One would have never imagined an app that would let you tweet while learning morse code at the same time. Shacked Software have created a stunning Twitter client that lets you tweet in morse code with TeleTweet. It gives you that nostalgic feeling of sending and receiving telegrams in morse code. While it may seem like it has little practical use, it teaches you morse code in a fun way with something you end up doing a lot, tweeting.
The interface is as steampunk as it can get with authentic sound effects and beautiful visuals. The main window has a morse code machine and the paddle let’s you type a message assuming you know morse code without looking. There is a cheat sheet for the folks who don’t know morse code that can be swiped down easily. If this gets boring at any point, there is an option to use the standard qwerty keyboard. Once you’re done coding your message and hit send, the fun starts. The app now shows you a telegram with your message and the machine plays your message in morse code and transmits it. This makes me want to tweet more and spend some time learning morse code. The settings let’s you enable auto-space morse (which adds a space after a few seconds automatically), add location to tweets, enable tweet marker sync and choose which Twitter accounts to use.
When you turn TeleTweet into landscape mode, you are presented with an 1869 Thomas Edison ticker tape machine that acts as a receiver printing your tweets in morse code and english. I love the sound effects here but would really like some way of controlling which tweets are retrieved because it is quite late in fetching most of them. The app has a few bugs here. It sometimes displays the same tweet over and over again or displays a few tweets twice.
There are tons of things I would want them to add here but for $0.99, this is an absolute must buy given the fact that it teaches you morse code, lets you tweet and has a drool-worthy interface that takes you back to a simpler time.
Here’s a simple yet gorgeously functional app for all of you who like to keep a track of how the weather’s going to be over the next few days.
Nubilous helps you glance at the temperatures for you city over the next seven days. It displays a simple list of temperatures and how the weather is going to be for that day of the week. Tapping on each day shows you the temperatures and weather predicted for the Morning, Noon, Evening and Night.
The app automatically geolocates you current city on launch, but you can add multiple cities that you can swipe through, just as you would between your homescreens. Swiping up takes you to the app’s settings. Nubilous has a dark-ish color scheme, but goes well with the overall carbon-coated UI of the app.
I love this quote from the app’s App Store description:
Reliable forecast based on Scandinavian technology. They’re Vikings, they know their job.
Wondering what’s the weather on the other side of the planet? Now you’ll know.
The developers have tried to keep the app very simple and elegant, and this gives it its own unique character. If I lived in a country where checking your city weather was a routine daily task, I’d definitely download Nubilous — it’s FREE on the App Store for today, otherwise the regular price is $1.99.
[Update: The app is priced at $1.99, but is FREE on the App Store today.]
If you’re a designer, you probably already know about and are on dribbble. Dribbble is a community for designers to showcase their latest work and get feedback from others. It is an amazing source of inspiration for anything related to design. There have been quite a few dribbble apps for iOS and they look great. Balllin’ was my pick for the best dribbble iOS client until today. Misecia of NowPlayer fame have just released Backboard, a beautiful dribbble app with nice gesture controls.
Backboard features a nice overlapping pane interface akin to Sparrow’s and Facebook’s iOS apps. It doesn’t go overboard with different gradients and elements and has a flat UI which seems very popular recently. When you launch the app, you are shown the popular shots of the day and swiping from left to right reveals the main menu. There is an option to enter your username and see who you are following. It also has a built in twitter view to see tweets by users on dribbble. The detail view for a certain image resembles the Facebook timeline where the image is the cover photo and the profile picture is the Player’s avatar. Images can be shared to twitter or viewed on the dribbble website from here. You can read the comments but not actually post any due to Dribbble’s API limitation. Tilting the device horizontally gives you a nice full screen view of the image and a swipe will give you sharing options and the Player’s name. The profile view lets you see your Shots, Likes and also the people you’re following, people following you and draftees. A two finger swipe from left to right will always take you to the main menu while a single finger swipe goes back or takes you to the menu. Tapping the avatar takes you to the Player’s profile. The settings page lets you change the accent colour for the app with a few options available and let’s you enable iCloud backup.
Misecia have been raising the bar with UI for a while now and I’m very pleased with Backboard. The only thing that may put other apps ahead of this is the fact that this is iPhone only and not universal. At just $0.99 on the App Store, Backboard provides you with a beautiful experience for browsing Dribbble and does better than other iPhone-only dribbble clients on the App Store.
