The monsoon gods decided to surprise us with some spectacular rain this Sunday evening at the iXyr Media HQ and the accompanying Petrichor has me pumped up about this week's Platter. We're just over a week away from WWDC '13 and are just as excited as everyone else for what new announcements Apple has lined up for us. Till then, let's take a look at what's been served on the Platter this week.
Recent
Recent is a tiny menubar app for Mac created by Mert & Prekesh that brings you the breaking news. It sits in the menubar and using its Notification Center integration, notifies you of any breaking news as and when it is reported by Breaking News. Clicking on a notification takes you directly to the site, where you can read more about the news. It's a petite utility, so there are no options to configure yet. I do wish I could change the notification sound though. You can download the beta of Recent from here.
GeoGuessr
GeoGuessr is a brilliant & fun game powered by Google Maps & their Street View technology. Created by Anton Wallén, GeoGuessr presents you with a random street view and makes you guess the location of that place on a map. It then gives you points depending on how close your guess was to the actual location. You have 5 turns to make the most points. It's a lot of fun and is interesting as well. It makes you study the landscape, look for any signs or boards that have any indication of where this particular place is. Go ahead, try it out and let us know how much you scored.
CSS Beautifier
CSS Beautifier is an open-source project from Sencha Labs that helps your beautify your CSS code. Just paste your code in there, configure a few simple options if needed and BOOM! You've for yourself a nicely indented, color-coded and beautiful CSS Code. Give it a try, you'll love it.
Poetreat
Poetreat is a nice iPhone & iPad app for anyone who loves poetry. Poetreat is designed to help you write 'em by suggesting words that rhyme, as you type. It's got a really simple, subtle UI with a really neat color scheme. On the left, you can customize the rhyme scheme (AABB or ABAB or others) while on the right, you have a list of your poems. The app also smartly tells you the syllable count for each line. Poertreat syncs your poems across devices, so you're never away from what you write. You can grab it from the App Store and try it out. It's Free, though there's an IAP for unlocking additional poetry saves.
Thanks for this tip, Kaleb
Groceries•
Groceries is a beautiful new iPhone app from the folks at kidBombay, the same team that brought us the CardFlick app we've written about in the past. The app lets you quickly & easily create multiple lists for your grocery shopping so you can always remember what to buy when you're at the market, and how much. Groceries has stunning photographs of the products in its database, making it easy to remember not only the names, but also how the product looks like. If the database is missing an item, you can always add your own to the list. Your lists are synced across devices, although it uses its own sync account instead of iCloud. Groceries costs $1.99 on the App Store.
PitPass
PitPass is a new product/service from Second Gear Software, primarily targeted towards iOS app developers. It lets the developers offer an easy way to reach their potential & existing customer base and promote their upcoming app with the help of Apple's Passbook feature in iOS. PitPass adds a pass to your Passbook and indicates the status of the upcoming app. Second Gear itself is using PitPass to tease its own upcoming app, though it's not ready to talk much about it yet. You can try PitPass out using this example that they've set up.
Music Related iOS App (Concept) Designs
Designmodo has put together this collection of some stunning designs of music apps for iOS. While most of these apps are concept designs, a few of them (like the T3 Player App) have made it to the App Store. Going through this, there shouldn't be a doubt in anyone's mind that there's some incredible talent working on iOS apps these days and that other platforms are far behind when it comes to UI design.
We’re facing some issues with our image gallery plugin, due to which some items were screenshot-less this week. Please bear with us this time.
Know a website, app or something else that would look great on next week’s Platter? Let us know!