George Tinari

George started writing about Apple rumors in high school on his own personal blog. Over five years later, he's thrilled to have built up enough experience at various online publications to cover a wide expanse of technology news and reviews. Currently a university student, George is studying journalism and business administration. When he's not passionately writing or reading about all things tech, chances are he's listening to music, eating, trying to be funny or actually being funny.

Articles by George Tinari

TuneMob syncs multiple devices to play surround sound music
Very often, people have a lot of music on their iOS device that they'd like to play at a get-together or party. Unfortunately, the speakers on iOS devices are designed for personal use and therefore typically aren't loud enough to satisfy a group of people. Sure, you could go to the store and spend a few tens (or perhaps a few hundreds) on a Bluetooth speaker, but spending money isn't anyone's favorite hobby. Completely free, TuneMob is an app that solves this problem by pairing up multiple devices and playing music in sync on all of them. TuneMob is easy to set up and control. When you sign in with Facebook or via email, you have the option to either start a new session or join an existing one. If you start a session, you are officially the DJ. This means you're in charge of creating the playlist as well playing, pausing, skipping a song or moving back one. Then make sure your device has Bluetooth turned on along with all of the other devices you want to pair and sync the music with. Now on those other devices, rather than start a session, tap "Join" and TuneMob finds devices to link with. It can play music in sync with up to five devices. Aside from a master volume setting, each device can control its own volume without affecting the others. If you have all five on full blast, that makes for some pretty decent party music. Placing a few devices in a triangle around the room produces a rather satisfying surround sound effect. Of course the quality of the sound has limits rooted in hardware, but for an Apple device, at least it's loud. TuneMob gets its music from two sources: your own iTunes library or SoundCloud. Unfortunately there's no way to use the two simultaneously so you have to just pick one for the occasion, unless you want to switch midway through. I hoped TuneMob supported additional services like Spotify or Rdio but alas that's nowhere to be found in the app, but perhaps it's worth remaining hopeful for the future. So, is the sound all truly in sync? To my mere human ear, yes. Each device is playing music in perfect time with the other. In fact, when you first start your playlist, TuneMob initializes a five-second countdown before the party begins. I did notice when I paused the music on the "DJ" device there's an ever so slight delay for the others, but it's minuscule enough to be forgivable. While TuneMob is functional enough, I think the app could be even better if it tapped into its full potential. I'm talking more music sources like Spotify, plus the ability to pass on the responsibilities of being a DJ to a different device or rearrange the music queue after adding it. It's also important to note that TuneMob supports the iPhone 4S and later, 4th generation iPad and later, iPad mini and later and the 5th generation iPod touch. Overall, the app does exactly what it advertises and does it well, so I'm certainly not complaining. TuneMob a great tool for catering to the music needs of a group of people without spending extra cash on an external speaker. Better yet, since the app is free, you don't need to spend money at all.
Follow updates from only celebs you choose with Popeek
Popeek is a free app for iPhone that creates a personalized feed of Hollywood news tailored to you based on the celebrities you choose. When you select which people you're interested in, the app gathers links from Facebook and various news sources and puts them all in one place. It can even alert you of new updates as well. The Popeek app doesn't have much to it. When you open the app for the first time and log in, more than a few familiar faces should appear in the Explore section. This is where you select which celebrities you want to follow in your main feed. There's the A-list names such as Beyoncé, Angelina Jolie, Jay-Z, Justin Bieber, Kanye West, Katy Perry and then there's some lesser known folks like Lionel Messi and Bar Refaeli thrown in for some variety. Right off the bat, I wasn't impressed with the number of celebrities available to follow in Popeek. In fact, I can actually count how many celebrities there are in total: 33. Considering just how many people in Hollywood there are and how much coverage sites like TMZ spews out every day, that's a very small number. I selected a few celebrities at random to see what came up in my feed. It was a decently aggregated collection of Facebook posts, tweets and links from Hollywood websites like E! Online, Perez Hilton, Just Jared and some others. Each post comes with a like button, comment button and share button attached at the bottom for some social flair. Posts in Popeek like tweets actually just pull the number of favorites the tweet has into the app, so it's not just exclusive engagement from Popeek users. However, if you do like something in the app, it shows up in a collection of reverse chronological likes on your very own profile page. Where Popeek fairs a bit better is on individual celebrity profiles. The My Peeks section lists the celebrities you're keeping up with, but tapping one will show only content from them. Even better, the menu to the right of the profile grants access to a fan wall where Popeek users post messages, tour dates, videos, a Wikipedia bio and a store. Unfortunately, the fan wall, tour dates and store sections replaced any meaningful content with a "Coming Soon!" banner. Alerts in my experience were sporadic. I'm not entirely sure how the app chooses which news to alert you of, but I followed four celebrities and only received one alert in 24 hours for an insignificant news story involving Jennifer Lawrence. Popeek seems like an app that's ripe for potential, but its limitations are too much of a hindrance to give it a wholehearted recommendation. The main problem is the severely lacking library of celebrities. If you're passionate about keeping up with a wide range of celebrity gossip, chances are you won't enjoy much of what this app has to offer because it's truly minimal right now. I'd say Popeek is worth revisiting a few updates down the road once the content is built up. If you don't want to wait, get it for free in the App Store.
