AppAdvice App Of The Week For April 13, 2012
Every week, our staff will handpick an app from the past seven days that we believe is a must-download for your iPhone or iPad. These apps will always be from various categories, but they are chosen because our own staff members love it and have been using them daily. So here are this week’s picks! Enjoy!
Drafts
I, and many of the other staff members here at AppAdvice, love the brand new app from Agile Tortoise called Drafts.
Think of Drafts as sticky notes on steroids. Or if you’re a fan of Launch Center (another app we love), think of Drafts as the Launch Center of text.
What does the app do? It launches directly into an empty text field so that you can immediately start capturing down thoughts, ideas, notes, and whatever else may come across your mind. Let it sit in the app for a while if you needed, and then when you’re ready to act on it, you can.
Drafts has several actions that users can apply to their “draft,” such as tweeting (with native iOS 5 Twitter integration), sending to Tweetbot or the official Twitter app, emailing the text, and copying to the clipboard. Additionally, the app supports Markdown syntax, which can be previewed from the app itself, sent as a Markdown email, or the Markdown syntax can be copied for pasting into your favorite text editor, such as my favorite, Byword.
Drafts will remain in the app even after an action has been taken on it, and you can search through your old ones as well. There are no settings for the app besides a few options for appearance, which include four themes and a baker’s dozen of fonts.
We love the app because it’s insanely fast to open and immediately jot down some text for taking action with later. It’s much quicker than opening up other note apps, waiting for it to load up, then tapping on “New” (sometimes your amazing idea may have already escaped). The developer already has many plans for the app (including a new, better icon) in the future, so it can only get better from here.
Make sure to grab this amazing app in the App Store for $0.99 (currently only available for iPhone) and make sure that nothing escapes your mind again!
Check out my original review here.
Honorable Mention
Frame Artist With Templates Pro
We love photography here at AppAdvice (even though not all of us are pros), so it’s always nice to see a new photography app come out for our iPhones and iPads. This week, we have Frame Artist with Templates Pro.
No, this isn’t just another frame app. With Frame Artist, you could make your standard framed photo (with multiple images), but that wouldn’t be anything special. Instead, Frame Artist features various templates that allow users to create invitations, calendars, and even business cards.
The app even goes beyond what we’d normally expect from similar apps, and allows the import of photos from Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, Tumblr, and even Instagram. Speech balloons, text, and even stickers can be added to your framed image for some fun accents. Finally, you can even apply one of the 17 included filters to give your framed image a unique look.
Settings can be saved to create a new template, and the final product can be shared across many social networks, email, or SMS. It can also be saved directly to the Camera Roll.
Our own Karen Freeman said the app isn’t incredibly intuitive, but it is an extremely powerful tool once you take the time to learn it.
There is the free Frame Artist with Templates that you can try before buying the Pro version, but keep in mind that it is limited to saving or sharing five photos only. Both versions are a universal app for your iPhone and iPad.
Make sure to check out Karen’s original review for more information.
