music theory and I played in bands in high school; but what I really wanted to do was learn the guitar.

I found my goal, and set upon my journey with iPad 2 in hand to start my adventure. The first thing I needed to do was buy a guitar. I fired up my eBay app to see if I could get a good used one. When nothing jumped out at me, I launched the PriceGrabber app and looked for a guitar that got a great write up in Guitarist Magazine that I had just read using iOS 5's Newsstand.

The PriceGrabber app let me look for a guitar that got a great write up in Guitarist Magazine that I had just read using the Newsstand app

PriceGrabber - Free - Download Now

I ordered my new guitar and started looking for apps to teach me how to use it. I was very surprised that when I did a search for “Guitar” in the App Store, I found over 800 iPad apps and close to 2000 iPhone apps. Where to start? I narrowed my search to “Beginner Guitar” to narrow the field a bit. Pay dirt!

To better cope with the quantity of apps in the App Store, I narrowed my search to “Beginner Guitar” to narrow the field a bit. Pay dirt!

Beginner Guitar Songs - Free - Download now

I found Beginner Guitar Songs from GuitarJamz.com. Marty Schwartz, who is an amazing guitar teacher, showed me how to hold the guitar, how to hold the pick, basic strumming patterns and then introduced easy chords to learn. I quickly progressed through the Beginner Lesson Series and advanced to Important Guitar Chords. After an afternoon, I could play an E minor, A major, D major, G major, E major, A minor and C major chords –not bad for the first day.

Beginner Guitar was so much fun and I could really see some progress.

The next morning of my first weekend with a guitar, I fired up the Beginner Guitar app again and went through the Strumming Patterns and tried to learn some songs from the Easy Guitar Songs section. This was so much fun and I could really see some progress.

One thing that Marty did mention in the lessons was keeping your guitar in tune. I had forgotten about that. I touched base with some musician friends and read up on line. It seems that the “purists” like to use a tuning fork, the “realists” like to use an analog chromatic tuner and the “techies” like the digital chromatic tuner. I just couldn’t see dropping close to a hundred bucks on a tuner when I knew there must be “…an app for that.” Back to the App Store – this time searching for Guitar Tuner. I came across many options, but I settled on Cleartune Chromatic Tuner. For $3.99, I figured it would be worth a shot and it is great. Play a note on the guitar and the “analog looking” dial shows you how far off from the actual note you are. I just tuned my strings and kept plucking and tuning until the guitar was in perfect tune.

Play a note on the guitar and the “analog looking” dial on Cleartune Chromatic Tuner shows you how far off from the actual note you are.

$3.99 - Cleartune Chromatic Tuner - Download now

Now I was ready to learn more chords – I had about seven under my belt and I wanted more. I found the Howcast Guitar Lessons app and found over 140 video lessons – mostly chords and progressions. I spend the better part of the day learning more chords. I continued each day; adding a new chord and then reviewing the ones I had learned. By the end of the first week I had about 10 chords I was comfortable with. By the end of the second week, I had about fifteen I could remember and play. The Howcast app also taught me how to play scales and I learned the Pentatonic scales and the Blues scale and felt like I was ready to dive into some music.

I found the Howcast Guitar Lessons app and found over 140 video lessons – mostly chords and progressions.

$1.99 - Guitar Lessons from Howcast - Download now

I so enjoyed the GuitarJamz app that I looked for more stuff from Marty Schwartz and found Blues Licks, Solo Guitar and 100 Lessons and I downloaded all those apps. I then saw that in addition to the apps and the website, Marty had hundreds of lessons for free on his YouTube channel. I watched, learned and experimented to see what I could do. I had to remember, I was only a little over two weeks into my new hobby.

What I learned was that some of my favorite classic rock songs were pretty easy. America’s “Horse With No Name” – two chords. The Beatles’ “Let it Be” – four chords. Cat Stevens’ “Peace Train” – four chords. I could do this.

Over the next few weeks – and now after about four months – I have been watching YouTube videos, using the Chromatic Tuner app and downloading guitar sheet music via the Songsterr Plus app. The guitar learning apps showed me how to read guitar tablature and chord diagrams – so I can do that as well.

The Songsterr Plus guitar learning app showed me how to read guitar tablature and chord diagrams – so I can do that as well.

$9.99 - Songsterr Plus - Download now

As I write this, I have just learned the guitar solo to Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” – something I never envisioned I would be doing four months into learning how to play the guitar. Now, I still need lots of work and I’m sure my technique needs improving. Thanks to a Valentine’s present for my first “in-person” guitar lesson, I hope to work on those things and more. However, the reality is that I really did learn how to play the guitar using my iPad.

Have you learned how to do something new using your iPad? Let us know by posting a comment below or joining this discussion thread in our forums.

How many times have you started your run with the intent of finishing your mile in a specific amount of time, then halfway through give-up and slow down, promising to do better next time? Now what if your music slowed down when you slowed down -- would that be enough to keep up your pace? If yes, then Faster for iPhone is for you.

