MoneyBook is an eye-pleasing budget manager by a young developer team based in Switzerland.
The problem with pretty app designs is that very often functionality is worse. This app provides both – an aesthetic interface and extensive functionality.
The app comes with two modes:
First the budget mode, which lets you determine a monthly budget which you can spend for whatever you want to.
Another option is to determine your budget and allow the app to include extra income to your monthly budget. This comes in handy in case you win the national lottery jackpot or simply have a friend who finally refunds the beer you ordered him the weekend before.
MoneyBook is quite easy for daily use. Transactions help you to keep an eye on your expenses and divide it into categories like food, clothes etc. Very useful is the option to setup recurring transaction for every month, such as rent or insurance, and you can start the month on any day you want to. If you receive your salary cheque in the middle of the month and not at the beginning you simply tell the app to start your budget at this point.
We strongly recommend to use all finance apps with a password. You wouldn’t do online banking without it right?
A little hint: Turn your smartphone into landscape mode to view you earnings and expenses as a pretty diagram. If it still makes you weep, that’s not the fault of the app …
Every designer needs some inspiration for the implementation of new ideas. Our app of the week provides some color inspiration for your next projects.
Most of you may be familiar with the tool “kuler” from Adobe. It allows you to find the color scheme you need for your project. It’s also possible to share your own designs.
While “Kuler” is perfect for desktop, app “ColorSchemer” is for portable use. It comes with millions of color palettes which you can browse by theme, color or occasion.
If you found a matching color range you can save it as a personal favorite, “love-it” and comment on it.
By tipping on the colour the app shows you HEX- and RGB-values.
Like already mentioned, “ColorSchemer” offers the possibility of sharing your own color scheme with the community. Just choose the colors via color spectrum or upload a picture and convey particular colors to a new palette. With the tool “LiveSchemes” you can change colors and keep the harmony amongst colour shades. This app provides optimized setting options which is especially for designers worth a try.
Do you already use this app? Tell us what you think about it!
Today we’d like to introduce you to an alternative browser to Safari. Dolphin is available for iPhone and iPod Touch as well as for Android systems.
For you we tested the recently released iOS version.
The browser doesn’t reinvent the wheel but it comes with new concepts for mobile web which are not provided by Safari as of now. You can add tabs as you would do it at your computer and if necessary you can change to full view. Swipe from right to left on your screen to access the toolbar which includes more useful features like a download list. Speaking of downloads we found that images can’t be saved to the image roll. Wondering why that is we hope they will update this soon as it turns out to be quite annoying.
Probably the most thrilling feature is the direct integration of social network options. Unlike any other iPhone browser we know off you can share pages to Twitter with the click of a button. For heavy twitter users who love to share what they find this is a priceless feature as it saves the hassle of copying URLs into Twitter apps. Only problem is that it doesn’t grab the meta information like page title. You have to add that manually.
Dolphin also integrated magazine-style Twitter, Facebook and Reader feeds. Those work fine until you try to access a link in a status update. This plainly doesn’t work. Guys, what’s the point of that? Usually the most interesting updates are those with links. If I can’t click them they aren’t useful anymore and I’m left there hanging in open air. Solve it quick, please!
In the bottom toolbar can find a quick selection for the gesture tool. It allows you to draw 8 different predefined gestures at the screen to navigate within the browser. This is a nice feature but not really necessary. If you’re missing a gesture you simply “teach” Dolphin. Just draw a new symbol and link it to your desired website. However, playing around with that feature revealed a few bugs as many new gestures tend to be interpreted as already existing ones, which would have you overwrite the old ones.
Other features are
Like every other alternative browser for iOS, Dolphin is based on Safari’s webkit engine since Apple doesn’t really allow other browser options. Due to apple politics, Dolphin can’t be used as standard browser which means that if you’re e.g. opening a link in an app it’ll still open with Safari. However you should test the free download. It upgrades Safari with a few useful features and is fun to use. It only appears that the developers seemed to be in a rush to publish the app as some really useful parts of the browser are so sloppily implemented that they become nothing but visually appealing sidekicks with no use whatsoever.
With a few bug fixes in the next upgrade I see some great potential for awesomeness
Desire helps you to visualize an annoying but essential task that might even cause some sense of satisfaction: Saving money.This app doesn’t claim to be a retirement arrangement but like the name says it’s about saving money for a secret desire of yours. If that isn’t motivating the gaming aspect of the app will certainly do its part.
You simply define your desire and how much money you need to fulfill your dream. Once you started a desire, you can start saving money right away and the app will visualize what you set aside to make some castle of smoke a pleasant reality. You have the possibility of depositing or withdrawing an amount by using the green or red button.
You can check your achievement bar from time to time to see your progress. By tipping on your money you can decide if you want to see the money you already saved or the amount you still need, depending on what motivates you more.
To keep track of all your actions Desire comes with a neat history function.
To put it in a nutshell: Except for thrifty procrastinators Desire is not a must-have app but we really enjoyed the interface and it’s fun to use.
