AppShopper

Though the iPhone comes with a clock app out of the box, this hasn’t fazed developers one little bit from trying to provide a better alternative (a search of the App Store here on AppShopper for “clock” yields over 1,000 results). On its face (see what I did there?), making a clock app unique seems kind of difficult – how many different ways are there to tell the time and set an alarm to wake you up? But there are a few clock apps that have stood out from the crowd recently.

First up is a new release from AppAnnex, Tap Alarm Clock. It offers a clean, simple interface with one of the easiest-to-use alarm setting mechanisms I’ve seen. To set the alarm, you spin a virtual dial reminiscent of an iPod click wheel to select the desired time. Tapping and holding at a specific clock position on the virtual dial will automatically set the alarm for that hour.

Here’s a demo video showing it in action:

Tap Alarm Clock lacks the ability to set multiple alarms or change the alarm sound but it works very well if your alarm needs are straightforward and you don’t need a lot of bells and whistles.

• $.99Buy Now
  Productivity
  

  Tap Alarm Clock

  Last Changed:

  2 days ago

  Rating:

  3.00 (1)

  Version:

  1.2

  iOS Universal

  Tired of fiddling with complicated settings trying to set an alarm clock? We have a simple solution for you - Tap Alarm Clock. Tap Alarm Clock offers a completely new, elegant, but at the same time,...

Siri on the iPhone 4S seems to have prompted even more interest in apps that recognize speech and talk back to you and alarm clocks are no exception. Crop Duster Media released Wake Smarter late last year and it offers a plethora of alarm features plus the ability to read nearly anything to you when you wake up. You can choose to hear RSS feed updates, upcoming events on your calendar, posts from your Twitter and Facebook feeds, the weather forecast, and more.

Wake Smarter can also listen for your “magic word” (like Studio Heat’s Kei, which debuted in early 2010) and respond to a list of preset commands to tell you the current time and date, your upcoming calendar appointments, set an alarm, and more, a handy feature if your iPhone or iPad isn’t within easy reach.

• $299Buy Now
  Utilities
  

  Wake Smarter – The Voice...

  Last Changed:

  4 weeks ago

  Rating:

  4.00 (47)

  Version:

  1.2

  iOS Universal

  Wake Smarter is the first voice-controlled alarm clock for the iPhone, iPod Touch & iPad. *** Nominated "Most Useful App 2011" by 148Apps.com *** "WakeSmarter is...

Last but not least is Silent Clock, an unusual yet innovative clock by developer 10-sor that will tell you the time without requiring you to even look at your iPhone, a useful function in situations when picking up your iPhone and looking at the screen is inappropriate, such as in meetings or at a movie theater. How does it do this, you ask? By using the iPhone’s vibrate motor and a Morse-code like, um, code. The code looks a little confusing at first but it makes sense once you feel it in action.

The app automatically makes your iPhone vibrate every quarter of an hour in a two-step sequence. The first step in the sequence denotes the hour and the second denotes the minutes (on the hour and at 15, 30, and 45 minutes after). So, 1:45 pm will be denoted with a single vibration followed by three more vibrations in a row.

The code still requires you to have a general sense of the time of day since the codes are the same for some hours of the day to avoid being too complex. To use Silent Clock, you need to open the app and leave it open without locking your iPhone and then place it in a pocket so you can feel the vibrations.

• $199Buy Now
  Utilities
  

  Silent Clock

  Last Changed:

  4 weeks ago

  Rating:

  No data

  Version:

  1.0

  iOS iPhone

  Silent Clock is an amazing app that delivers time information in a discrete and clever way using the vibrator of your iPhone. Every quarter of an hour, Silent Clock tells the time according to a...

Avid, the Massachusetts-based maker of audio and video editing software and tools, has released a version of its popular video editing application, Avid Studio, for the iPad. Avid Studio allows you to combine video, audio, and pictures and add titles, animations, transitions and more to create polished videos that can be published directly to YouTube or even exported for further editing in Avid Studio for the PC.

