This month we bring you a selection of inspiring apps for caffeinating, traveling, photography, and quantifying yourself and your driving.
Brewseful
We love coffee. Possibly not nearly serious enough to warrant a precision timer for our brewing process with the new app called Brewseful. However, the idea of a clean, smart looking app that help us optimize our already lengthy Chemex hipster coffee is pretty interesting. Help with timing, grind, and water ratios is something you don’t get from your local barista. What’s interesting is just how quickly this app tapped into the zeitgeist and coffee culture, appearing across the web on every trend centric website there seemed to be.
Smith Hotels
The first app from boutique hotel booking service Mr. & Mrs. Smith is a gorgeous, make-you-want-to-just-jump-on-a-plane and travel app. The new app does a lot of things, all heavily influenced by the eye-candy centric approach of Airbnb. If you’re going to make a travel app, photos—and we mean good photos—have to be at the center of the experience. Even if you don’t sign up, you are dropped right into the “Tempt Me” section—a visual cornucopia of drool-worthy hotel images. If you’re not inspired to book after surfing through these rooms, you’re probably dead inside.
Flickr
In the post-Instagram world, we didn’t think we’d hear much more from Flickr again, but here we are a week after they launched their all-new app. In a fight to stay relevant with the filter and selfie generation, Flickr looks like a powerful, grown-up, pro edition. It’s not getting terribly inspired reviews from its own community, but that’s to be expected. What Flickr does more comprehensively is categorize things for the user.
Even if you have thousands of photos, our intelligent search engine will help you find what you’re looking for fast,” wrote Bernardo Hernandez, Vice President, Flickr. “Flickr’s understanding of your photo’s date and time (ex: “January 2014”), place (ex: “San Francisco”), and even scenes and objects (ex: “car,” “sunset,” “beach,” “portrait”) helps organize your images so you don’t have to.
Breeze
Now that Facebook has purchased one of our favorite simple fit trackers, Moves, of course there is yet another well-designed app to take its place. The interface is very cool, and the retrace your steps feature grabbing your last 7-days of activity is both creepy and awesome at the same time. Breeze is kind of like a combination of Moves and Human on user interface on crack.
Driving Curve
Now take everything you know about fitness apps, and then apply this to an app for your driving skills. Nothing ground breaking about Driving Curve, but this free app works by evaluating your speed, acceleration, and breaking by using your phone’s GPS to give you a score. It’s gamifying your driving. The current look and feel is a bit more geared to the Fast and the Furious crowd but I’m sure someone will come along and make something a little more high-end and sophisticated. Think more James Bond, less, Need for Speed. We’re sure Elon Musk probably has this developed already.
