Currently Browsing
Internet
Bitly’s fun pufferfish has long been a friend to verbose tweeters who needed to keep it under 140 characters, and if all you use Bitly for is shortening URLs, that’s enough. But there’s another side to Bitly, an even more useful side, that allows online marketers and bloggers to track how many “clicks” their links are getting. It’s pretty easy and fairly important if you make your living on the internet, but there hasn’t been a good way to generate those little links on iOS until now.
Bitly recently relaunched their website, and with it they launched their first iOS app simply named, Bitly. They’ve made Bitly more social by integrating Twitter and Facebook and creating community curated groups of links, or bitmarks. But does the iOS app work as well as the webapp and browser extensions? And will it have the same analytical functionality for those who need that information? Let’s find out together. (more…)
Every social network provides some way to like, favorite or share content. We have favorite YouTube videos, tweets and Instapaper articles, but each carefully curated list is confined to the website of its creation. If only there was a way to pull favorites together into one central hub.
Favs attempts to pull all of your favorites, likes, shares and bookmarks from the cracks and crevices of social networking and bookmarking sites into one unified app. It wants to do more than simply aggregate favorite items, it wants to bring favorite people along for the ride as well.
Does Favs live up to its promises? Is this the end-all app for favorites or another Swiss-Army failure? (more…)
I use my iPhone to browse the Internet quite a lot, actually. I’ll visit at least four or five webpages per day on average. It’s a great device to use too, because everything works smoothly and there are many websites optimized for mobile devices. But what about an enhanced experience — something that you’re used to on your desktop computer? What about Chrome for iPhone?
Luckily for those of you who use the browser, Google released an iOS version of their famous multi-platform browser on Thursday. It brings everything you loved about the Android version (if you used it) and a few of the great features included in the desktop app to your iPhone. Chrome on the iPhone has the potential to be a great browser, but let’s take a deeper look. (more…)
I’m big fan of Google. I use almost all their web apps and the ones I don’t use probably are geographically locked — but that’s on the web. On the mobile, it’s a totally different story altogether. From Google Reader to Calendar and Docs, all my favorite apps on the web don’t have a native iOS app.
But they’ve all been present in the Android Market for a long time now. Then there are native iOS version of apps like Gmail that blows. The Google Search app for iOS has been around forever. While not as horrible as the Gmail app, it wasn’t mind blowing either — up until now. Follow me after the fold to learn how the new version of Google Search has made me a believer. (more…)
Google Search is one of the entries on the growing list of Google services that I no longer use. Search results are muddled with advertisements, and it’s clear that producing accurate outcomes is no longer a core goal of the company. I switched to DuckDuckGo for these reasons, and so far I’ve never looked back. For the most part, DuckDuckGo’s search results are comparable to Google’s, and it even offers encrypted Google searches for things such as images.
Even though it delivers excellent results, it’s certainly not going to win any beauty contests, and the iOS application is prohibitively homely. Bang On is a dedicated DuckDuckGo search app that takes all of the great things about the service and wraps them in a beautiful package.
Is this facelift enough for Bang On to earn a coveted place on the iOS dock? Read on to find out. (more…)
User generated content defined the whole Web 2.0 era. From written word to videotaped recordings, common folks took control of everything and shared it publicly for free. Sharing videos and pictures has exploded exponentially, aided by easy to use mobile apps and social networks. Twitpic is one such web app and it is synonymous with image sharing on Twitter. Millions of folks use it to share their photos everyday.
Consider it the defacto Twitter web app for uploading images and videos along with tweets. Curiously, such a successful, social multimedia sharing platform didn’t bother to come up with a mobile app. Up until now. Recently, this free image sharing network launched its iOS app and after the break, let’s take it for a spin. (more…)
Recent changes to Google’s privacy policy have spurred many thoughts of abandoning ship in search of Google alternatives. While leaving Google altogether is probably an overreaction, it’s worth taking inventory of just how much or your data travels through the Google pipeline. Yes, Google services have no monetary cost, but there is a privacy cost involved. Soapbox aside, it’s also every geek’s job to tinker.
Google search alternatives such as DuckDuckGo are growing in popularity, but users of services such as Google Reader have few other choices. Shaun Inman’s Fever is a self-hosted feed reader that offers several improvements over Google Reader, but unfortunately, Fever’s mobile experience is limited to web clips. Sunstroke is the first native iPhone application built for Fever, and today we’ll see if this app can maintain Fever’s personality while offering all of the features that make it a superior alternative to Google Reader. (more…)
Just recently, I wrote a review of Leef App for iPhone. The idea is built around accessing Forrst and browsing the latest questions, shots, code snippets, and popular links. Up until recently, there hasn’t been much competition for Forrst on iOS.
Except the new release of Bosquet really turns things around. This is a much more simple application compared to others that access Forrst or Dribbble. It provides all the default features you would expect with a third-party API connection. Plus, the app is fun to use and only comes with a $0.99 price tag! Let’s get into it after the jump. (more…)
There are a large handful of Twitter clients in the iOS App Store. Both iPad and iPhone users have a wide variety to choose from, and we are seeing new applications enter the store each month.
Tweetlist is another such client with a pretty big twist: you can quickly flip through all of your different Twitter lists from a single easy-to-use interface. Let’s take a look after the break.
(more…)
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always loved Cartoon Network. It’s been on cable television since early 1992 and still airs some of the best animated series around. Plus, their sister network Boomerang airs all the nostalgic classics from the days of Hanna-Barbera Productions.
Recently, I had a chance to play around in their mobile app for the iPhone and iPad. It hosts plenty of useful features that any fan of Cartoon Network would enjoy. Along with typical schedules and show listings, you can also log into your cable network account through CN, then stream cartoon shows right on your device. Let’s find out more about this truly amazing piece of mobile software that combines the Internet with traditional cable television after the jump.
(more…)
