Filed under: App Review

The Digit-Eyes Audio Scanner and Labeler (US$29.95) from Digital Miracles is a remarkable Assistive Technology (AT) app for the iPhone and iPod touch geared to the blind and visually impaired community. What it does is fairly straightforward once you get the big idea, but the implications of its uses are fairly mind-boggling.

The app does three things. The first and simplest is, using the built in camera, scanning UPC and EAN codes found on most everything. Taking advantage of the VoiceOver accessibility capability built into the iPhone/IPod touch, it searches a database, brings back the results and reads it to you. There is also a button to search Google for more information. That's really no big deal since a variety of barcode scanning apps such as Red Laser can do roughly the same thing. You need an Internet connection for this since you are referencing the Digit-Eyes database.

The second thing it does, is more compelling. Once you register for a free account on their site, you can create text labels for printing on over 50 sizes of standard Avery labels. Select a type of label and a template page is displayed full of empty boxes representing labels. In each box, type in up to 100 characters of anything you want the label to say.

Once done, all your text is transformed into a .pdf page of QR (quick recognition) codes like the one shown in the upper right corner of this post. Print the page on the Avery label stock, and stick each on whatever you wanted the label to say. For example, if you typed in "Blueberries bought on July 31st", you would stick that corresponding label on a container of blueberries. Then using the Digit-Eyes app, scan the label on the container and the screen will display and a voice will read back "Digit-Eyes label read: Blueberries bought on July 31st". The database of what's behind each label is stored on your iPhone so you won't need an Internet connection to access the information.

Medici [$5.99] is the latest in a growing, impressive line of heavy-ish board games to make the jump from the table to the iPad, and it's amazing to see this game – so carefully crafted and respected by the designer board game community – on a touch screen with an animated background. With Medici being a game of perfect information in real life, it works amazingly well as an iPad app, and if you've ever wanted to practice your Medici bidding skills for your next board game night, this digital version provides a lot of AI opponents of varying ability to challenge. The app isn't perfect (more on this later), but it does a fine job of bringing a 15-year-old board game to life for a new generation of gamers. Read on to see if you might be someone who enjoys this sort of thing.

The American Museum of Natural History on New York City's Upper West Side has released AMNH Explorer (free) for the iPhone and iPod touch. This app, funded by Bloomberg, is a tour guide and personal navigation system that allows you to easily traverse the museum's huge collection. You can search for an exhibit by popularity, exhibit hall, or an alphabetical listing, and the app will use the museum's free Wi-Fi to give you step-by-step directions to your intended destination (using either the stairs or elevators). You can also get directions to the closest restroom or exit as well as information about restaurants and gift shops.

If you want to know more about an exhibit, tap its card to see more detail. After you've seen an exhibit, you can mark it as visited, which puts a banner on the exhibit's information card. You can also bookmark exhibits, which will send you an email that details what you've bookmarked as a record of your visit. There is also an option to send exhibit information to Twitter or Facebook.

Civil War: America's Epic Struggle (US$4.99) from MultiEducator Inc. is a full history course in an iPad and iPhone app. It contains at least as much information as most textbooks on the Civil War at a fraction of the cost, while adding elements that no textbook can. There are 24 multimedia presentations, some as long as nine minutes, a nice selection of music popular during the Civil War, and a wonderful navigation system that just makes sense.

When starting the app, information can be sorted 18 ways, from a changing Categories bar including Battles (sorted either chronologically or alphabetically), Multimedia Presentations, Statistics and topics like Navy, Economics, Railroads, Music, etc. Depending upon where you are in the app, tapping on Categories brings up a contextual listing of what you can see. For example, tapping on Major Battles Chronologically changes the bar to a listing of battles grouped by year. Tapping on a battle such as Bull Run, brings choices of a text summary of the battle, a five minute multimedia summary, seven text articles on aspects of the battle, 20 photos or drawings, most of them taken from the Matthew Brady Archives, and full color maps. Depending upon the battle there is more or less information available, but this is done for 26 battles in total; clearly, there's a phenomenal amount of information in the app, plenty for even a Civil War buff to peruse.

Sure, you'd love to be able to check and answer your email while you're driving. But fortunately for the rest of us, many countries, states, and municipalities have made the act of reading and tapping out emails on your iPhone while driving illegal. Hands Free Software has come up with a solution that not only reads your incoming mail to you, but allows you to reply to those emails through voice.

Text'nDrive Pro for iPhone (US$19.99) works with a single email account, scanning its inbox to see if any new messages have arrived. If there's something new, it reads the message to you and then lets you reply to it if you wish. After receiving a review version of the application from Hands Free, I installed it on my iPhone 4 and then promptly got into my car and drove away. Within a minute or two, I heard a rather loud and obviously computerized male voice that I knew was not my wife speaking. Sure enough, Text'nDrive Pro had received a new email in my MobileMe inbox and proceeded to read it to me.

While I was able to ascertain what the voice was saying from the speaker of my iPhone, Text'nDrive Pro does work with all Bluetooth headsets and hands-free kits, so you can customize the way that you listen to the spoken emails and prompts to your preferences.

