Chronicles of a Techoholic A blog chronicling the life of a 17 year old student and aspiring programmer

18Feb/100

[Review] iSaidWhat?!

Over the holidays, I stumbled across a very useful app for audiophiles, students and pranksters. iSaidWhat?! is an audio recorder, editor and mixer which can be used to record lectures or mix together recordings to create the illusion that someone said something they didn’t.

The first thing I noticed about the app was the icon. The icon was very clean and stood out from the rest of the pack. I immediately had high expectations of this app and I was not disappointed. I proceeded to open the app’s iTunes page and the next thing that struck me was the clean layout of the app. I knew exactly how to navigate around easily when I installed it. A nifty feature of this app is the input percentage meter, which allows you to choose how much the app can pick up. Although, this was not very intuitive. It should be there by default, rather than having to click the small grey microphone icon, which does not give a good indicator of its function. However, the feature is a bonus and not a necessity.

The next thing that caught my eye was the script feature, which puts a script for you to read from, which could be useful for song writers for example.

Now onto the main function of the app, which is the editor and mixer. I think it performs this function very well and it is very easy to use. It has two tabs, one for the recordings and one for arrangements of recording snippets. It’s very easy to cut bits out after a recording and easy to use it in arrangements.


Unlike some App Store reviewers, I disagree that the name is bad. I think it’s a unique name and will catch student’s eyes along with its icon that makes good use of the small square area. It could be improved to appeal to the songwriters though.

Complaints

The only complaints I have about this app are very minor. The first is that I should be able to delete a recording without deleting an arrangement that uses snippets from it.

The second is that the app should open to your list of recordings rather than the “New Recording” screen except on first launch. That’s it! Like, I said, these are not big deals and can be very easily fixed.

To sum up, I would recommend this app to pranksters, students and songwriters. For example, a student could use the arrangements feature to make one arrangement for a topic that was discussed in several lessons. This could be useful for many other purposes and I think at 99 cents, it’s a steal.

Update:
“The app opens in the recording screen on launch only if you didn’t close from within the snippets view, or arrangement view.”- my mistake
Also, as I suspected the developer says that “Arrangements aren’t seperate files, they actually read from the recording. Snippets are just shortcuts to a recording in order to conserve space and time.”

26Jan/102

[Review] ReelDirector

ReelDirector is one of the best apps I have ever downloaded for my iPhone. And I download a lot. I am always on the App Store just for the sake of downloading useful(one day) free stuff.

ReelDirector is the first full-featured video editing app for the iPhone. And by video editing, I don’t mean trim. ReelDirector is a powerful tool not to be trifled with. Think of iMovie for the iPhone, then you’ll have a pretty good idea of how powerful it is.

What never ceases to amaze me is that this app is a mere 2.6Mb. Just over a quarter of 10Mb. You can download this app with 3G in a matter of seconds.

You’ll never be short of transitions on ReelDirector with 27 professional effects to seamlessly change from one scene to the next. You can also drag and drop the videos in any order, which should be familiar to Mac users. When you press the ‘Add’ button, the app asks whether you want to import a video or picture or record something or use pre-imported music. Alas, the app does not allow you to import your music directly from the iPod app, although I believe this is being looked into. The app can import clips from synced folders too. If you don’t have video, this app is still very useful as you can make brilliant slideshows with it and you can import photos with the Ken Burns effect. Your Hollywood creations can be shared with friends and family via email and/or saved to your camera roll.

I really like the fact that they haven’t bloated the app with features. How they managed to do that on a phone app, even a smartphone, really baffles me, but I suggest you buy it before the developer(s) turn sane and charge more for this app.

Complaints

The only complaint I have about this app to the developer(s) is that it should be able to import music from the iPod app directly, although I realise there may be some difficulties. It should also be taken into consideration when buying this app that the video features only work with the 3GS, although this is to be expected. Apart from these minor annoyances, the app is very well executed and deserves a lot of credit for fitting into 2.6Mb, making it speedy and for being the first of it’s kind. It really has a lot of potential and I would love to see this app grow. I highly recommend it if you have a lot of vacation videos on your iPhone for example. I think Wired.com Gadget Lab summed it up really well: “File this one under sent from the future”… “A quite amazing demonstration of the march of technology.”

Promo Code

And finally, a surprise to all who read this far. I have one free US promo code for this app. So the first person who grabs it gets the app: X6A64M3E4PP7. Remember, this will only work if you have a US iTunes Store Account.