The major benefits of the iPhone app are that you get to experience a variety of different dial designs in one place, and that it only costs $0.99 (or free for a more limited version), as opposed to the hundreds you’ll spend on an actual Nooka watch.

The Nooka app provides a basic local time clock, with three different faces to choose from, as well as a world clock, stopwatch and timer. For all of the above, you can choose the color of the clock’s background and time indicator elements using a simple color picker. The app works in both portrait and landscape orientation, which makes it a great candidate for a desk or bedside clock, although the presence of an alarm function would really help that, as would an interface tweak to hide the status bar when the clock is active.

Even though I’d like to see those features added in an update, the Nooka app is definitely cool as-is, and fans of good design and visually intuitive time-telling will not regret the $0.99 purchase price.

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Remarks, like PDF Expert, offers PDF annotation and filling tools, but it’s a much more streamlined tool than that app, with a focus on making it easy to mark up and share documents, as well as create your own notes and notebooks independent of any pre-existing PDFs that can also be marked up and shared with other Remarks users for collaborative work.

Remarks is that rare beast among PDF tools, either on or off the iPad: it features a simple, straightforward interface and everything work very quickly, with speedy response times for turning pages, adding notes, and basically anything else you’d want to do. Tools, including pens, highlighters, preset shapes and text entry, are clearly labeled with simple icons, and there’s no visual clutter or wealth of unnecessary options to distract you from what you actually need to get done.

Sharing may be one of Remarks’ best feature. Using email, you can easily share documents with other Remarks users, including annotated PDFs and notes created in the app itself. But in an upcoming update, Readdle is planning to introduce Dropbox, Box.net and other cloud storage sharing options, too, making it even more convenient for doing collaborative work.

Paired with a Bluetooth keyboard or stylus, Remarks is even more useful. It features effective accidental touch or wrist-detection, meaning you can write naturally with a stylus without worrying about drawing in the wrong place, and regular Mac key shortcuts like Command+C, Command+V and Command+A work with keyboard text input.

Remarks allows flexibility in creating notes and notebooks, allowing you to rearrange pages as you add them or after the fact, but it doesn’t overwhelm with options like other iPad notebook offerings. And since it’s also a full-fledged PDF annotation tool, and one that can be used collaboratively, it’s probably one of the most versatile iPad apps for students, and a fairly inexpensive one at $4.99.

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Trenches II ($1.99 iPhone, $2.99 iPad) is the latest in a lineup of World War I-themed games from Thunder Game Works. Falling somewhere between Plants vs. Zombies  and Flight Control, Trenches II offers slightly more advanced, compelling gameplay, so much so that it approaches the realm of real-time strategy gaming.

The game’s training mode leaves a lot to be desired, with constant, annoying pop-ups, but you can get the hang of things without the tutorial. The basics are as follows: As time passes, you earn money to buy more troops. Troops advance from left to right with the swipe of a finger or two.  You do need to be careful though, as your troops will need to be directed to bunkers and other objects on the battlefield to take cover.

You can lead British, French or German troops into battle. Game strategy comes in the form of which type of troops you buy when. There are sharpshooters, engineers, medics, spies, and flamethrower units to name a few. Along the way, you earn Perk points, which can be used to unlock new troop types and upgrade existing ones. For the impatient, there are in-app purchases to accelerate the earning of Perks.

The more rewarding part of the game, and what makes it a great game for a weekend, is definitely the Skirmish play mode.  In it, you need to scope out a battlefield with airships, and then decide how to deploy your troops. The challenge comes from knowing when to invest in an engineer, and when to invest in a rifleman. The resemblance to Flight Control comes in directing different groups of troops to different points on the battlefield.  This adds a lot to the overall feeling you get of being a real-time field commander.

The iPhone can seem a little tight in terms of available screen real estate with Trenches II, so if you have an iPad, that’s the way to play.

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My Xbox LIVE doesn’t have the console-controlling functions of the Xbox Companion app, but it does offer gamers access to their Xbox LIVE account info, including game achievements, your 3-D avatar and friends management and messaging. In fact, if you don’t have a keyboard accessory for your Xbox controller, it makes chatting with friends, managing your friends list and setting Beacons, which alert you to when your friends want to do the same thing as you, much easier.

