Developer’s Site | iTunes Link | Price: $1.99 | Free Promo Codes: 1 code (U.S. store only)

For most things I dread to do, I need a reason. I have never “want” to track how balanced my diet is, or how much of what I’ve eaten. Not after I discovered Foobi.

Just like how Nike Plus makes me want to run, Foobi makes me want to track my diet!

If you’re a body builder, nutritionist, vegetarian, or anyone who just wants to track their diet, there has been no easier way to do it.

Not only does Foobi look absolutely gorgeous, it is extremely easy to use. Tracking your diet doesn’t require you to type any numbers. As they say “.. if you can flick, you’re an expert”.

Meet Foobi

Foobi greets you with a beautiful opening screen unveiling the app itself.

Launching Foobi

Whenever you consumed a category of food, launch Foobi, flick the screen left or right to choose the type of food, tap “+” to add a serving to the record.

Clicking the 3 stripes button on the left lets you take a quick glance at your diet for today or any date that you select:

For Foobi to be useful, you need to tracking your diet daily. Overtime, weekly summaries of your diet will be displayed on a graph. To see the graph, just flip your iPhone / iPod Touch into landscape mode.

As you can see from the graph below, I have been eating more meat (red) than vegetables (green).

If you have been wanting to eat more vegetables than meat, this graph will tell you you’ve been doing otherwise.

Planning Your Diet

Foobi is great for planning diets. In order to have a well balanced diet, you need to consume more of this and less of that. How do you know how much of what you’ve already consumed? By using Foobi to track your daily servings, it is easy to maintain a well balanced diet.

To plan your diet, simply go to Settings by clicking the “i” icon on the bottom right.

From here, you can set a daily servings limit for each food category or change the category name. If you don’t like the name “Poultry”, you can name it “Birds”.

If you can’t find a category from the default list, you can add your own. You can also change the color label of the food category, for example vegetables would most logically be green, not red! By using the right color to label your food category, it’ll be easier to read your weekly consumption graph.

Conclusion

I have not been able to find fault with the app except that I was not able to subtract servings. Other than that it does what it says and does it well.

Foobi might be the best looking diet tracking and balancing app you can ever find on the App Store yet.

Giveaway

The developer is running low on promo codes. Unfortunately I only have 1 promo code to giveaway! The first commenter gets the promo code to download Foobi on the U.S. App Store!

Each time I empty my invites, Google replenish them with more.

Bookmark this post if you want. I will be giving away Google Wave invites to commenters of this thread!

I’ll be updating this post with the number of invites left and the consolidated list of winners’ names.

Even if I run out of invites, I will still send out the invites to the remaining commenters each time I receive a top up from Google.

So keep the comments coming, you’ll be sure to get an invite when Google gives me the top ups.

IMPORTANT: READ THIS

- Please check the winners list to see if you’ve been invited before posting a comment

- Do not type your email address in the comment unless you love spam, type your email in the email field instead

- Again, if you’re wondering why you have not received your invite yet, Google says “Invitations will not be sent immediately. We have a lot of stamps to lick.”

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Invites Left: 0
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Winners – 5th Nov 09
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1. Ade Chong
2. Martina
3. Yajun
4. Ryan
5. Brenda
6. Rob
7. Michael
8. Tim
9. Henning
10. Caili
11. Alex
12. Evgeny
13. Sid
14. Jimmy
15. Ryan
16. Crash
17. Palma
18. Victor
19. Progress
20. Dorian Grey
21. Sivert Haltbakk Sandvik

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Winners – 9th Nov 09
================

22. Adam Randall
23. pigouinos
24. Miles
25. Joseph Higgins
26. Boris
27. Joey
28. Mady
29. bro
30. Oliver (already has a Wave account)
31. Nate
32. Eduardo Neves
33. yohannh (already has a Wave account)
34. Xoozlez
35. sifulan

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Winners – 10th Nov 09
================

36. ca_iphone
37. Bob
38. nniiicc
39. Varun
40. Nicolai
41. JimmyB
42. Alex
43. Barry

Developer’s Site | iTunes Link | Price: $0.99 | Free Promo Codes: 10 codes (U.S. store only)

I usually receive a number of request per month from app developers about their new iPhone apps. As a designer myself, I tend to pay more attention to well designed apps and icons.

