Oh my goodness, we’re breaking the rules today. Up until now we’ve featured apps from the App Store, but Patrick has included one from Cydia (jaaailbreak) to mix things up a little. Exciting, no? Yes. This week’s Free Reign features:
- Bargain Bin
- Screensplittr — Patrick: “Ah, no.. Cydia.”
- Big Oven
- Polarize
Bargain Bin
Concept: An app to help you find apps. More importantly an app that helps you find bargains and price drops in the App Store.
Strengths: Lets you see what’s had a price drop / what’s gone free across the whole store, or by categories. You can create a Watch List for apps you’d like to see get discounted and set a price level you’d like to see them drop to. Push notifications – it will push alerts to you on Watch List apps that hit the price target you set, on apps that have gone down to free, and more.
Non-strengths: no search feature.
Overall: One of several good apps for finding bargains in the App Store, and the only one with push so far. We just posted about this yesterday, but it has since been updated and improved on a major UI weakness. Previously a single tap on an app in a listing dropped you out to the App Store; now a single tap reveals a menu of buttons to choose to see the app’s description, screenshots, add it to your Watch List, or jump out to its App Store page.
Screensplittr
Concept: A jailbreak app that lets you share your iPhone’s screen and display it in apps like DemoGod on your Mac – so you can see everything being done on the iPhone within the demo app on your Mac screen.
Strengths: Great for doing screencasts / demos of iPhone apps. Extremely simple to use – single tap to toggle it on and off.
Non-strengths: None to speak of.
Overall: One of those ‘this is why you jailbreak’ apps.
BigOven
Concept: Access to 160,000 recipes on your iPhone. Om nom nom.
Strengths: I haven’t personally counted the number of recipes, but non-scientific test searches for the “hot dog” and “steak tartar” yielded at least eight results each. Recipes are formatted for the iPhone screen with ingredients and instructions (and photos, when provided)
Non-strengths: It’s slow. Pretty darn slow, even on the 3GS.
Overall: Okay, so you don’t cook up a meal in the same way you check your e-mail, but speed is still a factor. It’s a lot more fun to look recipes up quickly, so I’d leave this alone until it gets faster.
Polarize
Concept: Give your photos that polaroid look and flare with a filter and custom tags
Strengths: Simple and easy; photos look like they were printed from a Polaroid camera; taggin them is as easy as typing on the keyboard
Non-strengths: None.
Overall: It’s not for everyone, but it’s another cool little way to play with photos on your iPhone and the tagging is a nice touch.
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Here's a non-strength for Polarize — the output resolution sucks (450×520). In the Polarize group on flickr, the author says Apple is refusing to let him update it with a version that outputs at a higher resolution.
@kbrian
thanks for that feedback. Didn't think about that, but I guess I'm so used to the iPhone photo resolution looking like crap on the device anyway that I didn't notice or even think about it. That's not good!
Thanks for the feedback on BigOven. Since the free app connects to an online recipe archive, the speed of display/searching is limited by your current 3G or Wifi connection speed. We also have had a pretty overwhelming number of users of this app, and, while it runs on multiple machines already, we'll look at expanding it. It's currently approaching its 2 millionth download, so the servers can get hit pretty hard at various times. Hope you have a chance to try it again!
- Steve (founder, bigoven.com)
PS: One way of verifying whether it was your 3G/Wifi connection speed or the servers is to visit a desktop that's connected via a broadband line to the Internet and visiting our mobile-friendly version of the site, http://www.bigoven.com/m (note the trailing m). I've just tried it now and it's pretty lickety-split, so my hunch is that you either hit it during very peak time or your AT&T or wifi connection could have been a little pokey.
(This shortcut can be used for Blackberry, etc.)
thanks for the comments, Steve.
I'm actually on Rogers in Canada, and as far as I know my connection was pretty decent, but the servers might have been pretty busy at the time, so another try wouldn't hurt.
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