appoftheweek

App of the Week: Laundry Day

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A screenshot of the Laundry Day app on an iPhone

When you’re a child, your parents are usually kind enough to wash your clothes for you. This means that, when you become a responsible adult and have to wash your own clothes, it can be a bit of a shock. Especially if you own clothes which can’t be shoved in a standard mixed load wash at 40°C.

Most clothes include written washing instructions on the label, but will usually also have 5 symbols on which tell you what temperature you should wash it, whether the clothes can be bleached, tumble-dried or ironed, or whether you should take them along to the dry cleaners. These symbols are essentially a de-facto international standard, which is handy if you’ve bought clothes overseas and the care label isn’t in English.

To help you decipher these symbols, there’s an iOS app called Laundry Day. Give it access to your iPhone’s camera, and then point it at the care label of the garment in question. It’ll do its best to identify the symbols, and, with a tap of the screen, it’ll explain what each symbol means in plain English.

I found that the camera struggled a bit, especially on labels where the text had faded following many washes. In most cases, it wasn’t able to correctly identify all five symbols.

A screenshot of the Laundry Day app on an iPhone

Fortunately, the first tab of the app shows you every possible symbol, so if you’re having no luck with the camera, you can manually select the symbols and still get the information in a readable format. The last tab, ‘Help & About’, also offers some general tips for working with certain types of fabric like silk and wool. There’s a checklist as well – did you empty the pockets first?

It’s a handy little app and I could see many students wanting to use it when they first go to university come September. For years, our student magazine at Bradford used to have a page about washing clothes, with an explainer for the various symbols, in the freshers week issue. I suppose this is the more modern equivalent of it. And it’s more accurate than this list.

Laundry Day is 79p, and available on the App Store for iPhone.

App of the week: Carrot Weather

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A screenshot of Carrot Weather on iOS

There’s no shortage of weather apps for the iPhone – indeed, it ships with one out of the box. But Carrot Weather is probably the only app that also insults you as well.

Carrot Weather is one of a suite of five apps which are primarily focussed around productivity. There’s a to-do list app, an alarm app, a fitness app, a calorie counter app, and this weather app. What the Carrot apps have in common is a sadistic, judgemental artificial intelligence feature that rewards you for good habits, but insults you if you displease it. So if you don’t complete your tasks on time, don’t meet your fitness goals or sleep in, then Carrot gets angry, and you’ll have to work hard to make her happy again. Her AI is not too dissimilar from GLaDOS, the antagonist of the Portal games series.

Because Carrot Weather isn’t based around objectives, you don’t need to worry too much about upsetting Carrot, but she will still make wry comments about the weather.

The app defaults to showing the weather conditions based on your current location, and the home screen shows the temperature, wind speed, conditions and an overview for the next hour. If it’s raining, it’ll indicate when it’s due to stop, or vice versa. It’s possible to set various other favourite locations, if you want to see what the weather is like elsewhere.

You can also swipe left to see the conditions over the next few hours, and again for a three day summary. Swipe up, and extra detail such as air pressure, visibility, humidity and UV index are available. This information can also appear as a widget in the notification centre, and you can customise how much data is shown.

As long as the mute switch is off, Carrot Weather will also use your phone’s text-to-speech function to speak her comments to you. She will also get angry if you keep tapping on her ‘ocular sensor’, which is the glowing circle that shows the current weather conditions, so, you know, don’t do that.

As you use Carrot Weather over time, various hidden features will unlock. This includes the weather for various fictional locations, such as Mount Doom, where it’s apparently 47° Celsius. I thought it’d be a bit warmer, personally.

If you like an app that’s a bit different and has a sense of humour, then I can recommend Carrot Weather. It’s certainly more fun to use than the weather app that ships with the iPhone.

Carrot Weather costs £2.99, and is a universal app available for iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch.

