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Pay Anywhere gives you that flexibility and more. The card reader is smaller than the Apple Store’s and sleeker than Square’s and available for iPad, iPhone, Android and Blackberry. Getting started is a cinch. The folks at Pay Anywhere will set up your merchant account for you for free. You just pay 2.69% per swipe, a notch lower than the going rate at Square. Now you’re ready to accept credit cards right at the tables in your restaurant, or out front right next to cars at your carwash, or in the middle of a vacant lot at the local flea market. Literally anywhere. App features include commitment-free pay-as-you-go pricing; GPS; compatibility with cash drawers and thermal printers; text- and photo-based inventory; detailed receipt emails; built-in reporting of sales trends with “Heat Maps”; and a free merchant portal for detailed account activity – all directly within the app itself. No need to log into a remote Web site to get important sales data. It’s a feature-rich sales app that truly takes credit card processing on-the-go to a whole new, well, place, literally any place.

// PayAnywhere.com

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Like Instagram, the Via.me app uses the built-in camera on your iPhone to record photos or video (you can also record sounds) and post them to your Via.me, Facebook and Twitter accounts. Like Instagram, it comes with a suite of fun filters you can apply to your photos, instantly transforming them into apparent works of art. Having studied photography in college and even spent a little pro time behind the lens, it piqued my interest, and as soon as I left work I began a photographic odyssey home to Jersey City.

In Greeley Square, a block down from Macy’s in Manhattan, I took my first photo and tried to post it to both Twitter and Facebook simultaneously. There I ran into a brief bit of trouble. Upon reopening, it helpfully asked me to report the crash, which I did. A few more fumbling tries and I posted my first pic to both Twitter and Facebook, with a complaint that it wasn’t quite working right. A moment later, a notification popped up that a comment had been posted. “Hi Jonny – I work at Via.Me – what issues were you having? If you can email support@via.me they will be able to help you out!” I was not expecting that. Nor was I expecting the notifications that began to pour in as my photos were posting. People were starting to follow me.

One test video and a few more photos on the train platform and in Jersey – each using a different filter – and I arrived home to find I had amassed a 17-person following already.

Visually, the Web site is a lot like Pinterest, with a couple of major differences. Pinterest pics seem to be predominantly consumer items that when clicked on almost always lead to a page where you can purchase whatever it is you’re looking at. Via.me pix take you to the next post in the member’s profile, giving you the option to start following them. On Via.me I found a lot of personal photos, pics people liked and reposted – a portrait of Steve Jobs was popular, as well as a series of quotes from a user named “Brotips,” who posts such wonderful guy-oriented bon mots as “Brotip #1983: If she says she’s into you, she probably is. If she says she isn’t, she probably isn’t. Don’t dwell on that s#¡t.” Click on it and you get another, then another and another. Want to share it? From the site you can share in just about any way imaginable, including to Pinterest, if you were so inclined.

Ultimately, Via.me is a marvelous fusion of a creative app, a sharing tool and a Pinterest-like Web site. It is still early for Via.me, and it’s always hard to say where these things will lead. But they have just released version 1.05, and no doubt further improvements are in the works. The creative results were impressive, and as for where it’s headed – I woke up to a full screen of notifications in the morning – I now have 29 followers. I’ve only been using the app for about 16 hours. I’d say that is a good indication!

The article Via.Me by RadiumOne Labs appeared first on Appy Awards.

Sharing content doesn’t end with game scores. Touch the share icon and a transparent screen slides up, post your comment to The Daily, Facebook, Twitter or email, or record a voice comment. When I posted to Facebook, the Facebook comment interface carried the icons from Facebook mobile, with red badges indicating two messages and four alerts. Very helpful.

Navigating is a breeze. Touch The Daily logo and you’re presented with a table of contents. Touch any story and you’re taken there immediately. You can also navigate through by sliding page to page, or dragging a white dot along a thin blue scroll bar. Or tap the icon in the upper right corner and scroll through story by story in Cover Flow mode à la iTunes. The overall effect is to keep you completely abreast of where you are within the publication at any time. If that’s not enough, a simple menu bar stretches across the top or bottom of most layouts with the headers of each section: News, Business, Gossip, Opinion, Arts & Life, Apps & Tech, and Sports.

The daily is neither a newspaper nor a magazine, but rather an iPub, an immersive tablet experience, well designed, informative and accessible. At 99 cents a week it’s a steal.

The article The Daily appeared first on Appy Awards.

Hello, Musicshake. Remixing is simpler than you might think. Dance music (and most pop music as well) is broken down into 32-beat blocks. A typical refrain plays out over 16 beats (four measures) and repeats and resolves over the next 16. A verse is typically two 32-beat chunks strung together. Never was the simplicity of this structure more evident than when playing around with Musicshake apps – they have a number of them, most of them free, though “Airplanes” goes for $2.99. Heck, B.o.B. has to make his Benny’s somewhere, right? Anyway, Musicshake breaks these 32-beat blocks into literal colored blocks. Vocal, guitar, keyboards, drums, bass, these are all their own rows of blocks and inside each block you can select which 32-beat segment you want to play, swapping bits and pieces around however you like, surprisingly enough, never ending up with a really bad mix.