Star Walk Kids is a fun constellation browser for children
Star Walk Kids is a version of the astronomy apps Star Walk and Star Walk 2 - the latter of which TUAW's own Mel Martin called "impressively good looking" - designed specifically for educating kids about the wonders of the stars and the universe. It features use of the iPhone and iPad's built-in gyroscopes to label the stars as you pan your device across the sky, plus other information like solar system planets and facts presented in a fun manner for children. It requires iOS 7.0 or later and is available universally for US$2.99. What I love right off the bat about Star Walk Kids is there's no setup required which is ideal for kids. The app launches with a cartoonish landscape view of the world and stars in contrast to the regular Star Walks apps geared more toward adults. The cartoon-style is far from a bad thing though, it's actually quite attractive. Using your iPhone or iPad's gyroscope, pan the device around to find stars, constellations and planets. Panning down will reveal what's on the other side of Earth that's not currently visible in your night sky - a very nice feature. The first constellation I happened to glaze by was Andromeda. She appeared as I was panning, but when I tapped it the app said the name out loud. Tapping the name in the bottom left corner brings up a fact sheet including number of stars in the constellation, the brightest star and its latin name. Most, but not all, constellations come with an audio clip playable by tapping the audio icon in the fact sheet. This will play a short recording with an additional fun fact or two. I wish the audio clips were longer and more detailed, but they're still adequate. A limited number of constellations come with well-designed cartoon clips too, further explaining background information in a playful manner appealing to kids. Back on the main screen, there's some additional tools to aid in browsing the depths of the universe around us. If at any point you want to focus in on a particular area of the sky without your hand movements affecting the app, tapping the Compass icon will lock your position. Otherwise, it serves as a handy location guide. The Clock icon above that brings up a slider to rotate the view of the sky, essentially moving back or forward throughout the length of a day. If you want to skip the discovery aspect altogether, the magnifying glass displays a complete library of planets in the Solar System, constellations, individual stars and extras: the Hubble telescope and the ISS. The developers didn't miss a beat. The vast amount of information in this app is really impressive, especially given that it's a kids' app. Could there be more? Absolutely, but there's plenty here for the app to have serious educational value. Animations are buttery smooth and Star Walk Kids as a whole just makes learning about astronomy that much more fun. For just $2.99 including both iPad and iPhone versions, Star Walk Kids shapes up to be a must-have for kids curious about all that surrounds our planet.
Squiggle Racer's new world tour mode keeps you hooked
Squiggle Racer is back with a brand new world tour mode that adds hours of additional gameplay. The app is a deceptively difficult racing game that's wrapped up in an always nostalgic 8-bit design. The simple controls and easy instructions yet frustrating results evoke memories of Flappy Bird. Squiggle Racer is free with in-app purchases and requires iOS 7.0 or later. Kelly Hodgkins of TUAW gave her review for an earlier version of this game, all of which still applies to the game now. In addition to the new world tour game, there are basic tracks to complete - short and long tracks - with the goal of merely trying to beat your own record. You also pick from one of six cars to use, each very slightly different in speed and handling than the others. Left and right arrows toward the bottom of the screen guide the car along the track. Simple, right? Wrong. Squiggle Racer is brilliantly designed to appear easy but it's actually far from it. The cars typically take very wide turns, making it particularly hard to maneuver around curves in the road. In a typical racing game, one might consider this a flaw in the game's design. However, here it actually enhances the experience because although it's thwarting, you always find yourself coming back for more. This gameplay style doesn't change in the new world tour mode. The biggest differences between this mode and the regular racing tracks are the way the track is set up as well as a new list of challenges to accomplish. In world tour mode, the track is seemingly endless and scrolls along as your car moves. In classic modes, the entire track is shown on screen from a bird's eye view. When you enter world tour mode, Squiggle Racer presents you with the option to head straight to the tournament or practice in a grassy, desert or city area. I recommend getting some practice first because it takes plenty of time and patience to achieve a score even remotely decent. Regardless of what you select, before you play you have to choose a car. There's the original racer, sports car, Hummer, school bus, buggy or super racer. They range from being fast and furious to slow but steady to light and agile. Keep in mind though that this is an 8-bit game so none of them bring any wow factor to the table. Enter the tournament to see your three challenges. The first three are to pass 20 checkpoints, collect 40 coins and make it to the desert. You level up when you get past these. If at any point during the race you crash (and trust me, it's inevitable) you have to start from the beginning, unless you're willing to fork up 100 coins. If you run out of coins, packs of them are available as in-app purchases. The more cost-effective solution though is just to buy the full game for US$1.99 to unlock all the race tracks, remove the ads, gain 10,000 coins and reduce the amount of coins you have to pay to continue in the world tour mode. It's a pretty solid deal. The new world tour mode adds an extra layer of entertainment and dramatically increases the value of replaying it over and over. Squiggle Racer is ridiculously addictive and fun, and for free you really can't go wrong. You just have to be content with possibly throwing your life and productivity away.
Turn the real world into a profitable empire with Cashsquare
Cashsquare is a free app requiring iOS 7.0 or later that turns the world around you into a game for starting your very own real estate empire. The game uses Facebook and Foursquare to retrieve locations around you to compete with other players to "buy," then build upon and earn income on when others check in. Think the Monopoly board game with tie-ins to the real world and social media. Start Cashsquare by logging in with your Facebook or Foursquare account, then your handy tour guide of sorts will lead you through the first few steps of the game. Choose a nearby location to set as your headquarters which the game calls the "heart of your empire." You start off with $150,000. You use this to "purchase" properties around you like residences, banks, businesses as well as empty land. The other form of in-game currency is gold nuggets, and the game grants you with 250 of these to boot as well. My first purchase was an apartment complex down the road from me. I got a bit too excited because this property alone cost me about $220,000, which was more than the $150,000 I had. Luckily, if you don't have enough money, Cashsquare lets you put some of your gold nuggets toward the purchase. It's worth noting that this was on the high end of the pricing scale - most of the properties nearby cost anywhere from $50,000 to $75,000 so you don't blow all of your money on the first purchase. After buying the property, the guide instructs you to hire an employee that will work and earn you income. Each property has its own card for monitoring income and expenses. When you put your employee to work, you earn income at the end of the shift. You also earn income when real people use Foursquare to check in to your owned property. However, every 24 hours you have to pay some expenses too, which take a bite out of your profits. All of this, by the way, happens in real time. It's generally difficult to earn money quickly. The employee has working hours that translate into real minutes. For instance, at my apartment complex the shift is about 8 minutes and 30 seconds. You have to wait that amount of time to earn any income. Oh, but there's always a costly catch with these types of games, isn't there? Yes, in Cashsquare you most certainly can earn money quickly! You just have to be willing to spend some. At the bottom left, tapping "Advertise" speeds up the work process, but it costs gold nuggets. If you run out of gold nuggets, you have to either tediously wait to earn more in very incremental amounts or buy more via in-app purchases. The game is certainly interesting and unique enough in that it basically turns your actual surroundings into a game of Monopoly, but it suffers from a fatal flaw that most of the games within this genre also suffer from: if you want to get anywhere at a decent pace, you have to spend real money. To hire more employees, you need to have income, if you want income quickly, you need gold nuggets, if you want gold nuggets, you need to open your wallet and spend up to $100. Seriously. The same applies elsewhere in the game, even for purchasing more properties because when you run out of land, you have to acquire more using gold nuggets. If you don't mind the type of game that either requires you to spend money or check every few hours or days to see any progress, Cashsquare might be for you. The design is decent and gameplay is generally easy. Unfortunately, it seems people often lose their interest after a few weeks with these types of games because it becomes too difficult to move forward for free. Perhaps you're better off spending your time and money on something of greater value.
