One of the year’s best iPad apps just got a big update to become even better, and it leads our Fresh Apps for today. Read about what’s new on Flipboard, plus a few other interesting additions that hit the App Store, in our list below.
Flipboard update (iPad) Free
Apple’s pick for the best iPad app of the year got a lot cooler with its recent, expansive update. Flipboard was already a very simple and elegant solution for browsing news and RSS feeds — it literally looks like flipping pages to go through the feeds you add — but now the app supports a whole host of things other than just piping in news articles.
You can now sync Flipboard with a Google Reader account to make setting up RSS feeds a breeze. Flipboard also supports browsing in Twitter, Facebook and Flickr, and you can also post photos, status updates and other things to your various accounts and Google Reader. Basically, if you liked Flipboard before, you’re going to fall in love with all the cool new things you can do with it.
Bords (iPad) $4.99
Bords is kind of like having a white board at your disposal at all times. The app allows you to take notes in a variety of ways, reorganize them, resize them, and draw freehand on the the iPad’s touchscreen. It’s handy tool both for organizing your thoughts, and brainstorming with a group.
The app lets you do a lot of helpful, simple things that work to get your point across when working with a group. It’s easy to quickly draw shapes and lines, color them in and resize them, so Bords will work for low-key presentations and impromptu simple diagrams. You can also email your various boards and notes to others to help keep records and share ideas, and when you’ve got lots of different ones saved, the app provides a search function to quickly find specific notes.
DanKam (iPhone) $2.99
App creator Dan Kaminsky whipped up this augmented reality app as an attempt to help a colorblind friend, and while there are only two reviews in the iTunes App Store so far, it appears that he was successful. DanKam lets you shoot items with the iPhone’s camera in real time, but it adjusts the colors of what appears on the screen in order to cater for the issues with the color receptors inside the eyes of people with color-blindness.
By shifting the colors slightly, the app helps the receptors receive the correct information, creating contrast between colors that were previously hard to distinguish. DanKam makes for a handy color-blindness solution in the moment with its augmented reality feature, and includes several kinds of filters to help with different color-contrast issues. It also will adjust the colors in your iPhone’s photos, as well.