It’s actually a very handy little app, and it does a good imitation of Windows Phone 7 for people who haven’t experienced that platform’s interface yet. Sounds are taken straight from the Xbox itself, and despite a little lag when switching between some screens as the info is retrieved from Microsoft’s servers, it’s a pretty fun way to navigate content that’s kind of a chore to view on your console.

The app also includes a “Spotlight” section that presents you with video trailers and featurettes normally available through the console. It’s free, so if you’re an Xbox LIVE user, there’s no reason not to check it out.

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Cross-platform: check.

Touch, has one thing going for it right away (besides a great bargain on a good domain name, touch.com) in that it’s immediately available for Android, iOS and BlackBerry. No “Android version coming soon” or “BlackBerry? Why bother?” for them, and that’s a very good thing in terms of encouraging user adoption. That’s mostly because it isn’t entirely new; it was PingChat, but has been rebranded as Touch, along with the introduction of its new “experience” sharing features. But long-standing leaders in the space like WhatsApp Messenger also have cross-platform access covered, and also boast a lot of momentum, so it alone won’t guarantee success.

Group messaging: check.

Another thing Touch has covered is group messaging. You can add people to group chats, see participants at a glance via profile pics, and leave group chats whenever you wish just by swiping to delete the message thread in your main list view. It all works well, and as advertised (though Touch’s servers are having some sporadic trouble at launch, so there’s been a few issues with messages getting through) but you won’t find too much that isn’t available in Facebook Messenger here.

With one-on-one messages, you’ll get “Sent/Delivered/Read/” receipts, just like you would on BlackBerry Messenger. You can’t, however, turn off read receipts like you can on iMessage if you’d rather not let someone know whether you have or haven’t check out what they said.

Photo sharing: check.

Touch’s major changes revolve around “experience sharing.” Essentially, this is photo sharing, wherein you choose a picture from an existing album or take a new one, upload it to Touch and select friends to share with. You also choose a name for the experience, and then friends you share it with can comment. It also reports whether or not your friends have viewed what you share. In this way, Touch sort of competes with Path, or with Instagram, but with a much more private audience, since you handpick individuals to share with.

A capable product in a crowded market

Touch is a good app; it’s cleanly designed, easy to use and strips away unnecessary features and frills to make conversation the real focal point of the experience. But it’s also in a tough spot; I found it hard to find anyone I know using it, despite its having taken over PingChat’s reported 12 million users. Plus, for photo sharing, Path’s gorgeous version 2.0 has it beat in almost every way, besides the ability to be more selective with who sees your photos, and a landscape mode for browsing and composing.

There are some things that work in Touch’s favor, however, including the ability to limit sharing but in a better way than most dedicated private messaging solutions provide. Also, there’s an HTML5 version in the works, which could open up Touch’s cross-platform appeal to a very broad audience, since it’ll allow desktop and all tablet users to participate, too.

Touch has a lot of polish and a lot of promise, and beats the user experience of WhatsApp in my opinion, judging by my trials on Android and iPhone devices. But its staying power will depend on whether or not it can convince more users to jump on board; tough to do at this stage in the group messaging competition.

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If looks could kill

Version 1 of Path wasn’t ugly by any means, but the new Path is positively breathtaking. Little things like the timestamp indicator that floats into view while you scroll through your friends’ activity, and then fades away again when you stop moving, work perfectly. In fact, the small animations when you call up controls, and other bits of visual candy offered by the app all add up to an incredibly pleasurable browsing experience. I mention this up front because it’s that sense of pleasure that is Path’s single-biggest improvement in terms of convincing users to stick around and engage.

Path 2.0 succeeds immediately, without even scratching the surface, by having a surface worth coming back for, time and time again. It’s image-heavy, but not just a straightforward waterfall of pictures; comments and activities notes break up the stream, but never threaten to take over and make browsing paths a text-heavy endeavour.

More friends, but no overload

Path has also upped the max size of your circle, allowing you to add up to 150 friends instead of just 50. It’s a smart change; opening things up altogether would take away Path’s defining feature, taking away its ability to cut through the noise of sites like Twitter and Facebook and offer users a less noisy social networking experience.

The friends limit also makes its similarities to Facebook’s new Timeline feature more apparent. You can pick a cover image, just like in Timeline, and activity presents itself in a time-organized stream very similar to how it does on Facebook. Unlike with FB’s Timeline, however, Path isn’t strewn with apps, updates from relative strangers and other detritus. Its limited circles and limited activity types (location, check-ins with friends, music, simple status messages and photos) makes it so that your stream will stay clean, while still also providing plenty of opportunity for interaction.

