Home Screen Wallpaper Maker is a nice, free way to create attractive backgrounds for your device. Sure you can just snap a picture and use that for your wallpaper, but this app allows you to customize the pictures before saving them back to the camera roll and selecting them as backgrounds.

Features

The app is simple to use. You first either select one of the many included high-quality backgrounds, or select a picture from your camera roll. Then you can choose to add frames to your app icons, then you save the background back to your camera roll to use as a wallpaper. There is even a random button, though the results may obviously not be to your liking.

Limitations in iOS itself prevent the app from being able to directly change your background, which is why you must save the image first to your camera roll and then select it as a background.

Pros and Cons

The app works smoothly and does a great job of adding the frames to the icon placeholders. The frames add a nice touch of class to otherwise static backgrounds. There is also a nice varied selection of background images to choose from, though you can of course get background images from many other sources.

The only things I wish this app had to offer was the ability to take a picture and use that as a background, rather than having to only choose from the camera roll; and more effects to add to pictures that you choose for backgrounds (some basic color balance effects, brightness and contrast, etc).

All in all, this is a great free app that does a nice job of spicing up your iOS device’s otherwise bland wallpaper.

Home Screen Wallpaper Maker is free, and has minimal ads.

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Staying healthy is more than just a matter of going to the gym or running a marathon. It’s also about maintaining a positive attitude, not just about your environment but also about yourself. Mental and spiritual well-being is just as important as keeping your body in shape.

Health Yourself by Kagan Media Net is an app with that same philosophy in mind, intended to give you access to a resource of information on keeping your body, mind, and spirit in top condition.There is a great volume of information within the app itself as well as links to other resources for delving into a topic further.

Features

Overview

When you first start the app you are presented with a daily affirmation, and the option to view an Intro or go to the Home menu. The Home menu gives you the main access to the categories of body, mind, and spirit, as well as direct access to the additional Links and an About page. Each category takes you to a page with further topics, such as “Create Health”, “Disease”, and “Purpose”. Under the Body category there is even a simple health test to rate your overall health.

Pros

Cons

Bottom Line

Health Yourself is a good resource if you are seeking information thoughts on getting and staying healthy. Though most of the information would fall into the “alternative medicine” or “new age” category, most of it is very compelling and could even be considered common sense if you’re not into “new age” spirituality.

One note about the price: I hate that $4.99 is a high app price these days, but that’s just the reality of the app store. A price tag like that is a bit high for something that’s basically a hyperlinked document.

All in all though, if this is the kind of information you’re after, Health Yourself could be a great portable resource and daily reminder about how to stay healthy in all aspects of your life.

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There are over 225,000 apps in the iTunes App Store, and the number is growing each day. While the apps available are neatly divided into categories and you can browse by several different criteria, finding anything good in that morass of mediocrity is almost hopeless. Add to that the fact that developers change their prices almost daily, sometimes for only hours at a time, and I think we can all agree that an app like AppZapp can come in handy.

What AppZapp does is track new app submission as well as price changes, so that you can quickly find apps that have dropped in price (sometimes to as low as free). You can also create an account and add apps to one of several lists, so that AppZapp will track price drops on those specific apps and alert you when the price has changed, potentially saving you money. Considering that the app itself is free, it seems like you have nothing to lose, right?

Features

Pros

Cons

Overall

All in all, AppZapp is a great way to browse the App Store and track apps that you’ve been keeping your eye on. At the price of free it’s definitely worth a look to see if it’s the app for you.

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I’ve been on a cruise once in my life. The comedy of errors associated with that vacation is a topic for a personal blog post, but the cruise itself was exciting and awe-inspiring. The sheer size of the ship; the constant flow of food, drink, and frolic; and the bizarre juxtaposition of being isolated at sea in a self-contained floating city are exciting and not to be missed.

For those who take frequent cruises or are looking to take a cruise for the first time, the Cruise Finder app for your iDevice is an almost comprehensive database of cruise lines, vessels, departures, destinations, and itineraries. If you want to take a cruise, Cruise Finder bills itself as the app to use. I did not intend for that to rhyme.

Features

Description

The app itself is basically a front-end for iCruise.com, which presumably contains all the data which powers the app. Starting it up you immediately see an offer to register for their newsletter, a link for hot cruise deals, and four quick search links. Scrolling down on that page gives you more options: destination and departure port calendars; cruise info like passport requirements, weather, and port directions; and iCruise links for their mailing address, customer service, and getting a cruise quote.

The data in the app is presented well and navigation is mostly intuitive. There is a huge amount of info on each ship, including staterooms, prices, and deck plans. The port information is useful and gives you information on parking and weather, so you can plan your arrival and departure accordingly. The departure calendar is especially fun to look at, showing the price for departures from your chosen port by month, so you can see at a glance what your home port offers.

Pros

Cons

Overall

If it looks like the Cons outweigh the Pros, it’s just because the app is overall a great searchable cruise database that has a few annoying interface issues. If you’re looking to go on a cruise soon then this app would be a great place to start.