Bounce to impressive heights with Kitten Mega Jump
Kitten Mega Jump is an iOS game that places a fun, blue kitten on a trampoline and leaves you in charge of maneuvering it to collect coins and avoid obstacles. When you reach a certain score, calculated based on a combination of both, you'll level up and face new goals to accomplish at new heights. Downloadable now through the App Store, it's free to play and includes some in-app purchase options as well. Gameplay is truly an enjoyable experience throughout Kitten Mega Jump. The kitten immediately starts to slowly bounce on the trampoline and its your job to guide it to and away from certain objects as it bounces. You accomplish this by tapping on the left of the screen to move the cat left and toward the right to move it right. Otherwise, the kitten bounces completely vertically. The longer you press your finger, the faster it will move in that direction. Red birds (that most likely not by coincidence look like cousins of Rovio's famous characters) occasionally come to drop eggs, which the kitten must avoid. If it fails to do so, the game is over. On the flip side, gold coins will appear throughout the game that you should guide the kitten toward. Each coin is worth 50 points. As you advance in the game, new opportunities and challenges both present themselves. There are power-ups to help you out, like a bubble to temporarily protect the kitten from the impact of an egg or a tool that widens the trampoline to prevent leaping off and ending the game. Other power-ups are available for bonus round-esque gameplay such as a jetpack to freely soar and collect as many coins as possible for a short period of time. While all this is happening, new enemies come along like larger green birds with fiery eggs ready to threaten the feline. To advance in the game, you have to complete missions. Each one comes with three tasks to complete, very similar in nature to Jetpack Joyride. For instance, the first mission requests that you score 1,000 points, survive one season in the game and get the jetpack. Complete all three and you're on to level two. There's something I find incredibly charming about the game design here. Between the faux-3D menus UI and the deliberately cute gaming environment, it's probably hard to not like Kitten Mega Jump. The controls do require a small learning curve as I kept falling off the trampoline the first few times I played, but after that it's pretty much smooth sailing - er, bouncing. While the game is completely free to enjoy in its entirety, if you find yourself in need of more coins, grabbing some in the store will cost you some real bucks via an in-app purchase. A few different packages are available, but it truly doesn't feel gimmicky at all; it's easy enough to just take your time and earn the coins you desire. Overall I had a considerably fun time playing Kitten Mega Jump. The game lands perfectly in the middle of being addictive and simply intriguing. Grab it in the App Store for free.
Chicken Scramble is like 2048 with a unique barnyard twist
Chicken Scramble is a brand new app for iOS that draws inspiration from the popular 2048 puzzle game. Instead of swiping up, down, left or right to merge numbers, you start out by merging eggs until they hatch into chickens. The game is broken down into levels as well, so when you gather enough chickens, you move on to the next round which progressively introduces new features and obstacles. Free with in-app purchases, Chicken Scramble is now live in the App Store. When you start off in level one of Chicken Scramble, you might get the impression that this game is ridiculously simple. Since it has very small levels, the goal is not to keep swiping on the grid for 10-15 minutes until it fills up. Merge two eggs to create a cracked egg, merge two cracked eggs to create a hatched chick, then merge those two to create a chicken. You'll need two to get through level one. It's ridiculously simple, but if you have experience with these types of games, you know it's only going to get more entertaining, albeit more difficult, from here. Later on in the game you come across interesting new twists. In some levels, boulders appear at random places in the grid requiring you to maneuver around them to merge two items. In others, merging over a flower patch will double the amount of chickens you create. Even further in the game, you won't even have to collect chickens, but rather haystacks that are pushed together by two chickens. While there are no ads in Chicken Scramble, the game has two major in-app purchase options. The first is for health. If you quit a level while it's in session or you run out of moves for that level, you lose a life. You get up to five and they will refill themselves over time for free, but if you run out of lives and don't want to wait for a refill, forking over some real money is your only choice. The game's form of currency is gold. Gold allows you to buy power-ups to ease the pain of some of the more difficult levels. At the start, you get two power-ups and five uses of each: an undo button that will go back in time by one move, and very shortly after a claw for removing obstacles in the grid like the aforementioned boulders. (More advanced levels unlock a third power-up as well.) If you run out of these power-ups, spend gold to acquire a new set. Real money enters the equation if you run out of gold, in which case purchases ranging from $0.99 to $49.99 will get you more. Gameplay in Chicken Scramble is seriously exciting. I was enjoying the game so much that I actually started forgetting to take screenshots of what was happening for this review. Performance is solid, the graphics are just delightful and the game, like 2048, can get pretty addictive. In regards to that comparison, Chicken Scramble is more than unique enough to stand on its own and has huge potential to become the next big iOS game.
