collection posts

Visua Mobile's old Apples collection

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (RSS feed) on Jul 14th, 2009

A couple of months ago I wound up in Paris and received a surprising direct message via Twitter from a young employee at Visua Mobile. Having nothing better to do in the City of Light, I wound up at their offices. I'm often suspect when a "mobile" development company rings me about their iPhone stable. Just like my tea, I prefer my developers steeped in Apple. Well, Visua Mobile is certainly made up of Apple fans. Just check out the gallery of their offices to see what I mean.

Visua's raison d'etre would be iPhone apps. To my astonishment, none have been runaway hits. They are beautifully designed and generally work well (some 3.0 bugs crept up). Visua gained some noteriety around their app, Fracture, that would make the iPhone screen appear broken when pressed. But they make a host of already-approved apps, including Celebrity, which features a special magazine cover just for TUAW fans.

Gallery: VIsua Mobile

Tags: apple 2, apple II, Apple2, AppleIi, collection, cube, France, gallery, imac g3, imac sunflower, ImacG3, ImacSunflower, iphone, mac, mac II, MacIi, photos, vintage

Filed under: iPhone

TUAW First Look: Cellar puts your wine collection in your pocket

by Michael Rose (RSS feed) on Jun 29th, 2009

Beverage choice should be simple: coffee or tea to rev up, wine or beer to spin down (App Store links). Of course, when it comes to drink choices, there's definitely an app for that: from the makers of espresso-instructions app Barista, we now have the $0.99 Cellar (under App Store review and appearing momentarily). Cellar's slick UI and quick data entry make keeping track of your wine library almost as fun as actually drinking the wine you collect.

When you start up Cellar, you face an empty winerack; you can add bottles one by one, entering both vintage details and customizing the look/label of the bottles with photos of the bottle labels. You can adjust the number of bottles of each kind of vino you have stored away, and then as you polish them off the 'empties' are stored in the Garage area of the app for reference or repurchase.

Cellars isn't an industrial-strength wine database or collection manager (My Wine or Velvet Vine Wine Pro might be better choices there, or a general-purpose database like Bento), but it is a handy way to remember what you've bought and liked. I'd like to see future versions support importing label images from the photo library (for iPod touch users) or download them from online wine libraries. Update: Apparently the library-select feature is already in place for iPod touch users. Readers also suggest checking out Drync for higher-end wine cellar management.

Cellar's $0.99 introductory price won't last for long. Check out the gallery for more Cellar shots.

Gallery: Cellar for iPhone

Tags: cellar, collection, iphone, labels, vintage, wine

Filed under: Software, iPhone, iPod touch

Pocketpedia takes your media collections onto your iPhone

by Michael Rose (RSS feed) on Sep 28th, 2008

While there are plenty of media collection/organizer applications for the Mac -- some well-known and glamorous, others quietly utilitarian and functional -- fans frequently swear by the merits of Bruji's 'Pedia suite for books, DVDs, music and games. Armed with a barcode scanner or your iSight, you can quickly and easily catalog all your media, manage your lending habits and wishlists, collect tips and walkthrough links for your games, export to a website, pull data from Amazon or other sources -- even browse your catalogs in the Finder via QuickLook. The individual organizer apps (Bookpedia, DVDpedia, etc.) are only $18US, and you can get the bundle of all four for $49 if you want.

Now Bruji has taken the obvious and exciting next step with Pocketpedia for the iPhone and iPod touch [App Store link], allowing you to create collections on your device or sync up from your Mac and take your catalogs with you. Having your DVD rental wishlist with you at the store sounds like a great idea; plus, you can quickly access reviews online if you're having trouble deciding what to rent or buy. Pocketpedia is a free download from the App Store, and will work just fine in standalone mode if you don't have the Mac apps to sync with. If only it could do barcode scanning from the iPhone's camera... *sigh.*

Tags: bookpedia, bruji, collection, dvdpedia, iphone, media, pedia

Filed under: Software, Productivity

Yojimbo updated to 1.1

by David Chartier (RSS feed) on Mar 14th, 2006

We're a little late on this one, but Yojimbo, a very functional yet simple information collection tool, has been updated to version 1.1. Among the decent list of additions, changes and bugfixes are new features like:

opening a bookmark in a preferred browser (not necessarily the default)
applescript-ability
search field improvements including toolbar statistics like iTunes and Mail
improvements to dragging items to the collections list
removing backgrounds when printing web archives
.Mac syncing no longer requires Yojimbo to be running

I started finding all sorts of great uses for Yojimbo and actually decided to buy it last night, so I highly recommend checking it out if you've been looking for a better way to get organized.

Tags: collection, information, managment, organizer, productivity, Yojimbo

Tip of the Day

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