edu.Mac.nation App Spotlight

TED

“Enjoy inspiring and edifying talks from the Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conferences on your iPhone or iPod Touch. This application integrates multiple information feeds from TED into an unique user experience on the iPhone.

FEATURES

• Watch and listen to the latest videos and audio published by TED

• Search their vast collection of content on your iPhone

• Bookmark your favorite talks to share with others or enjoy later”

via TED

Classics

FEATURES

• An intuitive and elegantly designed reading experience with realistic 3D page flips that track to your finger. You can even drag a bit to take a peek at the next page, or finish reading a sentence as you start turning!

• Flick up and down in your virtual bookcase to view your collection, tap a book to open, and tap and hold to drag and sort your books

• Tap the table of contents button on the top right for quick navigation between chapters

• View how far you are in a book at a glance with a subtle progress display integrated into the top bar

• Classics automatically remembers your place with a satin bookmark when exiting the app or book

• Options to toggle ‘page flip’ animation to a more minimal ‘slide’, and to turn the page flip sound off and on can be found in your iPhone’s settings application”

via Classics

There are a ton of great classic books contained in this application.

Classics

FEATURES

• An intuitive and elegantly designed reading experience with realistic 3D page flips that track to your finger. You can even drag a bit to take a peek at the next page, or finish reading a sentence as you start turning!

• Flick up and down in your virtual bookcase to view your collection, tap a book to open, and tap and hold to drag and sort your books

• Tap the table of contents button on the top right for quick navigation between chapters

• View how far you are in a book at a glance with a subtle progress display integrated into the top bar

• Classics automatically remembers your place with a satin bookmark when exiting the app or book

• Options to toggle ‘page flip’ animation to a more minimal ‘slide’, and to turn the page flip sound off and on can be found in your iPhone’s settings application”

There are a ton of great classic books contained in this application.

NASA App

“The first official NASA App invites you to discover a wealth of NASA information right on your iPhone or iPod Touch. The NASA App collects, customizes and delivers an extensive selection of dynamically updated information, images and videos from various online NASA sources in a convenient mobile package.”

via NASA.gov

Sky Voyager

“SkyGazer and SkyVoyager are easy-to-use but powerful planetarium programs for the iPhone and iPod Touch. SkyGazer is the intro version, designed for beginners, and SkyVoyager is the “Pro” version for advanced users.

SkyVoyager includes an optional Expansion Pack with 2.5 million stars, and more than 300 color deep sky object images, dramatically increasing the realism and usefulness of your sky charts.

If you have an iPhone 3G S with a compass, SkyGazer and SkyVoyager can show you the sky in same the direction that you’re holding your phone. You can identify stars and planets by holding your phone next to them, and you can find any object in the sky by following an arrow that points in its direction.”

(via Carina Software)

Sky Voyager was the Macworld 2010 Best of Show Winner.

Note2Self

Note2Self is an audio recorder and voice note sharing solution. Bring it up to your ear and start talking. Bring it back down in front of you and the recording stops and is saved or emailed automatically.

• Automatic recordings using the accelerometer by bringing the phone to your ear, turning it upside down or shaking You must be vertically straight and the phone is positioned with the bottom at your mouth and top at the ear. You can also turn the phone face down on a table to start recording. If the accelerometer fails to reliably start recording, quit and relaunch Note2Self.
• Share your notes via email our our WiFi Server on your desktop (Mac, PC, Linux)
• Location Tracking of your notes
• Manual and Automatic Pause based on level
• Powerful Organization Abilities
• Beautifully designed to make sending email the easiest of any other app on the iPhone
• Play, Pause, Seek notes
• Pause Recordings
• Record Audio in Compressed and Uncompressed formats
• Add Text Notes
• Easy to use and great to look at

I am amazed that this app is still free. I use it to quickly send myself audio notes. The automatic phone-to-ear recording is just like the voice search feature in the Google Mobile App.

DinoMixer

Designed to please dinosaur fans of all ages, DinoMixer lets you mix and match dinosaur heads, bodies and tails to make your own crazy mixed-up dinosaurs!

DinoMixer 1.8 features detailed, colorful images of 14 different dinosaurs:

• Allosaurus
• Apatosaurus
• Carnotaurus
• Coelophysis
• Edmontosaurus
• Gallimimus
• Pachycephalosaurus
• Parasaurolophus
• Spinosaurus
• Stegosaurus
• Triceratops
• Troodon
• Tyrannosaurus
• Euoplocephalus (New!)

Swipe up an down to spin through the dinosaur heads, bodies and tails. Mixed and matched, there are thousands of crazy combinations!

Match all three parts of the same dinosaur and the dinosaur name pops up.

Click the arrow and you get 3 pages of information about each dinosaur, how big they were, how long ago they lived, where the dinosaur’s fossils were found and background information on what makes the dinosaur interesting and different, along with fossil location maps and size comparison images!

via DinoMixer

Dragon Search

“Dragon Search is the Fast, Accurate and Smart way to search online content on your iPhone™ using your voice.

Simply speak your search queries and get simultaneous results from a variety of top websites and content sources including:

• Google™ (or Yahoo!™, Bing™, depending on your default settings)
• YouTube™
• Twitter™ Search
• iTunes™
• Wikipedia®

The innovative Dragon Search Carousel allows you to quickly access results from multiple sources, and is a one-stop shop for all of your search needs, even when you are “Hands-Busy””

via Dragon Mobile Apps

This app certainly is fast, easy to use, and free! The Dragon voice-to-text feature is simply the best in the App Store.

Instapaper Pro

“Save web pages for later offline reading, optimized for readability on your iPhone or iPod touch’s screen. Featured by Apple and critically acclaimed by top blogs, newspapers, and magazines!

Great for long articles and blog posts that you find during the day and would like to read, but don’t have the time when you find them. Save with Instapaper, then read later when you’re commuting, in a meeting, or waiting in line.

Browse the Editor’s Picks for more stories to read when you haven’t had time to find any.

PRO FEATURES:

• Folders
• Automatic updates
• Save your position
• Dictionary lookups
• Tilt scrolling, pagination
• Adjustable fonts and text sizes
• Dark mode for night reading
• Send to Tumblr and Twitter”

via Instapaper

Two words: Tilt Scrolling

I wish every reader/RSS/e-book application had tilt scrolling.

AutoStitch

“AutoStitch is the only app that can stitch images in any order or arrangement, including vertical, horizontal, or mixed arrangements. It produces much higher resolution images than other panorama apps: up to 5 megapixels on the iPhone 3G or the original iPhone and up to 20 megapixels on the iPhone 3GS.”

via Cloudburst Research

I have tried some of the other panorama apps in the App Store and I find this one to be the best. It is super easy to snap shot after shot and “stitch” the final product together in AutoStitch. There is no need to worry about aligning images. The work is all done for you.