The history of jazz

This iPad app is an essential for any jazz cats. This app offers an interactive timeline, detailing the history of jazz. It also includes music samples, videos and playlists. This is the perfect excuse for putting your feet up, getting the speaker docks out and listening to the best jazz music there is, whilst swatting up on your knowledge.

PocketGuitar

Another iPhone app, PocketGuitar is also compatible with the iPod Touch. This app will turn your device into a virtual guitar, so you can practice on the move without having to drag the real thing around with you. The app allows you to strum strings just like a real guitar, and offers six different sounds – including electric and classical.

Midomi Ultra

This iPhone app can identify music in an instant. If you hear a song that you recognise – or perhaps you’ve had an unknown song in your head for days, but, frustratingly, can’t remember for the life if you who sung it or what its name is – take your phone near a speaker and this app will cleverly identify the song within five seconds. Relief will ensue.

Cleartune

If you find yourself at band rehearsals without your guitar tuner – fear not. This app acts as a powerful chromatic tuner, displaying a note wheel and a fine-tuning meter to achieve pitch-perfection. The app works for electric and acoustic guitar, as well as piano, bass and many other instruments – just in case you’re not the only forgetful one!

Bloom

This iPhone app allows you to create music by the simple touch of a screen. The app features a colourful screen, combining composition with visualizations. Part instrument, part composition and part artwork – this app boldly covers new grounds.

This Day in Music

This is a must-have for all music fanatics. It was voted number 2 on the UK iTunes music chart in 2010, and number 1 on the Australian iTunes music iPad charts.

If you are a die-hard music lover, there are a number of new apps out there for your consideration, and few are still on their way. Take a look around, hunt and try out others till you find something that meets your needs.

HB Latteland is a game with a fresh concept and a great experience of preparing caffe latte. The game is divided into three sections- School, challenge and freestyle drawing/etching. You start with the school and play as a trainee who gets trained by the experts of the Holly Brown cafe.  Starting with some simple and basic latte arts you come across a variety of challenges in the game. Right from creating a simple heart, to designs like feathers, flowers and some that resemble animals and character, you will also be able to make your own designs with free hand just in case you want to try it over a real coffee cup.

The game is played by holding your iPhone in one hand just like a pitcher of milk while simultaneously tilting it in corresponding direction to give a design over the surface of latte. The game is build with just 2 simple controls which are tap and tilt. You tap the pitcher to tilt it over the cup and later tap to etch the latte art if required while also keeping using the accelerometer of device to adjust the position of milk pitcher. The game is not really that strict on rules of physics and chemistry but if you lose a lot of time you are out of the challenge anyways. For each practice session or challenge you are awarded a rating in range of 1-3 coffee beans just like the star rating system themed for this game.  Generally ratings are calculated based on the moves made, time taken and the final design achieved.

The game has other sections like profiles which are fun to read for once and get an idea about the trainers and experts in each level. The social sharing functionality would be really cool to send the design of latte arts and score but unfortunately are not included in the game.

The next time you make a caffe latte of just have one at a coffee shop around you, you will definitely imagine each shape you have done over HB LatteLand.  If you are looking for something fresh and interesting HB LatteLand is definitely worth your attention whether or not you love coffee.

Screenshots from the app :

App Name: HB Latteland	Note: There is a rating embedded within this post, please visit this post to rate it.
App Category: Games
Price: $0.99
Developer: HB Latteland

Builda the Re-Bicycler is a book that aims to teach the kids ‘why go green’. The story starts in a town where the most trending thing is bikes. The people of the town have gone crazy and just need another excuse to buy a new bike.  Every time a bike is broken, it’s just tossed into the dumb which gets even worse when older bikes are dumped just for the latest replacement available in the market. This is all that accounts for the dump that’s has takes a shape of a mountain and start to overflood the city. Builda the bicycle factory owner takes the initiative to reduce, reuse and recycle the old bikes.

With the beautiful graphics, animations and interactions this app is very appealing to kids. Kids will actually enjoy the melodious music and cute sound effects in the book. The book can be enjoyed in auto-play mode with narration and turning pages automatically, or the Read to Me mode where the story lines are highlighted while the kids reads it simultaneously or the Read by myself mode which excludes the text highlighting and narration seen in previous two modes while the sound, music and animations still accompany the kid in every reading mode. While reading the book the reader can quickly navigate to a specific page by making use of navigator and also change reading options, turn on/off sound, change reading options or replay a page. The story book also includes several discussion questions asking children about opportunities in their own homes for reusing, creative repurposing, and community service.

Builda the Re-Bicycler is a well crafted story book for your kid that available for just $1.99 on the iPad.