Simple

Navigation is handled using the new swipe left/swipe right type interface that has become very popular since first appearing in apps like Twitter, and more recently, Facebook. It’s a good fit, letting you access your own settings and activity with a swipe of one finger to the right, and checking in on friends (plus finding more) with a swipe to the left.

You can add new contacts from your own address book, from Facebook or by inviting them, or by searching for them by name. A Twitter account tie-in would be nice, but for this kind of sharing (closer friends, relatives) I think the options are effective as is.

Areas where it might be too simple include the lack of a landscape navigation mode, which I think could add a lot in terms of making picture viewing more flexible, especially for landscape shots. The app also cries out for an iPad version, where it’s easy to see the interface being even more of a pleasure to navigate. I wouldn’t be surprised if all these options were in the pipeline, however, so it may just be a matter of time before we see them addressed.

The Path to greatness

From checking out who has seen which photos and sharing simple feedback via icons, to letting people know the music you’re playing right now through direct integration with your iPod app, Path no longer feels like a closed book where not much goes on. Instead, it comes across as a much, much more enjoyable version of Facebook, with an interface worthy of design awards and sharing options that actually let a user feel like a simple set of advertising data to be mined. The only time you’ll run into any commerce in the app is when you use the built-in camera, which presents you with live filters, four of which are available as paid upgrades through in-app purchases at $0.99 a piece.

If Path sticks to this kind of freemium setup, as founder Dave Morin suggested it would in conversation with our own Colleen Taylor, while also keeping the base product this appealing and easy to use, I think it will become a shining example of how you can turn a so-so idea into a great one through intelligent redesign.

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Based on my quick tests, the app as it stands now is pretty much the same one Kevin took a look at following its first retracted release. This time around, however, you aren’t greeted with a bug notification immediately upon launch, and push notifications appear to be working, although oddly, there’s no way to turn Banner notifications on in iOS 5, so the phone just vibrates and displays nothing when a new email comes in.

Be sure to check out Kevin’s post for a more detailed look at how the Gmail app works. Suffice it say, it’s pretty much like the Android version in a lot of ways, and seems like it could be an HTML5 app in a native iOS wrapper. I’ll stick with Gmail set up as an Exchange account in the native iOS Mail app, but Google’s free native app may be more your speed if you miss things like Priority Inbox icons and labels.

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Samsung agreed with a suggestion from the court to change its request for a temporary injunction into an expedited application for a full injunction, the legitimacy of which will be determined at a hearing in March 2012.

Samsung released a brief statement (via The Australian) about the decision, indicating that it’s happy with the arrangement:

Samsung is pleased with this outcome as we believe expediting the main proceedings will be the most effective way for Samsung to protect our intellectual property rights and bring about a final resolution to this case.

Apple, for its part, didn’t seem as thrilled with the decision, since its lawyers tried to convince Justice Annabelle Bennett, the presiding judge in the case, to delay the final injunction hearing until July or August, due to conflicts in witness availability owing to proceedings ongoing in many countries overseas to deal with the very same issues. The judge denied this request on the basis that the iPhone 4S may be too old by that time for any resulting ban to have a significant effect.

Samsung is pursuing similar injunctions in Europe and Japan, but revealed on Monday that it would not attempt to secure a ban in its home country of South Korea. The original attempt by Samsung to get the iPhone 4S banned in Australia came hot on the heals of a victory by Apple that saw sales of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 formally put on hold.

Apple at least will be able to sell the iPhone 4S leading up to the holidays in Australia, which is generally a very lucrative selling period for iPhone devices. Samsung has a hearing coming up Nov. 25 in which it will appeal the court’s decision regarding the Galaxy Tab 10.1, in an effort to reverse that injunction and salvage some of the holiday shopping season.

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Unlike other social music discovery tools, Shuffler.fm isn’t basing its findings on your existing tastes, as Last.fm or Pandora do. Instead, it aggregates and organizes content from popular online music blogs, like Pitchfork, TheMusic.FM, Stereogum and many more. Content is then organized by genre-based channels, which also help populate a playlist of tracks you can play back from the bottom of the iPad interface while you read about the very songs you’re listening to.