This is not Avid’s first foray into the App Store (Avid Scorch, a sheet music viewing app, debuted last June) though Avid has not yet released anything in the Mac App Store. Avid last hit our radar in July when it tried to woo Final Cut Pro users to its Media Composer application via a cross-grade promotion.

Avid Studio debuted in the App Store yesterday and costs $4.99. It requires iOS 5 or higher on an iPad 1 or 2.

• $499Buy Now
  Photography
  

  Avid Studio

  Last Changed:

  1 week ago

  Rating:

  3.50 (224)

  Version:

  1.0

  iOS iPad

  Big-screen moviemaking comes to the touchscreen with Avid® Studio for iPad. We’ve distilled the world’s leading film-editing technology into an easy-to-use app that enables you to edit video,...

Adonit, a Seattle-based product design company, has released JotStudio, a drawing app for the iPad intended as a companion for its own stylus products, the Jot and Jot Pro. JotStudio hit the App Store yesterday and is free for the first week, after which its price will go up to $1.99.

JotStudio features a handful of basic virtual paper types: plain, ruled, grid, or storyboard. When it comes to virtual pen styles, you can choose between pencil, fine-tipped pen, marker, or highlighter and several colors for each. There’s also a virtual eraser to let you refine your drawings as well undo and redo buttons. You can also import a photo from the iPad’s Photos app to use as a background or draw on or around.

Adonit’s Jot stylus is unique compared to most other styli currently available for capacitive touchscreens because of its tip design. Instead of a rubber or foam tip, the Jot’s tip features a metal point attached to a clear plastic disk. This disk is what comes into contact with your screen and since it’s clear, you can see exactly where you’re writing. I purchased a Jot Pro stylus from Adonit back when it was a Kickstarter project last year (and reviewed it for my personal blog) and I’ve found it to provide a more pen-like writing experience on the iPad compared to several other styli I’ve tried.

Though JotStudio is intended to be used with Adonit’s own Jot stylus, it will work with any stylus made for capacitive touchscreens or even your finger.

JotStudio is a little glitchy and feels pretty basic at the moment, lacking a feature that I think is critical in iPad drawing apps: wrist protection. Without wrist protection, resting your wrist or hand on the iPad’s screen as you write will be interpreted as drawing, marking up the virtual page more than you intended. When I go to take notes on my iPad, I use NoteTaker HD or NoteShelf, two full-featured writing apps that offer a wrist protection feature. Adonit mentions in JotStudio’s App Store description that many more updates and features are planned so hopefully wrist protection is on their to-do list.

• FreeBuy Now
  Productivity
  

  JotStudio

  Last Changed:

  2 days ago

  Rating:

  3.00 (101)

  Version:

  1.1

  iOS iPad

  Paper had a good run. JotStudio is a collaging and sketching app calibrated for a precision stylus rather than a finger. JotStudio was built specifically to be used with Jot by Adonit; the most...

Tax season is upon us and if you want to get an idea of how bad the damage will be in terms of any taxes you may owe or see if you’re due for a refund, check out Intuit’s universal TaxCaster app for the iPhone and iPad. TaxCaster is not new to the App Store but it was recently updated for the 2011 tax year and is a free and handy tool to help prepare yourself for the dreaded date of April 15.

Today is the deadline by which employers in the U.S. must mail out W-2 forms to employees so most of you may have already received these documents and can start preparing your 2011 tax forms. TaxCaster will ask you for information from your W-2 as well as for amounts of other income and interest and tax deductions and will provide you with a ballpark estimate of the taxes you may owe or the refund you may be entitled to as a result. Of course, there’s a link in the app to get more information on Intuit’s full TurboTax products, but we expect that and it’s easy to ignore if you’re not interested.

Sample screenshots provided by Intuit

Psychologically, I’m finding that an estimate of a refund that’s this easy to get is an incentive to file my taxes sooner rather than later. Of course, an estimate showing that you owe the IRS money instead may be an incentive to do the opposite but at least you’ll have a heads up.