With Faster for iPhone, you will will be motivated by your dislike for horrible, slow music to keep your pace. Just tell Faster how far you plan to run and how long you want your run to take. It will use GPS data during your run to determine if your pace is fast enough to meet your goal. If you run too slow, Faster will slow down your music.

Some other features include voice feedback, calorie burn tracking, detailed logs, and achievements. You can also compete with your friends (and strangers) for total distance and best times.

I tested out Faster this evening and it works as advertised. When I slowed my pace, hearing the slow, distorted music was definitely a motivator to pick up my pace.

The whole point of Mobile Nations Fitness Month was to help you get motivated to take fitness seriously and make lifestyle changes to better your health -- maybe Faster for iPhone will help you keep that momentum going.

$0.99 - Download Now

The popular reading platform Readability has finally made it's way to the iPhone and iPad and boy is it beautiful. If you're not familiar with "read later" services, they transforms web pages into a clean, simple reading view -- no ads, no crazy stylings, no heavy layouts or navigation. You can even save the cleaned paged to read later on your iPhone, iPad, or computer. Once you've synced over your articles, you don't even need to be online to read them. If you've ever used the Reader button or saved something to Reading List in Safari, then Readability is similar (Apple based Safari Reader on an earlier, open source version of Readability), but it's contained all in one app and does a lot of things Reader and Reading list don't.

Readability is integrated with a lot of different apps, including Reeder, Tweetbot, Early Edition 2, Twitterrific, and Echofon. You can also install a bookmarklet to your web browser on your computer. The idea is that if you come across an article that you know you want to read later, you can do so while using any of these apps and continue on with the task at hand knowing that the article will be waiting for you when you're ready to read it.

The typography in Readability for iPhone and iPad is gorgeous. It comes with 5 different fonts by Hoefler & Frere-Jones, making reading a truly pleasurable experience. In addition to customizing the font type, you can also adjust the size, contrast and margins to your liking.

Readability also has some nice gestures making switching between articles, deleting, and marking as read or favorites a breeze. It's also equipped with it's own browser so that you can search for and add articles directly within the app. And of course, you can share your favorite articles with Facebook and Twitter.

Readability is a free service that is free to download, but if you want to give back to the websites that you frequent, you can sign up for a $5/month subscription. 70% of your contributions will go back to the writers or publishers you read with Readability. It's a great way to support your favorite sites.

Free - Download Now

A picture is worth a thousand words -- and WordFoto takes this quite literally by artistically splattering meaningful words all over your photos, transforming them into typographic works of art.

Creating your masterpieces is simple -- just add the words you wish to appear in your photo and WordFoto will choose where and how large the words appear on your image and apply a filter. You can also choose from 8 preset styles or create your own by choosing the colors for shadows/highlights and adjusting saturation, brightness, contrast, padding, and font. You can store up to 8 of these custom styles that can be quickly accessed for other photos.

If you still want to make a few more adjustments, head to the "finetune" tab where you can make further changes to the edge, edge threshold, and color tolerance. You can also force the entire image to be re-rendered for other word placement options.

Speaking of word placement, sometimes the wrong words end up emphasized. For example, in this example, the most important word should be "California", yet WordFoto made "state" the largest word in the photo.

WordFoto definitely needs to include the ability to mark the importance of the words. After many rendering attempts, this was the closest I could get to focusing on the word "California".

My other complaint is that you cannot share directly with Twitter. You can only share to your Camera Roll (from where you can then tweet), Facebook, and email.

Despite these two changes I'd like to see, I still recommend WordFoto for creating photos with a message because it does this very well and quite beautifully. Not to mention, WordFoto is extremely easy to use

$1.99 - Download Now

I've been sucked into yet another puzzle game - this time it's Circadia. For me, what makes a puzzle game great is if the objective is very simple, yet achieving that goal is challenging, but not impossible. Circadia has found the perfect balance.

Each level has a constellation of colored dots. Each color is assigned a sound so that when you tap the dot, a circle grows around it with the dot as its center. It's as if the circle represents a sound wave leaving its origin. Not all colors are treated equal, however; the circles for lower notes grow slower than for high notes.

The goal? Get the color bursts to converge on the white dot at the same time.

Simple premise, yet very challenging. Circadia does a great job of easing the player into more challenging levels, but not at a snail's pace that makes you lose interest. It wasn't long before I was working on levels that included three colored dots per level. These were pretty challenging, but then Circadia went and scaled it back down to only two colored dots -- and a moving white dot. Moving! Screenshots show that Circadia does eventually introduce 2 white dots into the levels and I'm willing to bet there's a level set with both dots moving.

Oh, and did I mention that the simplicity and vivid colors make this a very visually stunning app?

I made it to level 40 before deciding that I needed to stop and write this review. If you pick this one up, I'd love to hear how far you get!

$0.99 -- Download Now

Popular video sharing service Vimeo has added iPad support to their App Store app so now you can upload, edit and manage all your videos natively on the bigger screen. I've played around with it, and it's very nice.

