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Changing iTunes Audiobook Covers

I listen to a lot of audiobooks, almost as much as I listen to podcasts and music. So inevitably I spend a lot of time looking at audiobook covers in iTunes and iBooks on my Mac and iPhone. I even create my own audiobook covers when the standard iTunes and Audible covers aren’t good enough.

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Mac Email App Showdown

I first started experimenting with Mailbox a few years ago but sadly it was bought out by Dropbox and promptly discontinued ? I went back to the native mail app and while it’s come a long way, there are features I just can’t live without anymore. After spending six months jumping between a dozen different apps I have found some amazing tools and eventually decided the best Mac mail app around.

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iCloud Clipboard Manager Showdown

I’ve been a long time user of Flycut for Mac, it’s a brilliant clipboard manager but doesn’t sync with iOS. So I decided to try out all the clipboard management apps I could find, a day of testing later and the result… was somewhat unclear! It depends on what you need it for so here are the top three apps I tested and the type of user they suit best…

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The Best Kids Apps of the Year

Our kids love to play on mum and dad’s iPhones, our girls started before they were one year old.  Within moderation I’m quite happy for them to play games at this age, it’s a lot more stimulating than just watching TV.  Apple recognises this growing market too and their new kids app store has made it easy to access a lot of children’s apps, but it can still be very hard to know which ones are brilliant and which are a waste of money.

Our daughters (now 3 and 6 years old) have been working hard on a three year research project: finding the best kids apps for the iPhone and iPad!  They’ve been playing testing lots of games apps, we’ve made sure they’re wholesome and spam-free, and now we’re ready to share the scores thesis with you.  So here are the top 10 best kids apps, ranked by the time our kids spend on them over the last three years.

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TVNZ and TV3 On Demand on Apple TV

My wife watches more on-demand shows than broadcast tv but she has to watch it on her 13″ MacBook rather than the 30″ tv on the wall. Being the wonderful husband I am, I set about on a little geek DIY mission to get TVNZ and TV3 on demand playing through our Apple TV.

It was a lot harder than I thought and quite a few people asked how I pulled it off, so here’s the lowdown, if you give this a try yourself, please leave a comment about how you got on :)

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Building an iPhone App

Back in 2010 I was approached by Mobile Orchard to write an article about how my Plethora iPhone app was made.  Well I finally wrote the article this week and here’s the intro…

After nine months of after-hours work, I released Plethora for iPhone in June 2010. Plethora is a design gallery that is powered by over 90 of the world’s top design blogs. All of the posts are manually curated by our team so that only the best designs make it through to the actual app.

I have been running design and other companies for nine years but Plethora was my first iPhone app so I probably approached the project quite differently to how most iPhone development houses would have. Here’s how we did it.

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