App of the Week: Airmail

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Screenshot of the main window for Airmail, an email client for Mac OS X

After a hiatus of several months (um, July!), it’s time for another instalment of my App of the Week. This week, I’m looking at Airmail, a new email client for Macs.

After Sparrow got bought out by Google last summer, development ceased (bar one small recent update for the iPhone version for iOS 7 compatibility). Sparrow had been my primary choice of email client, after I decided that Thunderbird was overkill for a home user. Earlier this year I changed from Sparrow to Apple’s own Mail app that is built into OS X, after following this guide to customise it.

But now I’ve moved on to Airmail. Like Sparrow, it has a clean and simple interface, support for a unified inbox, and it tries, where possible, to display pictures beside your emails. These can come from your address book, but Airmail also looks for a ‘apple-touch-icon.png’ file on the domain and will display that from time to time, hence the PayPal logo in the screenshot.

As well as supporting IMAP accounts, Airmail will also accept POP3 and even Exchange accounts. It also supports the various IMAP extensions used by Gmail. And like with Sparrow, attachments can be sent using Dropbox as well, although Airmail adds Google Drive, CloudApp and Droplr on top.

Most of all, Airmail seems very fast, light and stable. It opens quickly and doesn’t hang much. And it doesn’t slow your computer down so it’s fine to have running in the background whilst you do other things.

I really like Airmail and I’m happy to have it as my default email client on my Mac. It manages to tread the delicate balance between simplicity and depth of features very well.

Airmail is available on the Mac App Store for a mere £1.49. Bargain.

App of the Week: Osfoora

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I’ve reviewed several Twitter clients over the past couple of years, and just over two years ago I had a look at Tweetie, which was a freemium Twitter app for Mac OS X and at the time my preferred choice of Twitter client. The developer of Tweetie later got hired by Twitter themselves and with the launch of the Mac App Store last year came an official Twitter for Mac client based on Tweetie.

Until recently this was my favoured Twitter client on my Mac, but having used Tweetbot on my iPhone for some time I felt that I wanted a more powerful desktop Twitter client too. Osfoora had just been launched, so I gave it a spin, and I have to say I’m impressed.

The interface is apparently very similar to Twitterific, a veteran Twitter client that I’ve never really used before, but it’s also very similar to the official Twitter for Mac app so users should feel quite at home with it. I’ll therefore focus on what sets it apart from the official app.

Firstly, it supports the rather useful Tweet Marker service, which lets you bookmark your position when reading through your timeline. If you read every tweet in your timeline and use multiple devices (like a PC and a smartphone), Tweet Marker allows you to read some tweets on your phone (while travelling home on a train for example), and then pick up where you left off on your PC at home. Tweetbot also supports this on the iPhone. It’s a free service but donations are requested.

Moving on, as you’ll see in the screenshot, thumbnails of images in tweets are shown inline, so that you can easily see a preview before clicking them to view them full size. This is good as sometimes you’ll click on an image that looks interesting to find that it’s actually rather boring, or worse, an announcement that you’ve lost the game (sorry). Popular image services like TwitPic, yFrog, Instagram and Twitter’s own image hosting service are supported.

When composing a new tweet, you can include the title of the current song that you’re playing in iTunes by simply clicking a button, and like with the official client typing ‘@’ allows auto-completing of Twitter handles if you want to mention someone.

In terms of more advanced features, support for Read It Later and Instapaper is included, so you can save interesting links to these services for later reading. This isn’t as useful as it is on a mobile app, but I’ve still found myself saving links for later reading. You can also ‘mute’ specific usernames, in case someone you follow starts tweeting more than usual about something that you don’t care about and want a bit of a break. Conversely, you can also have tweets from other usernames highlighted, if you feel they’re more important than other tweets on your timeline. Unlike Tweetbot, Osfoora doesn’t yet support the muting of hashtags (which is useful when TV shows like X-Factor are on) or muting of clients (to hide tweets about what TV shows people are watching, what games they are playing or where they’ve checked into on Foursquare, for example). This would be useful to me.