Screenshots from the app :

App Name: Builda the Re-Bicycler	Note: There is a rating embedded within this post, please visit this post to rate it.
App Category: Book
Price: $1.99
Developer: Midlandia Press

oneSafe Photos does everything you would have seen on other secure digital lockers, be its robust AES 256 bit encryption of files stored, hardware encryption with pin, password or visual pattern and even destroying the data in case of security breach. Actually the visual pattern feels really good to use at the same time its easier to remember when choosing it over long complex passwords and pincodes that can be easy guessed out. The visual pattern lock is much advanced with multiple and repeated selection of points with the same 3×3 matrix pattern we have seen on Android phone. In this way your data is secure from both internal as well as external attacks. But in case you leave your device attended and someone desperately tries to access your private data, each time they enter a wrong password their image will be captured from the front camera and saved in the break-in report section where each wrong passcode entered with time & data is recorded.

Codes are just for access, the real beauty is inside the safe vault of the app. The app has a beautiful and simple UI which will give you a glimpse of an actual metal vault with animation like opening and closing door and a rotating lever. All your pictures, videos or other documents reside within the locker organized into categories like family, holidays, finances, confidential, office etc. Each category can also have a second authorization if you feel information stored is highly sensitive or your main password/pin is simple. Or you can use the default double protection folder which will guard your ultra-confidential information and keep them off the search results too.  The search functionality can search through all the image files based on their names and additional image information provided by you. Image files can be marked as favourite to quickly access them via the favourite window.  Additionally the app offers settings like auto-lock period, password change reminder, self destruction on 3 unsuccessful passcode attempts or a temporary lock which will disable the lock for 15 seconds each time a security break occurs. New users can get started with the documentation to get a better idea about the features and usage of the app.

“oneSafe Photos” from LunabeePte. Ltd. Is one of the most secure way of storing your secret pictures and videos and having total control over your personal data within this safe on your iPhone and iPad.  For just 99 cents we found this app not only cheaper than the competition but also highly affordable for the loads of advanced features it offers.

Screenshots from the app :

App Name: oneSafe Photos – Secure Vault for Secret Pictures and Private Videos	Note: There is a rating embedded within this post, please visit this post to rate it.
App Category: Photo & Video
Price: $0.99
Developer: Lunabee Pte. Ltd.

Starting with a beautiful color transition effect, the app takes you to the main screen through which you can visit the gallery and watch an array of beautiful images in a slideshow pattern. Though it may not be really easy to start with the app for most if the users due to the lack of a complete tutorial, but having done a couple of sessions with the app and going through the individual help sections in the app we now find it pretty easy to get going and create new designs with the app. Once you have all the pictures you need in your store, you may proceed with the design section which lets you access all your store pictures over head but if you wish to use backgrounds you will need pictures from camera or camera roll for using during the design process.  You can use the store images by just a tap over them on the dashboard. The images can be placed anywhere on the design area and zoomed with the scale but not the traditional pinch to zoom control which is not supported by the app currently. You can also merge images with the transparency control over head but only the topmost layer can be edited thereafter. Sadly there’s no option to choose layers and you will have no way to correct your mistakes if any. Finally you can save your creation to the album in the app where you can view, manage and share them with your friends via facebook, twitter and email.

We used our camera and camera roll to choose high resolution background for our design and later choose images from the image search function of the app to add cartoon characters and effects like lightning in our one creation. And during this we found Instudio’s to be pretty quick and simple to use. Though the limitation of tools can be a setback for people who are looking for more than just basic use but the simple design and ability to quickly design new pictures on your iPad can be a good reason you will want to own it for just 99 cents which is cheaper than many other similar apps available for iPad.

Screenshots from the app :

App Name: InStudios	Note: There is a rating embedded within this post, please visit this post to rate it.
App Category: Lifestyle
Price: $0.99
Developer: Veena Karthick

Doodle Tales is not merely a drawing and painting app. The app comes with tons of tools to play with and a wonderful social experience. You can share your doodles with the whole world and let them rate and comment on it.

The app starts with a splash screen followed by the menu where you can choose between doodles or tales. The doodle section lets you create doodle freely and flawlessly while the tales section is where you can turn your imaginations into a colourful story even with sound effects that can make the whole experience really amazing and feel just like reading a well crafted multimedia eBook.  Within both the doodle and tale section there are options to create new doodles or tales, view your previous creations in gallery and also access the community gallery with doodles and tales from all over the world.

Doodles can be created using a wide range of colors and shades with the help of color pencils, crayons, sketch pens, brushes, colored chalk, stamp brushes and bucket fill. Just like any basic painting app Doodle tales also offers different type of shapes for quickly creating objects for example sun(circle), building(rectangle, stars and a few more. You will have a text writer to write notes on your doodles or to add expressions or speech bubbles to a character with the choice of colors available in app, beautiful font choices, font resizing, placement and free rotation controls to do it your way. The multi-touch ability to resize and rotate active element or zoom the complete doodle takes away the pain you may face when creating accurate graphics even with fat fingers. The active object and tool is always shown in the status box to avoid any confusion along with other tools like a universal size control for active tool/object, redo-undo buttons, duplicate layer, move layer below another layer, quick color selector, zoom button and more. The app includes and supports stamps with variety of objects, characters, animals and even more. Say you can use a character in your doodle without putting in too much effort to draw it yourself.