Read It Later and Instapaper have been the only 2 main ‘read later’ apps (before Readability) and the latter has been winning on iOS at least because of its beautiful interface. Read It Later has supported more platforms and devices and hence more apps but has only been a let down to some users because of its interface. All that changed today when Read It Later was rebranded as Pocket. Pocket (Read It Later V4.0) took what was wrong with the Read It Later interface and made it absolutely gorgeous. Everything looks so much better now, using the old Read It Later seems impossible.
While the app has always been functional, its UI changes are particularly spectacular. Pocket has gone with a flat-ish UI full of whites and subtle greys. There are no glossy effects or shadows thrown on for the heck of it. The emphasis is now more on the actual reading than ever. There are tons of small changes that you notice like the beautiful tiled pattern that appears before an image thumbnail has loaded. My only problem with the look of Pocket is the fact that they haven’t bothered changing the Share button option view. That looks exactly the same and is inconsistent with the rest of the new UI with its typical iOS navigation bar gloss effect. Pocket on the iPad also has an additional item viewing option that let’s you view articles grouped together as a grid fof thumbnail views as opposed to a typical cell view. [Ed note: Pocket on the new iPad's Retina Display is phenomenally better, and makes all the difference when reading in the article view. It feels fantastic.]
Pocket classifies items as articles, images or videos. Each separate class of items has its own unique view as compared to the old version that had everything as a basic cell. Viewing images in a beautiful thumbnail gallery makes glancing through loads of items much easier. The pencil tool on the top right lets you bulk edit and items saved can now be tagged for easy sorting later. A new option to favourite items has been added to the article view. Pocket lacks different fonts in the article view and I hope future updates will change this.
Readability was made available on iOS and Android in 2012 for free and has been very well received with its elegant interface. Pocket changes everything. Not only does it look better than every other app in its category but it also performs exceptionally well with a plethora of new features. Pocket is available for FREE on the iOS App Store and Google Play for Android devices.
Oh sweet holy lord of Pixels, what have we got here!? Who knew something as mundane as scrolling a list could be turned into something so beautiful?
Hakim El Hattab, the Lead Interactive Developer at Qwiki has put together a collection of lists having various scroll effects achieved through CSS/JS. There are eleven different scroll effects to experience, and each one is better than the other.
From the description, Hakim says:
Decided it was time for some CSS tinkering again and ended up creating this set of CSS3 scrolling styles. Not intended for any practical use but the visuals are surprisingly impactful.
This works by applying a future/past class to list items outside of the viewport as you scroll. Based on this class a variety of transforms are transitioned to via CSS.
The page has CSS 3D effects like Curl, Flip, Fly & Reverse Fly and normal effects like Wave, Skew, Helix, Fan, Tilt, Papercut and Zipper. The best way only way to know more about these is to check them out yourself.
Hakim has other gorgeous CSS experiments too, my favorite being the WebGL Particles one.
[View the page here]
The App Store has a plethora of music composing apps. Most of them were rendered useless when Apple announced Garageband for iOS. While most pro musicians would tend to use the higher end music composition apps like Korg iMS-20, the casual musician or the non musician now has tons of apps that make it unbelievably simple to create something that sounds beautiful. PropellerHead have created a tool that is both visually pleasing and simple to use for the layperson with Figure.
Figure has a very simple metro interface with a nice sandy beach theme. PropellerHead have really gone all out with the interface here. Transitions are smooth as butter and nothing feels out of place. Each different instrument section has its own colour theme for the play pad which is below the knobs. The best part about the actual music composition part of the app is this play pad that allows simple creation with a slide of a finger. Figure let’s you record for 8 bars only of a fixed duration and this is represented by a small nice slider with 8 sections on top. The interface is probably one of the most unique ones ever for a music app and given the ease of use you can almost never create something that sounds bad.
It has 3 main sections for music composition : Drum, Bass and Lead. Each of them have their own knobs to adjust the rhythm,range and scale steps. Each sound can be tweaked using a similar interface. There is a separate tab for adjusting the master controls that are the tempo,key and scales within the key of the current song. These apply to every instrument. Mixing each instrument is very simple. You control the volume of an instrument or mute it entirely. Once you have your pattern for one instrument, you can change the sound in each sections. With the amount of permutations and combinations that are possible it will be almost impossible to come up with the same tune twice.
Figure let’s you create something that sounds great in almost no time. You could spend almost an hour fine tuning one section you came up with and this app definitely adds the fun element to a music app. My only complaints are the fact that you cannot export your creations and also the duration of recording is quite short. That said, Figure is available for only $0.99 and is an absolute steal at the price for something that let’s you kill time and compose some nice electronic music.
