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Daily iPhone App: Blur Studio lets you add a touch of blur to personalize your wallpapers
Blur Studio from Taphive is a wallpaper-creating app that uses a blur filter as its primary design tool. It generates creative home screen designs that match the look and feel of iOS 7. Blur is photo-based and allows you to either take a new photo or import one from your camera roll. Once you have a photo on your canvas, you can adjust the blur strength within a range that allows you to apply no blur or so much blur the entire image is a mixture of hazy colors. You can also change the tint of the blur to match your phone, your case or even your mood. One of the handiest features of Blur is the preview mode, which allows you to test out your new home screen while you are still tweaking its look. This Home Screen Test Mode supports Apple's parallax effect so you get a realistic look at your wallpaper before you finalize all your changes. Once you are done with your design, you can tap the "checkmark" button and export the wallpaper to your camera roll. Once it is in with your photos, you can select the exported wallpaper, tap the share button and choose "Use as a Wallpaper" to assign it as your new home screen. The wallpapers are saved at the correct size for the parallax effect in iOS 7. Blur allows you to easily and quickly create new wallpapers. It has an intuitive UI that's easy to master in just a few minutes. My only critique is the lack of basic photo-editing tools. It doesn't have a crop tool or a move tool that would allow you to pick a section of your photo for your wallpaper. For example, I have a nice shot of my daughter holding a turtle and would love to use the colorful painted turtle as the focus point of the blurred wallpaper. Unfortunately, the turtle is on the right side of the photo and it gets pushed off the wallpaper. It would be helpful if I could move the photo a bit to the left and put the turtle in the center. This is a new app, so hopefully this feature will be added in future updates. Despite this drawback, Blur Studio is still worth checking out. It is available in the iOS App Store for US$1.99.
TodoMovies: The must-have movie app for movie lovers
Taphive's TodoMovies (US$1.99) app for iPhone has recently been updated to version 2.0. I'd not seen or used TodoMovies before, but as a huge movie enthusiast, I knew I had to check it out. At its heart, TodoMovie is an app that keeps track of movies you want to watch, but it's supercharged in every way. Here's how it works. Say, for example, you heard a friend talking about a film, like Iron Man 3. You want to know more about it, so you open TodoMovies and go to Discover View. You enter the title in the search box and it pops right up with a thumbnail picture, title and the release year. When you tap it, you're presented with the movie's poster and numerous options. Watch a trailer for the movie. Check out a gallery with all the official pictures. Add the film to your watch list or mark it as watched. Furthermore, find out about the storyline, cast and crew, release date as well as TodoMovie's own universal rating. If that's not enough, review ratings are also imported from Rotten Tomatoes and Netflix. In Discovery View, it's easy to find films by genre, what's in theaters at the moment and what's upcoming. With a tap and hold, quickly indicate whether you've seen a movie or you want to add it to your watch list. Movies you've seen will have a little green tick in the top-right corner. Movies you're still to watch will have a blue plus sign. %Gallery-186699% If you find a film you want to watch that's still unreleased, just add it to your watch list. TodoMovie will let you add a release notification reminder with notes, perhaps to remind you to buy tickets for a screening at your favorite cinema! TodoMovie makes it easy to share information on a great film with friends or family. From within the app, share to Twitter, Facebook, a text message or email. The app also searches and links to the iTunes Store, should you want to buy a soundtrack or even rent or buy a film. TodoMovie supports iCloud Sync, so if you're signed into iCloud, your list will be saved and accessible across your iDevices. There's also Dropbox integration, which lets you export images from movie galleries to your Dropbox. It's a really nice idea, especially if you enjoy having movie posters as your desktop picture. Add the Dropbox folder to Desktop pictures in your Mac's System Preferences and set it to change pictures periodically. Export the images from within TodoMovies and you'll have a carousel of movie posters as your desktop picture. My only gripe is the lack of high-resolution images. While offering all of these fantastic features, TodoMovie keeps what's important front and center -- movies. The app is really well-designed, functions flawlessly and looks gorgeous. The only complaint is that it's sometimes hard to decipher the movie title from a poster image. I'd have to tap the image and enter the movie details section just to find out what it was, which was a little frustrating at times. A list view would be nice. In summary, TodoMovies makes it really easy to discover new films, keep track of what you want to watch and what you've watched, and is a fantastic resource for movie info, reviews and media. Whether you're a film addict, conniossuer or you simply want to keep track of movies you want to watch, TodoMovies is a must-have app. TodoMovies is available from the App Store now. Our own Victor Agreda, Jr. spoke to the creator of TodoMovie at last year's WWDC. To learn about the origin of the app, watch the video below.
