When Apple released the new iPad back in March this year, we had featured a stunning collection of Retina wallpapers for the new iPad. It’d be a crime to not fully utilize the brilliant display on this magical device by using something sub-par on it. Since then, as more and more folks have bought the device, there have been many new wallpapers that have become available. 2048pixels, a new site that launched earlier this month, is a platform for sharing wallpapers for the Retina Display on the new iPad.
The site showcases original work from some of the best designers out there, all ready for that gorgeous display on your new iPad. It is also one of the first few websites that is retina ready and that works brilliantly on a tablet. Tapping on an image reveals the wallpaper page with a 2048×2048 image that you can share or save. Swiping across the screen changes the page and reveals more wallpapers. The navigation bar at the top lets you submit images as well. There is also a switch that allows you to toggle a light or dark theme. I really love when developers pay attention to small things like this in their work. There are many Apple inspired wallpapers that look spectacular. The overall site looks and feels really nice. If you own a new iPad or just want some brilliant wallpapers, head on over to 2048pixels and give yourself a visual treat.
While iOS has been able to natively take screenshots from the beginning, managing screenshots has always been a tad difficult. Your screenshots are treated as regular photos in your camera roll and there is little you can study there. Screenshot Journal aims to change the way you work with screenshots on your iOS device. UIForge have developed an app to help you study screenshots that looks really good.
When you launch the app, you are greeted with a nice splash screen and then the app scans through your camera roll and adds all screenshots to the app — sorted by the month in which they were taken. Since apps are not allowed to delete photos in the camera roll, you will have to do that yourself if needed. There are 3 main tabs in the app. Storage shows you all your screenshots organized by month. You can favourite a screenshot as well for easy access or delete one and send it to trash. One huge advantage this app has over the photos app is the zooming capability. You can zoom to 3200% and study every minute detail. There is a nice grid option that can be enabled as well. Screenshots can be shared by email or tweeted from within the app as well. Another key point is the app can recognize what device screenshot it is and whether the screenshot is retina or not.
Overall, this app looks great and will be very useful for people dealing with a lot of screenshots or UI designers and developers who have tons of screenshots in their camera rolls. I would have liked a few more sorting options like custom folders or the ability to edit screenshots. If you take a lot of screenshots, you need this app and it is available as a universal app for $1.99 on the App Store.
If you’ve ever designed for iOS in Photoshop, you know how long it can take to go from concept to Xcode. You work with Retina and non Retina resolutions for the iPhone and the iPad and you need to save files differently and keep track of quite a few different sizes for different elements. The guys at Ui Parade have created an Adobe Photoshop plugin that will make your job much simpler. DevRocket is a plugin for iOS app developers who use Photoshop.
DevRocket has you covered on almost every base when it comes to UI elements on iOS devices. You start off by choosing your orientation and device and it has a layout ready for you. This layout has rulers, guides, a navigation bar and a tab bar as separate layers. The best part about this plugin is that you work on one single canvas and it takes care of both resolutions for you. There is a layout guide button that is immensely useful while designing something. You can also create Ui Snips easily with a click of a button. My favourite feature of the plugin is the auto appending of @2x to a filename for retina displays. I love how it allows you to create canvases for every icon size you would need including corner radius clipping guides. It also takes care of naming every small element correctly depending on its resolution.
After using this for a few days, I can’t imagine working on any iOS app layout without it. This is one of those things that will change the way you work and allow you to get more things done faster. I recommend DevRocket to every app developer and anyone working with app layouts. DevRocket is compatible with Adobe Photoshop CS5 and above available for $10 here.
Here’s a video demonstrating DevRocket:
Weather apps are dime a dozen on the App Store today. There are literally hundreds of weather apps available for both the iPhone and iPad. So it’s very difficult to pick out the apps that are not only beautiful and gorgeous, but also have the information that you need. Weather 2x by McLean Mobile Solutions is a once such app that packs the perfect combination of beautiful pixels and insightful data.
Weather 2x displays gorgeous, animated, fullscreen real-world visuals on the screen, based on the weather in the selected city. These are absolutely stunning to look at, and look great on their own. Weather 2x displays the temperature, name of the city and the weather status on top of these visuals. A single tap on the screen toggles between the weather state and information like the amount of precipitation, visibility, humidity, wind speed and pressure levels.
