TheDopeFiend

Apps for the Pocket Designer

Touchgrind

Fingerboarding is one of those things that I never understood how people get so good at. I used to watch videos of kids doing some insane things with fingerboards. It seems kind of silly when you think about it, but takes a lot of coordination. The same goes for the new iPhone/iPod Touch game out by Illusion Labs called Touchgrind. The game is basically a virtual fingerboard that you control with different finger combinations. It’s obvious a lot of time has gone into this game. The physics are very lifelike and there are different skate parks and games you can play within the game. For only five bucks you can spend hours trying to master this virtual fingerboard.

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Poladroid Project

Poladroid is one of the coolest little applications I have found in a long time. For those of us who were saddened when Polaroid announced they would be discontinuing the production of their film, Poladroid helps fill a small part of that hole left in your heart. The application, which is only available for Mac OSX at the moment (available for Windows in November), creates very realistic looking “fauxlaroids” of any digital photo. Simply drag and drop your photo into the neat little app and it virtually processes the photo for you. It’s available for free download, and they also have a Flickr group full of cool photos.

Midomi VS iPhone

There’s nothing worse than forgetting the name of the artist who sings a song you heard. Or when you hear a song in a store an really want to know who the artist is that sings it. Midomi for the iPhone takes care of these problems along with providing many other cool features. This iPhone application allows you to sing, hum or play a song into your iPhone’s mic, then searches Midomi’s music database to match your singing, humming or the song with the closest results. You can also simply say or type the name of a song or artist to search the Midomi database. After you do a search and results are found you can then purchase the artist’s tracks from iTunes, view YouTube videos, view photos and see more tracks available from the artist. The application’s interface is very simple and easy to use. I only hope that the database becomes a bit more expansive, as many of the more obscure songs I have searched have no results. Overall a great application with many uses.

In The Mod

In The Mod is a small application that every designer will love. The application comes in four different editions: The Flickr Edition, Webcam Edition, Your Images Edition and the Online Edition. The concept of each edition is essentially the same, creating swatches from various photos from either various Flickr photos, photos from your webcam, and photos in your personal library. Have you ever been inspired by the color way of your favorite sneakers, or by a photo that you took of a building in you neighborhood. In The Mod can import and use photos to create a swatch of 1-1,000 different colors, and then export the swatch to Photoshop of Illustrator. A handy little tool in any designers collection of apps.

Dropbox

Dropbox is a new online service making it possible to easily and seamlessly sync and access your important files over multiple computers. After installing Dropbox the application creates a designated folder on your hard drive, simply drag and drop files into this folder and they are synced with your online account. Installing the application on multiple computers works the same way, except those files are now synced with all computers on your account as well as your online account. This is a great way to make sure you always have current working files if you are on-the-go or away from your computer and the ease-of-use is unmatched by any other option I have tried. Not only does Dropbox sync and backup your files, but you can also create public folders to invite others to collaborate and share files with. At the moment Dropbox is still in beta and only offers 2GB of storage. I am really hoping they offer pay plans with more storage which I am guessing is likely. The service is available for both Mac and PC and works fine over cross platform networks.

Songbird

I have had my eye on the web browser/music player hybrid Songbird for awhile now. Songbird has recently released version 0.5 and it’s looking pretty awesome. Songbird brings you features of other music players like iTunes, playing music from your hard drive and iPod. In addition to these features Songbird also doubles as a web browser that can play/download MP3s directly from music blogs or other music sites. Although I can’t really see using Songbird as my primary browser, it is built using the Mozilla platform so you definitely could. Overall I think the new version of Songbird is a solid tool for browsing MP3 blogs. Additional features include downloadable skins or “feathers”, iTunes Library Import, LastFM Audioscrobbler plug-in, Album Art Manager and a long list of other available plug-ins.

[Available for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux]

Desktoptopia

Desktoptopia is an awesome little desktop/wallpaper manager that will automatically update your PC or Mac with fresh wallpapers directly from their online vault of wallpapers. Simply install their free software and set your preferences to how often each wallpaper changes and which libraries you want them selected from. They claim to have a panel that only selects the best of wallpapers submitted, and most of them I have seen so far have been pretty cool. However, if for some reason you aren’t liking the selected wallpaper you can easily skip to the next.

[Via: Josh Spear]

Awaken, the Alarm Alternative

Waking up to that super-annoying alarm clock beeping just doesn’t seem like the right way to start of your day. I’ve been looking for alternatives for a long time, even the radio alarm is annoying most the time. I recently got clued-in on an application for the Mac called Awaken. This nifty little app allows you to set the alarm time, and then customize a specific iTunes playlist that will slowly fade-in to the volume you choose. Not only that, but Awaken allows you to set a sleep timer as well, so you can fall asleep and awake to and music you choose.

[via: The Don]