Best of AppStorm in March

Spread the Word and Win an iPad 2!

To celebrate the launch of iPad.AppStorm, we’re going to be giving one lucky reader a brand new iPad 2!

This is the latest and greatest piece of hardware to emerge from Apple HQ, and today you have the chance to get your hands on one completely free!

The iPad 2: Does Apple Make Mistakes?

Following the international release of the iPad 2 it’s worth giving a thought to the continued ability of Apple to develop and market incredibly successful products. Can the iPad 2 possibly fail?

The release of the first iPad, way back in April 2010, was met by dissenting voices in the technology community. From people heralding it as a marvellous technological breakthrough, to asking serious questions over its purpose. Where does it fit in? Do people need it?

Instapaper: Change the Way You Read the Web

Let’s say that you’re wandering around the Internet and you stumble upon an article that you really want to read. Problem is, it’s a bit long, and your boss is coming around the corner so there’s no way you can read it right now.

Your options are to leave the tab open on your browser indefinitely, bookmark the article for later reading or just close the tab and move on with your life. Not much else you can do about it, right

Hold on there, chief. There is an answer, and it’s named Instapaper. Not only will the service allow you to access that article anytime you want, you don’t even have to be online to do it.

11 Apps to Turn Your iPad Into the Perfect Cooking Companion

The iPad has proved itself a very useful device in more situations that any of us thought possible. Developers have done some truly wonderful things in many different areas, from gaming, to music, and even cooking!

The iPad is definitely shaping up to be an incredible cooking companion. There is a plethora of cooking and food related applications now available and we’ll try to sift through the pile for some of the best and most interesting ones available right now.

Go Treasure Hunting With c:geo

Geocaching is becoming increasingly popular all around the world. People of all ages are joining in this huge global game of hide and seek. In the past month alone, caches around the world have been successfully found over three million times.

There are dozens and dozens of Android apps available to help you find caches using the GPS built into your Android phone, but so far, c:geo is certainly my favourite.

Outstanding Themes to Redesign Your Android

Customizability is one of Android’s most loved traits. The ability to tweak the look of every aspect of the OS experience makes for an extremely personalized mobile experience for each user.

The most basic form of customization on Android is the home screen, and there are hundreds of launcher replacements out there. A few of them support themes – the ability to package a coherent set of visuals that alter each aspect of the launcher UI, including the icons, widgets, and backgrounds.

Here’s a look at a few of the popular launcher replacements and the best looking themes for each, from iPhone-style makeovers to Tron skins.

Looking For a Smarter Note Tool? Try Springpad

When it comes to note taking and organizing, many services and applications have attempted to create a solution that syncs across platforms and provides an ultimate experience.

One of these services, Springpad, stood out for me thanks to its ability to do more than just notes.

HTC Wildfire Performance: Hints, Tips, and Tricks!

Though it is a brilliant and compact smartphone, HTC did regrettably hinder the Wildfire’s CPU and graphical processing capability. Due to the small 528mhz chip, people have often complained that the eyecandy transitions, default applications, and general experience can be a bit slow, laggy, or unpleasant. I have found this to be the case myself.

Since getting mine late last year I have found a few ways to reduce these problems and better my Wildfire’s overall user experience, as well as increase productivity and gain a few great applications too. Now I would like to share these tips with you! No purchases are needed. Rooting of your phone isn’t needed either.

3 Things You Won’t See On an iPhone Any Time Soon

Whether the the next iPhone arrives this summer as always or is pushed back to Fall, you can bet that there will be enough fancy new features to make us all hate our currently beloved iPhone 4′s.

However, there are at least three popular feature rumors that shouldn’t be taken seriously. Each of the supposedly possible iPhone 5 features we’ll discuss today arises from a fundamental misunderstanding of Apple as a company. We’ll go through why Jobs and the boys in Cupertino simply aren’t interested in bringing these features to the iPhone or even the iPad.

Level Up Your Real Life Productivity with the EpicWin Game

EpicWin is a lot like a regular task manager, only with a role-playing game built around it. You create a character, complete quests, earn experience and loot, and walk away from the washing machine with much bigger biceps thanks to all those stamina points you’ve earned.

Why App Store Search is Broken and How to Fix It

As the editor of one of the best iPhone app publications around, I spend a lot of time in the iTunes App Store. Significant portions of my every day life are spent browsing new offerings, spotting trends and checking out the latest updates to already popular applications.

Every time I visit the App Store I can’t help but notice how broken it is. Searching and even browsing for apps is an incredibly inefficient process that gobbles up time easier than playing Angry Birds. Below we’ll discuss what’s wrong and why Apple needs to quit dragging their feet and implement a fix already!

100 Social Networking Apps to Feed Your Internet Addiction

The iPhone was the best thing to happen to social networks since Facebook. The social revolution brought us a ton of new ways to communicate, but it was really the iPhone that drove the huge leap of these communication tools from the desktop into our pockets.