Are you planning to use Doodle tales to take classroom notes too? Well that’s wonderful to start with.  By choosing the type of paper you wish to have in the background and just your brand new pencil, you are ready to take notes with free hand drawing or just use the text type tool. Similarly you have pre drawn doodle backgrounds which can be painted with your choice of colors and are easy to use for anyone from right from your play school kids to grandma.

Sound can be added to your doodles by recording with microphone which finds great importance in doodle tales where you can create interactive kids story books or presentations for your professional needs right from your iPad on the go and the best part is, it’s really easy to express yourself with Doodle Tales.

Sometimes you may find the toolbar obstructing your painting that’s when you can reposition it at top or bottom to give you complete screen estate for drawing.

Your creativity can be shared to the world over the doddle tales community, saved locally for editing later or even emailed to anyone as a beautiful greeting or motivational quote.

Doodle Tales comes with unlimited power and possibilities but at times you may desire to add effects like patterned brushes, stamps and backgrounds to the app and would like to have more choices on your finger tips. That’s when you can visit the content store where you can find a huge collection of content packs with different themes, but they are totally worth their low price stating from 99 cents.

Doodle tales offers an amazing social experience with a vast community to share creations and achievements to collect. You will also need to create a profile to use the app to its full potential on the first launch and you are ready to go with tooltips that can assist you until you get the hang of the app.  Doddle tales offers highly descriptive video tutorial for beginners that are easy to understand and thus cut off the need to read boring text notes. Though Doodle Tales is a fairy new app and any updates are yet to be seen, we found the app highly stable and working without any known issues.

For Free Doodle Tales is a unarguable at price point and an app you shouldn’t afford to miss.

Screenshots from the app :

App Name: Doodle Tales	Note: There is a rating embedded within this post, please visit this post to rate it.
App Category: Games
Price: Free
Developer: Europress

Riddle Wheels is an educational game for kids which aims to teach them new shapes, colors, creatures, apparels, household items and more with visual and audio aid. Riddle Wheels uses a recognize and recall approach which builds a strong foundation of basics for your kids while also improves the skills of your child with the aid of practice exercises.

Riddle Wheels is split into 4 sections – Shapes, What they like, pair and missing.  The Shapes section has all common shapes including circle, triangle, rectangle, square and oval. The What they like section is basically where kids will learn the eating habits of creatures and match their food by dragging it over creators just like feeding them. Then comes the Pair section which is brings variety of cups to be matched with their saucer, apparels to be matched with their identical pattern and colors and also matching family of animals like a chicken with the Hen , a puppy with dog and more. The learning curve in these exercises is that each time a kid taps on a choice , the name of object/creature is spelled in a sweet voice with an associated sound effect, like a bark and its name(dog) when a dog is tapped and so on. The Find Pair sub-section within Pair is three in one matching game where there are three different types of object that need to matched to their associated items. The fourth and last section is the Missing section where kids will be matching the missing items in the picture say the wings of a butterfly, find the tail of animals within three choices or complete a piece of cloth by finding its appropriate patch.  Each level can have 4-10 quizzes that come one after the other and offer collectibles on successful competition. Your kids can view the collectibles any time and arrange them in the virtual gift room.

There are lot of advantages of interactive learning, besides their primary benefits of being more engaging, easy to learn, easy to remember and cost effectiveness.  And Riddle Wheels has got it all what your kid will love to learn while he/she enjoys the bright and colorful graphics for hours together. Your kids will quickly get accustomed to the gameplay and controls which are simple and maintain same pattern of drag and drop throughout the app providing a friendly experience. Riddle Wheels comes with plenty of unique puzzles that will last for weeks and months together before he/she completes them all. For just 99 cents, Riddle Wheels is much cheaper and engaging than the most colorful image book you could come across for your kid.

Screenshots from the app :

App Name: Riddle Wheels	Note: There is a rating embedded within this post, please visit this post to rate it.
App Category: Games
Price: $0.99
Developer: Olga Romenskaya

CloudMagic supports Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, Gmail, Gtalk chats, Google Apps, twitter and Microsoft exchange for seamless cloud search functionality from one search bar. You just need to grant access to CloudMagic once after you login to any of these services and you are ready to go.

On firing up CloudMagic, the homescreen readily gives you access to search bar along with the list of recent searches made. You can repeat them anytime by tapping on them or start a fresh search which takes a little bit of time at first but is totally worth being patient.  CloudMagic’s search on the twitter is also worth an applause. The twitter search results were not a mess rather gave importance to the search keyword as well as people i followed for the search term. The Search functionality is  notable the way it smartly aggregates the results from each online service.