Aplos is a very flawed, but beautiful new Twitter client
Aplos is a brand new Twitter app for iPhone that tries to shove important user features into a minimalistic design. Some highlights include a unified timeline for multiple accounts, web browsing reminiscent of Facebook's chat heads and intelligent tweet actions for each account. In a very crowded App Store category, Aplos enters as a US$4.99 Twitter client for iOS 7.0 or later. As far as first impressions go, Aplos makes a terrific one. The design is nothing short of beautiful. The app even comes in six different color themes, including the default red and white, if you want to give it a nice paint job. The timeline streams tweets live from all of your Twitter accounts, which is clear by the profile picture thumbnails on the top left. Tap them to switch to individual views. The UI for tweet actions harkens back to the era of Tweetie, which featured a left-swipe gesture on any tweet to reply, retweet, favorite and some other actions. This works nicely in Aplos and helps keep the main timeline cleaner. Another feature I love is the chat head-like web browsing. Tap any link in Aplos, including tweet permalinks, and a thumbnail of that page bounces out from where you tapped and pleasantly lands in the bottom right hand corner. Tapping multiple links will store all of them in that corner and they all open up in a tab view when you're ready. In recent years, Twitter has been severely limiting the capabilities of third-party clients by restricting API access as well as just flat-out not providing APIs for features like seeing when people retweet or favorite your tweets. Aplos suffers from this hindrance, but it's not fair to blame this app or any others. Unfortunately, those are far from the only features Aplos is missing. There is absolutely no sign of direct messages anywhere within the app, which now more than ever is a prominent part of Twitter. Even worse, the app doesn't suggest usernames or hashtags when you start typing either in a tweet, forcing you to use memory as your only source, which most of the time (at least in my experience) doesn't work out so well. Twitter profiles only display the bio, location, website and information about who you know that follows the account and if the account follows you. Aplos lacks a way to view tweets from an individual account. It also lacks a way to view individual tweets themselves. Yes, a permalink is present, but that inadequately opens the tweet in an in-app browser window. The fact that Aplos is missing this smorgasbord of Twitter essentials is downright disappointing. I'm reminded a bit of the iPhone when it first debuted. Its gorgeous design and functionality successfully distracted from it lacking many basics such as video recording and MMS messaging. There's no doubt this Twitter client mimics the stunning design aspect, but functionally, Aplos is missing too much right now to recommend -- especially with its relatively high price tag of $4.99.
Craaave is an app that finally makes music truly social
Making music social is a feat many have tried accomplishing but no one has quite nailed it. Spotify and Facebook came pretty close when they teamed up to share what Spotify users were listening to on their Facebook profiles. This worked for a little while, but the prominence of music on Facebook has since diminished, signaling mediocre results to the experiment. So what's next? Craaave is a free app for iPhone yearning to answer that question. It's built entirely around the concept that music can and should be social. The UI of Craaave is ever so slightly reminiscent of Foursquare before its redesign. Much like a floating check-in button, a pink, hungry PacMan-esque icon at the bottom of the app is seemingly begging for someone to tap it. If you give in to its wishes, you are given two very distinct options. The first is "Tap to Listen" and the second is "Type to Search." Tapping to listen requires access to your iPhone's microphone so Craaave can enter what's essentially a Shazam mode -- that is, it'll listen to surrounding sounds and identify the song playing. It's not as fast as Shazam, but in my tests it was repeatedly accurate. If you aren't listening to music at the moment, start typing any song, artist or genre and Craaave will feed you results as you type. The app pulls music from a variety of services and your experience depends on which ones you use. Upon signing up, you're asked to link these to your account. The list of currently supported services include Spotify, Deezer, Rdio, SoundCloud and your iTunes library which Craaave includes by default. Even if you choose not to link anything else, the app also searches through SoundCloud's public database. Now here's where the social part kicks in. When you find or identify a song, you tap to send it to one or multiple friends on Craaave, optionally including a brief message up to 40 characters in length. They receive it in their inbox, just like you would if they send you a song. From there, they can play the song, press and hold it to save it to a particular service or buy it on iTunes. What's even more impressive is that you, as a sender, get to see this take place. If you switch to your Outbox view at the top, the app lists the songs you sent along with whether your friends decided to save it or not. This is a fantastic way to indirectly determine whether your friends have similar music tastes. The only potential downside I see to Craaave lies actually within its users. A group of people can still be friends while each person prefers a different genre of music. It takes either a friend group of similar or at least eclectic music tastes for this app to really shine its brightest. Luckily, music in general is something we all have in common. It's almost human nature for each person to feel a connection with some rhythm. This app has the potential to bring a lot of people together by taking the powerful experience of music and planting it in its own social network. Free and executed well enough, Craaave is available in the App Store.
Grow fighting power with gems, cards in Call of Challenger
Call of Challenger is an action/adventure game for iOS that uses the power of cards - for champions and powers - to build your fighting team, while still being fully interactive. The storyline is virtually the same one we've all heard before: a brave summoner (you) must embark on a journey to save a goddess and claim a treasure at the very end. Along the way, the summoner must win battles and unlock champions and various new powers to upgrade his fighting power. The game is free to play, but has many in-app purchase options. The game runs on all iOS devices running iOS version 4.3 or later. The beginning of Call of Challenger starts off a bit slow and confusing, but don't let this discourage you from playing because it improves after the first few battles. The summoner is placed on a grid-based map and you only get to see a small portion of it. Light illuminates the path you've traveled already, while everything that still needs exploring remains in the dark - a very clever design choice. Moving along this path introduces you to new people that will help along your travels, as well as enemies to battle. The game typically awards you cards after a victorious battle, but they don't play much of a role until a little ways in. Eventually you'll unlock Teemo, the first new champion. This is when cards start to come into play. A navigation menu will appear at the top of the game that lets you essentially pause the adventure to start using your cards and arranging your champions. If you tap a champion, buttons appear to evolve or upgrade the character. The champion card also displays a number of details like level, class and star ranking. The Arrange feature allows you to assemble a team of up to five different champions to fight at once. It's totally customizable, even letting you drag and drop champions into emphasized or deemphasized positions. Tapping "Upgrade" for any one champion shows you all the cards you've collected along the way to then apply to that champion. This becomes important for advancing in the game as giving champions new skills increases its ability to win battles when they become harder. However, adding cards to a champion costs gems, the game's form of currency. While gems are easy enough to earn to move forward in the game, it's even easier if you take advantage of the in-app purchases Call of Challenger offers. There are packages of gems ranging from $0.99 for 60 to a whopping $99.99 for 6,200. The fact that the $99.99 in-app purchase is more popular than the $9.99 one is pretty revealing about the addictive nature of this game. Graphics and performance are both solid. I experienced pretty much no lag or pauses performing variation actions in the game. The graphics are far from intensive, but they're pleasantly old-school. One small issue I had is the persistent border on the top and bottom of the iPhone version of the game. It seems to serve no other purpose than to fill in the gap that the larger-screened iPhone 5 created in 2012, but given how much time has gone by I'd prefer if the developers took better advantage of the bigger display by now. Call of Challenger is a fun action/adventure with seriously addictive properties. The more battles you win, the more cards you earn, the more gems you use up and ultimately the more gems you'll want to earn or buy. It's available for free in the App Store.
