Best new apps of the week: Flickr 4.0 and Streamline Calendar
Every week, our staff will handpick an app from the past two weeks that we believe is a must-have 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!
Flickr 4.0
Manage, organize, share, and edit your photos from one place with our App of the Week.
Do you still use Flickr for all of your photo management needs online? Then you’ll be pleased to hear about the latest update to the Flickr app from last week, bringing it to version 4.0.
This was not a minor update, but a rather significant one, so we thought it was worth mentioning again. In Flickr 4.0, Yahoo has decided to make a move on mobile in order to be a top choice for photo storage and management for people, instead of just a photo sharing app similar to the likes of Instagram.
The biggest change in Flickr 4.0 is the new Auto-Uploadr feature, which will automatically upload all photos and videos from your device onto your Flickr account. And when they say “all,” they mean all photos and videos from the past, present, and future. But don’t worry about things that you may not want others to see — everything remains private until you choose to manually share them. Don’t worry about space either, since all Flickr accounts have 1TB of free storage space. Now that’s a lot of photos and videos.
Previous users of the Flickr app will notice a brand new design as well, with the most notable feature being a new Camera Roll section that looks and feels like the native Camera Roll on iOS. This means that there is nothing new to get used to, as it feels natural already. There is also a new timeline view that makes it much easier to browse, organize, share, and even edit your photos. To top things off, there is also a new sharing feature that sends your photos to Instagram if you choose to do so.
We love photography here at AppAdvice, so we are glad to see Flickr get a breath of fresh air with the latest update. If you are a longtime Flickr user, or want an all-in-one photo management, sharing, and editing solution, then we recommend giving the Flickr 4.0 update a try for yourself. You can get Flickr on the App Store as a universal download for free.
For more about Flickr 4.0, don’t miss our original article.
Honorable Mention
Streamline Calendar
Get a refined calendar to suit your needs with our Honorable Mention pick for the week.
Do you have a busy schedule and want a more streamlined way to view it on your iPhone? Then look no further than our Honorable Mention this week, Streamline – calendar from Serendipi.
While most other popular calendar apps go with the traditional month, day, and week views, Streamline takes an entirely different approach that is more refined. No matter what view you’re in, Streamline will use a unique timeline view for the hour, day, or week. This timeline will show users more information about their schedule than other calendars, which makes it easy and fast to see when your next event is and when you have some time to spare for something else. The design, color use, and typeface in Streamline make it look fantastic too. The developers claim that this is “the first real evolution from the paper diary.”
Streamline does fetch data from the native iOS Calendar app, so you will have to have that set up first. Once it is, users can browse their schedule in three different ways: Hour, Day, and Week, and the timeline can be zoomed in or out with the multitouch pinching gesture. Hour breaks down the day in 15 minute intervals, Day shows every hour, and Week displays up to eight days at once. Events are shown on the day they fall upon, with start and end time, and a colored dot to indicate the calendar the item belongs to. Curved lines connect events to the appropriate time blocks, so you can get a visual approach to your appointments even as you scroll up and down.
Creating events is done by tapping on the teal bubble that “scrubs” the timeline, and dragging it to a specific time frame of the day. Once you lift your finger, you’ll find the Event Creation screen, where you give the event a name, location, choose the calendar, toggle single or multiple reminders, fine tune the meeting duration, and add any necessary notes.
We are big calendar app fans at AppAdvice, and we’ve been appreciating the new approach that Streamline provides. However, be warned that this is not a feature-packed calendar app, so it doesn’t include support for invites, natural language input, maps for locations, search, or much user customization. But it is worth checking out if you want a calendar that is just simple and streamlined to be able to view the most of your schedule from a single glance without the extra fuss. Streamline – calendar can be found on the iPhone App Store for $3.99.
For a more in-depth look at Streamline – calendar, make sure to check my full review.