CloudMagic has given me more than just a simple search engine for my mobile. And using it over and over every day has saved a lot of my precious time and effort in finding what i am looking for. If you start loving the search functionality of CloudMagic on your iPhone, there are many good reasons to check out the cross platform app on Safari, Mozilla, IE and Crome as an extension/add-on.

After getting used to the powerful universal search functionality, i desperately want it to tie its hands with other services like Facebook, Google +1 and Yahoo making the search really universal. For anyone who would want to keep up with Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, Gmail, Gtalk chats, Google Apps, twitter and Microsoft exchange; CloudMagic is the perfect app you should grab today for free on the App Store.

Screenshots from the app :

App Name: CloudMagic – Exchange, Gmail and Twitter Search	Note: There is a rating embedded within this post, please visit this post to rate it.
App Category: Productivity
Price: Free
Developer: CloudMagic

ToucHotel iPhone not just lets you find an accommodation but also lets you choose from the hotels based on your preferences. To start with you just need to enter or choose your city, specify the dates and number of guests. We tried it with location services enabled and strict filters for services offered within app. ToucHotel did not disappoint us rather we were amazed to see the wide number of choices offered along with sorting based on distance, price, and popularity. All the results carry details like hotel name, location, distance from current location, occupancy, price, rating and availability details. You can elaborate the details by tapping on a hotel to check short summary of hotel and its features, pictures of their rooms, services and amenities. You can also view the location of the hotel or multiple hotels on the map which can be helpful when you want to choose a hotel based on its location and route from a specific point.

ToucHotel gives you the ability to book rooms without leaving the app. You can follow the standard booking procedure to choose the type of room from the list and enter your check in and checkout times along with credit card details to confirm your booking. Usually bookings are not charged and payable at hotel itself but credit card may be charged in case of a no-show or if a cancellation is not made within available timeline. All other details regarding cancellations are mentioned and the cancellations are not charged before the specific timeline.

ToucHotel is a truly amazing app you should take along on your next trip or just help you plan and book accommodation for your business clients or guests. ToucHotel is fairly simple and beautiful in terms of design to offers you a smooth and friendly experience during the use.

It’s hard to argue over the price and convenience the app has to offer you. Take a trial of the app with the test booking option that shows you how easy it is to book a room for a pleasant stay.
ToucHotel is available for both iPhone & iPad.

Screenshots from the app :

App Name: ToucHotel – Hotels, Hotel Reservation	Note: There is a rating embedded within this post, please visit this post to rate it.
App Category: Travel
Price: Free
Developer: UserFans

Saavn brings you the hottest music to your iOS device. With hundreds of tracks added every week Saavn is a strong contender and stands in the app store top lists for music category in India, UK, Pakistan, US, Canada, Singapore, UAE, and more.

Saavn iPhone app has three main sections- Saavn (main screen), Player and Search. The main screen of the app brings you ‘new releases’ which will include latest albums and movie songs, it also lets you access featured playlists that can be fun to explore new music and find the music by type, say  by an artist,  actor, occasion or a genre.  From the main screen you will also be able to manage your playlists by logging into the saavn.com account which saves your playlists and lets you manage them from multiple devices and thus keeps your favourites in sync. We expect to see this feature extend to the web version soon.

A lot of times i have desperately desired to listen to a song on my mind but all i ended up is purchasing the whole album on iTunes or streaming it via YouTube when i just want to listen, not watch. But no more would you do the same again; just scroll up on the main screen and you will have a search box readily available. Search results will be available either as songs or playlists in a tabbed manner. You will be able to see the album art, album name, and song name while you scroll down to find the appropriate one or tap on one of them to get more details. But if you instantly want to listen to wonderful songs, just head to the “weekly top 15” or “surprise me” which will add the latest hits or all time hit songs to your current playlist by seeking your permission and you are ready without much of playing around with the app.

Saavn is not just about finding your favourite music and listening to it for free but also streaming via live radio will be available in multiple regional languages soon. The settings in the app give you option to choose your language authenticate facebook sharing and manual sharing via Twitter, Facebook, email and sms and even adjusting your audio quality. Saavn tries to adjust to your current internet bandwidth but if you have a slow connection and your songs keep breaking you can change the audio quality to the best preferred level by choosing between low, medium and high via the settings menu and thus improve your music listening experience.

Saavn is a great experience both on the web and mobile. The UI gives an elegant look and is easy to navigate while enjoying to your favourite songs. Moreover Saavn is available for free and there nothing that should stop you from trying it.

Screenshots from the app :

App Name: Saavn	Note: There is a rating embedded within this post, please visit this post to rate it.
App Category: Music
Price: Free
Developer: Saavn