News360 just launched updates to its Android and iPhone apps that bring them up to speed with the tablet and Web versions. Now the personalized news reader, which uses semantic data to read for stories you like, rather than just assuming from your social graph, syncs across all devices and platforms.
Prior to today's launch, the mobile versions of News360 lacked the login and personalization features on the tablet and the Web. But now Android and iPhone users can log in and view their personalized headlines while on the go.
The Eatery is a beautifully designed new iPhone app that helps you report what you're eating and have its healthfulness rated by other users of the system. Built by former Firefox UX guru Aza Raskin as the first release from his new company Massive Health, the app promises to make your eating habits easy to track and thus to change. The service captures data about when and where you ate well or poorly and serves that up in visualizations. Massive was co-founded by Raskin and CEO Sutha Kamal.
Not everything in the world may be suitable to crowdsourcing, though. I ate a container of soy yogurt this morning and while nine people have said it was healthy, three said it was not. Why? I have no idea. Do I care about their nutritional assessments of my meals? If they are making the same stabs in the dark as I am to rate other peoples' food on a scale of one to ten - I'm not sure I do care about other peoples' uninformed opinions. So far I don't think this app is as good as a number of alternatives.
People say everything bad you post online will be found when you grow up - but what if you could use help finding the good things you've posted to the web? Startup company Vizify believes there's a need for that and the company's first product, called Tweetsheet, is already showing me things about my use of Twitter that I didn't know before. Here's my profile page there.
Log in with your Twitter credentials and the service will show you what your most popular Tweets have been, how your Tweeting has grown or fallen over the past year, who retweets and replies to you the most and where the people who respond to you live. All this data is pretty straightforward but it's presented well and is a good example of the company's big vision: to help people surface their best historical content to present that to the world.
Startup StrawberryJ.am takes any Twitter feed, List, search, hashtag or other incarnation and filters it for just the most retweeted Tweets that include links in a stream. It's like a highlight tape displayed in a full-featured interface complete with community discussion call-outs, Instapaper integration and time-release retweeting features. It's simple and cool.
Still in closed beta, the service will allow the first 300 people who use the invite code "jamwithrww" to create an account. It's a very handy way to make sure you catch the hot stuff in any rivulet making up the roaring river of tweets in your Twitter. I've got big fat Twitter Lists running through it and it's great. Not without its shortcomings, but for a private beta it's awesome.
After months of careful iterations, a mobile app called Found is now available to all iOS and Android users in 26 countries. It's one of those apps that felt like it was missing from your phone until you installed it. Found helps you share where you're going and arrange to meet friends there. Or, it can help you find where your friends are going.
It's a fundamental use case for a smartphone, if you think about it, but no one has gotten it right quite yet. Real-world Web problems are tricky. It's hard to find a balance between utility, privacy and serendipity. Found, and its founder, Danny Tan, have really thought it through. Now it's time to let the people get Found.
How do you keep track of what you want? Do you use Amazon wish lists? Do you share them with your friends? How's that working out for you? Get any good gifts lately? Moreover, what do you do with items that aren't sold on Amazon?
Enter Whimventory. It's an app for making and sharing shopping wishlists. You click a bookmarklet or browser extension on any shopping page, and it saves a link, an image and the price. It will solve problems for anyone who buys things (or wants things). It's simple. That's all I have to explain. But Whimventory is too high-quality to leave it at that. I want to show you more.
Jori Lallo, a web and mobile designer at developer-loving message board startup Convore, has released a new version of a side project built with Finnish designer Karri Saarinen, called Kippt.
It's a bookmarking app along the lines of Delicious or Pinboard but without social sharing, with a stripped-down Reader view of all articles and with a nice simple aesthetic. Lallo says a number of new features are in the works and if you like simple tools developers build for solving everyday problems, Kippt could be a good service to try out and keep an eye on.
Online book publishing service Blurb today launched a new way to publish collections of photos - as an eBook for the iPad. The new eBooks come in templated or custom two-page layouts, which readers can swipe through, search the text of and zoom into full resolution images.
Publishers pay $1.99 per book and get to keep 100% of the profit beyond that cost. Paper books from Blurb start at $10 each to print on demand. Two buck easy-to-make eBook publishing on demand sounds awesome.
Online video directory MeFeedia today released an iPad app that's very easy to use and could provide hours of entertainment. The app lines up video after video on any of 6 different topics, from news to comedy to tech and business. It's a very simple app but could be a good source of content if you'd like to know what's new in the world. A stats page keeps track of how much video you watch and tells you how many people have watched more. Each video's age in minutes or hours is listed and it's easy to bookmark a video to watch later.
The app would be much nicer if it allowed you to play your playlist of videos continuously but it's not so taxing to click play after each video. It's a good little app!
"Tell me when it's an iPad app," I've told the team behind web curation startup Pearltrees over and over again. That day has finally come and what was a clumsy, Flash-based web experience is now a gorgeous, brilliant iPad app. Happy day, the Pearltrees iPad app is finally here!
Pearltrees is a link saving and sharing service that uses a beautiful visual metaphor - links are saved as floating glass orbs just made for touching, swiping and zooming. You might be confused by the iPad app if you haven't used the web interface a little already. You can go be my buddy here. Bookmark links on a topic as you peruse the web, with a bookmarklet on either desktop or mobile browsers, then go back and read the collection on your iPad in the Pearltrees app. Look at any link's preview and you can see who else has saved that link and in what collection. Click and drag their collection into your own collection and you can quickly build out a body of reading on any topic. The app isn't perfect but it's a real joy for anyone who loves to read content on the web.