Like most third-party clients, you get a choice of URL shorteners, rather than using Twitter’s own, although CloudApp is currently the only other one supported – no support for bit.ly, for example. Similarly you don’t have to use Twitter’s own image hosting service if you don’t want to.

Osfoora doesn’t yet support live streaming – tweets are refreshed on a schedule. However, this can be set to every minute if you wish, and support for live streaming should come in a future update. A nice touch is that a small message briefly appears at the bottom of the timeline stating how many tweets were received at the last refresh – although Osfoora also supports Growl notifications, I find this less jarring.

Finally, there’s support for multiple Twitter accounts, although each account gets its own timeline window. You can hide them though, or just use one window and use a keyboard shortcut to cycle through them.

Osfoora is £2.99 from the Mac App Store. It’s also available on iOS, but I haven’t tested it as I’m happy with Tweetbot at the moment.

App of the Week: Tweetbot

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Back in July, I reviewed TweetDeck, which at the time I felt was the best combined Twitter and Facebook client for iOS. But recently a degree of bitrot has infiltrated TweetDeck such that it now crashes regularly on devices running iOS 5, and so I’ve been on the look out for a replacement. Whilst Seesmic offers one client which supports both Twitter and Facebook (along with ping.fm), it doesn’t integrate them as well as TweetDeck did – the timelines are separate.

Since I have the official Facebook app on my iPhone anyway, I decided to try alternatives, and Tweetbot by Tapbots had been recommended. Unlike other Twitter apps it isn’t free – it costs £1.99 on the UK App Store, and there’s no trial version with adverts. But, having used it for a couple of days, it is worth the investment.

The interface is a little different to other apps, as it uses its own interface widgets, rather than following the same design principles as standard iOS apps. But, it is arranged in a logical way, and it shouldn’t take long to get used to. The main tabs – your timeline, mentions and direct messages – are where you’d expect, and there’s easy access to your favourite tweets, retweets and your profile. It also has very good support for Twitter’s lists feature which other clients tend to skip.

A single tap on a tweet produces a menu below which allows you to reply, retweet or favourite it, or open a further menu to quote, copy, email or translate it. It will also activate any links or @mentions. You can also click the ‘view detail’ button which lets you view the tweet full-screen, and click to see who has replied to, retweeted or favourited the tweet. If a link in a tweet is an image, such as on TwitPic or yFrog, TweetBot will show it full screen, and it supports a large number of services for this.

When composing tweets, you can use either Twitter’s built-in link shortener (t.co) and its own image hosting service (pic.twitter.com), or you can use one of several third-party services. Tweets can be saved as drafts and you can add a location; auto-completion of hashtags and @usernames is also supported.

What makes Tweetbot stand out is its ‘mute’ feature. You can mute users, hashtags or particular clients either indefinitely or for a short period of time. So if you don’t want to see tweets from paper.li, you can mute it across all of the people you follow, but still be able to read their other tweets. Similarly if someone is tweeting more than usual and you’re not interested, you can mute them for a few hours without unfollowing them. And you can also mute hashtags – so if you don’t care about The X-Factor you can restrict the tide of tweets from the people you follow by muting the hashtag.

Finally, unlike some other third-party Twitter clients, it supports push notifications, so that your device will alert you to any new mentions or direct messages. You can also limit push notifications of mentions to people you follow, to reduce spam.

The only real downside is that it only supports Twitter – there’s no integration of other sites like Google+ or Facebook, which is a bit of a shame. However, it does support Twitter very, very well.

I’ve been really impressed by Tweetbot. It’s quite a new client – version 1.0 was only released in April of this year – but it’s being actively improved and enhanced and deserves more attention than it gets. The price tag will put people off, but if you don’t mind spending less than £2 then you won’t be disappointed.

