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For the longest time, I didn’t feel the need to play around with alternative iOS browsers. Why would I, when Mobile Safari fulfilled just about every need that I had? I was content with Apple’s default offering, and would skim through browser reviews just to say I had checked out the competition.
This changed with a review that I read on our sister site, Mac.AppStorm. Joshua Johnson reviewed Sleipnir, a browser that combined WebKit rendering with a powerful, gesture-based navigation system. I immediately downloaded the app on the iPhone and began to play with it. Here are my thoughts.
When you think of website search engines, it’s big-name brands like Google or Yahoo! which come to mind — even Microsoft’s Bing is doing very well in the rankings. However, there is an underdog in the mix and it’s not Dogpile.
DuckDuckGo Search is a very simple engine which borrows a lot of traits from Google’s UI. Their search functionality is easy to use and also includes extra features for custom searches — in this way you can limit to specific domain names or even search in alternate places such as Wikipedia. Their web app is certainly fantastic, but the company has done an even better job for their iOS app, which we’ll delve into after the break.
Social news is still a new idea in the realm of social media. Digg itself only launched into popularity back in 2005. Currently it has lost a lot of attention over to the social news community Reddit, but there are still many loyal diggers cascading down the front page. Along with the attentive v4 redesign we’ve also seen a new iOS app launch.
This release still includes most of the functionality you would expect from Digg. It’s easy to log in and start voting on stories, both popular and trending. Unfortunately, we have also lost a lot of content such as mobile user profiles. So is it worth the download?
Google Reader is by far one of my favorite services. In case you haven’t used it, Google Reader allows you to read all your RSS feeds on the same place, share them and add notes to them easily. It’s been available for quite some time now, and it’s just great because it’s simple and reliable. Since I got my iPhone, I’ve been reading my feeds using Google Reader straight from Safari since they have a mobile version (which is pretty good I might add). Lately though, since Flipboard for iPhone was launched, I’ve been reading all my Google Reader news from that app.
But to change things up a bit, I decided to take a look at GoReader. It’s an app that works specifically with Google’s service and syncs everything as well. Let’s see if it’s a viable replacement for its competitors.
Tumblr has been a very renowned service since its launch in 2007, and even the huge downtime they had last year didn’t seem to affect their popularity. Two years after launching, in 2009, Tumblr acquired Tumblerette, a very popular iPhone app for the blogging service. Today it’s simply called Tumblr and it’s available in the App Store for free.
In this article I’ll be talking about this app’s functionality, what you can do with it and why it’s so great to keep your blog updated on the go.
The world of content management systems has come a long way in the last couple years. As the online world steadily becomes more mobile, these systems have sported some fantastic apps that make the management process as seamless on the go as it is at the desk.
While those worlds of WordPress, Squarespace and other popular content management systems go mobile, there’s one ecosystem that’s been left out of the party: Drupal. Thankfully, the talented fellows at Breek.fr decided enough was enough and created the gem we’ve all been waiting for. Introducing Drupad: bringing Drupal on the Go.
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Safari on the iPhone is an extremely well designed browser. It’s simple, useful and very powerful. There are a number of alternatives on the App Store that offer extra functionality, but personally, none of them live up to the expectations, and I always tend to switch back to Safari after a while or even without thinking about it.
Dolphin Browser was originally available only for Android smartphones, and is pretty popular on that platform. It was recently ported to the iOS line, and in this review I’m going to see if its popularity on Android is well justified. Follow on after the break.
There are two things all professionals seem to have in common these days: smartphones and LinkedIn accounts. Accordingly, LinkedIn created a native iPhone app a few years back to help busy people connect on the go. Though it allowed you to use basic LinkedIn functions like viewing profiles and updates, it was far behind other social media apps in terms of usability, design and features.
This August, LinkedIn released Version 4.0 of their iPhone app, and it’s more than just an update: they’ve completely overhauled the app’s interface and functionality, bringing LinkedIn to the forefront of social media app development. Take a look inside after the jump!
Starting a blog or website can be difficult. There are seemingly countless options for where to host your site, what kind of publishing system you should use, how you’ll get things to the site; the amount of options can be freeing but also paralyzing, as it’s hard to find one that will work “just right” for what you have in mind.
Enter Squarespace. Squarespace is a hosting and publishing system designed to make running a weblog or website incredibly easy. Outside of being such a well-integrated service, the part of the deal that really sweetened the pot for me was the fact that they had a native iPhone app, titled appropriately enough, Squarespace. Read on to find out why this was such a big deal!
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VoIP clients (Voice over Internet Protocol) have been all the buzz really since Skype made its debut in 2003. When developers realized the potential behind mobile platforms and VoIP there was a race to see who could get the best quality services out there. Skype introduced its iPhone version in 2009, and while there have been other apps like Nimbuzz that offer ‘package’ IM services, Skype had the most success on the iPhone.
Then came applications like WhatsApp that offered free texting – BBM style. This was hugely popular because it was cross-platform free texting, simply using (a very small amount of) your phone Internet. Further, instead of using a separate account that you have to set up like Skype does, it relied purely on your phone number, and synced with everyone in your phonebook, so anyone who had the app could contact you without having to add them again.
Well what would happen if you combined the glory of free calling that Skype offers and the free texting and use of your mobile number that Whatsapp brings – the answer is Viber.