Whatt aims to make status updates more colorful, less public
Whatt is an iPhone app that wants to turn social networking into more of a private affair for a closer circle of friends than social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter currently allow. It uses brief status updates as the basis for communication and nothing else - no photos or videos. It's completely free, even ad-free, and is available in the App Store for iOS 7.0 or later. The app expedites the sign-up process nicely by allowing new users to create an account using either Facebook or Twitter. The Home screen is barren unless you have friends already on Whatt. Otherwise, use the Find Friends feature. I didn't have any friends using Whatt just yet, but I decided to post my first status update anyway. Updating your status on Whatt provides you with a blank canvas and your keyboard. When you start typing, a small tip will appear above letting you know Whatt's options for getting a bit more creative. If you swipe down or up, you can change the color of your text. Swiping left or right changes the font. There are ten different colors provided and ten different fonts, which allows for 100 possible combinations. It adds a small personal touch, almost like an Instagram filter but for a status update. The Update Status view also includes two small Facebook and Twitter icons. When they're in color, your status update shares to those social networks as wellas your Whatt friends. I tested this out for Twitter and I'm not fond of the download link Whatt includes after the status. I would understand a link to visit a page with comments and likes for promotional purposes but to be so blatant is a tad off-putting. However, this feature should still impress social network users looking for an easy way to post the same message on Facebook and Twitter. When you post your status, the app will automatically include a timestamp as well as your current location, but no more specific than the city. I checked the settings for an option to turn the latter off and there is not. That'd be nice, but I suppose since thepurpose of Whatt is to just share with close friends, it doesn't matter much anyway. Your posts also get their own view counts, which I can truly appreciate. On Facebook, only Pages have the ability to track how many people see an individual post. Everyone else has to depend solely on interaction such as comments or likes to determine reach. Perhaps one of my favorite aspects of Whatt is its design. It's clean, straightforward and doesn't try to be anything more than what it is. Intuitive tabs separate the home feed, notifications, friends and profile views.The app is also very snappy as far as performance goes. It does have some competition though. Path is much of the same concept except Path has a much larger user base and supports photos and other types of content. GroupMe labels itself as a group text messaging service but really, the differences in capabilities between Whatt and GroupMe are also very minor. Still, if you're looking to share updates with a small group of friends and get a bit creative with them, Whatt seems like a free, viable alternative.
Talking Holidays Wheel is decent kids app, but limited
Talking Holidays Wheel: Christmas Halloween Summer is an interesting combination of a children's game and an educational app with a title that can't possibly get anymore self-explanatory. The app includes three wheels for Christmas, Halloween and the season of summer, each with their own symbols for that occasion. When a child lands on a symbol on the wheel, the app announces it out loud in an attempt to teach the child the connection between the word and image. It's a free, universal app available on iOS. I downloaded both the iPhone version and iPad version and immediately gravitated toward the latter. The larger iPad was far more immersive and most likely more enticing to children. It's also easier to play with because the targets like the button to spin the wheel is larger. The app starts up by greeting you with all three holiday wheels where you pick one to start spinning. Each wheel has eight colorful symbols. Christmas features a gift, wreath and Santa Claus among other things. Halloween has a pumpkin and ghost while summer has items like sunglasses and a beach ball. When you decide on a wheel, it enlarges with a shiny red button next to it begging for the child to push it. This sends the wheel spinning until the arrow lands on one of the symbols. When it does, the wheel fades out and the winning symbol bounces in. The app pronounces it in conjunction with displaying a banner naming it at the bottom. Then confetti flies and options to share it via mail, Facebook and Twitter prominently appear. This doesn't seem like the best UI decision, given that if children are playing unsupervised they could easily send unwanted emails or post unwanted images. However, I couldn't get Facebook or Twitter sharing to work at all so I suppose here that's a positive. That's really all there is to the Talking Holidays Wheel app. The educational factor is decent because pairing a visual component with an audible component could help children better identify objects related to these holidays. However, compared to apps that teach the toddler essentials like ABCs, this one doesn't quite feel like something a child (or parent) needs. Most children do just fine learning about holidays on their own because they're inherently fun and exciting already. Speaking of fun, that too is just decent here. While I see young kids enjoying spinning the wheels and getting a small yet delightful treat each time, since there are only eight symbols per wheel, the entertainment factor is bound to run out pretty quickly. Despite some drawbacks, you can't go wrong with free - and that just so happens to be Talking Holidays Wheel's price. An in-app purchase of US$1.99 will remove the ads, but they aren't too obtrusive and the free version is likely more than adequate. If you want to keep your child entertained for a little bit while simultaneously providing some education, give Talking Holidays Wheel a try. Just bear in mind its inability to impress for long hinders its value.