Last week, TUAW featured a post about how development house tap tap tap has been able to string together a series of App Store successes. In that post, we used tap tap tap's sales stats for Camera+ to demonstrate the company's success not only in the U.S. App Store, but internationally as well. That post got me intrigued about the Camera+ app, so I purchased it for installation on my iPhone 4. What I found is a US$1.99 app (it's currently on sale at that price, so buy it soon) that is a must-buy for any iPhone owner who likes to dabble in photography.

The UI for Camera+ is the first clever detail in an app that's chock-a-block with little wonders. What you see after launching the app is what appears to be the viewfinder on an DSLR camera with a small LCD display below. On that display are two buttons -- Take photos and Lightbox.

Take photos does exactly what you would expect -- the screen zooms up from the viewfinder view to a full-screen iPhone image of what your camera is facing. On the iPhone 4, of course, you have the choice of either the front-facing camera for self portraits or the high-resolution (5MP) camera for taking pictures of other people or objects. When you're ready to shoot, you can either just press the traditional shutter button or turn on image stabilization.

Violet for the iPad (US$2.99) from My Black Dog Books is the latest entry in the emerging field of interactive books for children. Geared at children ages 4 and up, Violet is the first of a series of stories about a charming little girl with a big secret. The 20 page book tells a nice little tale, along with a moral, and it introduces elements that will be continued in future books.

Allison Keeme's illustrations are beautifully drawn, and they take full advantage of the graphic capabilities of the iPad. If you like, you can take a look Allison's process of building the graphics. I'm positive that small children will enjoy reading about Violet and her secret identity. The world of Violet has a consistent look and a great attention to detail. When the family gathers around the breakfast table after one of Violet's exploits, they look absolutely exhausted, but you'll have to read the book to see why. There are two specific tasks to perform in the book, and I think it was a good design choice to have the book do it if the child doesn't.

Unfortunately, I found a number of problems with the execution of the app, which may frustrate small children. There is scant interactivity to be found. With many possibilities for interaction, only a small number of things that you can tap on actually do anything. There are quite a few pages that are static. In fact, outside of credits on the first page, the first bit that does anything appears on page five, and you might easily miss it. There is a spider that swings when touched. If the accelerometer was used, as in Alice, it would be much more apparent. I can imagine small kids getting frustrated by tapping on everything and not getting paid off very often. A real design problem is that you need to tap on a page in order to display an arrow that, when tapped on again, gets you to the next page. I think the arrow should be persistent and eliminate an unneeded tap on every page.

As promised, RPGnet has transformed another Reiner Knizia card game into an iPhone/iPad app. The coders' last such project was the very well done Money. This time around, it's High Society [US$2.99], and RPGnet has kept the interface and look of the games almost exactly the same but swapped the bidding, set-collecting gameplay from Money with the bidding, card-collecting gameplay from the High Society tabletop game. Like with the first app, High Society is smooth and intuitive, allowing you to easily wrap your head around the new challenges and strategy. While they appear similar, the two games are quite different – as different as two light, auction-based card games can be.

The High Society card game was originally released in 1995, and it has since been published in a variety of editions. The RPGnet app takes its art from the latest physical version, currently in print from Gryphon Games (there's even a code in the app for a 10 percent discount off the card game, which almost covers the price of the app). Keep reading to find out if that discount is something you'll be interested in.

Although it drives my wife nuts, I like social networking apps. I've been tweeting since the Twitter bird first hatched from a little blue egg and I leave a trail of FourSquare check-ins wherever I wander. On the other hand, it seems like that for every really cool social network that appears, there are a lot of them that I use once and then drop.

When I first heard about Glue, my instinct was to give it a try and then move on. However, what I've found is another fun tool that is quite a bit different from FourSquare (which is all about locations) and Twitter. Glue is described as a "social network for entertainment," and that's a very good description.

Instead of FourSquare's "Where am I now?" and Twitter's "What am I doing?," Glue asks what you're currently up to -- watching a TV show, listening to music, reading a book, watching a movie, playing a video game, chatting about a celebrity, thinking about a topic, or drinking wine.

Glue builds a profile of your likes and dislikes by letting you rate a number of items in each category. Like FourSquare, Glue rewards your activity with stickers (FourSquare calls them badges) that give you bragging rights among your peers. I'm happy to report that due to my vast amounts of dislikes when it comes to current movies and music, I have acquired the "Debbie Downer" sticker. Unlike FourSquare, once you've unlocked 7 stickers, Glue gives you a way to get real (not virtual) stickers to paste on your laptop, iPad case, or children.

Firefox Home is now available for iOS. Although not a full-featured web browser in its own right, the app is probably as close as we're going to get to running Firefox on an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad.