You also have the ability to simultaneously watch a video while browsing other clips, which is great, and if you're looking to discover something new, Vimeo provides "meticulously curated" channels, based on your interests.

If you're making your own movies and looking for a soundtrack, the editor now has Vimeo Music Store integration, which means there are 45,000 tracks available for you to choose from right on your device.

Vimeo claims their latest update also gives you the ability to browse featured channels without logging in or signing up. Despite this claim, I did have to create an account before viewing any videos, otherwise the app would crash. Once I signed up, everything worked like a charm. Hopefully that gets fixed soon.

Overall it's a great update for anyone wanting an easy way to store, spice up, and share their videos online, or simply enjoy new and original videos on their iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad.

Free - Download Now

Screens VNC, the best designed, easiest to use VNC app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, recently went 2.0 and now handles remote computing better and faster than ever before. Even better -- we've partnered with Edovia Inc to put both the iOS and Mac versions of Screens VNC into the hands of 5 lucky readers! That's $50 worth of apps for each winner!

For a chance to win, just leave a comment below! The contest begins now and ends Sunday, March 4 at midnight PST.

$19.99 for iPhone and iPad - Download Now

$29.99 for Mac - Download Now

Every week a few of us from team iMore 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!

FilterStorm 4 -- @Alli_Flowers

The other day I watched someone struggle with Photoshop on a pc. Not long after, over on Twitter, @redwhiteandjew recommended FilterStorm. Since I was already in the image editing mindset, I decided to check it out.

The Filterstorm website (http://filterstorm.com/fs4/videos) has tons of video tutorials, including a feature walkthrough. I was quite impressed with the variety of tools and ease of use, but kept thinking it was overkill for me. Nonetheless, it didn't stray far from my thoughts. And then I watched that someone still struggling with the same image in Photoshop and thought...I'll bet Filterstorm would be perfect for that. So I parted with my $3.99 and installed Filterstorm on my iPad.

I must say that Filterstorm is not for the faint of heart, or the novice image editor. Its tools are powerful, and I spent time watching and rewatching all their video tutorials before attempting my first edit. But what a great job it does! If layers and curves are what you need (and who doesn't need them if you're editing photos?!), then you will never again do any editing on your desktop.

This screenshot gives you only a tiny taste of the power you get with Filterstorm. There are more options inside each filter tab. The video tutorials make it a treat to use, and you feel that help is only a click away.

$3.99 -- Download Now

Air Media Center -- @sethclifford

In my search to reduce the number of redundant apps I use on my device, I'm always trying new media server apps. I wrote about Emit in a previous pick of the week. Air Media Center is another in a long line of apps that has a mobile interface that hooks into a server component that you run on another machine. This week I tried it because of one specific thing that it offered that Emit didn't - photo support.

Until Apple provides me a great way to host all the photos I want to see externally and view them seamlessly on my devices without physically syncing them all, I'm on the hunt for the best way to do this with third party apps. Previously, I kept my entire photo library in Dropbox, and used the mobile apps to view pics, but my photo library grew by a few large leaps with the addition of a DSLR to the mix, so that was out. Then I started optimizing pics and resizing them and keeping them in Dropbox, but it's a lot of effort to stay on top of my folders, and ultimately, I'm not altogether thrilled with the way Dropbox handles image viewing on iOS. It's ok, but not ideal.

Air Media Center does the table stakes stuff pretty well - streams all kinds of video files with live conversion, and it does the same for music (I still use iSub and Subsonic for music though, because nothing can beat Subsonic for me right now. The differentiating factor for me as I said was photos. What sets it apart is the way in which you can browse the photos. In Dropbox, you see a list by default - just text - until you tap on one, at which point you can tap another button to view a series of thumbnails similar to the Photos app. In AMC, you get a similar list to start, but the list has reordering options; you can sort by name or date, and jump to the beginning or end of the list as such, and (wait for it) - thumbnails in the list view. As soon as I saw this, I was thrilled. Once you tap into a photo, as with Dropbox, you can load a thumbnail view of all the photos in the folder as well. But just being able to flip through the list visually first is huge for me.

There aren't any options to share or to save to camera roll for the picture as with Dropbox however, so if that's something that's important to you, you'll miss it here. The interface is really nothing to go bananas over either, but as I've said before, in cases like this, it's a tradeoff I'm sometimes willing to make if it makes access to certain things easier. It's easy to configure, works great over wi-fi, and can be shared to be accessed remotely over 3G as well. The companion app is free in the Mac App Store, so if you're still looking for a media client with a little more, you're in for two bucks.

Air Media Center, $1.99 -- Download Now

Air Media Server, Free -- Download Now

XBMC for iOS –- @chrisoldroyd

As I have a jailbroken iPad I decided to try installing XBMC for iPad. For those that don't know already, XBMC was originally created as a media center application for the first-generation Xbox game console but has since been ported to lots of different platforms, one of which is the iPhone and iPad.

