All Articles in Quick Apps

A daily double of ringtone makers today, this one focusing on Ringtone Studio from PocketMac.

Ringtone Studio includes visual sound editing, volume control, fade in/out, and the ability to grab ringtones from movie files.

If you give Ringtone Studio a try, let us know what you think!

Twitbit [$4.99 - iTunes link] is a Twitter client for the iPhone and iPod touch that provides built-in push notification for @mentions and direct messages (DMs).

For those of you still reading — those didn’t immediately jump over to grab it — what this means is you get all the functionality you’ve come to expect — reading, posting, multiple accounts, start and stop following, searching, trends, user profiles, reply chains, etc. etc. and you get any @mentions and DMs pushed straight to you without the need for an extra enabler app (which most other Twitter clients currently require).

The folks at High Order Bit were gracious enough to give us a sneak peak to try out, and I’ve been using it pretty much non-stop since. And… I’ve found all the functionality I need and then some. The push works wonderfully as well. So far, so fast.

One thing I particularly liked (but others may not) is that, when you get multiple @mentions or DMs, rather than having the latest obliterate the previous text alert (fix that by implementing a genius stacking system, will you Apple?), Twitbit collates them up. You don’t get to see the contents of the latest message, but you do get to see “X new @mentions and X new DMs” (see screenshot below). At least you have some idea of volume.

Of course, iPhone notifications being interruptive as they are, there’s still a chance something will pop up while you’re watching a movie or playing a game…

Given that limitation, more granularity as to who and what Twitbit pushes would be grand — and it’s likely forthcoming in an update — but wow are these young upstart devs and apps giving the entrenched Twitter clients a race for their functionality.

If you want an amply functioning Twitter client with built-in push notifications, take a serious look at Twitbit and let us know what you think.

Tons of screenshots after the break!

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Boxcar [$1.99 - iTunes link] is almost more enabler than app. It only does one thing, but thus far it does it very, very well — it sends Push Notifications for Twitter @mentions and Direct Messages (DMs) that then open in either Tweetie or Twitterrific.

Setup is straight forward; you log into your account through an in-app view of Twitter’s website, and authorize Boxcar. You can select whether you want Push Notification for either @mentions, DMs, or both, and which of the aforementioned apps you want to open them in (hopefully support for more options will be forthcoming, such as Tweetdeck, Birdfeed, Twittelator Pro, etc.). You can also choose to automatically tweet them a shout out.

Like all Push-enabled apps, you can exit to the iPhone Settings to turn on or off Sounds, Alert (text boxes), and/or Badges.

That’s it. Sit back and enjoy Push Notifications so you can immediately know when anyone talks to or about you on Twitter. Even when you’re watching a movie on your iPhone. Or playing a game. Or writing an SMS. Or even taking a phone call — if anyone still does that…

In other words, it works so well, you may have to learn to better manage your Twitter interruptions.

Now the crux: is a couple of bucks a lot to pay for an app that arguably only extends the usefulness of other apps that you already paid a few bucks (or more) for? Depends on how badly you want Push Notification for Twitter, whether you’re willing to wait for full-on Twitter clients to add it themselves (however long that takes), and if you realize a couple of bucks is very little, and partly going to support the developers servers that are handling the Twitter calls and passing them on to Apple’s notification servers.

I bought it without a second thought. You’ll have to weigh the value (which is more important than cost) yourselves, and let me know what you think in the comments — or @reneritchie and I’ll get it right away via push

More pics after the break!

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GoodReader [$4.99 - iTunes link], sent to us courtesy of editor emeritus Mike Overbo, is an app to help iPhone and iPod touch users view very large PDF (Adobe Portable Document Format), images, and TXT (plain text) files.

While it can use the built-in iPhone file viewer for Office and iWork, GoodReader has its own, very fast renderer for:

• very large PDF’s, fast opening, password protected files, 50x zoom, text search, bookmarks
• very large TXT’s, fast opening, no zooming or left/right scrolling required (text lines are wrapped to screen size), text search, bookmarks
• high-resolution pictures, slideshow

The new version also allows for USB file transfer.

If you like your files BIG, and decide to give GoodReader a try, let us know how it works for you.

G-Map from XRoad sent us a postcard from their drive up highway 3.0 and let us know they’ve come back with great new features like real-time voice guidance and turn-by-turn arrows.

And as always, since G-Map 1.3.1 downloads its maps to your iPhone, you don’t need a data or Wi-Fi connection to use them, which comes in handy when in-between cities and off the grid.

Both G-Map East [$34.99 - iTunes link] and G-Map West [$34.99 - iTunes link] are currently on sale at a reduced price in the App Store. So, if no-subscription, download-to-your-iPhone turn-by-turn GPS navigation appeals to you, and you decide to give it a try, let us know if it gets you where you’re going.