As part of further updates we would love to get occasional push-notifications, which remember us to keep the wallet closed. We already reached out to the developers to see what they think about our idea. We keep you updated.
Right now it sets you back $ 1.99, so the first logical desire would be to refinance it. We kind of love the twist to that.
So, tell us: What’s the desire you would be using this app for?
We’re presenting the app of the week for quite a while now and don’t want to ignore one of the most popular apps on the market.
Instagram is like a Twitter for photography. The community of Instagram users increased rapidly to 5 million in less than a year. Additionally a whole infrastructure of web-apps, offline-printing services and more was built around this app.
Here’s a little guide for those who are not using Instagram yet.
The functionality of the app is really easy. You take a picture with your smartphone or just chose one of your gallery. If you like you can add a layer to enhance the picture and publish it in your Instagram network. Gaze at the artworks of your friends, like and comment them and of course you can share your posts easily via Facebook and Twitter. Like Twitter it allows you to follow people and people can follow you. If you don’t want to share your private pictures you can set your status to private and limit image access to friends.
Here’s a short video to introduce you to the app:
What we like so much about the app and the Instagram community is the complexity. There is a wide range of photography no matter if you’re interested in cooking, street art or architecture. You decide who to follow with a simple click. The filter function for picture editing and the currrent trend to retro photography are some more reasons why Instagram is so successful. Even if you’re not a photo pro you can create great artwork.
Enough talk, just try this amazing app and don’t hesitate to comment or share your work.
There are plenty of iPhone apps out there to handle information overflow but Summify really sticks out of the crowd. It’s not just the beautiful interface but also the way it filters your streams for relevant news and updates.
Before I lose too many words on the way Summify works you might as well have a look at the video embedded below
I’ve been using it almost since its release in July and the quality of the filters absolutely convinces me. The stories drawn in tend to be on the relevant side and it indeed improves through my reading behaviour.
The design of the interface reminds me of an iPhone version of Flipboard for iPad. Almost everybody who has an iPad has Flipboard and loves it, so it must be excellent at what it does. Summify managed to pack the iPad magazine interface into a design that works very well on the smaller iPhone screen.
Everyone who reads a lot of news on the phone knows how important the reading experience is when consuming mobile news and content. It basically makes the difference between “hitch” or “ditch”.
Another plus are the manifold settings to control your summary, how you share it and which accounts to draw from. I’m a big fan of the multiple account integration which allows me to summarize and share from different Twitter accounts.
Enough said, try for yourself and tell us what you think about it.
Being kind of addicted to music ourselves we now discovered another great app called “Aweditorium” for the iPad, which we simply have to recommend to you.
It comes with an intuitive and beautiful interface and it’s completely for free. After starting the app you see a movable wall of tiles. Every tile represents an artist. By clicking on it you get a sneak preview of the artist’s style by playing a featured song. Additionally you can see interviews, watch HD-Videos of the artist or share your favorite content via Facebook and Twitter. During the song you see lip sync lyrics to imitate Karaoke-like feeling and little pop-ups with short information about the musician appear. You’ll find some new favorite artists without making much effort in a short time.
This week we decided to test a budding Android-app. It’s a photo app which provides a wide range of picture editing tools even in the demo version. You can choose between 84 effects and 59 different frames, which are easy to apply to a taken picture or a picture of your gallery.
Vignette comes with 10 exposure shooting modes, which you can determine before taking a picture e.g. double mode which overlays 2 pictures or strip mode which imitates photo box pictures. It is possible to save your favorite effects or use given ones like funky city effects of London, Paris or New York.
Vignette is quite similar to a regular camera. It’s possible to set up flash mode (depends if your smartphone provides flashlight), exposure, contrast, saturation and many more. A quick change to video mode is provided by a button in the left corner.
We were positively surprised by this little app after trying all effects and modes as it is a perfect basic for professional-looking pictures. Despite “Vignette” could have shortened the list of effects since lots of them look alike. When using Polaroid frame you shouldn’t forget to bring your smartphone in a horizontal position, otherwise the picture is backwards and you can’t change it later.
Despite these few flaws the app is a nice way to be creative and get some great results. Enjoy!
Our today’s app is all about panorama photography. This category offers lots of apps with different functional ranges.
An app we find worth recommending has to come with an easy and fast handling, a good looking interface and of course it has to be proficient in its main function.
There are some panorama apps which definitely provide more features, but “Dermandar” gives the best performance in this range.
The panorama shot is fully automated, you just have to move your smartphone in the right direction. Even if you move a little too slow or fast, the app connects the separate pictures perfectly. The Ying-Yang sign at the screen symbolizes a new exposure.
A great feature is that you can choose the type of panorama e.g. if you turn right round the app automatically creates a 360° panorama picture.
“Dermandar” is precise and fast. After taking a shot you can view the picture, spread it on your social networks or export it to the CameraRoll of your mobile device.
The Dermandar network provides a wide range of photography. Sign up to share your panorama pictures with the community, take a look at user photos from all over the world and discover interesting places and landscapes. Enjoy!
