Worldictionary – Clever, Translating iOS App

As far as Augmented Reality goes, generally the only use is finding a McDonalds in your line of sight up to 100km away or looking up at the stars to see whats overhead.

With Worldictionary, you can point your camera at a word and it will translate in real time on your screen. It’s pretty impressive how quick it snaps into action and if it picks up half a word, it will quickly correct itself when you steady your hand.

There are a plethora of languages to choose from and you can translate to/from English with ease.

I’m looking forward to using this on holiday as I point it at menus or road signs!

As you can see in the screenshots below, the layout is fairly simple and the actions speak for themselves.

You can browse through the history of your translations and Worldictionary will even read the words out to you.

Translating isn’t where it all ends though, it also quickly finds the definition of the word you’re looking at. So it’s fairly useful to use on home territory even when you’re not looking to try to impress an Italian waitress.

Worldictionary now sits on my 2nd home screen and I look forward to using it more!

Worldictionary is available for iOS in the App Store (£5.49 UK / $7.99 US)

Jan 22 2012

Piezo – Audio Recording Made Easy

Piezo from Rogue Amoeba is one of those simple, easy to use apps that once you start playing with, you’ll think how did you live without it?!

When activated, Piezo will record audio from any application providing some sort of sound. Some apps require a restart, but that’s quick enough.

There are simply two buttons on the app, record and settings. You can literally launch the app and start recording!

You can record from a microphone if you want to make quick voice memos but more importantly, you can choose to record specific applications. Spotify (rightly or wrongly…), Skype (make sure you tell them you’re recording!), Safari and pretty much any other app!

Catch live radio or live streams like the good ol’ days when you used to rush to get a cassette ready and hit record+play ready to go!

As an old user of Audio Hijack Pro, I find Piezo a great replacement making things even easier. A great little app that I’d recommend to anyone at this great price!

Piezo is available in the Mac App Store (£6.99 UK / $9.99 US)

Jan 7 2012

WorldCard Mobile iOS [Review]

So there are a plethora of apps available for iOS which allow some sort of ‘Smart Scanning’ and I’ve used things like Evernote in the past for saving business cards, or taking quick snapshots of receipts and invoices but after using WorldCard Mobile for the last few weeks, I’ve gotta say it’s the app which I find works best.

WorldCard Mobile (developed by PenPower Tech) is one of the smartest and easiest business card reader/scanner I’ve ever used. You simply take a photo of the card and that’s it. WCM will recognise each part of the card, separate the fields and export into your Address Book.

As you can see above, once you scan a card you can specify parts that may have been missed. I’ve only experienced the app missing information on my own dodgy card! Using a professional card as below, it recognises every field and imports it perfectly! There’s even some image-stabilisation being used in the background because each snap I took was crystal clear and was read in a matter of seconds.

As well as being exported into your Address Book, each card is saved in the WorldCard Mobile app, the image and the exported information!

So if you meet a lot of new people or always find your pockets filling with business cards, then I’d suggest getting this app so you can record information with ease and not have to sit adding people’s contact information into your Address Book manually.

You’d expect there’d be more to write about this but it works so well, it really is that simple!!

WorldCard Mobile is available now for iOS (£4.99 UK / $6.99 US) and various other flavours including hardware at WorldCard.

Nov 22 2011

Re-Downloading Media in iTunes

Through various recent changes, both in iOS for iPhones and the such but also in the iTunes Music Store, you are now able to re-download your past purchases in iTunes!

You can also download straight from your iOS device but today I’ll be concentrating on using iTunes.

You’ll notice some new items on your iTunes home page. iTunes Match isn’t available in the UK just yet, so that’ll be covered at a later date.

For now, just select ‘Purchased’ and this will take you to a new section of iTunes where you can re-download everything you’ve ever purchased.

You can select to look at all your previous purchases, or just what isn’t currently on your computer. This is great if you’ve had to delete media or lost music over the years, I’ve lost plenty of tracks here and there and iTunes will filter out what you’ve already got and show you what isn’t there!

Download

Once you’ve gone through your Music, you can also re-download any apps you may have purchased. Or indeed Books from the iBook Store. If you’re lucky enough to have a US iTunes Store, you can also download TV shows!

TV Shows