Ever since YouTube and Vimeo democratized the distribution process of filmmaking, there’s been an abundance of online video content to watch. And while a lot of it is really good, it’s just lost in the noise. But where there’s friction, there are at least a couple of apps trying to solve the problem. Video discovery platforms like 5by and Showyou come to mind. While all of these apps have some combination of aggregation, personalization, and an endless feed, they were still mostly just repackaged YouTube apps. Hyper is different. It’s an app made by filmmakers, dedicated to curating what they…
Author: Khamosh Pathak
Remember the time when not everyone’s social pages, websites and phones looked the same? The time before “skeuomorphic” design was even a thing? The time when no one cared what their hair looked like and when music was actually good? The time when skinny jeans and selfies didn’t exist? I do. Things were loud back then. We were loud back then. Instead of carefully crafting pixels in Photoshop, we made collages. They were bad. They were awesome. But here’s the thing about nostalgia — no matter how much you romanticise the past, you can’t go back. I can’t go back…
It’s raining journal apps here on Beautiful Pixels. It started with Journey for Android, Heyday for iPhone and now STEP Journal has showed up on my homescreen. At this point, a seasoned BP reader must be thinking – who needs more journal apps when we already have Day One? You sir are right, but Day One is a paid app and in the world we’ve built for ourselves, that severely limits its reach. In the ‘free apps’ market, the journal app space keeps getting interesting with every passing day. STEP, just like Heyday, is also an automated journal app. It…
Journal apps like Day One and Journey are great, but they only work if you are willing to. What if you’re not? What if you just want a passively curated timeline of your life to scroll through, just like Facebook? There’s Heyday for you. Heyday is an automated journal app. Once you grant access to your Photos and Location Services, the app will scan your photo library (thankfully ignoring the screenshots), match them up with the tied up location data, build small album-esque collages (like Moments in the Photos app) and present it all in a scrolling feed. Heyday is…
Sablo, by Disportium, claims to “let you explore the nebulous boundary between order and chaos — complexity”. The experience I’ve had with it was really trippy and memorable. You start out by selecting the shape you want – square, hexagon, or triangle. The playing field changes with your selection. There are colour swatch options as well. Swipe your finger across the screen to start the journey. Shapes form, patterns die, things merge and everything becomes chaotic. The app is actually based on math and science. It uses the Abelian sandpile model which makes sure that no two experiences in Sablo…
iCloud was supposed to be our file system saviour. The dream of managing data without interacting with files didn’t end well thanks to how unreliable iCloud was at launch. Dropbox, with its accessible and universal file management system won and the dream of the cloud ended up being just a messy folder. Unclouded aims to make sense of your messy Dropbox and Google Drive cloud storage. All that free space you earned in promotions and a careless attitude means your Dropbox storage is far from organized. Sure it’s like your bedroom where you know exactly which obstacles on the floor…