Welcome to this issue of app review. You can quickly jump to the content you are interested in through the article directory. If you find other apps or topics of interest, please feel free to discuss them with us in the comments section.
In addition to fresh apps, many old faces in the App Store are constantly being iterated and updated to add more interesting and useful features. We want to help you filter the App Store for noteworthy App developments, so you can quickly get up to date with what’s going on with the App and its developers.
HRZN: A stylized iPhone photo shooter
Platform：iOS/iPadOS
Brief: mobile photography, retouching
See something interesting, press the shoot button – cell phone photography makes image creation easier than ever, we use it to record the moments of life at hand, leaving a precious record. At the same time, smartphones offer endless possibilities for photography: perhaps a DSLR with a distinctive style, or perhaps a film camera that will be nostalgic in the hands of previous generations.
Film cameras create images with the old taste of chemical processing – images that look yellow and faded, but are unmatched by today’s digital cameras. HRZN is an amazing app that turns your iPhone into a film camera in every style.
Unlike other photo apps on the iPhone, HRZN attaches different effects to the camera by creating camera presets. For example, you can choose from five different aspect ratios, including 21:9 super wide, faux medium format 6:7 and the classic 3:2 DSLR-like ratio. You can also set a fixed focal length, such as a wide-angle 20mm lens, a portrait 35mm lens or a selfie front camera, just as if you were using a fixed-focus lens on a DSLR.
You can choose specific stylized effects, adjust exposure compensation, lighting effects, dark corners, and fading effects and even time stamp styles to achieve a full range of customization of film effects.
In addition to creating your own presets, HRZN provides three default presets with different styles for use by default. After clicking Favorites, we can find the presets we created and the default presets we collected in My Favorites, and click the shooting button on the right of the preset to call the camera to shoot.
HRZN’s shooting will bring in the presets we’ve previously selected by default, so we can take a variety of film-style photos the moment we press the shutter. If you create multiple presets, you can also place multiple widgets for different presets, so you can quickly recall them with a single click.
Of course, in addition to shooting through presets, we can also import photos previously taken in the system album into presets for editing, so we can create a batch of pictures with the same preset style to share on social media.
HRZN can be downloaded for free from the App Store, and by purchasing a premium subscription you can unlock more stylized effects, more types of aspect ratios, import system photo library photos, and adjust photo details, among other features.
Fluent Search: A Productivity Plugin for Closer-to-Native Results
Platform: Windows
Brief: launcher, search tool
Spotlight search is a very important feature in the Apple ecosystem and is a great productivity tool, especially on macOS. On the contrary, although Microsoft has tried to expand the search bar with more features, the results are not as good as they should be. So “haters” have created a number of desktop search tools, such as Wox, uTools, and today’s Fluent Search.
From the name, we can see that this tool adopts the Fluent design style advocated by Microsoft, with rounded corners and simple icon style, combined with the mica effect in the settings, everything is close to the native Windows effect, visually very uniform with Windows built-in applications (Task Manager, Explorer, etc.), which is also the main focus of Fluent Search This is the main differentiating feature of Fluent Search.
Of course, Fluent Search is not just a vase. One important purpose of using such tools is to search for files, and Fluent Search has its own search engine built in, so we can choose to install the indexing service in the initialization settings to use it; if you are a long-time Everything user, Fluent Search can also call it directly, which eliminates the step of indexing. In addition, Fluent Search also supports “tag” indexing, which will automatically create some feature tags for files, and also allows users to add them manually, making it more convenient to search.
Fluent Search’s search bar can trigger related tasks with specific keywords, such as passing command line arguments directly to CMD or PowerShell, searching a list of processes, finding settings items, or even searching the screen for visible content, and if you allow it to be associated with Microsoft To-Do, it can search directly for delegated items.
In addition, Fluent Search, like most third-party tools of its kind, also supports the installation of plug-in extensions, and currently has a search, unit conversion and other plug-ins on the shelves, if you are a programming newbie do not know how to write plug-ins, you can also use the built-in workflow customization function to edit their own triggers, a detailed introduction can wait for subsequent articles. If you are also interested in Fluent Search, you can download it in Microsoft Store or official website, the application is free without internal purchase.
Water Hero: Hot water to drink and warmth for the winter
Platform: Android
Brief: drinking water record, drinking water reminder
Water Hero is an application that helps you record your water consumption and encourages you to drink more water.
After downloading Water Hero for the first time, all we need to do is set up the appropriate units and choose whether to turn on the notification permission. Then, we can set our daily water goal by combining our gender, weight, activity level, etc. The app will calculate an appropriate amount of water to drink based on the values we enter, or you can manually change it if it doesn’t match your goal.