Running XBMC on my iPad gives me access to all of my media on my networked storage. Better still I don't need to convert it to the crazy file types that a stock iPad restricts me too. This system enables me to play AVI and even MKV right over the air onto my iPad 2 and it looks perfect. Now here is the real crazy part. If you have a camera connection kit for your iPad, you can copy your video files onto an SD card and XBMC can read them right off the card. That has given me an additional 32GB of storage space!

XBMC is free and you can learn how to install it from the XBMC Wiki.

Procreate -- @bla1ze

While I don't get much time to sit down and draw much any more, when I do have a few moments I always like to check out some of the drawing apps for the iPad. One that I've been digging for a bit now is Procreate, mainly because of the simplicity offered but should you decide to get a little more advanced with your artwork, it supports that as well. With auto-saving features, the ability to export PSD files that support layers and brush customizations, it's a great tool for artists or casual drawers alike and it only costs $0.99.

$0.99 -- Download Now

Anticrop -- @iMuggle

Anticrop is a pretty easy to use app that does exactly what the title implies - instead of cropping an image to be smaller, it allows you to extend an image.

It's a lot like the free transform feature you'll find in Photoshop or other similar tools on your computer. If you need to extend an edge of a picture, Anticrop allows you to do so in just a few taps

Load up the picture you'd like to edit and drag the border in the direction you'd like to extend it.

Obviously this won't work for images that have hands or people in the part you're trying to extend but it'll work for most patterns and scenery shots extremely well.

It's a much quicker way to perform a quick edit than having to transfer a photo to my computer for editing.

$0.99 -- Download Now

WeeToolbox (jailbreak) -- @andrewwray

With so many jailbreak extensions hitting Cydia nowadays, it's hard to sift through everything and avoid some of the bad eggs. Many jailbreak modifications could even be considered useless for some, but once in a while there's a real gem that comes along and just can't be ignored. WeeToolbox is definitely one of the better tweaks that beefs up Notification Center in iOS 5 so much, I'm actually surprised the developers didn't end up charging for it.

With WeeToolbox, you can quickly send a tweet, make a call, enable the LED flashlight, send copied text to Pastie and access your camera with just one tap, all right from within Notification Center. Calling up the camera and sending quick tweets are two of my favorite features of WeeToolbox. If I'm ever in a pinch or on the go and don't have time to load up Tweetbot, I just pull down Notification Center and with just one tap, I'm immediately tweeting away. It's extremely useful for taking photos in an instant by tapping the camera button from anywhere on the iPhone, too! It could just be me, but I swear the camera loads slightly faster from WeeToolbox versus launching the Camera app from the iPhone Home screen. This would be possible with MobileSubstrate hooks, but I'm really not sure if that's the case as the developer didn't specifically mention anything in that respect. However, it's definitely faster than the stock app, that's for sure -- and especially evident with the slower iPhone 4 compared with the iPhone 4S.

I've also found the flashlight to be very useful whenever I need to light up a darkened room. Sometimes I come home late at night and all the lights are off, so instead of blindly wondering around the living room tripping over everything before I'm able to switch the lights on, I can now instantly turn on the flashlight from the Lock screen (thanks to IntelliscreenX putting Notification Center on the Lock screen, of course!) and save myself a bundle of frustration. WeeToolbox is great if you have a jailbroken iPhone, and I highly recommend giving it a try -- you'll wonder how you ever got by without it!

Free -- Download Now

Tell us your pick!

Those were our picks, iMore Nation, so now it's your turn! Tell us your pick of the week below. Give us the name of your favorite app, site, or accessory, and tell us why it made your life more productive, more informed, more entertaining, or just plain more fun. Let us know your pick of the week!

It's not long before Facebook will require everyone to switch to the new timeline profiles and Cover Photo Maker for Facebook is here to help you design the perfect header for your timeline.

It comes equipped with 16 templates sized perfectly for a Facebook Cover photo. Each template is a collage of 1-5 photos with customization of border thickness and color. For even more personalization, Cover Photo Maker for Facebook has over 30 unique and stylized fonts for text. When your cover is ready, you can upload it directly to Facebook, email it, or save it to your camera roll.

Cover Photo Maker for Facebook is very easy to use and is a quick and easy way to create a unique cover for your Facebook timeline. However, it's not quite perfect. The biggest disappointment being that the resolution of the final image leaves a lot to be desired. I'm a photo snob, though, so the results may be more than satisfying for someone else.

It would also be nice if the app overlaid a box exactly where you'd expect your profile photo to be, so that can make sure none of the important elements of your cover photo will be hidden behind your profile picture.

If anyone picks this one up, we'd love to see your results in the iMore Photography Forum!

$1.99 - Download Now

Does looking through your tweets make you cringe and despise the impression that it gives of you as person? Tweeticide is here to give you a fresh start! With just the tap of button, Tweeticide will delete all your tweets. You can now relax about being judged by that potential employer!