And yes, I mentioned icons, far too many apps have great functioning apps but less than attractive icons. A good icon should be easily identifiable, iconic and ties in well with the actual app itself.

Pleasant wood design

Jukebox ($0.99) is one of those apps with a beautiful design topped with a consistent icon.

For me, I’m not a hardcore gamer, I don’t get addicted easily. It’s usually because most games requires too much thinking and learning of controls. Call me lazy, but I use too much of my brains in my day to day work as a designer/developer so when I unwind I want to “shutdown” as much as possible.

Jukebox really lives up to how they describe their app, “..addictive, attractive music quiz.”. Apart from it’s addictive gameplay, Jukebox also spots a pleasant looking design.

Swipe Interactive sent me a promo code sometime ago, I redeemed the app, started playing and boy it got me hooked within a minute or so!

Gameplay

Tap the correct song

Basically Jukebox tests you on your entire music collection. It plays a a random portion of a song for a few seconds and you’re suppose to choose the right title from a list of four.

Sounds simple, but the longer you play, the more nervous you will become. Jukebox progresses on a relatively fast speed leaving you no time for dilly dally which increases the challenge. This game actually gave me an adrenaline rush. With each incorrect song I chose, it made me want to play on and choose more correct ones to increase my score percentage.

Scoring System

Your Statistics

One good thing about this game is that whenever you end the game, your current score will be accumulated as a total score under ‘Statistics’. When viewing your statistics, your results will be optionally uploaded to Swipe Interactive’s servers which will in return your ‘World Ranking’ score.

It’s pretty interesting to see how well you fair compared to players around the world, a good incentive to keep on playing.

Conclusion

All in all, an addictive game coupled with a well designed interface.

Jukebox is great for situations like “in a queue, waiting for the next train or bus etc”, as there is no limit to how long or short you should play this game in order to achieve your best score.

Certainly a good game to keep!

Giveaway

The developers are kind enough to provide 10 promo codes for SUBERAPPS readers to redeem the game on the App Store for free!

The first ten readers who comment will be sent an email almost immediately with the promo code!

The promo codes works in the U.S iTunes store only.

Comment now to redeem this wonderful game!

I witnessed the entire revealing of the MacHeist nanoBundle on UStream while also watching the stream of comments go by, mostly about how disappointing the bundle is. Most of them say they won’t pay for it, but guess what? You don’t have to pay for it!

6 apps with a combined price of $154 cost nothing the next 6 days. Get it while it last!

I am only happy with WriteRoom in the bundle. Tried ShoveBox (still prefer Evernote) and Twitterrific (now prefers Tweetie), but not the rest.

Here are the 6 apps you can get yourself without paying:

ShoveBox (developer’s site)
ShoveBox catches all those little scraps of information that you can’t act on now but would rather not forget. It sits up in your menubar, waiting for you to drag in text, images, urls, and more.

Writeroom is all about eliminating distractions. Unlike the cluttered word processors you’re used to, WriteRoom lets you focus on writing. What’s more you can take your writing on the go with the accompanying iPhone app ($0.99).

Twitter + Mac lovers will be familiar with Twitterrific. It’s one of the first best performing Twitter app for the Mac. Twitterrific’s user interface is designed to let you view as much or as little information as you desire. The application shows a scrolling list of the latest tweets from either your friends or public feeds. Twitteriffic also has an iPhone version.

TinyGrab is a simple yet extremely powerful utility for Mac OS X and Windows. Harnessing the power of pre-existing and new OS screenshot taking capabilities, TinyGrab instantly uploads and allows you to share with a small URL— all in under thirty-seconds.

A “Tower Defense” game in which you must build walls and lethal towers to defend your village from the Orcs emerging from, what the village elders call, “The Glowing Portal of Really Bad Things That We Should Have Bricked-Up a Long Time Ago.” Sadly, the Portal is un-bricked and the Orcs are very, very hungry. If 20 Orcs make it to your village, you’re toast.

Mariner Write is a powerful, yet streamlined word processor for Mac OS X for everyone from professional writers, to educators, students, to the average user. Boasting an elegant interface, as well as hundreds of intuitive features such as the ability to read Microsoft Word documents and produce customizable headers, footers, endnotes, and footnotes, Mariner Write has everything you need to turn out great-looking documents.