• FreeBuy Now
  Finance
  

  TaxCaster by TurboTax – Free...

  Last Changed:

  1 week ago

  Rating:

  4.50 (142)

  Version:

  3.5

  iOS Universal

  Get a quick estimate of your 2011 tax refund. IT’S EASY Just enter some basic info and watch your refund add up. “A quick and dirty estimate on your tax return” – Bestof1000.com “A...

Like AT&T and Verizon, Sprint now has its own account management app available for the iPhone. Sprint Mobile Zone debuted in the App Store yesterday and offers Sprint subscribers access to their accounts to check bill amounts, pay bills and more.

The app even has some utility for those who are not Sprint subscribers, offering device information on battery and connectivity status. The Power Controls section will show you estimates of remaining battery life for activities like web browsing and watching video while the Resources section will display a list of apps currently running in the background. You can also use the app to locate an Apple store and call Apple for support.

Sprint Mobile Zone is free and requires iOS 5.0 or higher on an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad.

• FreeBuy Now
  Utilities
  

  Sprint Mobile Zone

  Last Changed:

  2 weeks ago

  Rating:

  4.00 (52)

  Version:

  1.0

  iOS iPhone

  Sprint Zone offers Sprint customers immediate access to their account online, Sprint News and promotions and in addition, it offers the following for both Sprint and non-Sprint customers: - Simple...

If you’re in marketing or website design and frequently need to find the exact value for a color on the web or in a digital document, Sofmatic’s new Pick application for the Mac is a great choice at the best price ever: free.

Once opened, Pick resides in the menu bar on your Mac and can be activated with a click or a hotkey combination. A virtual loupe lets you home in the color you’d like to identify and left-clicking with your mouse will copy the revealed value to your clipboard for pasting elsewhere. You can choose from several color formats to suit your needs.

Pick is a lightweight application that weighs in at just half a megabyte. It debuted in the Mac App Store earlier this month and requires Mac OS 10.6 or higher and a 64-bit processor.

(For you Mac OS experts out there, yes, Mac OS X includes a color picker app out-of-the-box called DigitalColor Meter. While it offers the same basic functionality and doesn’t require a trip to the Mac App Store to get, its interface isn’t quite as slick and it isn’t as easy to invoke without a hotkey combination or menu bar shortcut.)

• FreeBuy Now
  Graphics & Design
  

  Pick

  Last Changed:

  2 weeks ago

  Rating:

  5.00 (7)

  Version:

  1.1

  Mac OS

  Softmatic® Pick™ is a handy little color picker with a loupe. It sits in the status bar on top of your screen and is invoked with a hotkey. Using Pick is simple: You launch the loupe with...

It’s not often that I get excited about task apps. After all, they’re meant to hold the millions of things I have to get done, for which there are never enough hours in a day to complete. Sometimes I get tired just thinking about everything I have to do or should be doing. While I’ve seen several task apps that try to make managing my tasks as painless as possible, Clear, an upcoming app created by Realmac Software and new studio Impending, actually looks like it will make recording my tasks easy to do and even a little fun.

Here’s the preview video for Clear:

I love the multitouch gestures to navigate tasks and lists and how the interface seems to be very simple, as promised by the app’s tagline.

So far, details are sparse about Clear’s features, including any synchronization or back-up capabilities (like with Toodledo, iCloud or Dropbox). What has been revealed so far via the Twitter account for Clear is that it will be for devices running iOS 5 and higher only and it will be available in the App Store in about two weeks. Our sister site, MacRumors, has been able to ferret out a little pricing information at Macworld | iWorld 2012, noting that Clear will be free with in-app purchases for additional color themes and multiple lists capabilities.

Clear will be Realmac Software’s first entry in the iOS App Store, supplementing their existing offerings in the Mac App Store: Courier, RapidWeaver, LittleSnapper, and Analog. Impending is a new studio formed by Phil Ryu and David Lanham of MacHeist bundle fame and other endeavors.

