Author: Serenity Caldwell

When I’m not writing about apps, OS X, or iOS, I play roller derby with Boston’s all-star travel team. We’re currently ranked 16th in the world, which is pretty exciting—but it also means practicing and scrimmaging at an extremely high level, three to four days a week. And as anyone who has played a contact sport can attest, your body can get a little beaten up after just a few weeks.

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Over the past year, I’ve seen more and more photo collages pop up on my social media timelines. Some folks use iOS apps such as Frontback for an automatic front camera/back camera collage, while others manually put multiple pictures together with an iOS program such as Diptic.

But you’re not limited to the iPhone or iPad to build collages—nor do you have to spend bank-breaking money on an image editor. For just $1, you can pick up PicFrame (Mac App Store link), a standout app for making quick and easy—and easily shareable—image collages.

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The best reading apps vanish before your very eyes, letting you immerse yourself in a sea of words and stories, forgetting for the moment about beveled edges or highlighted buttons. And though Quote-Unquote Apps’s Weekend Read beautifully implements iOS 7’s design schema, its true power is how quickly it lets you forget about the interface and how deeply it pulls you into the scripts, screenplays, and other documents hidden within.

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As someone who despised WYSIWYG software for most of her life, I found myself rather shocked to be enjoying Tumult’s HTML5 web and animation software, Hype, when it first came on the scene in 2011. Our initial review praised the software for its excellent HTML5 animation and website-building tools, and the app has only gotten better over the last few years. Its latest update, which Tumult calls “a love letter to our users,” makes an already fantastic piece of software downright essential for anyone who is interested in building complex, scaling HTML5 animations but is lacking in HTML, CSS, or Javascript expertise.

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We love iOS apps, but there’s a lot of junk and cruft out there. Our Staff Picks column separates the great from the mediocre, offering our expert advice on the best apps, games, tools, and programs in the iOS App Store.

It takes a lot to hook me on an iOS game. I stare at screens for a good portion of my work day, and social networks and the occasional TV program are just about the only thing I can make leisure time for. But for the last few days, I have been obsessed with one tiny little number-crunching game: Threes.

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Dark Sky has long been one of my favorite weather apps for the iPhone, but it’s seen few updates this past year as its developers focused on growing their new project, Forecast.io, and their public weather API of the same name. 2014 is a new year, though, and the Dark Sky Company is starting it right, with a full redesign of Dark Sky for iOS 7.

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If you haven’t yet played around with Apple’s slo-mo feature on the iPhone 5s, now’s a perfect time to start. This week’s video tip has Macworld associate editor Serenity Caldwell demonstrating how to shoot slo-mo video, preview it on your own device, and share it with others.

Transcript:
One of the great features of the iPhone 5s is its slow motion video mode. To use this mode, just swipe over while in the Camera app to the Slo-Mo setting.

To begin shooting a slow-motion video, make sure you’ve got your target focused, then press the record button. Your video will begin recording in what looks like real time, but don’t be fooled: there’s some slow-motion magic yet to come.

If you just want to view your masterpiece yourself, you can open up the Camera Roll. There, two new blue edit handles will drop down, allowing you to phase in and out of slow motion. But if you’d actually like to send those videos to anyone, you have to move over to iMovie, Apple’s free software for editing and sharing home movies.

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Since the early days of the .epub and .mobi formats, writers and publishers have been trying to find better ways to make ebooks. Some writing apps included primitive built-in options. A few design apps offered limited-functionality exports. But few apps have thoroughly focused on building ebooks.

180g’s Vellum is one of the few pieces of software dedicated to doing just that. It’s not a word processor, nor is it a design program. Rather, it’s an app for turning your finished manuscript into a beautiful ebook.

Rather than launch with half-built bells and whistles, Vellum 1.0 provides the basic necessities you might look for when building an ebook. You can import your manuscript from a Word doc; style text, subheads, breaks, block quotes, and verse; preview a live version of your book for the iPhone, iPad, Kindle, or Nook; and export multiple versions with a single click.

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