EmoYo shares your emotions with friends and nothing else
EmoYo is an app clearly inspired by the simplistic nature of Yo. both in name and design. Quite interestingly though, the creator is only 16 years old. The app's sole reason for existence is to add friends and share your emotions with each other easily and without any other context. It's free for the iPhone and requires iOS 7.1 or later. As with Yo, there's not very much happening in EmoYo. When you sign up, you're asked to enter your email address, plus pick a username and password. Tapping inside the password box for some reason brought up the numeric keypad rather than a full QWERTY keyboard, forcing me to restrict my password to only digits. For security purposes, the developer should address this in a future update. Congratulations, you have now signed up for EmoYo. How are you feeling? If you tap "Emotion" on the top right, you have nine different answers to that question: happy, sad, mad, excited, busy, confused, relaxed, sick or in-love. Each one carries its own color. The design of EmoYo is nice and fits in quite well with iOS 7's new design principles. However the overly thin font choice (I'm guessing some extremely light variation of Helvetica Neue) sacrifices legibility in favor of aesthetics, which is a no-no. The emotions are particularly hard to read on darker colors, and this applies throughout the app. In the early betas of iOS 7 in 2013, Apple used a light font as the system-wide default before switching to a slightly thicker Helvetica Neue for the same reason this app should. Once you choose how you're feeling, your friends in the app will see your username over that emotion's color as well as the emotion itself. If you have multiple friends they all just appear in a multi-colored list. At the bottom of that list is a Plus button to type in someone's username and add them as a friend. That's the entire app. It's a bit buggy at the moment too, but that's nothing an update can't fix. To say EmoYo is minimalistic would be an understatement. I wouldn't go as far as to say the app is crude, but it certainly has more potential. Down the road, I could see an EmoYo with built-in functionality to react to your friends' moods. For instance, if a friend is feeling sad, with one tap send a text message wishing them well. Perhaps even integration with a third-party service to send a small gift isn't out of the question. For now, the biggest challenge EmoYo faces is but one question, yet it's a question anyone who finds the app will inevitably ask: "Why do I need this?" If your friends are feeling a certain way, chances are they're already tweeting about it or texting you about it. A separate app dedicated to merely sharing emotions just isn't necessary. If this concept happens to intrigue you, EmoYo does a fine job with it so by all means, indulge. Otherwise, EmoYo feels a bit too bare bones to appeal to the masses.
PhonTunes stores your favorite YouTube music in one place
PhonTunes Free is a clever app for iOS that organizes all the music and music videos on YouTube in one neat and tidy location for you to browse and enjoy. It has sections for popular videos, genres and even your own personal video library to store all of your favorites. The app requires iOS 7.0 or later. PhonTunes Pro is also available in the App Store or US$1.99 and removes the advertisements. Everybody likes a good music video to accompany an equally good song. YouTube, thanks largely to music video service Vevo, houses almost any music video you search. However, since YouTube is home to virtually every other type of online video that exists, finding and filtering down to just your favorite songs and music videos can sometimes be a hassle. PhonTunes makes a solid effort to fix this. Open PhonTunes and you're greeted by a "Discover" page. Here you find the "Popular" tab, which lists all of the most popular music videos along with their thumbnails, as well as the "Genre" tab, which lets you browse music videos all over YouTube by genre. Those of you with an eclectic taste should be pleased as there's a bountiful selection of genres from rap to country to avant-garde. A search function is available as well where you can type in a specific artist or song to find results on YouTube. Unfortunately, this searches all of YouTube rather than narrowing down to just music. For instance, upon searching for Taylor Swift's new music video "Shake It Off" I received a result for Grace Helbig merely stating her thoughts on the song in a review. Another quick search for "Ice Bucket Challenge" in this app quickly revealed that music is far from the only form of content this app surfaces. Tapping the plus icon next to any video listing adds it your own collection of favorite videos, accessible through "My Videos" at the bottom of the app. Additionally, using the batch management feature in My Videos allows you to select multiple videos for deletion or to add to a custom playlist. As for the videos themselves, the player does them justice. They play in HD (when on a good connection) as one might expect and I actually think I like the player in this app better than Apple's default in iOS 7. It's simple, easy to understand and doesn't have that blurred translucency which I never cared for as part of the video player UI. For some reason though you have to tap an icon to expand to full-sized landscape mode. It seems easier to just use the iPhone and iPad's built-in accelerometers. All in all, PhonTunes is a convenient solution for collecting and watching music videos on your phone. There are more popular competing apps like Vevo with similar functionality, but Vevo is limited to its own library while PhonTunes can play anything on YouTube, Vevo included. Other than the fact that you'll occasionally run into YouTube videos completely unrelated to music, PhonTunes Free is worth a download.
Call or text while protecting your identity with StitMe
"It is our belief that privacy is a right – not a commodity." Those are the words of Gurtaj Padda, CEO of StitMe, a free app for iOS that imports your contacts and let you call or text message anyone using a randomly generated phone number, thereby completely concealing your identity and real phone number. It works for both iPhone and iPad running iOS 5.0 or later. Sign up using your regular phone number when you launch the app, then input the security code sent to you via SMS. The app asks if it can "securely" import your contacts. Say yes, because without your contacts in StitMe you lose out on the most important features. It took me a while to figure out what purpose the main StitMe tab actually serves, probably about a solid five minutes to be honest. It turns out it's to add other people on StitMe. There's really nothing indicating this other than the logo at the top modified to include a plus sign. When you're friends with someone who uses the app, you communicate using your StitMe ID. This acts as a username, making the service similar to other apps like Kik. That's really where the similarities end though. The Contacts view lists all your contacts much like the standard Contacts app, except there's notably no sorting options - you're stuck with alphabetical by last name only. Next to each name is the StitMe logo to invite them to join and a phone icon to make a phone call. When you tap the phone, a prompt will appear with an unfamiliar number. This, too, was another confusing UI element. It looks like you're about to dial this odd number, but the app is actually telling you that's how your number will appear on that person's caller ID. Trying to call a different person will generate a different number. In my test, it works very well. What's impressive is that the person you dial can even call back that number and your phone will ring. StitMe doesn't need to be open or even running in the background for this to work. It's just a typical iOS phone call. This is identity protection at its finest. One feature request: a dial pad to be able to essentially call anyone anonymously using a randomly generated number rather than just people in your contacts. The Chats view is where all your private text messages are stored, but sadly chatting only works between two StitMe users. Again, this uses StitMe ID. Notifications informs you of missed calls and friend requests. Lastly, the Settings view. There's not much special here; everything you'd expect except for one unique feature. Tap "Contact Time" in Settings to specify which days and even times during those days people can contact you using your StitMe ID or random phone numbers. Workers using this app should greatly appreciate this ability and the extensive customization options within it. StitMe is an effective solution for protecting your privacy making phone calls or sending messages. The calling feature in particular impressed me the most. Get past some of the confusing (or more blatantly poor) UI choices and StitMe proves to be pretty efficient.
