Hasta La Ideas

Gorgeous weather with Hollr’s new iPhone app

Mobile development house
Hollr follows up last year’s
GO HD, a GPS-based app that lets users explore a new dimension of their neighborhood in real time by posting pictures and videos of their daily activities while neighbors do the same. This month the company distinguishes itself yet again with Solar, a simple and visually appealing weather app that turns checking the forecast into a surprisingly enjoyable experience. In the onslaught of recent apps designed to reveal the climate’s intentions for the day, Solar outranks its competitors by shying away from complex interfaces and confusing vector polygons and instead chooses to make high design a priority by sticking to the basics.

The rain-or-shine experience begins by selecting a city of origin, and Solar lets you view the weather for up to four destinations simultaneously with an intuitive double tap or pinch—a winning feature for travelers. The true genius behind the app’s design reveals itself once you hone in on a single location, with a home screen that displays on the time, date, weather condition (rainy, sunny, partly cloudy) and temperature in the upper lefthand corner while a beautiful, hyper-sensorial colorscape fills the background in gradient hues that reflect the time of day. When applicable, an understated animation will fill the display with soft raindrops, dewy fog or snowflakes, but Hollr’s take on this now-standard weather app feature doesn’t go over the top.

Solar’s most winning element comes in the form of its 24-hour forecast: scrolling up prompts the appearance of a simple clock in the screen’s upper righthand corner, its hands advancing through the day as your finger moves northward. The time, date and weather update in corresponding real time as the hours flash by and the aurora-like background undergoes a series of dazzling changes in color combinations. The effect is pleasantly subtle, giving you a more artistic vision of what the day has in store. In the other direction, swiping down brings a three-day forecast into view at the top of the screen, while swiping left-to-right allows you to sift between chosen cities.

Hollr’s newest creation wins out with its minimalist design and unwillingness to burden users with unnecessary information. Though the app doesn’t delve into the technical information required by a sailor or mountain climber, it emerges as the perfect digital addition to any city dweller’s cadre of innovative, simplified applications.

Solar is available for 99¢ in the
iTunes App Store.

Color-coded shopping results in an iOS app

LuxeFinds, the online luxury shopping engine for women, has produced a mobile shopping app that searches the web for lifestyle goods based on color. By taking a picture of an article of clothing or selecting a color from a color wheel, shoppers can find an exact match from LuxeFinds’ massive database. The app, which launched today, aims to help shoppers match clothing to their current wardrobe and fix the common problem of inaccurate colors that tend to crop up with online shopping.

While husband-and-wife team Phyllis and Philip Cheung founded LuxeFinds as a site for women, their app caters to men and children as well with results for clothing, cosmetics and fragrances. Colors can be selected by taking a photograph, or by using LuxeFinds’ color wheel and swatch selector. From there, the app returns a curated selection of items matching the selected color. Shoppers can buy, save or push the items to a number of social channels.

While color-based search options exist across the web, we appreciate the strategic application to styled shopping. The uncluttered interface is easy to use, and LuxeFinds does a spot-on job of curating the mess of items online, presenting users with a kind of color-coded luxury megastore.

The LuxeFinds “Ultimate Color Shopping Engine” is available for free through the iTunes App Store.

Three new applications aim to enhance mobile photography

A slew of photo applications for iPhone have rolled out recently, bringing a bit of competition to the Instagram-dominated scene. From professional features to creative image destruction, the following apps continue to expand the capabilities of smart phone photography.

Camera Awesome

Focusing on camera and video, this app brings some professional-level options to your touch screen interface. The slickest feature has to be the adjustable focus and exposure selection, which allows you to set each independently as you compose the shot. While shooting video, Camera Awesome will record the five seconds prior to pressing the record button, a clutch feature for capturing fleeting moments.

Pictures can be taken rapid fire, and the app has hundreds of filters and effects ready for application through the “Awesomize” button. Finished images are then shared across multiple social media channels. Not that it affects the app’s performance, but quirky loading phrases like “alchemizing dragon scales” and “grilling unicorn tears” sure make for an entertaining wait time.

