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ReviewsFlickr is arguably the most widely used photo sharing website around, with hundreds of thousands of photos hosted online and a fantastic API resulting in many third party apps.
Today we will look at Flickery, a Mac desktop client which pretty much does it all, from managing your account to searching the Flickr photo library. Flickery has been developed by Eternal Storms Software who also brought us Hierarchical Dock and GimmeSomeTune.
Loren Brichter of atebits has become a highly acclaimed OS X/iPhone developer in recent years as the man behind Tweetie, but that’s not all he’s worked on in the past. Today we’re going to delve into another atebits application – Scribbles.
Put simply, Scribbles is a lightweight tool for drawing on your Mac. It reminds me of Microsoft Paint, but with all the power and flair you’d expect from an OS X application. Deceptively simple at the outset, the power behind what you can do with Scribbles is remarkable.
In 2005, Apple released the first Mighty Mouse. A year later a bluetooth version was released. As much as we appreciate Apple’s attempt to creating a good looking mouse, the Mighty Mouse was heavily criticized for its usability – right click was awkward and the scrolling wheel was difficult to keep clean. How many times did we bang our heads because the wheel had stopped working?
The future of Apple’s mouse family is all of a sudden looking brighter with the introduction of the new Magic Mouse. If you are inline with Apple’s design philosophy, you would love the hardware design of the Magic Mouse – it’s simple, and it’s beautiful. The Mighty Mouse was a great piece of design with only a visible scrolling wheel on the top surface, the Magic Mouse takes one step further and presents you with one clean, curved top surface. From purely the appearance perspective, the Magic Mouse is absolutely breathtaking.
As a precursor to this review, I’d like to mention that Vibealicious will soon be releasing version Notify version 2.0. Around half the features covered are those planned for inclusion in the updated version. I have been lucky enough to beta test the forthcoming app, which has a number of changes that make Notify far more than just a regular email notifier.
Notify does what it’s name says – it tells you when you have a new message in your inbox. Version 2.0 goes beyond that, from viewing messages on multiple accounts to quickly responding to messages. This review will run through what you can expect from the app at the moment, along with what’s coming in the next few months.
A wide range of different iPhone apps are available for reading news – whether via RSS, or another method. Today I’m taking a look at Broadersheet, a $3.99 iPhone application that aims to be your portable electronic newspaper, aggregating the content that interests you most from a range of different sources.
A few features make it stand out from the crowd: it’s intelligent, and learns which stories interest you most as you rate them, you can read stories offline, and also view a simplified version of a website – optimised for the iPhone’s screen.
I’ll be looking at these features in greater detail, and assessing whether it’s a good solution for reading news on-the-go.
Although iTunes has offered a selection of internet radio stations for several years, this is one area of the application that hasn’t seen a great deal of recent development. Snowtape aims to take the baton, and offer a full-featured internet radio experience on the Mac.
The software makes it easy to find a station that plays a particular type of music, establish a “favourites” list, record and edit tracks, export music to iTunes, and automatically discover album artwork. I’ll be delving a little deeper into Snowtape and exploring what the app is capable of.
3D modeling applications are notoriously complex and can take years to learn. Complicated modeling tools, infinite material setting variables, lighting radiance adjustments, multiple cameras, UVs, etc., it can all be quite daunting and frankly unnecessary for someone looking to create a quick mockup. Enter Google SketchUp, an amazing free application for creating professional (non photo-realistic) 3D models on the fly.
Though SketchUp is relatively simple compared to more robust 3D applications, it still has a ton of features… too many too enumerate here. This review will briefly cover some of the principal features and tools in SketchUp and offer a little insight into how you can create complex geometry in a jiffy.