Although Tweeticide deletes all of your viewable tweets, it's worth mentioning that Google's cashe may still pick a few of them up for awhile. Also, don't forget that deal Twitter made with the U.S. Library of Congress - undeleted tweets that are more than 23 weeks old get sent to the Library of Congress for archiving, so even if you delete them from your stream, they will forever be in the hands of the US Government. To exclude individual tweets from this archival process, just include #noloc in your tweet.

$0.99 - Download Now

Here's a few apps we think think will do just that.

Magnificat Lenten Companion 2012

This universal iPhone and iPad app is designed to help you live all the graces of lent through daily prayer, liturgy, meditation and inspirational essays and poetry. The content is presented in a day-by-day format, similar to a devotional.

The layout of the app is very simple and strait-forward. However, I think the font size on the iPad is too big and there isn't a way to adjust it.

$0.99 - Download Now

40 Days - Lent Observance Tracker

With Lent, comes commemorations, and 40 Days - Lent Observance Tracker offers a way to stay true to your vow to abstain from chocolate, candy, beer, and whatever else you decide. With each of your commitments, you assign a dollar value and every time you slip up and sneak that piece of chocolate, you must record it in 40 Days - Lent Observance Tracker with the idea that once Lent has passed, you donate your total to charity. This, of course, is not a requirement, but if you commit, it's a great way to stay motivated (or forgive yourself for those few times you do slip up since it ultimately benefits charity).

$0.99 - Download Now

Days Without

If assigning dollar values to your commemorations isn't your thing, Days Without is an app that simply keeps track of how long it's been since you gave something up. It's not specifically designed for Lent, but still a great motivator nonetheless. Watching the number grow as the days pass will make you feel proud of your accomplishments.

Days Without allows you to track multiple goals and includes an automatic counter. The icon will display a badge that tells you how many days it's been for the selected goal.

$1.99 - Download Now

Your favorite Lent app?

Have you run into any other apps that you've found useful during this lent season? Do you have a favorite Bible app? What are you giving up for lent? Share and encourage in the comments below!

There are a countless number of tip calculators in the App Store, but what sets Billr apart from the crowd is that it offers a way to quickly and fairly split a bill, including tax and tip. By fairly, I mean that instead of an even split, each member of the group only pays for the items that they ordered and tax and tip on just those items.

As someone who often orders inexpensive entrees and water with my meals in an effort to save money, there is nothing more annoying than when the guy who ordered lobster and 3 cocktails announces that we're just going to split the bill evenly because it's easier that way. Well, now that guy can shut up and pay his fair amount, because with Billr for iPhone, calculating everyone's share is quick and easy.

Upon launching Billr, you select how many people are in your party then move right along to entering the price of the items that each person ordered. The layout of the UI is perfect for quick entry. The bottom half of the screen remains as a keypad and the top half of the screen displays a scrollable list of tickets for 4 people at a time.

Next, you enter either the percentage or dollar values of the tax and tip and Billr instantly does the rest. It will display up to 8 tickets at a time with the exact dollar amount owed by each person. You can then pass your phone around for people to see their totals, or you can send the results via SMS or email.

The only thing that's missing is the ability to add items, like appetizers, that can be split between multiple people. It's already an awesome app, possibly the best tip calculator currently available, but if the folks at Billr add this feature, it will be the perfect tip calculator app.

$0.99 - Download Now

App Savvy, the makers of the popular calendar app, Agenda, have released a new, just as productive app for contacts -- Buzz Contacts. This app offers a way to quickly access your contacts that are most important.

To use Buzz Contacts, you must first create groups of contacts that you frequently need access to, like family and coworkers. In each group, you then add buttons to quickly call, message, email, or FaceTime your contacts. Each communication method gets its own button so that when it's time to perform an action, it's very fast.

There is nothing elaborate about Buzz Contacts, but this is precisely what makes it so desirable. Each page only consists of four contacts displayed as a 4x4 grid with the first name in large text and a symbol that represents voice, text, email, or FaceTime. Tapping a contact will instantly perform the desired action, but confirms before placing phone or FaceTime calls.

Using one app for your favorite, frequently used contacts and one for everyone else can get annoying and confusing, so Buzz Contacts has also included a full list of all your contacts and a dialer so that you can stop using Apple's native Contacts app if you wish. In fact, Buzz Contacts' dialer is better than Apple's, because once you start entering a number, it will pop up contacts that match what you've entered so far.

The clean, simply UI of Buzz Contacts has won me over and I've already replaced Apple's native Phone app with Buzz Contacts on my dock.

$0.99 - Download Now

Lock Screen Designer is a great little app for creating custom wallpapers for you lock screen. It's filled with skins, frames, and decorations that you can combine with photos to create something that reflects you.

One of the disadvantages to the iPhone is that Apple doesn't allow much personalization to the look, but a couple of areas that they do permit such customization is with the home screen background and lock screen. Lock Screen Designer will help you make the latter truly unique.

To create your lock screen, first choose a skin, which is the background of your design. You can do this by scrolling through them one at a time, or you can pick from the thumbnail view. Then you choose a frame and add a photo and decoration if you wish. Included with the decorations are sticky notes with customizable text and calendars. When complete, you save the image to your Camera Roll and assign it as your lock screen wallpaper.