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In the movie Robots, Bigweld tells aspiring inventors “See a need, fill a need.” That’s essentially the way I feel about apps in the iPhone app store: target a need that you see not being met (or not being met as well as YOU think you can meet it), and home in on that like a laser. My most-used apps do basically one thing and one thing well, and don’t try to be too ambitious.

My Face follows this development model, giving you a simple way to associate pictures with contacts in your contact list. To be more specific, it actually allows you to specify what picture you would like to be associate with your contact info in someone else’s iPhone, provided they are using the My Face app. It’s an interesting idea.

The basic idea is this: within My Face, you assign a picture from your phone to be your contact picture that others see when you call them. They are presumably doing the same for you. So every once in a while you fire up the app and hit “Get Contact Pictures” to see if anyone in your address book has uploaded a new image for themselves.

The app is straightforward: on the settings page you enter your contact info and first and last initial, plus the country you’re in and your carrier. This information is actually what’s needed to match up your picture with someone else’s contact database, presumably by searching for the phone number in their contact list and seeing if the first and last initials match.

My face worked flawlessly for me ; I tested it rather accidentally since I have myself in my contact list (don’t ask), so when I hit “Get Contact Pictures” after saving all my settings it assigned the pic I had just chosen as the contact picture for myself in my own phone. Confusing, I know, but it basically did it’s job. I tested it as well on another handset and it worked perfectly there too.

One negative mark against it was the setup. At the time I felt like I was entering a ridiculous amount of information, and then after sending that in I had to click a link in an SMS in order to validate the info. All for a contact picture? Looking back on it though it took all of twelve seconds and wasn’t that big a deal at all.

The other issues of course is that everyone you know must have this app installed in order for it to work.

My Face is a useful little app that does one job and does it well. It’s free and has iAd within the app. Right now you may not know anyone that has the app installed on their phone, but the only thing stopping your contact list from filling up with pictures is widespread adoption, so go ahead and give it a try!

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Tracking usage statistics for your website is critical these days, even for the lowly blogger. Every decent host provides usage tracking tools, even Google has a good free service, but none of those free offerings seem to have any flare.

This is where NeoWORX (the self-proclaimed “Web Counter Specialist”) comes in. More than simply tracking visitors to your site, it offers gorgeous visualization tools in all shapes and sizes to further your understanding of your site’s visitors as well dress up your site. From the developer’s mouth:

“NeoWORX accurately tracks the visitor traffic of your blog, website or social page and displays it in many different ways. You can follow your blog’s past or present traffic by country or city, by unique visitors or page views. Click a country and see what cities visited you. Click a city and display a map of its location. You can visualize your visitors on a mesmerizing animated Earth globe. Rotate it as you like with your fingers. Zoom in or out with great ease. Watch you past visitors as yellow dots of varying sizes and your online visitors as red pulsing circles. You can analyze your valuable visitor data in great detail and obtain useful statistics. Display a “heatmap” of your world traffic. List your top 50 visiting countries. Follow your traffic progression day after day.”

It’s predominantly eye candy to be sure, but eye candy never hurt anyone, especially if it’s presenting accurate and timely content in a way that’s fun and intuitive to use. So is it?

Features

The iPhone app gives you access to roughly the same information available on the website, which is basically global visitor traffic information, dissected into various different analytical chunks:

Pros

Cons

Overall

NeoWORX offers a useful set of visitor tracking tools, presented in a fun and beautifully interactive package to display on your website. The iPhone app gives you a window into that data and a little taste of the visual magic that you get on the full website.

The app is free, but the service is not. You get a 14-day trial (which requires NO up-front payment information) and thereafter must choose from a few reasonably-priced service levels to continue using the widgets.

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Acey Deucey. Bingo, Bango, Bongo. The Snake. If any of these phrases mean something to you (with the caveat that it has something to do with golf), then you may be in need of GolfMoolah.

GolfMoolah takes golf scoring apps deeper into your pocketbook by tracking not just the strokes, but also the results of any number of different side games you may have going on the round. Suffice it to say that none of this makes any sense then this may not be the app for you.

Features

Pros

The app is designed well, leading you from the first screen step by step through the necessary details to create a round of golf. You can start off by simply creating a new round, then select a course, then add players. You are finally presented with the standard golf scorecard, at which point  you can select the side games you would like to play.

Keeping score is accomplished by simply tapping on the hole and entering the score for each player, just as easy as you would expect. The app tracks the information given and applies it to each game as appropriate, taking the bookkeeping out of your hands so you can focus on the game.

One nice feature I noticed is that you can even have different player and team configurations within the same round of golf. For instance, in Bingo Bango Bongo you are all playing solo, but in Las Vegas you play on teams of two. You can then even have a game of Skins in which only two of the foursome participate. I can only imagine what a nightmare that would be to keep track of with pencil and paper or a standard scoring app, but GolfMoolah handles it with ease.

The scorecard also has a nice option to view the holes by score or by money, letting you see at a glance who is ahead in the score that really counts.

Cons

Overall

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