Start out acapella and then bring in a beat and then the whole enchilada. Or start out full throttle and drop everything after the first block. Or, give up control and “shake” for a new random mix. Shake is perhaps a bit of a misnomer. I first tried valiantly to shake my phone and get a remix. But you actually tap the shake button to get it to “shake” the mix up. Additional features include sharing the song on the Musicshake Web site, Facebook or via email. To share though, you have to set up a free account on Musicshake.com. The site lets you do a lot of what the app does and purports to have over 1.3 million different samples to work with, but that’s for a whole other review. When you go to share your song it will post to your Musicshake profile and then that link will be shared with Facebook or via email.

There is one thing I will warn you about. Music is not a lightweight medium. The first thing I noticed was how long it took for the app to download. Once it was loaded, it announced it had saved download time by not downloading everything. Downloading the pop samples took twice as long as downloading the app itself. Also, if you buy this one app, you had better really like B.o.B.’s song “Airplanes” because it’s the only song this app produces. Though, overall, the Musicshake apps are a wonder and the music mixes they produce, even completely by what appears to be random switch ups, are fun to make and listen to. Happy thanksgiving!

UPDATE: After this article was published, we received a comment from the Musicshake developer: “Regarding this passage – “Shake is perhaps a bit of a misnomer. I first tried valiantly to shake my phone and get a remix.” – it is actually not a misnomer. You can get a remix either by shaking your phone or the shake button.”
Maybe it’s supposed to work that way, unfortunately on my iPhone 4S it refused to do anything when I shook it – repeatedly. -J. McEwan.

The article Musicshake Remix [UPDATE] appeared first on Appy Awards.

You do need to download and install LogMeIn’s free software on any computer you plan to access. The app itself isn’t free ($29.99 in the iTunes store where I got mine). However, the basic service is free. You can upgrade to a variety of pro levels, but you don’t have to. For an individual, the free level is enough. Once you’ve set up your free account, you can log into it via the app. That delivers you into your computer where you will still need to log in to your user account to fully access it. Once inside you can either go right to the monitor view, navigate through a folder and file hierarchy to access and transfer files, or check the information screen on the computer.

In the monitor mode there are a host of multitouch commands to help you scroll, pinch zoom and use the cursor to click buttons. Tools at the bottom of the screen deploy an easy to use keyboard with clearly marked command, control, option and shift buttons. More than one monitor? Three fingers left or right to toggle between them. It takes a little getting used to, especially on an iPhone like the one I have, but it works and it works well. In the hierarchical mode, you can work your way through folders to a file you want, open it if you have the appropriate app in your device, copy, move, rename, even delete the file.

The interface is slick and for the most part intuitive. LogMeIn gets major kudos for a simple list of multitouch gestures that pops up when you first log into your computer. That’s a huge help. On a small screen it can be a bit awkward and challenging to navigate in monitor mode, but the results are surprisingly accurate. I have to say for the Appy Awards I get to load up and test drive a lot of stuff, most of which I play with for a while and dismiss. However, I am happy to report that LogMeIn Ignition is a keeper and well deserving of it’s nearly five-star rating in the iTunes Store.

The article LogMeIn Ignition appeared first on Appy Awards.

Bring up the main screen and you’re presented with what looks like a tropical landscape midnight view. Above everything shine several stars. Tap on them to release falling stars that create a percussive rhythm when they hit the ground. Tap on the bottom of the screen and a menu of various plant species slides up. Select one and drag your finger on the screen to create a foliage obstruction the falling stars will strike and bounce off of, creating a variety of tones and sounds. Stars behave a bit like pinball balls, often ricocheting off musical plants repeatedly in fascinating and often unexpected ways. You can control the speed and number of stars falling by tapping directly on the source stars again.

The share features seemed a bit spartan. What looked like a cool idea – share a melody I’d created with my friends through Facebook, Twitter or email – turned out to share a soundless JPEG of my creation and a link to download the app. While the images are pretty, absent the unique melody users create I found the share feature wanting. This would no doubt limit the number of shares. On the plus side, the share feature was easy to use, and unlocked a few additional sounds to play with – a feature that pretty much guarantees at least one share per user.

Overall, this is a wonderfully amusing time-waster, and well worth the free download.

The article Trident Vitality Falling Stars appeared first on Appy Awards.

Viddy let’s you shoot video and share it. Tap the share button and you’re immediately presented with a host of options including Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. You can also upload the video to your Viddy account. Much like Twitter limits posts to under 140 characters, so Viddy videos are limited to under 15 seconds. The app let’s you post as is, or style your video with a host of themes, such as “Retro” and “3D,” with music to match. The themes are impressively professional looking and easy to apply. And they do add that something extra: A video showing the vapid questioning stares of unsuspecting co-workers was amusing enough, but after run through the “Junkd” filter it was actually whimsical and funny.

You can also import video shot on the iPhone camera, or videos edited in other apps such as Adobe’s PhotoShop app. One of the best features is that the app knows when to to stop recording so videos are never more than 15 seconds long. It’s easy to see how this app might lead to yet another interesting variant form of storytelling. What can you film in 10 to 15 seconds? Viddyers are testing those limits for sure. As I skimmed through the video snippets posted by a young woman I had randomly chosen to follow, I became aware of a fascinating, sometimes choppy, montage-like portrait she — whether wittingly or not — was painting of herself and her life. Goofy song parodies, random observations and pranks played on friends, combined with her infectious laugh, made for a moving picture of “TaylorMaylor.” Viddy is quite simply, Twitter for the mobile video age.

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