The paid version of Lock Screen Designer includes additional skins, frames and decorations (including calendars) that can be downloaded from inside the app.

Free - Download Now

$0.99 - Download Now

Twitter for iPhone has received yet another update and brings back some high-demand features including the swipe shortcut. There is also a nice clear warning that explicitly states that the Find Friends feature accesses your contacts' email addresses and phone numbers.

Some other new features include the ability to copy and paste the contents of a tweet, and share tweeted links. The Direct Messages UI has also been updated and now allows you to mark all messages as read. Lastly, you can adjust the font size from Settings.

It's great to see Twitter make these improvements, but I'm still not a fan of the overall look and layout of the app. Andrew also reports that the swipe shortcut is rather sluggish on his iPhone 4. But my opinion is by no means the only one, so let us know what you think about the update in the comments below! If you are using a different Twitter client, is this enough to bring you back to the official Twitter for iPhone?

It's important to note that although Twitter is a universal application for iPhone and iPad, these changes are only reflected on the iPhone.

Free - Download Now

Source: Twitter

Simply HDR has the potential of turning your ordinary photos into extraordinary ones. HDR photography has turned into an art form itself, and Simply HDR does a great job of creating these types of images with very little work from the user.

Most HDR apps require you to take at least two photos, each exposed differently, to be combined into a single image. Simply HDR aims to make the process, well, simpler, by performing the edits on just one photo. This is great for those times when you're browsing through your Camera Roll and realize that a photo you took the other day might look nice with some HDR processing.

After opening the photo you'd like to edit, you can choose from five different styles: High Dynamic Range, Black and White HDR, Contrasted HDR, Shadows and Lights, and Contrasted Light -- each of which has 9-15 different "filters" to choose from. Then you can adjust shadow and highlight corrections, vignette settings, grain strength, and add a tint.

Many people like the over-processed look that HDR photos can achieve, so if that's what you're looking for, Simply HDR does it well. Personally, I prefer subtle, natural-looking HDR processing. Lucky for me, Simply HDR has some options that fit my taste as well. The photo above is one such example.

If you pick this one up, we would love it if you shared your images with us in the iMore Photography Forum!

$0.99 for iPhone - Download Now

$1.99 for iPad - Download Now

"With iCloud integration, SSH keys, and a re-designed Screens Connect, Screens 2.0 handles remote computing better and faster than ever before."

Screens 2.0 from Edovia lets you use your iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, or Mac to take control of anything from your home computer to a secure server room, from the couch while you watch the big game, to poolside, half a world away, while you sip an umbrella drink. Mobile VNC (Virtual Network Computing) is the dream every geek has had since we first saw prop tablets on TV starships, since we first heard talk of ultra-thin clients. And Screens 2.0, thanks to its design and usability, opens that dream up to a wider, more mainstream audience than ever before.

There are many VNC apps available for iOS, and several of them are excellent. Which you ultimately prefer will come down to personal tastes and requirements. Do you want your finger to move the screen, or move the mouse cursor on the screen? Do you want something that stands alone, or is tied to a subscription service, perhaps one your company or enterprise uses? Do you want something specifically designed for iOS, easy to set up and intuitive to use, or something incredibly bare-bones and expert-user focused?

Screens is a universal binary for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad, and a separate app for Mac

Screens 2.0 makes deliberate, Apple-style choices. It's gorgeously designed, intuitive to use, and as consistent with iOS and OS X standards as can be. If you're coming from an enterprise environment where you're used to using a specific, point-and-click based PC tool, Screens can take some getting used to at first. If you've never used VNC before, Screens makes it incredibly accessible.

When you first launch Screens, or any time to tap Help in the Settings menu, you get all the information you need to get going with VNC.

Screens setup is ridiculously easy. If you're not already familiar with the basics, Screens give you a quick how-to on startup, including connecting to Mac, Linux, and Windows, using Screens Connect on Mac and Windows (more on that later), and using the Screens app itself, including gestures, Siri dictation, the pasteboard, and more.

Screens will automatically detect and help set up any computers on the local network, but also allows IP connections and SSH tunneling for experts.

To add a screen (remote computer view), just tap the button at the top left. Screens will automatically detect nearby and remote computers on your network. For most users, when on their home or work network, this is the fastest, easier way to get up and running. Just tap the tab, tap the name of your computer, and Screens will populate most of the general connection info for you.

Screens options include scrolling type, color depth, and custom gestures for everything from Mission Control to CTRL-ALT-DEL

You still have to enter your own username and password, either your Mac user account, or VNC account. If you're a more advanced, or security conscious user, you can also add machines via IP address or Hostname, enable SSH tunneling, toggle color-depth, and create custom gestures.

Your available screens (machines) are beautifully rendered -- even with multiple display configurations -- and available at any time with a swipe and a tap.

Once you have a screen set up, you'll see it available on the Screens desktop. On the iPad you can switch to a grid view to easily re-oder them as well.

