In my early days of freelancing, I ran a pretty simple operation. Most of my clients were friends and my expenses amounted to less than the standard deduction (in the USA at least). I used an Excel sheet for both my invoices and my expenses. Then things started to pick up a bit and I realized that I needed something a little more robust than a spreadsheet.
A friend of mine introduced me to FreshBooks and I never looked back. It’s great invoicing software that added expense tracking shortly after I joined, as well as a slew of other features. The only thing they were really missing was a good mobile app. Well recently, that changed, too, with FreshBooks Cloud Accounting. (more…)
A lot of people find exercise to be more enjoyable when they’re also listening to music, and there’s the argument that a good song can even boost your performance during a workout.
The makers of Cruise Control: Run have taken that idea one step (ha!) further by finding a way to adjust in real time the music on your iPhone. This means you can set your target pace or just start running, and the app will continually keep the rhythm in check so that your footsteps fall just so. Click “more” and I’ll show you how it works. (more…)
Remember when Bump was the new app? There was really something genuinely satisfying to physically Bumping your phone to share contact information. Well, Bump has done a lot of growing up since the old days. From starting out as a contact sharing app, to diverging off into a payment app, and now having evolved into a file transferring app (that Bumps with your computer too!), Bump is making sure that you haven’t forgot about it.
See what’s up Bump’s proverbial sleeve after the jump. (more…)
Chef and best-selling cookbook author, Yotam Ottolenghi is famous for bringing together Mediterranean and Middle Eastern flavors, creating vibrant, colorful recipes that are modern and fresh. It all started with his wildly popular eponymous London food shops and expanded to a weekly column in The Guardian, a TV show and cookbooks like Plenty and Jerusalem. If you’re into food, you need to know about this chef.
Ottolenghi’s cuisine crosses borders and breaks down barriers. When his book was published in the U.S., the combination of sumptuous food photography, exotic seasonings and farm fresh produce fit in with the farm to table movement, becoming an instant hit. No wonder Ottolenghi Recipes was named the No. 1 Food & Drink App in the United Kingdom — like everything Ottolenghi, it’s modern, fresh and original. The creators put a lot of effort into developing an app that’s beautifully designed and highly functional. Ottolenghi Recipes stands head and shoulders above the rest in this respect.
If you’re interested in expanding your palate with a collection of flavorful recipes influenced by Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cuisine, keep reading. (more…)
A friend of mine bought a new car recently, and it came equipped with a Bluetooth connection that let him pair his iPhone with the stock stereo. It was super cool — much better than the dock connector input I have in my older car. And now Chevrolet is integrating Siri into some of its cars, taking it one step further.
Do you use your iPhone in the car? If so, is it just as-is, or do you connect it to the vehicle in some way? Let us know in the poll to the right!
Icon image via Zatz Not Funny
There’s a huge market for word games on iOS. My family is addicted to Letterpress, and my mother is having a not-so-secret-anymore affair with Words With Friends (sorry Mom!). That being said, despite its excellence, Letterpress and I aren’t exactly mutually exclusive, and if I see another hot word game app while I’m goofing around in a coffee shop, I might give her a shot.
And I can’t lie to you guys: Upwords caught my eye. I’m a big Scrabble fan (disclaimer: I’ve never played the traditional Upwords game). I love the board game, but have yet to play a Scrabble-like word game on iOS that I think works well. After all, the trappings of Scrabble are the trappings of a board game and I see no reason a digital display should be bound by the same rules. But I loved the twist Upwords brings to the classic game: stackable letters. (more…)
For many people, the calendar is the most important productivity tool on their iPhone. No matter how busy you may be, it’s important to keep track of your schedule so that you’re prepared for what lies ahead. Between multiple work trips and planning for a wedding, there are number of appointments and events I need to keep straight, and I rely on my calendar to do so.
I’ve never cared much for the first-party Calendars app, and have jumped from a number of third-party apps such as Agenda, Fatastical and Calendars+ (a few of which I’ve reviewed on AppStorm). But since its release in February, I’ve been using Sunrise Calendar as my go-to schedule maintenance tool, which I’ve found to be an interestingly new take on how a iOS calendar app functions. (more…)
Before I bought my first iPhone, I owned a BlackBerry Curve. I loved that thing, even with its many flaws, because it was my first device that handled email and the web, albeit in extremely slow fashion. That, and it was the cool thing to have around the office.
I wasted away many a day playing Snake on that thing, as I did on other phones that came before it. It was simple, fun and easy to use — why wouldn’t I play it? Turns out that’s Nimble Quest in a nutshell.
I don’t know what a Celsius is. There, I said it. When someones says it’s 15 degrees, I have really no concept how cold (or hot) that is. I couldn’t tell you my weight in kilograms. Fifty? One hundred? Seven? And don’t even get me started on the difference between a fluid ounce and whatever the other thing is. A dry ounce?
For me and people like me, it sure is nice to have Amount, a neat little conversion app that does for me all that terrible calculating I learned in grammar school and then promptly forgot about. It looks good doing it, too, and Amount knows way more units of measure than I ever did. Will Amount have the features to make it really useful? (more…)
One of my earliest memories is when my father took me to see The Empire Strikes Back. It was at this huge movie theatre located right off of Route 9 in Framingham, Massachusetts, and we waited outside for what seemed like forever just to see the film. By the time I left a few hours later, I was converted. I was a Star Wars fan.
As a result, I love all things Star Wars. When Zen Pinball first introduced Star Wars pinball as an in-app purchase in their game, I bought it and enjoyed banging on my screen. Now, Star Wars Pinball is its own app, complete with three different tables. Well, kinda. Let’s take on the Kessel Run after the jump. (more…)