In addition, Water Hero also supports water reminder function, all we need to do is to set our own wake up and sleep time, and choose the desired length of time between water reminders.
After completing the relevant settings, we can enter the main interface of the application, in which we only need to hold our finger at the bottom of the screen and swipe upwards to quickly complete a drinking record, and interestingly, as the distance we swipe changes, the amount of water recorded will also change. This is a small ritual to motivate us to keep drinking water.
Of course, we can also take into account our own drinking situation and the capacity of common drinking tools, in the settings to modify the sliding degree of the corresponding drinking value. If you can’t be sure of the amount of water you drink each time, you can also try Free Flow mode, where the amount of water you drink is completely linked to the sliding level and is not fixed, and Water Hero will also show you how much time has passed since you last drank in the main interface in real time, thus prompting you to drink scientifically and avoid drinking water only when you are thirsty.
Compared with other drinking apps, the biggest difference of Water Hero is the way it records the amount of water it drinks, Water Hero itself does not support rich drink customization and other functions, it only provides a simple and uncomplicated record of the amount of drinking. We don’t have to worry about whether we are drinking milk or coffee, we just need to remember: drink more hot water.
You can download Water Hero from the Play Store and experience it for free.
App Updates Worth Watching
Although we have been discovering and introducing quality App on each platform for you, there are still many App with excellent design, function, interaction and experience that we haven’t discovered and introduced yet. They may be an old App or a new App that has recently hit the shelves, and we will introduce them to you here.
Affinity V2 Update: New Features in the Family Bucket, New Payment Model More Affordable
Platform: macOS/Windows/iPadOS
Keywords: image processing, vector drawing, page design
I’m sure many people learned about Affinity as a developer because Adobe Creative Cloud subscriptions are expensive, and the Affinity suite of Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher can all be bought out for a relatively reasonable price, while The Affinity suite of Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher can all be purchased at a relatively reasonable price, while also providing a functional alternative to the Adobe family of software. Recently, all three Affinity family buckets have been updated to Version 2, and a more affordable paid purchase plan has been introduced.
Affinity Photo, for example, is now available for macOS, Windows, and iPadOS. I especially like using Affinity Photo on my iPad because it does most of the features of the desktop version, and I think it works better than Photoshop for iPad.
In the new 2.0 version, Affinity Photo also adds many new features, such as non-destructive RAW rendering, composite masks, real-time grid warping, normal adjustments, real-time masks, saveable layer states, JPEG XL import and export, and more.
Of course, Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher have also been updated with a lot of new features in the new version, so if you are interested, you can refer to the official blog post.
Let’s get back to the new Affinity V2 payment plan, because it’s the Best Value for Money. If you buy Affinity V2 Universal License, you can get all the clients of Affinity Photo, Affinity Publisher, Affinity Designer on macOS, Windows and iPadOS, and it’s a permanent buyout without subscription.
Affinity is currently available as a free trial on the website, and you can get 30 days access to all software on all 3 platforms with email verification.
Hookmark: 4.0 major update with new branding
Platform: macOS
Keywords: duplex connection, file management
Hookmark is a tool for linking different types of information resources in the macOS operating system, similar to Spotlight in macOS, but it’s not surprising if you’re unfamiliar with the name: it was Hook until the 4.0 update was released, when it was replaced with Hookmark is the new name.
In the feature update section, this update mainly improves the file link search mechanism within Hookmark: for example, when another user shares you a file link, but the file is not saved locally or does not have the corresponding access rights, a window will pop up to prompt you of this situation, and at the same time disable this link in the context to avoid the resulting crash.
The update also adds support for the recently popular Arc browser and integrates support for some of the features in macOS Notes to better match the newly released macOS Ventura. The update documentation also introduces the addition of support for OmniFocus 4, but also mentions that the latter is still in beta.
In addition to the name change mentioned above, the Hook package has also changed: Hook Lite is now Hookmark Basic, Hook Essential is now Hookmark Standard, and both versions support free updates for one year, which is a more acceptable way to pay than a subscription system.
The price of Hookwork 4.0 is basically the same as before: after the initial download, there will be a one-month free trial period during which you can use all the features. However, if you want to continue using the full functionality after the expiration, you need to pay $29.99 for the Standard version or $69.99 for the Professional version (Pro, with additional support for Markdown links and script automation capabilities), while the free version corresponds to the Basic version with limited functionality.
It’s also worth noting that Setapp announced on November 9 that Hookmark has been added to the subscription lineup, which is certainly a good thing for macOS users who have already purchased Setapp.
This 4.0 update is not only a rebranding, but also some subtle feature additions, which doesn’t seem to be worthy of a whole number of version numbers.
You can download the latest 4.0 version from the Hookmark website.