I’ve just got an opportunity to review a spanking new to-do iPhone app, thanks to Nick from Spiffing Apps. This app will be out in the App Store next Monday is now available at the App Store. But now, I want to share with you my experience with this lovely iPhone app.

The Laid-Back Todo List

We have seen way too many feature packed ‘to-do’ lists apps on the App Store. Having lots of functions in an app of this genre works for some people but there are also people I know who cannot be bothered with the GTD system, the hassle of syncing with a desktop counterpart, sub grouping tasks and so on.

This group of people only need something as simple as a “pencil and paper” type of system. Only needing a place to quickly pen what they need to do.

Put Things Off fulfills this beautifully with a cute wooden interface coupled with subtle sounds to compliment the experience. Using this is a joy, it kinda makes me feel happy using it, mainly due to the light hearted design.

Launching The App

Launching the app greets you with a wooden background and the name of the app.

I am not a fan of splash screens as most of them I’ve seen are outright ugly and inconsistent with the app itself.

This one makes me a little more forgiving because of its consistency and it’s lovely laid back design.

Interface And Function

Using the app is extremely straightforward. Can’t get any simpler than that:

Tap the ‘+’ icon and add your tasks right away! Whatever you have added lands in your Inbox, ready for you to file to other boxes of different context.

There are only 3 boxes for you to file your tasks:

1. Today (tasks you need to complete today)
2. Put Off (tasks you will complete later)
3. Done (completed tasks)

Very straightforward and logical. This simple way of organizing tasks gets you up to speed very quickly. It doesn’t force you to learn and adjust to complicated systems.

Navigating Around

Navigating to other sections is only a matter of taping on the other boxes at the bottom.

You can move your tasks around or delete them as you wish.

Once you’re done with any tasks, just tap the “tick” icon.

Price

This app will require $2.99 to own. I must say the price is directly proportional to its feature set, definitely reasonable for its concept, design and execution.

Watch The Video!

The above images probably won’t do much justice to the actual usage of the app itself, so i suggest you end off by watching this cute video featuring the app. Once again, this app will be out in the app store next Monday. Stay tuned!

I don’t want you guys to miss this. If you have been planning to get Coda, Transmit, CandyBar or Unison from Panic, this is the time. They’re taking 50% off the usual price of these awesome apps!

I’m personally a Coda user, wonder how I would live without it. If you’re a web developer, this is a great time to get it.

They say “It’s never happened before, and it’ll probably never happen again. Serious.”

The offer runs from 12:01 AM PST May 27th to 11:59 PM PST May 29th. Get it quick!

We’ve just launched the online project management service, SUBERNOVA!

One year+ ago when I first started out as a freelancer, I tried looking for an online project management service that we can use anywhere, on any browser. An app that looks good is also one of my criteria.

Yes there are indeed a bunch of them and they are very rich in feature, but in fact there are too many features I’ll never use like communicating with groups of people, an online calendar, file storage etc. Why wouldn’t I use the calendar or file storage feature? Having used my own native calendaring system for some time (iCal) there’s no reason to scatter both my personal and work appointments all over the place. Also, as I am a web designer hosting my own website, I have abundant storage space waiting to be used.

Let alone, if you’re a solo worker, you don’t need to communicate with co-workers.

Eventually I couldn’t find one suitable online project management service that can justify the price I am paying for, so we decided to build one ourselves.

SUBERNOVA

SUBERNOVA is a web based project management tool to help solo designers, writers, bloggers, etc manage their projects, milestones, clients, track time, get reminders for important deadlines and manage project related links and inspirations all in one intuitive and elegant user interface.

Project Overview

In project view, you can view all your projects and it’s vital data at a glance. How much time do I have left, have the project been quoted, invoiced or paid etc. There’s also an integrated timer attached to every project. SUBERNOVA will remind you via email when a project is due.

Time Tracking

With the time tracking feature, you can track your time easily with a click of a button. The timer button is attached to every project item, so it is always available when you need it. The program will also calculate the cost based on your hourly rate that you have previously set in your settings.

Milestones

Some point of time in your freelancing career you’ll get one of those huge projects, the best way to complete them is by breaking them down into smaller chunks with a due date for each so that it can see you through completion. Similar to “Projects”, SUBERNOVA will remind you via email when any of your milestones are due.