Tap a screen to launch it. If you haven't saved or recently entered your password, you'll be asked to enter it for security. Then your screen will open up. It's literally that simple to get remote access to your desktop or laptop from your iPhone or iPad (or other Mac, if you're using the Mac version.)

Once in your screen, swiping with your finger moves the screen around (not the cursor, as it does in some other VNC apps), and two-finger swipes scrolls the content within the active window (for example, scrolls through a document or web page). You can pinch to zoom, and touch-and-hold one finger to drag a window around or drag and drop an icon or highlighted text. Responsiveness for panning and zooming is remarkably fast and fluid. Scrolling within a window is a little slower.

A single tap is equivalent to positioning the mouse curser and clicking. A double tap is a double click, a two-finger touch-and-hold is a right mouse click (or ctrl-mouse click). These can be a little trickier to accurately pull off, especially on the physically smaller iPhone display, so you'll want to make sure you're as zoomed in a possible first.

If you're connecting to a Mac, three finger swipes default to changing Spaces or launching Mission Control. Other Mac options include launching Spotlight, showing Dashboard, etc. Windows options include Open Start Menu, CTRL-ALT-DELETE, etc. Four finger swipes are currently used for for system-wide multitasking gestures on iPad, but if you disable them in Settings, you can reassign them for specific Screens actions as well.

Screens can display your computer in portrait and landscape orientations, and has regular and special function keyboards.

Screens 2.0 for iOS has a great new unified toolbar. Escape, tab, shift, control, alt/option, and command/Windows keys, as well as arrow keys, the Action button, and a special purpose as well as default keyboard are all accessible along the bottom of the screen. The standard keyboard is just what you're expect, and the second, special purpose keyboard lets you quickly minimize, close or quit an app, undo, redo, or send to pasteboard, copy, paste, or cut, and similar, as well as offering function keys F1 through F12.

On the [iPhone 4S](http://www.imore.com/iphone-4s], Screens' default keyboard includes Siri dictation for easy voice-to-text entry.

The keyboard doesn't automatically appear when you tap into an editable area of the screen; you have to open it manually. That's typically been my experience with other VNC apps as well, and I can see the reasoning behind it, but it feels a little un-iOS-like.

The Action button lets you quickly disconnect, snap a screen shot, or access help and settings.

Closing a screen is as simple as tapping the Action button and hitting Disconnect. You can also use the Action button to quickly take a screenshot (of just the desktop, not the entire display the way a built-in iOS screenshot would) and quickly access Settings and Help.

Overall, the iPad feels like it was made with a VNC app like Screens in mind. The large 9.7-inch display just works so well. The iPhone and iPod touch can feel a little cramped at 3.5-inches but the density of the Retina display mitigates that a lot. And yes, Screens 2.0 just screams for a Retina iPad 3.

Screens 2.0 for Mac is every bit as easy to setup and even easier to use, since you're driving a windows-mouse-pointer interface with a windows-mouse-pointer interface, and don't have to worry about mapping multitouch gestures to point and clicks the way you do with iOS. If you're familiar with Apple's own Back to my Mac service, it's almost as elegant (just not built into the system), but it works with Windows and Linux machines as well, not just OS X.

Screens Connect lets you easily, almost effortlessly open a VNC session to your computer while on a different network

Completing the picture is Screens Connect, which lets you open a screen into your home or work computer while away from home or the office, on a different network. After setting up a free Screens Connect account via Edovia's website, you download Mac or Windows clients and install them on your local machines. They keep track of your machine's IP address, so you can always find that computer remotely, over the internet. Because most of us don't have static IP addresses, a service like Screens Connect is really a must-have for remote connections.

On a final, fun note, with AirPlay mirroring you can even beam your screens via Apple TV your big screen HDTV, which is great for conference room demos.

The good

• Excellent design, very iOS-like experience
• Incredibly easy to setup
• Universal binary for iPhone, iPod touch, iPad
• Also has Mac version
• No subscriptions or additional services required

The bad

• Precise cursor placement with multitouch requires a lot of zooming

The conclusion

With iCloud integration, SSH keys, and a re-designed Screens Connect, Screens 2.0 handles remote computing better and faster than ever before. While other VNC clients have some advantages, such as more precise mouse placement, or integration with popular subscription RDP solutions, Screens is the most iPhone, iPad, and Mac-like remote computing app on the market today. It's the easiest to setup and the most familiar to use. That makes it a great VNC app for anyone just getting started with remote computing, or anyone who wants something with a great user experience that "just works". If you're a pro or a network admin, you might cycle between several different VNC apps depending on the situation. Screens 2.0 will almost certainly become one of them.

Screens 2.0 requires iOS 5 on iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad, and OS 10.7 Lion on Mac. It's is available now, and is a free update for existing users.

$19.99 - Screens for iOS - Download Now

$29.99 - Screens for Mac - Download Now

Free - Screens Connect - Download Now

Special thanks to our resident networking wizard, Anthony Gabriel, for his assistance with the testing.

