360 DEGREES Weblog

Selling something on Craigslist?  Meet somebody new but want to check them out first before making a decision?  These are situations where you might want to give someone a phone number so they can contact you, but you don’t want to be stuck with them having your number forever if you change your mind.  With RingShuffle iPhone app from RingCentral, you create a temporary phone number that will redirect calls to your actual phone number.  When you no longer wish to be in contact with that person, you simply “shuffle” to a new temporary number.  These numbers expire in seven days, so you have plenty of time to make a decision about that new person you met or to unload your Craigslist item.  The RingShuffle app is free in the iTunes app store

The 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 is today.  The 911 Memorial: Past, Present, and Future app for iPad explores the World Trade Center events.  More than 400 pictures and 40 videos allow  you to see the construction of the Twin Towers and view them as they were before that fateful day.  You can also see how 9/11 unfolded, including never before seen video of the attacks on the World Trade Center.  Other information covers the cleanup and recovery phases and the construction of the Reflecting Absence memorial and the museum being built on the site.  The 911 Memorial: Past, Present, and Future app is free in the iTunes app store.

We love music services like Pandora and Spotify.  However, one of the major drawbacks of Spotify, which offers over 13 million songs streaming on the iPhone for $10/month, is the music discovery component or lack there of.  The computer app offer related artist info, while the mobile app, at least on the iPhone will only show what is new and popular in terms of tracks and artists.  As a result we’ve heavily relied on apps such as Pandora and Soundhound to discover new tunes.  The latter app listens to a track playing over a speaker and identifies it. However, there was no way to automatically find those tunes in Spotify, that is until.

Starting yesterday, Soundhound began including links to Spotify tracks after the service had identified a track.  Users commence playing.  This works for those that subscribe to Spotify’s premium service, but for those that don’t, they’ll be asked to purchase Spotify before proceeding to the track.

But here in lies the rub: this is currently ONLY available in Europe at the time of this posting.  But it’s safe to assume Soundhound US will soon provide the same update, though users on a mobile device that don’t subscribe to the Premium service won’t be able to stream tunes on their mobile device unless they make the $10/month investment.

For the record, SoundHound provides free, unlimited “music recognition, sing and hum recognition, lyric search and voice-recognition for music search, as well as rich features including lyrics, ‘Underplayed’ charts, song previews, YouTube videos, seamless links to iTunes, Amazon, Pandora, Twitter, Facebook and more.”

Flickbooks LLC, a Swiss developer, has just announced the relaunch of its fun flipbook app called Flickbooks. The app that turns videos into high-quality flipbooks is now available with new editing features as well as a streamlined process whole process of creating a Flickbook easier. In case you didn’t know what Flickbooks is, it is an app that can record a 5-15 second video on the iPhone, be edited, and then submitted to Flickbooks. The Flickbook is then printed out professionally as a paper flip book made from the edited video, and then delivered to the user’s address by mail.

The new Flickbooks app makes it easier to submit Flickbooks, which can be done over 3G or WiFi. It is compatible with both the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4, and is available for free on the Apple App Store.

IPad-owning photographers should stop reading right now (well, not right now, or you won’t know what to do next) and go download PhotoForge 2, a rather splendid update to the already decent photo-editing app. Better still, if you already bought the iPhone version, the update is free — the app is now universal.

The biggest differences are in interface design. Once you load a photo from your camera roll, you see nothing but a row of six icons across the bottom of the screen. These access the different editing sections. Press one and up pops a row of big, finger-friendly icons for special effects, image tweaks and adjustments, metadata, cropping and history.

All of these are presented like the magnified Mac OS X dock: as you scroll through, the central icons grow bigger and labels show above them. And once all the icons have scrolled across, they wrap around and come back in as if they were on a wheel. This makes it quick to navigate.

Hit the button and you are taken to the relevant controls. Everything is a lot smoother than it was in the previous version.

