Blends App  →

Blends is a great and new-to-me iPhone and iPad dictionary app. It’s fast and has a very nice design. But what’s best about it are some power-user features I haven’t seen in other dictionary apps before:

  • Wild Card Searches: Say you’re looking for a word that ends in the letter “t”? Just enter “*t” as your search term.

  • Ready on Launch: Go into the iPhone’s Settings app → Blends → enable Ready on Launch. This means that when you launch the app, the cursor will be in the search field and the keyboard will be pulled up ready to go.

In my experience, 90% of the time I launch a dictionary app it is to search for a word, and yet a couple extra taps are always needed to do so. Not with Blends.

Just 2 bucks on the app store.

Blends App

The condescending UI  →

Paul Miller, on The Verge:

My problem with many modern UIs is that they never get past the telling phase. They’re always dressing up their various functions with glows and bevels and curves, and in the process they somehow become overbearing to my senses. “Did you know you can click this? Don’t forget there’s a save button over here! Let me walk you to your control panel.” Imagine a car that verbally explains all of its various knobs and levers the first time you get into the car. Wonderful, right? Now imagine that car explaining all of these various functions every single time you get in the car for the next five years, until you finally snap and drive it off a cliff.

I’ve never been bothered by the animation of a window minimizing into the Dock, but the new UI of Address Book drives me bonkers. Not only is it ugly, but worse, it is far less usable. There is surely a market for a “Address Book Pro” that harkens to the app of yesteryear and allows us to manage our contacts once again.

The condescending UI

Bring a Trailer  →

The guys behind this website find and feature great vintage cars that are for sale around the country so you don’t have to scour eBay. It’s a fun site even if your not in the market for a “Barn find, rally car, or needle in the haystack”. (Thanks, Randy.)

Bring a Trailer

On Kickstarter: iPen Is a New Type of iPad Stylus  →

For those who’ve really been itching for a great stylus for their iPad, this may be it.

While I don’t agree with their opening statement that the iPen “transforms the iPad into a content creation device, not just a content consumption device”, this is the first iPad stylus I’ve seen that uses new technology to ignore touch input from your palm when writing with the iPen. Though, worth noting, is that it only works with certain apps right now — it won’t work with any and every iPad app.

On Kickstarter: iPen Is a New Type of iPad Stylus