We're over halfway through Mobile Nations Fitness Month, so it's time to spice up your fitness routine with some salsa dancing. Pocket Salsa is an iPhone and iPad app that will have you workin' your moves, burning calories, and having fun all at the same time.

Pocket Salsa is filled with over 150 instructional videos that teach everything from the basics of salsa dancing to intermediate level dance moves. I am probably the furthest thing possible from a dancer, and even I'm able to learn from these very clear lessons.

Watching videos on your iPhone or iPad is great and all, but you can enhance your learning experience by sharing the lessons to your television with Apple TV.

In addition to videos, Pocket Salsa also includes a list of salsa rhythms making it real easy to quickly turn on some music to practice your new moves. You can also watch the latest video podcasts from addicted2salsa to learn even more.

Most of lessons are for couples, so go grab a partner, tell them to get on board with Mobile Nations Fitness month, and get dancing!

$3.99 - Download Now

As if raising a child wasn't stressful enough, baby products like cribs, car seats, and strollers are constantly being recalled and it can get overwhelming to keep track if you own a recalled item. With Recalls Plus, you you can relax knowing it will notify you if any of your products have been recalled.

Parents aren't the only ones who need to concern themselves with recalls, however. That's why Recalls Plus also keeps track of allergen recalls. Whatever your concern might be, Recalls Plus lets you search recalls by category or specific items. You can also create a custom list of products you own and Recalls Plus will send you a notification when an item from your list is recalled.

What I like about Recalls Plus is that after I added all the products I'm most concerned about for my daughter's safety, I just buried the app away in some folder and know I don't ever have to think about it again -- the piece of mind is priceless.

Free - Download Now

My iPhone is the perfect cycling companion. It entertains, informs and keeps track of where I go and how long it takes me to get there.

February is Health and Fitness Month at Mobile Nations, and my exercise program for most of my adult life has been cycling. Living on Cape Cod, I am treated to some beautiful vistas, ocean views and a fair share of challenging hills. During the warmer months, I can be at the ocean in about seven minutes and then continue for 20 – 30 miles along the coast.

My rides would be far less enjoyable without my iPhone as my entertainment/navigation system and ride recorder. I use the heck out of my iPhone for pretty much every ride. Seeing as though we have pretty much avoided “winter” this year, I can continue my outdoor rides - even on a February afternoon!

Monitoring your general health

Fitter keeps track of any significant changes to BMI or body fat percentage or other measurements.

I have been pretty fortunate for most of my life in that I have stayed at virtually the same weight for the last 15 years (as long as I stay active.) I do have some fluctuations and occasionally use apps like the Fitter Fitness Calculator to keep track of things.

Fitter - $0.99 - Download now

Getting the right music

Having a great playlist on your iPhone can help keeping going, so can the right station on Pandora or Spotify

While riding with earphones is not always the smartest thing to do on a bike, most of the roads I travel are pretty empty; so I usually “plug in” when I ride. Often I will just put in one earbud and let the other hang so I can still hear the traffic.

I need to have the right tunes – especially on a longer ride – so I have a few options. I have a standard “Bike Riding” playlist that I made in iTunes, which usually does fairly well for me. There is nothing worse, though, than landing at the base of a hill and having a slow ballad come on. I try to keep all the music at a good beat to keep me motivated.

I also use Pandora stations and Spotify playlists on occasion. Everyone’s musical tastes are different, but for me, the Led Zeppelin station on Pandora usually suffices.

Free - Pandora - Download now

Free - Spotify - Download now

Keeping Track of the Ride

With the Strava app, I can keep track of all my rides and review them at any time.

I like to monitor my progress through the riding season. I set goals for distance, speed and calories burned. Fortunately, there are two great apps that I use to help me with this.

Strava Cycling is a great app and provides lots of useful data. It keeps track of where I am and where I go, how fast I’m going and what my average speed is. At the end of the ride, the path and stats of the ride are uploaded to their server, for easy reference later.

If you are looking for a “new” ride and are feeling competitive, you can try to beat the stats of another Strava user.

Another great feature is the Explore button that shows you other rides uploaded in your area by Strava users.

Road Bike Cycling Computer keeps track of all your data, and can even factor in weather and road conditions.

The other app I use is Road Bike Cycling Computer. It keeps track of each “Session” you ride and adds calories burned and rpm’s to the data. You can touch the History button to see your rides. One nice feature with the Road Bike Cycling Computer app is that you can input data for weather conditions and the type of surface upon which you were riding to help monitor your progress.

Get cycling!

My iPhone is the perfect cycling companion. It entertains, informs and keeps track of where I go and how long it takes me to get there. While there are certainly days where I leave the phone at home and ride with friends – most days you can see me pedaling along the shore, plugged in and monitoring my ride with one of the apps listed above.

Remember to jump into our Health and Fitness Forum and let us know your goals and how you are doing. You can even enter to win an iPod nano, and IOU for an iPad 3, or an XBox 360 Kinect!