iPhone Approll

There's a little battle forming up in a new mobile app segment: the graffiti app. The idea with these apps, of which Catarina Fake's Pinwheel is one, is that when you go to a location, you mark that you've been there and then maybe leave a note or a photo. Later, when your friends (or maybe not your friends) show up at the location or nearby it, they can see what you said and add their own comments.

The highest concept of these new companies is Wallit, which makes an augmented reality tagging app. You hold your … Read more

Anyone who has allowed a little porkiness to creep around their waist knows that removing it can be troublesome.

One tries to eat less. One votes for a new gym regime.

But getting up at 7 in the morning to jiggle with the bright-eyed and bushy-bottomed can verge toward the impossible.

So along comes GymPact, an iPhone app that will tear money from your pocket, should you fail to go to the gym when you promised.

At first glance, this seems to resemble, well, theft. Who are these GymPact people to take your money just because the duvet was slightly … Read more

Evernote, in addition to helping you keep track of the people you meet with its new Hello app, now also has a tool for keeping track of meals: Evernote Food.

In this app, you can take pictures of the meals you eat (and the people with whom you eat them), add comments and restaurant information, and then automatically sync this information into the Evernote mothership, its synchronized notebook.

It's a pretty lightweight app, but it is kind of fun, and it could be useful, I suppose, if you were really obsessive about recording what you ate. It could also … Read more

I didn't like Leap2 when I got the demo. It's a new iPhone search app that replaces the Google-standard, ultra-clean search interface with a bunch of list wheels and a tabbed results window. It looks complicated, slow, and unattractive.

But, oddly, it works.

As you type in your query, you'll see similar queries appear in a list wheel above and below what you type. To the right of your query, there's a wheel of icons you can select: news results, web pages, "buzz" (social results), images, and so forth.

The results window, on the … Read more

The year-old semi-social network app Path is getting a major update that adds scary but interesting automatic life-tracking features, as well the capability--finally--to share Path items with larger social networks.

A refresher: Path was designed as a mobile service that lets you share what's important in your life with only your closest friends. It's not a wide-open social network like Facebook, nor a broadcast platform like Twitter. It's designed to keep you in touch with your family and your close, intimate friends only.

Path now makes that even easier and, in my opinion, more enjoyable. The new … Read more

"The problem we're trying to solve is noise," the Stamped blog says to announce its new mobile app that lets users create quick recommendations to the products and services they like.

The problem that Stamped is not solving, unfortunately, is the noise of all the reviews and check-in sites out there. Sure, they're all different. First we had Yelp and Foursquare and Facebook. Recently, Oink came along. It looks great, is run by a tech celebrity, and lets you review and compare menu items instead of restaurants. I believe it has seized the high ground in … Read more

I used to be a slave to iTunes.

It's where I put my music and where I managed my podcast subscriptions. But times change, and Apple's apps don't change fast enough. For managing podcasts, there is a far better solution than sticking with the combo of iTunes and the Music app on your iOS device. Downcast is an upbeat little app that smokes Apple's own app in the podcast department.

First of all, it's an integrated podcast player and manager. It's easy to find a podcast, subscribe to it, and play it all from … Read more

I have to start this review by disclosing a gigantic bias: Evernote. I love it. I live in it. I do all my writing in it (I'm doing so now). I also like Evernote CEO Phil Libin. He's an interesting guy and great to hang out with. Ok? Bias.

But--sorry, Phil--Evernote the app is getting big, old, and suffering from some bloat. There are new apps coming along that are pure and elemental. One, Catch, reminds me of an early Evernote. Catch is also trying to go in a different direction from Evernote, with new social features that … Read more

So you want to lose weight? Train for a marathon? Swim faster? With 9,000 health apps in Apple's iOS App Store--with such titles as RunKeeper for runners, Strava for cyclists, and Gain Fitness for weight lifters--the health app market can appear pretty bloated. And most apps are built with a specific activity in mind.

A former triathlete, Geoff Pitfield wanted to build an app that could track his varied exercise and rate his overall fitness level. That's why he created Fleetly, a health-tracking service that launched last week on iOS devices.

Built using game design elements, Fleetly … Read more