Prowl ($2.99 – iTunes link) sends Growl alerts to your iPhone via Push Notification. That’s right, duck and cover, we’ve just found the nu-cu-lar option.

Growl is a well known 3rd party alert system for Mac OS X and provides heads up display of incoming email, twitter, file transfer, chats, downloads, and just about anything you can shake an “I want to know” at. And Windows users, don’t you fret — they’re working on a beta for Microsoft’s platform as well.

Prowl takes Growl alerts and send them on to your iPhone (or iPod touch), and you can configure the type and priority level you want to get. Up to 30 days of notifications are logged, and links remain active in the alerts.

For hardcore status trackers, this might just be a dream come true. For those who think one more alert will send them over the cliffs of insanity… best stay well clear.

If you do try it out, Mac or Windows, let us know how it works for you.

CNNMoney.com News, Stocks, and Video [free - iTunes link] for iPhone (and iPod touch) is the latest big name entrant into the App Store financial news and media space. Leveraging their brand and resources, it looks like CNNMoney.com’s mobile site while working like an iPhone app. iPhone-likeness aficionados may take a few blinking moments to adjust, but it’s a deliberate design decision that will no doubt appeal to the massive user-base of CNN.com’s existing web services.

TiPb had a chance to test drive CNNMoney, and from a pure content standpoint it’s impressive. When you first launch, you’re greeted with the News dashboard. At the very top is a rotating stock-ticker, then a sampling of latest news, stocks, videos, etc. Users can easily check or uncheck specific content options, and drag them around to re-sequence them in whatever order they prefer. (I immediately put technology news at the top).

The content itself isn’t merely a feed. In an effort to give mobile users the best experience possible, both statistical measures like popularity and hand-picked curation on the part of CNN Money’s editors determine which stories and in what order they’re made available to the iPhone app. Also, stories loaded into the app are cached locally in case you need to go offline (i.e. on an airplane).

The free app is supported by advertising, but when there is no appropriate or available ad, rather than filler or “house ads”, CNN Money cuts users a much-appreciated break and removes the ad space completely.

My Stocks is pre-populated with a few high profile favorites but can be easily customized. Tapping a stock brings up a details and graph view. As is typical with online stock reporting, quotes are delayed roughly 15 min. Once you’ve viewed a stock quote, a new section pops up on your dashboard News tab called Last 3 Quotes, and as the title indicates, it keeps track of your most recently views stocks.

Videos shows thumbnails and a brief description of the story. CNN Money typically produces over a dozen unique video segments a day, and they load quickly and look good on the iPhone.

The Add/Remove tab lets you do the content re-arrangement mentioned previously.

It should be noted that while CNN Money is compatible with iPhone 3.0, and the system-wide Copy functionality works fine, it doesn’t yet support push notification alerts, or automatic HTTP video stream optimization. Hopefully we’ll see these in an update. Along with a good James Earl Jones rendition of “This is CNN”.

Screenshots after the break…

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Rolando 2 Quest for the Golden Orchid [$9.99 - iTunes link], available now for the iPhone (and iPod touch) shows that Ngmoco not only takes great gaming concepts and beautifully renders them on the iPhone, but that they can make those great concepts and renders even better.

New gameplay includes a 3D stylized world, driving, swimming, and flying, and — now the Rolandos can fight back!

The first Rolando game won TiPb’s Editor’s Choice Award last time around, how does the new one stack up? If you give it a try, let us know!

If the iPhone and Twitter go together like chocolate and peanut butter, then for the most part current iPhone Twitter client developers give us many variations of the peanut butter cup. Tasty confections though they may be, and each unique and delicious in their own right, at the end they still tend towards variations of the peanut butter cup.

Enter Reportage from wherecloud [$2.99 - iTunes link], which rearranges those twin flavors like nouveau cuisine, utterly deconstructed and left for you to explore.

Too obscure? Okay, rewind. Reportage bills itself as a “radio tuner” for Twitter where followers are treated like stations on the FM dial and you can tune in (or tune out) to what they’re saying, and spin the dial to move from user “station” to user “station”.

It should be noted at the beginning that Reportage isn’t a general purpose Twitter workhouse. There are tons of those already. Like Birdhouse, which models itself on a “notebook” writing experience for Twitter, Reportage has also chosen to focus on one specific concept — pseudo-”live broadcast” of the Twitter users you follow.

Keep that in mind as we go along…

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From the team team that brought us Barista, Cellar aims to give wine the same app love coffee has enjoyed for a while now:

Cellar is a portable, swipeable showcase of what’s currently in your cellar or wine rack, plus the Garage feature lets you store wine that you’ve decided you might buy again.

Cellar has been submitted to the App Store and should be available… as soon as Apple decides to make it so.

In the meantime, enjoy the screenshots after the break!

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