Decim8

The anti-nostalgia attitude of Decim8 turns your photographs into pixelated works of glitch art. This is the third version of Decim8, and the UI has received a complete overhaul, giving you much more control over the final product through customizable presets. Effects can be applied one by one or as a batch effect. Menus and options are accessed through multi-directional gestures, and the focus is found by simply tapping the screen. Since corruption is really the point of Decim8, data is irrecoverable and pixel reconfiguration often renders your images beautifully mangled. Users share photos through social media or Postagram postcards.

Instamatch

Rather than compete with the popular photo app, Instamatch from Tiny Hearts pulls Instagram photos to create a fun memory game. The app recognizes similar objects and arranges them into themes, also allowing you to create your own categories. For example, a food-themed game would present a series of similar dishes that users will have to flip and match. Scores are determined by the number of tiles and the amount of time it takes to complete them. Multiplayer mode supports two people on the iPhone and four on the iPad.

Offline functionality and itinerary sharing dominate this multi-city metro app

The network of transit apps now available has grown nearly as complicated as the oft daunting subway systems they were created to navigate. Certain New York-focused programs we’ve used have their strong points—New York Subway features an augmented reality function for above-ground navigation; NYC Exit Strategy maps out which cars to ride for fastest transfer and iTrans shares service changes directly from the MTA. The relatively new Embark stands out by simplifying the system with a “tailored trip” concept.

Originally developed for San Francisco, Embark now serves Chicago, NYC, London, D.C. and Philadelphia, as well as the Long Island Railroad and New Jersey Transit systems through a series of location-specific apps. Most notably, Embark functions without a data connection, allowing users to plan new trips while underground. The user interface makes station-to-station navigation fast and easy, and trips can also be designed around address and landmark destinations. Linking with local transit announcements, Embark sends push notifications to keep users apprised of relevant delays, warnings and service changes.

Embark CEO David Hodge believes that, in the age of the smartphone, people shouldn’t have to think about how they’re going to get somewhere. Embark minimizes time spent on the app, streamlining A-to-B navigation with its offline functionality. In some ways, Embark does less than other similar transportation apps, but is able to set itself apart through intelligent navigation. Small details like planning trips based on arrival rather than departure and walking speed adjusted by city also give Embark a crucial edge.

Users are also able to Tweet, text and email itineraries so that friends can know when to expect each other. The free app looks to include transportation systems outside of railways in the future, and will expand to public bus schedules and routes next. With a flood of Olympic Games tourists set to hit the London Tube next summer, Embark hopes to ease the movement of unfamiliar travelers in the European metropolis.

Embark is available for download from iTunes.

An interactive narrative about the birth of the alphabet in a world of numbers

A charming interactive story app from Moonbot takes a pre-linguistic dystopia as the setting for a adventure tale about the invention of the alphabet. Following Moonbot’s first story “The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore,” Numberlys also takes a literary angle of a more cinematic quality. In part an homage to Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis,” the goose-stepping society of the Numberlys is less than intimidating as its citizens waddle across the frame.

The combination story-game-film app teaches a pseudo-history of the birth of the alphabet. Five friends set out to create something new in a world that relies entirely on numbers for communication. Their “number speak” is comically translated by our narrator, a European of ambiguous origins. In a factory reserved for number production, the friends cut, crank, twirl, bounce and bazooka all 26 letters into shape. In doing so, they unleash a new means of communication, bringing names, sunsets, jelly beans and Technicolor into their drab world.

While the high-brow references to film history and the curse of industrial capitalism may soar over the heads of little ones, the games and story are clearly aimed at young children. The mini games are entertaining enough, though really serve to keep the reader engaged as the story progresses. Closer to a film than a picture book, the story still makes good use of an alliterative vocabulary: “They were giddy! Glad! Gleeful! They would go forwards with grace, gallantry, and gusto!”

While there remains room for growth in terms of alternative story paths and better gaming, Numberlys represents a new standard in the development of interactive narratives.

Numberlys is available on the iPad and iPhone through iTunes.