Quickly send someone your travel time with On My Way Buddy
On My Way Buddy is a very simple app with a single purpose: to let someone you're meeting up with know that you are on your way. When you get stuck in traffic or you're just running a little bit late, it could be tedious and downright dangerous to make a phone call explaining the situation or try to send a text with your location. This free app available for iOS 7.1 or later promises to send a friendly text with your current location with just two taps. Before we dive in I have very important news worth sharing. Sending a quick message to a friend with your location in the app doesn't technically take two taps. It takes, well, three. In fact, sometimes more than that. Gasp. On My Way Buddy's main screen when you open the app for the first time is comprised of three elements: a map at the top showing your current location, the essential "Select a contact" link and the option to enable or disable "I'm delayed." Since you don't have any recently used contacts the first time, tapping "Select a contact" and then choosing one takes up the two taps right off the bat. Then the name appears on the main screen to tap again and finally, you can send the preset message. That's four, or perhaps even five taps if you count having to open the app. Okay, enough with all the tap counting. For what purpose On My Way Buddy serves, I do consider the amount of taps important though because users are likely behind the wheel of a car when they're using it. The next time you open the app, your recently used contacts will appear already, so really the app gets quicker the more you use it. It only stores your two most recent contacts though. Given the amount of space still left on the display, that's unnecessarily counterintuitive. When you do select a contact, a new message will slide in with the template "I'm on my way, now in" followed by the city and street you're on. (There's an option in the app's settings tab to disable the street.) Enabling the aforementioned "I'm delayed" option adds that to the beginning of your message. The text is followed by a link to On My Way Buddy's website tailored to your latitude and longitude, which pinpoints you on a map and shows the person you're meeting an estimated travel time and distance in kilometers. A setting to choose between kilometers and miles would be nice but it's not worth an urgent update as most people probably just prefer to know how long it will take for you to arrive. On My Way Buddy doesn't feature any bells and whistles; it's very straightforward. That's a plus in my book because people in the midst of traveling shouldn't have to deal with bells and whistles. A bigger concern is if this app is really that much quicker than sending a standard text or iMessage stating where you are or even asking Siri to do it for you. Luckily, On My Way Buddy is completely free to download so try it out for yourself - you've got nothing to lose.
Downloads for iOS is a decent file manager with limitations
Downloads - File Downloader & Manager is, as the name suggests, a universal app for iPhone and iPad that can download various types of files like documents, images, ZIP and RAR files. The app can then display certain (but not all) files you've downloaded using its built-in viewer. It's free in the App Store, but a paid in-app purchase for US$0.99 will unlock unlimited downloads. As far as first impressions go, the design of Downloads doesn't make a very good one. It is a very strange mixture of iOS 7's stock UI, an iOS 6-inspired UI and a custom one. I get the jarring feeling of using multiple apps within one, but no, this is actually the way the designers chose to design it. The app has a built-in web browser so if you download files quite often, you might spend more time in Downloads than in Safari. If you come across a file the app can download, such as a PDF, just tap it once to bring up your menu of options. The first option is aptly a "Download" button, followed by the ability to copy the link, send it via email or SMS or open it in Safari. If you download the file, it will go into the Downloads tab just while it's downloading then migrate once more to the Files tab when complete. I chose a random 0.18 MB PDF through Google search and the download time was almost instantaneous. It's not a large file size for the app to justifiably take too long, but the speed of the app is still very decent. The document viewer supports .pdf, .xls, .csv, .doc, .txt, .xml, .rtf, .ppt, .gif, .png, .jpeg, .jpg and .bmp file formats -- mostly all of the basics. The viewer presented thumbnails for each page of the PDF I opened at the bottom, plus a grid view option at the top and other buttons to print, email or bookmark. The viewer switches over to the iOS 6 UI, but offers all the essentials. Also worth noting is that aside from the document viewer and ZIP/RAR extraction, you have to open any other file in a third-party app that supports it. I then searched for something a bit more intensive to throw at the app. When I tried to download my second file, Downloads greeted me with a very unwelcome message stating that I had used up all my downloads and to buy the full version for $0.99 to download anything else. This is disappointing. It's not that $0.99 is expensive, because it's not. It's the principle of calling an app free when it's really just more of single free chip given out at a wholesale store in a weak attempt to convince you to buy the entire bag of chips. The app with the full benefits of being able to download as many files as you want is actually around a buck. Downloads - File Downloader & Manager seems mostly like a decent app for downloading and opening various documents, images and some other files. The user interface is strange but not unintuitive, and both the download speed and document viewer are perfectly adequate. Be prepared to pay $0.99 if you want to use Downloads more than once though. Also, power users who need a more advanced file manager may still want to consider looking elsewhere.
NodeBeat's stunning visual music creation will blow you away
NodeBeat describes itself as "the intuitive and fun visual music app for all ages." The app, available on iPhone for US$0.99 and separately on iPad as NodeBeat HD for $2.99, uses visual "nodes" to build rhythms. Generator nodes send a pulse to its connected notes and the notes then emit sound. The more nodes you drag onto the screen, the more complex your rhythm will be. It sounds advanced, but the learning curve is delightfully minimal. When you open the app for the first time, NodeBeat asks you if you want to start off by creating your own music from scratch or listening to randomly generated tunes. I recommend listening first to get a feel for how the app works. Each visual element contributes to the sound in some way. The large square sends out a drum sound, the large circles send out regular sounds and the small circles are the notes that produce what's sent to them. Each color is assigned a different pitch. For instance, among the circular generator nodes there are three colors: red is high-pitched, yellow is in the middle and blue is low-pitched. Then among the eight smaller note nodes there are another eight colors. According to NodeBeat, this combination is able to produce a range of 7 octaves, or 56 different notes. Even Mariah Carey can't compete with this. Even just mentioning these features you'd be able to get by using NodeBeat pretty well. The possibilities are endless with the combinations of notes and sounds, but pop open the settings drawer by tapping the icon on the bottom right to reveal an entirely new world of customization options and features. The stand-out feature here is the record button, which brings up a list of your saved records and enables you to record the music playing by tapping "Start Recording." When you're done, you can play it back, share it through email or SoundCloud and even export it to other apps like iMovie. The audio tab is for advanced users who want to dig deeper into the musical aspect of NodeBeat with options to edit the waveform (basically the harshness of the sound in my experience,) key, lowest octave, scale, echo, attack and more. In the rhythm tab, additional tweaks can change the tempo and which note gets a beat. Even the Node tab enables less conventional changes like whether a note or generator can float freely. Virtually everything a music junkie could ask for is available in NodeBeat. Anyone is able to toy around to achieve the exact sound they're looking for down to the finest details, and I find that utterly impressive. Apart from the audio, the visuals are also just gorgeous in the app. I can imagine setting my iPad down on my dock in the living room with friends over and letting NodeBeat deliver ambient music paired with a stunning graphical representation. Plus, anyone could walk over and have fun with it by customizing the nodes or even just pressing down anywhere in the app to add some notes like an invisible piano. NodeBeat is in the App Store as two separate apps: the iPhone version for $0.99 and the iPad (HD) version for $2.99, but truth be told not much sets the two apart other than size. That said, size matters with NodeBeat as I greatly preferred the experience on the iPad. The extra space allows for more freedom with your hands to play around with the music. While I do wish NodeBeat was a single universal app, both versions are well worth their respective prices. NodeBeat is fun enough for any inexperienced music enthusiast to play with and enjoy, but also has an abundance of advanced features to cater to power users and professional music lovers. NodeBeat easily shines among other visual music apps in the App Store and lives up to its aforementioned self-description. Purchase the iPad app or iPhone app and fall in love with it like I did.
