AppAdvice App Of The Week For June 17, 2013
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!
Palette - Life in Color
Ever need some color themes in your life, for a project you’re working on? Then our App of the Week should get the job done quickly and easily: Palette - Life in Color.
This app sports a simple and sleek interface that will fit right in with iOS 7 when it is released. Everything in the app is straightforward, and incredibly intuitive to use. While it may be minimal, it’s not bland or boring, as it features some texture and depth in the overall interface.
The app will feature some color schemes for you already, but it is easy to create your own. Just tap on the camera button and take a snap of whatever it is you want to create a color theme from. Palette will generate a grid of color swatches with the colors that are in your image. You can change the grid to one of three choices: 2x2, 3x3, or 4x4, so you can keep it simple or have something more complex.
Each grid will provide you with the color hex codes for each individual swatch, as well as the RGB and HSL values. If you tap on individual colors, you are able to use multitouch gestures to change lightness, saturation, and hue. Going back to the original color is easy thanks to the undo button.
When you’re satisfied with your theme, it’s saved automatically, but you can give it a name for easy reference later. These can also be emailed to others or yourself for later.
We’ve been enjoying the simplicity of this app, while also appreciating the bit of power that this app provides for the task at hand. You can get Palette - Life in Color in the App Store for your iPhone for $0.99.
Don’t miss my original review of Palette here.
Honorable Mention
Whisper for App.net
If you’re on App.net, you will love our Honorable Mention pick for the week, which provides a fun new way of chatting with your friends on the ad-free social network: Whisper for App.net.
This gorgeous app is brought to you by the same people behind Riposte, so you know it looks good, especially on your Retina iPhone screens. Think of it as iMessage for ADN.
The main screen will show off all of your current PMs in their own gorgeous bar, complete with the avatars and names of those who are involved in the current thread. Whisper supports individual one-on-one chats, as well as group chats with multiple people at once. Refresh the PM list with pull-to-refresh, and tap on individual threads to open them. To start a new PM, just tap on the + button and find the people you want to send a message to — Whisper will search usernames and deliver results in real-time.
Chats allow all participants to send messages up to 256 characters in length (like a normal post), and the character count is revealed after two full lines of text. Of course, the real fun with Whisper are the special features that you can send along with your message: Photos, Stickers, Nearby Place, or Your Location.
Whisper supports photos, which appear in-line just like you see in iMessage. These can either be new captures or imported from your photo library, and it will be uploaded to ADN’s file storage service.
Stickers are little emoticons that are unique to Whisper, and you can send these to your friends instead of text (they will only show up in Whisper, however, not other ADN apps or on the web). These are fun and add some flair to chats, since you can send Grumpy Cat, the CSI Miami meme, and more. There are only two pages at the moment, but hopefully more stickers are coming in the future.
The Nearby Places and Your Location features will send locations to your friends, with data provided by Google Maps. Nearby Places will display business names, addresses, phone numbers, and links to websites when available, so it’s great to give this info to friends you want to hang out with. Your Location will only show your location on a map, in case your friends are wondering where you currently are.
Whisper is minimal and relies on gestures mostly for navigation. Swipe to the right to go back to the chat list. Any other direction and you will bring up timestamps in a chat. Tapping on the bottom where your account name is will bring up the Settings and the Pro Upgrade option. Pro will give you multiple accounts, full-size images (free will scale things down in half), more typefaces (default is Avenir Next), screen brightness gesture, dark mode, and auto-dark mode. This is all available through an in-app purchase of $4.99. There are still some settings available even if you remain on the free version.
We have fallen in love with Whisper for App.net for chatting with others, and we highly recommend checking it out if you send PMs constantly on ADN. You can get Whisper for App.net for free in the App Store for your iPhone.
Don’t miss my original review of Whisper for App.net here.