Under the hood, a lot has changed. That speed is everywhere, and renders of effects happen almost immediately. You can also work in full-resolution, zooming 1:1 with a double tap, and things like the crop tool and curves dialog have been made easier to use with the fingers.

Biggest of all, though, is the addition of layers. And not just any layers. You can pick blending modes, adjust opacity and even add layer masks. Coupled with a stylus, this last makes a very powerful tool.

Finally, an iOS image editor wouldn’t be complete without retro-style film effects. While you get a lot of built-in effects, you can also opt for the $2 in-app purchase of Pop!Cam, a whole new set of FX which emulate films, add filters, simulate flash effects and even adds frames and grungy paper backgrounds. You can test many of these out before buying, too.

Right now, PhotoForge 2 is $2. If you haven’t already, go get it now. You’ll get $2 worth of entertainment out of it in the first ten minutes.

Hate gridlock? We’d surmise you aren’t alone, so pardon our excitement surrounding the latest addition to TomTom’s longstanding iPhone app. New in version 1.8 is the addition of HD Traffic, which extends congestion data to both “major” and “secondary” US roads. Existing TomTom Traffic subscribers get the functionality gratis, with the rest of us dishing out $20 via an in-app purchase. Free for all who upgrade are multi-stop routes, allowing one to tweak excursions to your heart’s content — provided you can count those diversions on one hand. The updated app is already live in the App Store, but please, pull over before downloading — cool?

In an attempt to edge its way into the crowded mobile payments market, a new credit card scanning system is saying “ah, hell no!” to typing and swiping. Card.io is billed as an SDK that takes advantage of smartphone cameras to let devs accept credit, because, as its creators point out, “typing on mobile phones is slow, and most consumers don’t have a separate hardware attachment.” When it’s time to pull out the plastic, Card.io gets your phone’s camera going, and up pops a little green rectangle, in which you frame your card and snap a pic. Your credit card info is then processed by a third-party merchant, and the details are subsequently deleted from your phone. Can you hear that? That’s the sound of our chubby thumbs breathing a sigh of relief. The Card.io SDK for iOS is now available here.

Leave it to a club manufacturer known for its personal customization to figure out how an app can help your putting game. iPing (Free) is a new app for the iPhone and iPod touch that identifies your stroke type, analyzes your impact angle, and measures your tempo, creating a “Putting Handicap” that gets lower as you become more consistent. Simply pick up a Ping cradle ($30) for your iPhone 4 or iPod touch 4G, snap it onto your putter, and get to work.

PopBooth is an iOS photo booth app with one big difference. It actually prints out real strips of photos. These pictures don’t pop out of a slot in the side of the iPad of course, but ordering them is as easy as posting your photos to Twitter.

In fact, you can post these photos to Twitter and Facebook, or send them by email, but the point is the real paper photos. Just specify the recipient from within the app and hit send. The prints will drop onto the doormat three to five days later.

The service comes from Sincerely, the folks behind Postagram. Postagram is a similar app which lets you use an iPhone or Android phone to send postcards containing your camera snaps or Instagram photos. These cost $1 a pop, and although Sincerely hasn’t yet revealed the price for PopBooth, it will be a little more than a dollar per strip.

I love the convenience of this idea. I’m always meaning to print my best photos, but I’m not willing to buy a printer, and I have no idea where I would get decent quality prints anyway. Snapping a photo and then having it turn up a few days later could get expensively addictive.

PopBooth will be available in a couple of weeks.

Evernote have launched the first iPad 2 app that is designed to work with the iPad 2′s Smart Cover, called Evernote Peek, and it is a free app that is designed to help your learn and strengthen your memory.

The app works when you lift the smart cover, a question is shown, if you lift the smart cover further the answer is shown, have a look at the video in action below, it looks like a lot of fun.

You can study your own notes, and peek turns your Evernote notebooks into instant study materials, you can find out more information about Evernote Peek over at the Evernote Blog.