Who doesn’t like free? And who doesn’t like great iPad apps? When the two come together it’s good stuff. With that in mind, we’d like to share our Best Free iPad App of the Week here every weekend.
This week’s pick is Frequency. Frequency is described on its App Store page as ‘your personal video service’. It’s another excellent, social and highly customizable video app for the iPad. This is rapidly becoming a category where iPad users are spoiled for choice – and that’s a very good thing given how crummy the selection is on TV these days.
Frequency claims to offer ‘more video from more places than anywhere else on the internet’ – I imagine some rival apps might have something to say on that, but the range and amount of content in the app definitely looks impressive.
Here are some of the app’s key features:
- Follow any of your favorite online video channels
- Stay up to the minute on all the topics that are trending right now
- Get every video your friends post on Facebook and Twitter
- Quickly access anything you are following in your personalized TUNER.
- Get highlights from all your channels in My Feed
- Go full screen or use AirPlay to watch on your TV
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Avid Studio, a new iPad app released yesterday on the App Store, promises to bring big-screen moviemaking capabilities to the iPad.
This looks like a serious iMovie competitor on the iPad. It’s priced at the same $4.99 level as iMovie as well, though iMovie is a universal app and Avid Studio is iPad only right now.
Here’s a bit of the App Store intro for Avid Studio:
We’ve distilled the world’s leading film-editing technology into an easy-to-use app that enables you to edit video, audio, and photos at the speed of your creativity.
Swiftly arrange your clips in the Storyboard, make precision edits using the Timeline, and add high-quality transitions, effects, and a soundtrack. Then share your movie directly to YouTube, Facebook, and more—or export your project to Avid Studio for the PC and continue editing with even more advanced tools.
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The Daily, the first iPad-only newspaper, is celebrating its first anniversary today. It’s published by Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp and has had backing to the tune of over $30 million before it even hit the App Store.
I did a review of The Daily last March (a month after its launch) – and though I found it a promising concept it was disappointing in many ways as well. Here’s a slice of my sum-up in that early review:
The Daily is a promising title, purely on the basis that it is the first of its kind and News Corp is obviously committed to making it a top-notch title for the iPad and possibly other tablets as well.
It has a long way to go to deliver on its promise though. Right now its speed and performance issues are severe, and they are killing the user experience in the app. They’re bad enough that it is tough to stick with the title.
Sadly, a number of those really basic performance issues stayed with The Daily throughout much of its first year. Millions might have been spent in many areas, but it sure didn’t look like many pennies were being put towards making the app work well.
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NewsFlash is a relatively new breaking news and headlines RSS reader app for the iPad and iPhone. It uses quite a simple interface and offers breaking news and top stories from around the world and in a number of languages.
I have a clear favorite RSS reader app for the iPad, River of News, and use Twitter and notifications from a handful of news apps to attempt to keep up with breaking news – but I’m always on the lookout for more good news and RSS sources, so I’ve been giving NewsFlash a try over the last several days. The short story here is that I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much I like this app. Hit the break for the reasons why …
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Photogene for iPad, one of the more capable photo editing / effects apps for the iPad, has had a major update this week, to Version 3.3.
One of the most notable new features is support for exporting images to Evernote and Tumblr (adding to a strong range of existing options like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Dropbox, Picasa and more). There’s also a new device-to-device transfer capability if you have Photogene installed on another iOS device. Unfortunately this uses Bluetooth rather than WiFi.
The update also adds some new editing tools – including a new Clarity Slider and Clone tool – and this very cool sounding feature:
Copy edit operations from one photo and apply the same edits on another photo. Long-tap on the photo in the edit screen to copy&paste edits.
Here’s the full list of what’s new in this latest version of Photogene for iPad:
New: order directly from Photogene real photo products that will be delivered to you by mail. Service by tap2print.
New sharing options:
- Device-to-device: transfer photos directly to another iPad/iPhone (requires Photogene to be installed on the other device).
- Evernote.
- Tumblr.
- Now it’s possible to preserve the original file names when uploading to Dropbox, FTP or mail (requires iOS 5).
- Add date-stamp to your exported photos.
New edit tools:
- Clarity slider.
- Clone tool.
- Can now make collages even if location-services are turned off.
- Copy edit operations from one photo and apply the same edits on another photo. Long-tap on the photo in the edit screen to copy&paste edits.
Bug fixes:
- Fixed problem that the app loaded very slowly on devices with large photo libraries.
- Fixed pixilation issues that occurred with some types of jpeg files.
Photogene for iPad is already one of the best photo editing apps for iPad, and it’s great to see its developers continuing to update it with impressive new features.
Here’s an App Store link for Photogene for iPad; it’s priced at $2.99.