Firefox Home is a strange app, so first let's look at what it is. According to the description at Mozilla's page, "Firefox Home provides access to your Firefox desktop history, bookmarks and open tabs on your iPhone." So virtually all Firefox data on your Mac or PC transfers to the cloud and gets synced to Firefox Home... at least after you download and install the Firefox Sync add-on, restart Firefox, set up a Firefox Sync account, then enter your Firefox Sync username, password, and secret phrase into Firefox Home on your iPhone/iPod touch. It's not terribly complicated, but anyone used to the one-click simplicity of syncing Safari on the Mac with Safari in iOS may well wonder whether all of this will be worth the bother.

That's a good question once you look at what Firefox Home isn't. Click the "Read More" link to find out.

I've been an Audible fan for far longer then I've owned an iPhone; when I first launched the App Store, Audible was one of the first things I searched for.

Thanks to some of the changes made in iOS 4.0, some of the largest challenges for an Audible iPhone app we've written about in the past are no longer a problem. I'm really excited that a free Audible app has finally arrived on the App Store!

Ironically, while you can create an Audible account from the app, you aren't able to browse Audible's selection or purchase books; plan on making a round trip to Safari whenever you want to buy something. Additionally, there are some older titles that have not yet been made available in a format ready for wireless delivery, but Audible claims over 75,000 titles are available.

One annoyance with the application is that you will need to be connected to Wi-Fi to download any files larger then 20MB. While this limit isn't particularly surprising given similar restrictions in other apps and the App Store itself, it is a limit not shared with at least one other Audible app on a competing platform.

Diptic, from Peak Systems, is an iPhone and iPad app that creates interesting diptych and triptych images by combining two or three of your photos into geometric arrangements. Diptic's well-designed interface (which provides nearly flawless execution of a single task), simplicity, and thoughtful balance of features make it a delightful app to use.

The workflow in Diptic isn't complex; you begin by specifying one of five different layouts for your photos. After selecting the layout, each space can either be filled with a photo from your device library, or iPhone users can use their camera to shoot new ones.

Diptic uses the same touch controls that any iOS user will be familiar with in order to transform the photos within their individual frames; you can pan around the image with one finger or zoom in and out by pinching. Tapping on a photo brings up a menu for mirroring or rotating by 90 degrees. The only small disappointment is that you can not rotate images freely; you'll need to plan on fixing issues, like a slightly tilted horizon, in another app before you start Diptic.

If there's anything that I love writing about, it's writing apps. I'm constantly looking for new and useful apps that will let me write on any device at any time, and keep all of the devices nicely in sync. For that reason, when I heard about My Writing Nook for iPad (US$4.99) and the iPhone / iPod touch version called simply My Writing Nook ($2.99), I immediately contacted developer PT Software Solutions to give it a try. What I found is an uncomplicated app that is perfect for writing manuscripts from any device.

Like many of the apps that I wrote about last year in preparation for NaNoWriMo, My Writing Nook is best for producing large quantities of text without worrying about formatting. The interface is spare, and for situations where you're just concerned about committing as many words as possible to virtual paper, that's what many writers want.

In the standard writing mode, you are typing onto a blank sheet of cream-colored paper. There's also a "dark and stormy night" mode which presents you with white letters on a black background. The settings also provide nine different fonts in a variety of sizes. Auto-correct and spell checking are turned on by default, and a real-time word count can be enabled with a single finger swipe. If you'd like the kids to stay out of your Great American Novel, you can password-protect your work.

Do you want to tie a specialized knot? There's an app for that! Animated Knots isn't particularly polished or overdesigned. Instead, it presents a list of knots that are arranged in categories, such as boating, fishing, and scouting. You tap on a knot, and you see the knot tie itself on screen using stop motion photography. I must admit, it's kind of cool.

Not only do you see each stage of the knot formation, but you also get a text accompaniment (which you can pause to read) that explains exactly what you need to do at each stage in order to create the knot. This app gave me flashbacks to summer camp, where I learned to tie a bowline with my eyes closed in under 5 seconds ... and that's a good thing.

Heading off to a conference? Here are five little apps you might want to consider adding to your iPhone before heading off to the airport. They all provide functionality that may come in handy when you're on the go.

SpeakerClock ($0.99) provides a bright easy-to-read display showing you exactly how much time you have left to present your paper and take questions. It's a deceptively simple application full of lovely little design touches. I used it at a recent conference and found it an absolutely valuable tool to have around.

This app works well both on the iPhone and the iPad -- as a conference organizer, it's really great to use the iPad's larger screen from across the room. As a speaker, the iPhone version works particularly well when placed on a small business card stand on the speaker's podium.

Want to easily share your contact information? Contxts offers a simple solution. You can sign up for a free account at contxts.com, where you can enter your details. Anyone with a phone (it doesn't have to be an iPhone) and an SMS plan can text a short phrase (like "demotuaw") to 50500 and they'll receive the information you set up at their website. Their free iPhone app lets you edit that information directly. What's more, when you turn the iPhone on its side, you can display a "HELLO my name is" contact sheet that instructs people how to retrieve your contact data. What's great about Contxts is that it's a solution that works with any group of people, whether they've hopped onto the Apple iPhone train or not (of course, if they have an iPhone or an Android phone, there's always Bump).