Clients

We already have our client’s number on our phones, their emails in the address book, what we need are more meaningful information we can’t find in other places, stuff like the total projects we have with them, the total revenue made from them. You can even rate your clients so you can sort them from your favorite to least favorite clients.

Links

For every project that I have worked on, there’re bound to be link references sent from clients, or links that I’ve came across during my research, but there is always no place to store them. What better place to save your project related links than in your project management program itself?

Reminders

SUBERNOVA will send you email reminders on the eve and on the day of every project or milestones deadline. Optionally, you can turn email reminders off in your settings if you don’t like getting bugged.

You can also set your hourly rate and renew your account easily in the settings window.

Subscription Cost

Update:
*For a limited time only, if you upgrade your account by 1st Jun 2009, you’ll get a 40% discount off the original price of $120. If you upgrade during your trial period, the one year credit will be added to your account on top of your remaining trial period.

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SUBERNOVA gives you 30 days free to try out the app, subsequently the price of the annual fee is $120, that’s only $10 a month. Way lower than most competing services because you’re not paying for features you’ll never use.

I believe most of us have the same gripe about copying text and pasting it onto another application but not wanting the formatting to be pasted as well.

There are many ways to strip text of it’s formatting, eg. pasting text into Text Edit, selecting “Make Plain Text” from the top menu, copy the text and pasting it into your desired application. Or pasting the formatted text into your browser’s address bar, select all and copy the text again before pasting the text into your desired application.

All these takes a number of steps and all these time adds up to cause annoyance, here’s an easier way to strip text formatting, meet Plain Clip (Free).

Faceless Application

Plain Clip is a faceless application, meaning there is no user interface, you install it on your Mac, the next time you copy a formatted text, you only need to launch this program to remove it’s formatting. What happens behind the background is that when Plain Clip launches, it strips the currently copied text on the clipboard of it’s formatting and closes itself. So that you can paste the currently copied text in it’s unformatted glory.

If you’re using an application launcher program like QuickSilver or LaunchBar, the process of stripping formatted text is even faster.

Using TextExpander with Plain Clip

But here’s the quickest way. This will require to be a proud owner of TextExpander ($29.95). For those of you who have no idea what TextExpander is, it’s a Mac app that expands your pre-defined text snippets, images or both by typing an abbreviation. More info about TextExpander in this post.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Create a new snippet
2. Paste this into the snippet field: do shell script “‘/Applications/Plain Clip.app/pc’ -v”
3. Select “Applescript” as the content:
4. Assign an abbreviation to your snippet, eg. ;pc (pc is for Plain Clip, so it’s easy to remember, you can use your own abbreviation of course)

The next time you need to copy a chunk of formatted text, type “;pc” and voila! You pasted text will be unformatted. The fastest way to un-format and paste text at the same time.

Have fun!

I’ve tried countless clipboard managers, though most of them are useful, but all of them have one or two things in common, they’re either “obtrusive” or have a high memory footprint. What I meant by obtrusive is that they cannot be hidden completely, letting you only hide the clipboard at the left/right/top/bottom of your screen with a little bit of the app jutting out of the screen, visible to the eye. That’s not very elegant.

Stuf (£12.99), written by The Escapers is simple and gets the job done. Utilizing Leopard’s new Heads Up Display technology, also known as the HUD, not only does the user interface look like part of your Mac, it’s also easy on your system’s memory resources which is an important aspect especially if you have many programs open at the same time and already eating up lots of system resources.

Clipboard managers are useful if you find yourself copying text, images or both, and needing them all over again just to realise that you’ve over-written your clipboard with a newly copied item. As a web developer I find that this is a very useful tool to boost my productivity as I’m dealing with codes and snippets everyday.

Stuf User Interface

This is the HUD window and this is all there is to the app other than the preferences window. I’ve set the background of the HUD window to white for my liking, of course you can change the text and background to whatever color you want via the preference window:

You can also create multiple clipboards so that you can store certain snippets that you might want to use in future.

Bring up Stuf via Hotkey

What is vital for every clipboard manager is that it has to be hidden from view when you don’t need it but lets you call up the app easily via a hotkey when you do. From the preference window, you can set your own custom hot key. I set it to “alt + S” in this instance. “S” stands for Stuf, so it’s easy to remember.

