Picks of the Week
Welcome to our weekly installment of Picks of the Week at iSource where we provide our expanded coverage of Apple accessories and applications Here we will promote our favorite iPhone, iPad, iPod, Mac and Apple TV related items, as well as bring you occasional tips and tricks. Hopefully many of our favorite items will also be of interest to you. Please feel free to comment on our selections, and suggest picks of your own. Check out this week’s picks after the break
Portal – Full Screen Browser (v1.0.1)
Picked by: AliciaB
My Pick of the week is Portal that introduces an innovative UI for the browser experience on iPhone, as an alternative to Safari. After reading an article on it on Gizmodo, I decided to take it for a ride. I’m always a sucker for novel ways of doing things coupled with gorgeous UI. And kudos to the developers for the ideas they implemented in the app. You have like a central dock button from which to launch activity on the web. There are 3 main portals (get it!) that open up the Tabs, Navigation and Actions menus – that in turn open up sub-categories like
Search Web, Go to URL, History, Reload, Find in Page, Print page, Add bookmark etc. You scrub through your choices in a semi-circle fashion – very unobtrusive, appealing and more importantly, easy to get used to. Because this indeed is the challenge to innovative developers, getting people to change their habits. I’m happy I bought the app. Now all I have to use it so it gets firmly entrenched into my daily routine. Who knows, maybe it will indeed replace Safari…
(€1,59 / $ 1.99) iTunes Link iTunes (US)
FileBrowser – Access files on remote computers (v1.8)
Picked by: Brandon
FileBrowser is my pick of the week because it brings to the iPad some genuine usefulness when it comes to replacing your laptop. One of the key missing ingredients for the iPad was it never shipped with anything like OS X’s Finder or Windows Explorer. If you had files you needed to get to, hope those were sitting on MobileMe or a Dropbox type service – otherwise you weren’t getting to them. Well, with FileBrowser you can browse files from all over your network (SMB Shares including Domain shares) and it can handle a huge array of file types for viewing. But what if you need to edit those files? FileBrowser has you covered there too because it can handle exporting to a number of third party apps (Pages, Documents to Go, GoodReader and more). FileBrowser is one of this indispensable apps for those of us who have files on the LAN that we can’t trust sharing out to “the cloud”.
($2.99) iTunes Link
Photo Transfer App (v2.2)
Picked by: PatrickJ
This is a great utility app if you ever need to move photos and short videos around between your iPhones, iPod Touches, iPads, and computers. It makes it easy to transfer photos in all directions between your iOS devices and your PCs.
It works with PCs running Mac, Windows, or Linux; lets you select up to 100 photos at a time (or 32 on an iPhone 3G or 1st gen); supports transfer of short videos (5 minutes or less) as well, transfers photos in full resolution and preserves metadata in all transfer directions.
I’ve used a number of apps that offer photo transfer, but none that are as rock solid and easy to use as Photo Transfer App. It’s exceptionally good at moving large numbers of photos quickly from iPhone to iPad (much faster than fussing with the Camera Connection Kit) or PC. It’s got a simple and effective UI and has become a very frequently used app for me.
($2.99) iTunes Link
Wunderlist Task Manager (v1.1.3)
Picked by: Renkman
I have been on the hunt for a good task manager app for quite some time now. I’ve tried at least a dozen different ones—free and paid. All I really need is a way to keep track of all my tasks in a clean, easy to set-up, cloud based system that isn’t filled with tons of other features I have no use for. I’ve found that that in itself is the hardest part sometimes. So many app developers now-a-days want to give us swiss-army knife apps, when all we might need is an app that does one thing really well. Thomas thoroughly reviewed Wunderlist when it first came out, and after the latest update at the end of December. Although he finds several short-comings with the first iteration of Wunderlist, he is quick to point out that the first update, released two weeks after the initial release, addresses some of his main concerns. I have found the newest version to be easy to embrace, easy on the eyes, and very good at keeping track of my tasks. Perhaps the big problem with Wunderlist vs some other task management apps is the fact that it really isn’t a task manager as much as it is a to-do list manager, and that’s alright with me. Either way, you can’t beat the price, so give the Wunderlist iPhone and desktop app a try and let me know what you think in the comments section below.
(Free) iTunes Link
There you have it! Hope you enjoyed this week’s installment of Picks of the week. Please let us know what you think, and share with us some of your favorites.
Continue reading:
- Everything New Apple Just Announced (Septembe
- Apple Watch Pre-Order
- Apple Research Kit launches with 5 Apps
- Apple TV now only $69
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