Today we present an overview of social networking on the iPhone. We’ve collected over 100 of our favorite social apps and organized them into categories such as chat & messaging, photography, location, fashion, dating and more. Keep reading to discover a wealth of new addictions!

Create Your Own Status Board With Geckoboard

Have you ever wished you had a dashboard as cool as Panic’s Status Board or Cultured Code’s Arrivals board in your office? Whether you work in a startup, small creative firm, Fortune 500 enterprise, or as a freelancer, there are dozens of things about your business that need to be kept up with. Seeing the numbers and graphs of your sales, website hits, inbox, project deadlines, and more can be a very motivating thing. Plus, fancy status boards can be downright impressive when others visit your office.

Plenty of people have set out to design their own status boards, but this can be a daunting project, especially if you want to tie into all of the apps and services you use daily. That’s where Geckoboard comes in. It makes it quick and easy to create an impressive status board in seconds, so you can see your business vitals at a glance from a dedicated screen, your browser, iPad, or any other internet connected device.

Wunderlist: The to-Do List App to Beat

Most of us struggle with too many things to do. From projects you need to complete at work or school to the random things you need to fix at your house, there’s simply too much to do each day. There are dozens of to-do list and project management apps for Windows, Mac, mobile, as well as standalone web apps so you can keep up with your tasks online. Many of them are beautifully designed and are simple to use, but they’re often expensive and only work on one platform.

Very few to-do list apps offer an integrated solution to keep your tasks synced between all of your devices. The last thing you need to do is to manage a complicated to-do list sync when you’re already struggling under too many things to do. But many popular apps still don’t sync seamlessly. Today we’re going to look at a new beautifully designed to-do list app that blows all of this away: Wunderlist.

The 24 Best Apps to Remember Everything You Discover Online

Today, there’s never a lack of new things to see and read online. In fact, the biggest problem is keeping up with the stuff you really want to remember. It’s so easy to read an article or discover a new webapp you like, only to forget it and never find it again. Fonts and icon packs seem to be the easiest for me to forget; I’ll find ones I love, and then somehow never be able to find them again later.

There’s no reason you have to lose stuff you find online, though. Even in our fast paced society with new tweets and notifications coming in all the time, you can still keep up with the stuff you like online. With little effort, you’ll have a curated set of all your favorite things you’ve found online. We’ve scoured the net for 24 of the best webapps that can help you keep up with things you find online no matter where you are. Chances are you already use some of them, but keep reading to find some new ones that might be the perfect solution for you.

10 Handy Web-Based Tools for Bloggers

Blogging, and its rapid rise in popularity as a way to self-publish, is arguably responsible in part for the great proliferation of web apps over the last few years. Back when blogging was only done by early adopters, you’d need to stock your computer with desktop apps – an image editor, an RSS reader, and so on. As bloggers became increasingly mobile, the need for always-accessible applications only got stronger, and today, many bloggers don’t need to leave the browser at all to get the job done.

If you’re new to blogging, you might be looking for a collection of web apps that will make your life easier. Today’s a lucky day for you, then, because you just found ten of them!

Become a Stickies Ninja: Tips, Tricks & Secrets

With the Mac App Store open and business booming for Apple developers, it’s easy to get into the habit of grabbing a bunch of useful third-party applications to handle your computing needs. While there’s nothing wrong with doing this, you may find yourself surprised at just how powerful some of OS X’s built-in tools are.

The next stop on our quest to help you make the best of your Mac is Stickies, the surprisingly powerful built-in notes application that you may not be using to the full potential, if at all!

40+ Beautiful Wallpapers to Brighten Your Mac Desktop

It’s time to ditch that ageing wallpaper on your desktop for something fresh and inspiring. There’s nothing better than a simple wallpaper that looks beautiful while not cluttering your display. Today we’re on a mission to find just this type of desktop background!

Whether you love simple graphic lines, typography, or photography, there’s something for you here. We’ve broken our collection of sexy wallpapers down into different categories to make it super-simple to find the right image for you, and even have a few exclusive OS X Lion wallpapers to share!

I hope you enjoy browsing through our collection of outstanding desktop wallpapers.

Google Reader on Your Mac: 7 Awesome Apps

The RSS reader market has been getting bigger, and Google Reader has established its position as the de facto standard for syncing and managing feeds. But are you tired of using Google Reader’s web interface?

Today we’ll be featuring some of our favourite picks for the best RSS desktop apps that work with Google Reader.

Thoughts and Reflections on Apple’s Product Release Cycle

With this week’s release of the iPad 2 (in the USA, at least), I know that many of you will now be sitting at home feeling ever so slightly less satisfied with the original iPad sat on your desk. It’s a strange phenomenon. Your iPad is no less amazing today than it was last week, but it feels that way!

Very few Apple fans can afford to buy each and every new product release, and the feeling of being slightly “out of date” is something that we’ve all come to accept as the norm. This isn’t exactly a bad thing. Let’s face it – a twelve month old iPad is still a long, long way ahead of any other competing device on the market.

But how does Apple’s release cycle operate, and is their approach working?