Clipboard Sharing

If you have multiple Macs and would like to have a synchronized set of clipboard items, this feature is nifty.

To conclude, Stuf succeeds in both form and function, although it lacks the option of pasting unformatted text which I find very useful in other clipboard manager programs. To counter this, I’ll share with you a simple and quickest way to paste unformatted text in the next coming post.

Stay tuned!

iTunes is a great software to manage and listen to our music, but the experience can be further improved by using additional plugins or apps. These plugins / apps basically extends the functionality of iTunes, enhances iTunes, or both, to satisfy some of the needs that iTunes cannot provide.

Here are 12 plugins / apps that you will find useful when used with iTunes.

Cover Stream

[$20 | Website]

Cover Stream puts coverflow into a HUD window that you can summon with a pre-defined hot key. You can browse your music library and control music easily in that window without having to use iTunes to do that. Cover Stream also integrates with Last.fm flawlessly, scrobbing your music while you listen to them.

CoverSutra

[$20 | Website]

CoverSutra is one of the most mature and popular app to control your iTunes music without switching to iTunes. The app features one of the best user inteface design, using the app is a real pleasure. With CoverSutra, you can search music, see the currently played song’s  album art on your desktop. Integration with Last.fm is also one of the feature.

GimmeSomeTune

[Free | Website]

Truly one of the most essential app to compliment your iTunes. GimmeSomeTune fetches missing coverarts and lyrics in the background while you listen to your music. I have tried many coverart and lyrics fetching apps and I must say this is one that really gets both the job done well. The best part is, it’s free.

Bowtie

[Free | Website]

Designed by Laurent Baumann, also responsible for Fontcase, Bowtie is a beautifully designed free iTunes controller that allows you control your iTunes music unobstrusively. You can also put the now playing song’s coverart on your desktop. Bowtie also features downloadable themes for the CD Cover that houses the coverart which you can start by downloading the themes here.

Tangerine

[$24.95 | Website]

Designed by Potion Factory, also behind The Hit List, Tangerine analyses the tempo of your music and lets you easily create playlists of music grouped by it’s tempo among many other options. Great app if you hate the idea of manually choosing songs for your next workout etc.

Awaken

[$15 | Website]

Awaken lets you play music when you’re sleeping, sleeps your Mac utilizing a sleep timer, and wakes you and your Mac up with your favourite music. You can also use Awaken to alert you about anything else other than waking you up by using the egg timer. Control the alarm and sleep timer with your Apple Remote from across the room while running Awaken in fullscreen mode.

CoverScout

[$40 | Website]

CoverScout scours the internet for coverarts and adds it to your albums. The neat part is that you can edit your coverarts by rotating, cropping, scaling, straightening and even adjusting the color levels of the image.

SongGenie

[$33 | Website]

SongGenie aids you in filling in missing meta datas of your tracks like descriptions, artist names, track names, album names etc, making your iTunes library much more useful and tidy. Written by the same developers from CoverScout, SongGenie integrates with CoverScout by assigning the tasks of adding album arts to your tracks to CoverScout with just one click.

TuneUp

[$29.95 or $19.95 yearly | Website]

UPDATE (Discount for SUBERAPPS readers)

TuneUp is offering a 15% discount promo code for SUBERAPPS readers, just enter SUBERAPPS during checkout, valid till 15 April 09.

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TuneUp cleans your tracks by fixing your mislabeled music and missing coverarts. The app adds a new sidebar to iTunes with all the tools you need to use to clean up your music. The now playing tab displays information about the track and even lets you play the music video of the track right in the sidebar (video fetched from YouTube). TuneUp was really buggy when it first launches late last year due to the overwhelming response but I guess they should have cleared out the kinks by now. Read more about TuneUp in a review written in December last year.

YouControl

[Free | Website]

You Control basically lets you control your iTunes music library via your menubar without switching to iTunes.

DockArt

[Free | Website]

DockArt does a simple but extremely useful job by replacing the default iTunes icon in your dock with the currently playing music’s coverart. When you stop your music, your iTunes icon reverts back to the original one.

AutoRate

[Free | Website]

AutoRate automatically rates your tracks based on how often the track is played and how often each track is skipped. Might not be the most accurate, but a good start if you are not really active in rating your music.

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Once again, if you have any other suggestions for a good iTunes app / plugin, please feel free to comment!