AppAdvice App Of The Week For December 3, 2012
Every week, our staff will handpick an app from the past two weeks 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!
Fantastical
This week, our top app pick is a beautiful new way to look at your calendar. Say hello to Fantastical.
Fantastical has been quite a favorite for most of the staff since the release of the Mac app, and now we can have all of the fantastic calendar goodness right on our iPhones as well. Of course, Fantastical for iPhone isn’t just a straight up port of the Mac version, as the developers wanted to make sure they utilized the smaller screen of the iPhone to present data properly and efficiently.
The best thing about Fantastical for iPhone is the Day Ticker feature. This puts the focus on your upcoming events, rather than just a traditional calendar view. The Day Ticker shows five days at a time, with the center day being on the top of the list of events underneath. You can also see your events as chunks of colored blocks, with placement depending on the time of the appointment. This makes it easy to see a general glimpse of how your day is planned.
If you prefer to view a traditional month calendar, just pull the Day Ticker down. There is also a search bar in between the Day Ticker and Month view so you can quickly search through your events in real-time. Fantastical even allows you to filter your search by Title, Location, Invitees, and All.
Now, what makes Fantastical really fantastic is the use of natural language input. This means that you can type in something like “Have coffee with Jamie tomorrow at 9 am,” and Fantastical is smart enough to analyze your sentence and fill in the appropriate details for creating a new event. You even get a preview of how your new appointment will look. If you have to make any further edits, just tap on “Show details.”
Fantastical makes use of whatever calendar data you already have set up in Settings.app on your iPhone. So if you have already been using the native Calendar, then there are no additional details to set up. You can also choose which calendars should be displayed as well as what day of the week the app starts on and even show week numbers if you want.
Our staff has fallen in love with Fantastical, as it makes us actually want to use our calendars even more. It definitely makes adding new events a breeze, so make sure to grab it for yourself in the App Store.
Don’t forget to check out my original review of Fantastical here.
Honorable Mention
KitCam
If you have been looking for a worthy replacement for Camera+, then you may have found it with KitCam from GhostBird Software. This is a beautiful replacement camera app from the makers that brought us PhotoForge2.
With KitCam, not only can you take photographs, but you can also record HD quality video from it as well. This alone makes it an even better option than Camera+. There is separate focus and exposure points, and you can easily adjust white balance. In addition to video recording, there are other image capturing modes like Timed, Stabilizer, Multi-Expose, Multi-Shot, and even Timelapse. All of these different modes will have their own settings that the user can adjust to make it perfect for their needs.
Additionally, KitCam is like Hipstamatic, in the fact that you can apply various lenses, films, and even frames to your photos and videos (only lens and film for videos). KitCam even displays a live preview of how these combinations will affect your photo or video, so it’s definitely a joy to play around with and experiment with different combinations. There are some “secret” effects that you can unlock (one is available for having PhotoForge2 installed), and you can also purchase additional films, lenses, and frames for $1.99 a pop for packs of three.
Anything taken with KitCam will end up in the Gallery for further processing. You can edit enhancements, crops, add effects, adjust white balance, and more from the Edit mode. Unfortunately, you currently cannot import photos for editing, but the developers are supposedly working to remedy this in an update. For now, think of it as a much better version of Hipstamatic.
Your final photos can be saved to the Camera Roll or shared via various social networking sites and by email, or they can be sent to Dropbox, your own FTP server, or even turned into postcards from Sincerely.
This is a fantastic camera replacement app that is worthy of knocking Camera+ out of the ring. If you are looking for something that makes shooting photos and videos a joy, then make sure to grab KitCam in the App Store.
Don’t forget to check out my original review of KitCam here.
