The 10 Best Apps Of June From The Daily App

App Reviews: The Best Of June

Across the spectrum of mobile platforms, the number of apps to handle everything from photo editing to parsing your calendar for free time continues to grow at a steady pace. Some platforms are seeing more developers produce nice apps than others (like the new BlackBerry PlayBook platform, for example), but the pace of innovation on mobile platforms is moving faster almost every day.

Here are 10 great mobile apps we evaluated during the past month in our Daily App blog.

Adobe Photoshop Express For iPhone

A free download from the Apple iTunes App Store, Adobe Photoshop Express for iPhone provides the ability to do basic cropping, sharpening, noise-reduction and more for photos taken on the phone itself. Turn photos from color into black and white, fix shading, add effects and more. It’s also a nice utility for uploading photos to Facebook, Photoshop.com or Twitter after editing.

Despite the well-known antagonism between Adobe and Apple over platform issues, Adobe’s Photoshop Express for iPhone shows how strong a player the company can be in the mobility market by adapting its core and flagship technologies when given the chance.

ClayFrames For Android

The basic concept of ClayFrames is uncomplicated. Take still photos, at 15 or more frames per second, of an image and then combine those still photos into a video. To help guide you, the app will keep an opaque image, on screen, of the most recent still photo. Make no mistake: this free app is not exactly production-quality if you’re pitching a Hollywood movie studio. But for simple animations for a multimedia PowerPoint, for example, it’s an app that can do a quick-and-dirty animation right from your Android device. And it can do it for free.

Using ClayFrames, it took about five minutes for us to make a two-second video clip of a tiny little plastic robot walking around a desk.

ClayFrames, for $2.03 from the Android Market, shoots frames and puts together a video in as high as 1080p resolution on a Motorola Droid X phone.

Free-Time For iPhone

The calendar-filtering app is free from Apple’s iTunes App Store (a 99-cent upgrade is available to eliminate in-app adds), and also provides nifty features including exchanging free time availability with another iPhone user by simply bumping phones.

The app integrates with your iPhone calendars, including Exchange, Google Calendars and more, and automatically picks through any blocks of one hour or two hours of ’down time.’

Network Mapper For Android

For $1.62 from the Android Market, you can install Network Mapper on your Android device and, within minutes, begin scanning a network to take an inventory of every device hooked into it.

We gave it a try in the CRN Test Center lab, and found it provided a comprehensive listing of every device on the network. It also provided the opportunity to scan ports on each device should we want to do that.

OmmWriter For iPad

OmmWriter for iPad is a little bit more comfortable for longer writing sessions than the iPad’s own native keyboard; if your thing is loud Heavy Metal or Rock as background noise while you write, then you'd probably want to keep moving. Still we found that OmmWriter, a $4.99 download from Apple’s iTunes App Store, is a really nice keyboard and app that will make longer writing exercises on the tablet a bit easier and less stressful when trying to hit that stressful deadline.

A couple of minor drawbacks: it will save natively to a .txt file or to PDF, but not Word extensions. Navigation through the file-save or file-share process isn't as intuitive as other word processing apps, like Documents To Go or Apple's own Pages. But if you need to roll up your sleeves and block out distractions for a couple of hours while you write a lengthy document, OmmWriter is worth giving a try.

iReport Flow For iPad

iReport Flow for iPad is valuable for ad-hoc, workgroup workflow for a few reasons:

It allows fast creation of reports that will help in execution of basic workflow; It supports text reporting, audio and video (iPad 2); It works with any corporate internet, by allowing reports to be uploaded to a team site; It’s free.

HandyLogs Money For BlackBerry PlayBook

HandyLogs Money for BlackBerry PlayBook provides a fast, simple way to keep track of expenses, work hours and odometer miles. It also synchronizes with a free, online-based account that HandyLogs will host for you on its Web site.

On the device itself, HandyLogs Money provides some great features, including a pie-chart rendering of how business expenses are spent between, for example, meals, mileage, supplies, etc. While the apps are free, HandyLogs does provide a ’premium’ subscription for the online offering -- for $2 per month -- for what it says are additional analytics and functionality.

VidTrim For Android

VidTrim for Android is a free download from the Android Market, and provides a straightforward, no-frills method of cutting down video clips directly on a smart phone or tablet itself.

While lacking the more sophisticated features of other apps -- including Apple’s iMovie for iPhone on that competing platform -- we did a quick download, installation and tryout of VidTrim and found it’s a clean, easy app for doing just what its name says.

IdeaCatch For BlackBerry PlayBook

A free download from the BlackBerry App World online store, Idea Catch is a quick, easy way to jot down ideas as they happen. The ideas are arranged in a series of tags -- ’Home’ ideas, ’Work’ ideas, ’Stale’ ideas, etc. -- and each tag is depicted graphically as a light bulb. (Get it: a light bulb for each group of ideas?)

Raw GPS For iPhone

A 99-cent download, Raw GPS ties into the iPhone’s GPS antenna and Google Maps to provide a slick trip tracker. Once you hit the ’Start’ button, it will record your location, velocity, altitude, average speed, distance and time traveled.

It also plots your location on a Google Maps satellite image, will present you with a map of the route you took to your present location and will allow you to export all of the data so you can integrate it with PC-based applications.