There are several turn-by-turn navigation apps in the App Store but sometimes these can be overkill when you just need to know the right direction to head in and can figure the rest out yourself. Aliya LX’s iPoint2 for the iPhone hits the sweet spot here, providing the direction and distance to your desired location in a very simple interface.

Say you’re vacationing in an exotic location and want to head back to your hotel but also meander around a little on the way to see the sights. Or you’re exploring a large park and want to keep track of where you are in relation to the park’s entrance. iPoint2 is perfect for these types of situations and many others.

You can save multiple locations to use to guide you as needed. The only time you’ll need a data connection (Wi-Fi or 3G) is to get the Google Maps information to set a location – after these are set, the app will use the iPhone’s compass and GPS receiver to determine current location and heading and calculate distance on its own.

The app’s settings are located in the iPhone’s main Settings app, where you can select metric or imperial units for distances shown, a handy toggle for Americans like me who are used to the nonsensical imperial-based system we’ve grown up with.

• $199Buy Now
  Navigation
  

  iPoint2

  Last Changed:

  9 weeks ago

  Rating:

  No data

  Version:

  1.1

  iOS iPhone

  Ever wanted to know the direction to any particular place on the planet? If so then iPoint2 is just the thing for you! As its name suggests, iPoint2 points to places, any place. Given where you are...

As pointed out by our sister site MacRumors yesterday, TechCrunch noted the debut of Evi, a new iPhone app that offers Siri-like voice search functionality powered by artificial intelligence. Evi, developed by True Knowledge, works on iPhone and iPod touch models running iOS 4, unlike Siri, which is only available on the iPhone 4S.

Here’s the promotional video for Evi:

True Knowledge has sought to differentiate Evi from Siri by emphasizing its ability to provide answers rather than offering to search the internet, a result obtained often with Siri. However, Evi cannot add appointments to your calendar or create reminders and alarms like Siri can.

Unfortunately, Evi has proven to be so popular that True Knowledge’s servers are overloaded and Evi isn’t able to even provide any answers at the moment. True Knowledge has acknowledged these issues and has posted a notice promising that its team is “working around the clock” to address the issues and ensure Evi can handle the volume of requests. So if you want to give Evi a shot, you may want to wait until it’s operational before spending your money. Once operational, Evi may give Siri a run for her money, at least when it comes to providing information.

• $.99Buy Now
  Lifestyle
  

  Evi

  Last Changed:

  3 weeks ago

  Rating:

  2.50 (1997)

  Version:

  1.1.0

  iOS iPhone

  Say hello to Evi. Evi is the revolutionary artificial intelligence here to help with all of your everyday information needs. Unlike a search engine, which simply looks for matching words and shows...

Time Warner Cable, an American cable television service provider, has released an update to its TWC TV app that adds compatibility for the iPhone and iPod touch, expanding access beyond the iPad for live TV streaming via Wi-Fi within subscribers’ homes.

Time Warner Cable’s TWC TV app first debuted for the iPad only early last year and experienced some controversy shortly after its release when several media companies objected to the use of their content in the app, forcing Time Warner to remove several channels from its line-up available for streaming within the app. Despite this, the list of channels available for streaming through the app has since increased and at least one of the media companies that complained initially, FX, is back in the streaming line-up.

Beyond streaming live programming, TWC TV offers the ability to change channels on compatible cable boxes and DVRs and manage recordings and settings on compatible DVRs. The interactive program guide is also accessible through the app.

The free app requires iOS 4.3 or higher on an iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, 3rd-generation or newer iPod touch, and iPad and iPad 2. You must be a subscriber to Time Warner Cable service with a Standard video package or higher and have a Time Warner Cable user name and password as well as a home Wi-Fi network.

• FreeBuy Now
  Entertainment
  

  TWC TV

  Last Changed:

  3 weeks ago

  Rating:

  3.00 (314)

  Version:

  2.6.0

  iOS Universal

  Now you can watch your favorite shows and control your TV on the iPad® AND iPhone®! Turn any room into a TV room* - If you are a Time Warner Cable video subscriber, the FREE TWC TV™ app turns...