Double tapping the screen reveals a 5-day forecast of temperature highs and lows, along with neatly crafted icons for sunny, cloudy, rainy states. Swiping left-to-right reveals the cities that you can track and the app lets you add as many cities as you’d want. This list contains mini-previews of the weather visuals of each city, which is a very nice touch. When you enter the Edit more here, these previews start jiggling just as the icons on the homescreen, with little X in the corner to delete one. Swiping right-to-left instead reveals the daily forecast in steps of 3 hours for the five days — again, containing some excellent icons of the sun and the moon.
Weather 2x supports On/Off toggles for Metric & 24 Hour Time in the settings, and also the ability to turn the subtle sound effects off. A recent update to the app (v1.3) brought iCloud sync, so your choices are maintained across your devices. At just $0.99 on the App Store, Weather 2x is one of the best looking weather apps I’ve come across on the App Store.
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Flight+ is a beautiful tool for tracking your flights in real time. There are a few other apps that do the same but Flight+ adds that extra bit of elegance to the category. International Airport Flight Track Technologies have put in the effort of making an app that is immensely useful, intuitive and beautiful.
When you launch the app you are immediately reminded of Apple’s reminders app with the textures. The airmail envelope border is a very nice touch. The app has an overlapping panes UI that is gesture driven (reminiscent of Path and Sparrow) on the iPhone and a document folder layout with tabs on the iPad to make use of the larger real estate. You can add flights by entering flight details (all optional) and searching for flights in the online database. The app lets you configure alerts for the flight and shows you information about the aircraft and seating map. You can also add custom notes for each flight in the respective tab. The information available is staggering and there are flight boards for over 16000 airports. The second tab has the airport search that lets you add airports to favourites and shows you information about the airport including a beautiful flight board, 10 day weather forecast and a map that shows all flight paths from the airport. Realtime weather and local time and are displayed with each airport in the search. The feature I really liked here was the Average Delay bar that lets you know what to expect in advance. The airlines tab lets you do the same things for an airline and also see the twitter feed for that particular airline if available.
I absolutely love the maps layout in this app. Each airport has a nice widget above it that has all the information available on the airport page and this is the kind of thing that makes you want to use this app more. The maps tab lets you view all your flights, favourite airports and the major airpots all over.
The settings tab has some nifty features like minimal data traffic mode that saves you some data usage by disabling updates for maps, weather and images. The auto delete option removes flights after they have completed the journey. You can customize the notification settings like alerts for scheduled and actual times along with status changes. There is an option to import your flights saved on TripIt as well. The support section has a detailed guide on using this app since it may overwhelm some with the abundance of information available.
This app is easily the best flight tracking app on the App Store but as with most apps it is not perfect. I don’t like the fact that it has to be purchased separately on both the iPad and iPhone and there is no iCloud sync for flights. Flight+ outclasses similar apps by a long shot. Compared to other apps in the category the pricing for Flight+ is fine since it is available for $2.99 on the iPhone and $4.99 on the iPad.
eBay pushed out version 2.0 of its iPad app a few days ago. This update adds tons of new requested features and a complete overhaul of the UI including support for the retina display of the new iPad. Most users have had to use the mobile version of the site for certain functionality which wasn’t present in the app like editing listings, etc. Using a mobile website is never as good as using an app as we all know. This update changes everything.
You are prompted to sign in after launching the app and after you sign in, you are greeted with a homescreen that can be customized with the sections of your choice. You can also see recent items and popular items in addition to what you’re watching, buying or selling on the top half of the homescreen. There is a small green tab on the top left that makes the control panel visible. The effect on the rest of the page when you tap this is a very nice touch. The control panel lets you see the same things as the home page with a few more items and settings. The settings page feels a little boring compared to the rest of the app but then again it is just a settings page. The overall app is very smooth, responsive (are you listening Facebook?) and supports both portrait and landscape mode. The app is full of pleasing subtle textures that make you want to use the app more and more.
I am really glad to see some big brands putting an effort into the UI of their apps and not just doing a mobile website container like others. eBay for the iPad will hopefully make more organizations want to improve their own apps. It is available on the App Store for free.