Send a message that's impossible to screenshot with Zeph
While Snapchat popularized the idea of sending photos that disappear after a quick view, sometimes you might need to just send a quick message to someone without a visual that you don't want the receiver holding on to. Enter Zeph. A free app for iPhone requiring iOS 7.0 or later, Zeph has pioneered a unique way to send messages to friends that not only disappear, but are impossible to screenshot. Everything about Zeph is extremely easy to use, right from the start. Signing up simply requires a username and password, just like logging in would. The only extra step is to follow up with your mobile phone number for verification and to check for any contacts already on Zeph. After logging in, the app displays a list of contacts who have messaged you. Though the color scheme is blue and white, Snapchat is no doubt the inspiration behind the design. If you have an unread message, tap the contact read it. I received an automatic greeting from "Teamzeph." It's in the way you read the messages where Zeph really works its magic, or perhaps rather in the way Zeph displays them. The team at Zeph calls it "rolling glow technology." When you view a message, only a small part of it is shown at once, about the length of a word or two. The rest of the message will gradually fade in as the previous parts fade out and disappear entirely. Imagine you wrote a message in invisible ink, shined a black light on it to reveal the words and then slowly moved your hand (and thus the light) across the length of the message. That's the illusion of this rolling glow technology. When the message is completely gone, you have two options at the bottom: replay or reply. The replay button disappears a few seconds after the message does, so you have to act fast if you want to see it a second time. If you decide to replay, you won't be able to do so again for the same message. Two strikes and you're out. Tapping the reply button slides the keyboard in and allows you 160 characters to type out a response, the standard amount for an SMS text message and 20 more than a tweet. Composing a new message works the same way, but is done so instead through the top right button above your main list of messages. To send messages on Zeph, it does require that you have friends or family already using the app. Sending invites through the app should help out with that, but they have to join to view your messages or respond to them. A tad bare bones for now, Zeph is teeming with the potential for even more powerful features. Snapchat does offer the ability to just text chat with friends without sending any photos, but the problem with the app as a whole is that it's relatively easy to screenshot and keep pictures and messages. Zeph fixes Snapchat's problem in a simple, yet elegant manner that's totally fool-proof in my experience.
+Cue is an intuitive way for anyone to create music
+Cue is a unique way for anyone to create music. This even includes people with absolutely no experience with music or instruments. Including over a dozen different instrumental sounds, all you need to do is shake your iOS device to generate different pitches that integrate seamlessly with the provided beat. It's a free app available for all iOS devices and requires iOS 7.0 or later. Upon opening the app for the first time, you'll get a quick welcome guide that explains the basics of how to use +Cue to create, save and share music. The main app itself is very well-designed, especially to match iOS 7's style. The first element you'll probably notice is the giant orange plus button in the middle. This acts as a record button of sorts; holding it down while shaking your phone will save the rhythm you created. Above that are four icons for drums, bass, piano and brass. Each of these contain subcategories, such as synth and organ for the piano instrument that you can swipe through to pick. The slider will adjust the volume of that particular instrument, but not the entire song which is a very nice touch. The initial tutorial explains that to begin, first press "Play" and shake the device four times to the tempo of your choice and a beat will start playing based on that. Unfortunately, I didn't have success with this method. The beat never started playing. Instead, while I still had the beat turned off, I manually controlled the tempo at the top left where it says "bpm." If you're not too familiar with music, "bpm" stands for beats per minute and it's a measurement for the tempo of a song. The higher the number, the faster the tempo. The four small dots indicate that the time signature is 4/4. This is the most common time signature in modern music with four bears per measure and the quarter note acting as one beat. The visual indicator is a subtle but very clever addition to the app, however I hope in the future +Cue adds support for other time signatures. I hit "Play" and the beat started playing. As per the instructions, I held down the giant plus button and started shaking my iPhone up, down, left and right. At first it sounds horrible because the sounds you make are out of sync with the beat and sometimes the direction you shake your iPhone in won't always produce the desired result. Let go of the plus button and +Cue automatically puts the recorded sound in time with the music and it magically sounds incredible. From there, switch up instruments to get even more creative with your mix. When you create a song of your liking, you have options to save it locally to your device to load and play at any time or save for sharing purposes. While I do appreciate the ability to share music on +Cue, the feature doesn't yet feel mature. Instead, I would have much rather seen iOS 7's native Share Sheets implemented to quickly send an audio file to someone or a group of people. There's no shortage of apps in the App Store that promise to deliver easy music creation with minimal experience necessary, but +Cue is both unique and pleasantly functional enough to stand out from the crowd. It was genuinely intriguing making music by shaking my iPhone and I was always satisfied with the end result. Music enthusiasts, definitely consider giving +Cue a download.

...