App of the Week: TweetDeck

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This week I’m looking at TweetDeck, although specifically I’m focussing on TweetDeck for iPhone. I actually don’t like the desktop version so much – I can see why it’s used by professionals, especially those looking after Twitter and Facebook accounts for brands, but it’s overkill for me. But the iPhone app, whilst more limited in scope, is a very nice little app, and beats out the official Twitter app in my view.

(I say ‘official’ – TweetDeck was acquired by Twitter back in May so it’s arguably also an official app – but there’s a proper Twitter client for the iPhone)

Most Twitter apps work in largely the same way, and as TweetDeck isn’t much of an exception I won’t go into too much detail about the basics – I’ll focus on what sets it apart and why I use it as my main Twitter client whilst on the move. Like most Twitter clients, you get columns for your stream (people you follow), mentions, and private messages, but TweetDeck lets you add others, such as searches or hashtags. I have a fourth column which shows tweets tagged with ‘#4sqsu’, in case another Foursquare superuser has tagged something important, which is quite useful.

TweetDeck includes support for ‘proper’ retweeting of other peoples’ tweets, but also lets you use ‘classic’ retweeting where you stick ‘RT @example’ at the front of the tweet. It also supports deck.ly, a service that lets you tweet more than 140 characters, in a transparent way that doesn’t require browsing to the deck.ly site – although as most other clients don’t support it, if you use it regularly you’ll probably annoy some of your followers.

A big feature, however, is Facebook integration. Status updates (and a few other things) appear alongside tweets in your timeline stream, and you can post status updates to Facebook from within the app itself – in fact, you can post the same thing to Twitter and Facebook. This is great for people who use both services, as you can read both at the same time. There’s also basic read-only Foursquare support, which shows some of your friends’ checkins, although the feature is a bit half-baked and you can’t use it to check-in.

I really like TweetDeck and as such it’s my preferred Twitter client. It’s a free download from the App Store should you wish to use it yourself.

App of the Week: Tweetie

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This is the second in a weekly look at an application I’ve been using lately and come to like. All of them will run on Mac OS X but some will be cross-platform.

It should be no secret by now that I like using Twitter. I’ve been a user for almost 3 years, sending my first tweet in late spring 2007. Twitter can be used quite well from the web but it’s real power comes from its API and the multitudes of applications which can make use of it. Tweetie is one such application – it began as an iPhone application and made the move to OS X last year.

Considering there are so many Twitter clients out there, what made me choose Tweetie? Firstly, it has a free version, which is supported by a few ads in your Twitter timeline (these are obvious and less frequent than I expected) and an occasional nag screen asking you to upgrade. Paying $19.95 removes the ads and the nag screen but doesn’t provide any extra features. It’s also built natively for OS X, unlike a number of others which use Adobe AIR – while this does allow them to run easily on Windows, OS X and Linux, in my experience AIR apps are quite slow and memory-hungry. Adobe have promised improvements to AIR so this may change.

Tweetie also supports multiple Twitter accounts – useful if you have a personal account and an account for your business, for example – although I personally don’t make use of this. The interface is very Mac-like, and it includes Growl notifications for new tweets which are useful if you want to be distracted whenever new tweets are received. It also has built-in search and you can view a Twitter user’s feed in the app by clicking their userpic. Support for URL-shortening services and TwitPic/yFrog is built-in too.

Tweetie’s use of animation makes it feel very smooth and slick, and it seems like the best-designed Twitter application I’ve used so far. It’s light enough to run at all times, and can be run just as a dock or notification icon.

It’s not perfect – it doesn’t support the new Retweet mechanism yet (so when you retweet it still posts ‘RT’ in front of a new tweet by you) and doesn’t show trending topics. There’s also no geolocation features, although this is of limited use for a desktop client.

I recently switched to Tweetie after having used EchoFon for Firefox, which I now can’t use due to bug 533535 in Firefox 3.6. But Tweetie offers much better features so I’m planning to stick with it. The Twitter client arena is very crowded but Tweetie sticks out as a very good application.