The idea behind Shuffler.fm is great, since it provides an alternative to algorithm-based recommendations in services like Pandora that often provide quite a narrow view of a user’s listening habits. By using curated blog-posted content, Shuffler.fm allows users to be much more broad in their approach to music discovery while also providing the advantages of some kind of editorial filter to prevent information overload.

Shuffler.fm’s iPad app design is simple, even more so than its web-based version. But through its simplicity it does a good job of getting out of the way of the music while at the same time presenting it in a visually attractive way. The presence of the blog-fueled radio playback interface, with its bookmarking (with a free Shuffler.fm account) and sharing options (email, Facebook and Twitter), also helps ensure that you agree with what you are reading about tracks and that you can share them with friends if you come across something you think they should hear.

That sharing element could become even more integrated in the future, as Shuffler.fm co-founder Tim Heineke told me that there are plans in the works “to connect [Shuffler.fm] more to your current social network of sharing,” but that there’s nothing definitive he can share at this point.

The only thing I’m not crazy about in Shuffler.fm is that to read full articles about the tracks in question, the app uses an in-app browser to direct you to the website of origin. I’ve been spoiled by nicely formatted reading views from apps like Flipboard (for some articles, though not all) and Instapaper. But at least Shuffler.fm is directing some traffic back to the websites that supply its content, which in the end is better than my selfish desire to read things in a slightly more easy-to-digest format.

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As reported, the app now allows you to purchase items directly for in-store pickup, available within an hour if it’s in stock at the local store of your choosing. If an item isn’t available, the expected ship times listed in the online store appear to apply. You can also now order custom Mac configurations (with more RAM, bigger hard drives, etc.) for in-store pickup through the app.

The other big new addition is EasyPay, which allows you to scan the bar codes of items you wish to purchase in-store with your iPhone’s camera (iPhone 4 or 4S only) and then pay for them directly in the app through your iTunes account. The app keeps your EasyPay purchase receipts, which should come in handy if you ever have to provide proof of purchase to in-store security on your way out the door.

There’s a new option to track the status of your orders right from within the app, too, which makes it easier to keep track of your online and in-store purchases in one place. The new Personal Pickup and EasyPay services are limited to U.S. customers only for now, but the update does introduce international support for Canadian and Chinese Apple Store customers for its other existing features. Hopefully Apple will continue to roll out Personal Pickup and EasyPay internationally if all goes well with the U.S. launch.

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As mentioned, Oink is all about rating items, and for now, that seems to be mostly about picking out favorite dishes on the menu at local restaurants. But people are already experimenting with a wide variety of items to rate, including the Walter Isaacson Steve Jobs biography and Oink’s own UI. You can see how it could have very broad uses down the road.

Trust issues

The first thing Oink asked me was whether I wanted to become a “Builder.” I did indeed, because I guessed (correctly) that there’d be precious little content in my neck of the woods here in Toronto. But you can’t just start creating content in Oink; you apply to become a “Builder,” and will be notified by email when your application is accepted (and/or denied?).

While I’m disappointed I can’t get posting things immediately, I think the idea of somehow gatekeeping who gets to do so is actually a good idea. In the long run, it’ll make for more meaningful content and item ratings, so that people can actually feel confident in following its recommendations, by keeping bots out of the system until there are safeguards against such potential abuses in place.

Many ways to Discover

Leaving aside ratings and content creation for the moment, the app is actually really beautifully designed, and even with limited, spectator style interaction, it stands out thanks to good development. Finding things through the Discover tab is a perfect example of why.

You can browse for stuff that’s popular, popular and near you, or look for things by their proximity to your location. You can also keep track of incoming ratings in real-time as they go up with the “Live” monitor. This displays a visually pleasing stream of photos from recently approved and disapproved of objects. These are global for now, and there doesn’t appear to be a way to narrow the focus of the real-time stream to a more specific geographic location, but it’s a fun way of doing some minor globe-trotting without going anywhere.

Lots more inside for builders

Once you achieve coveted builder status, you can add friends from Oink, as well as gain “Cred” through ratings, reviews and photos to help establish yourself as an Oink expert in your chosen field. You can also create a profile where all your Oinked info is stored. Unfortunately, as mentioned, you have to wait until Oink starts expanding its Builder pool before you can do any of this.

So Oink looks great, and the UI is full of smooth animations (like the loading ball near the top of the screen) and transitions that avoid the pitfall of being annoying. It already has a lot of active users in highly populated areas, and people lucky enough to be early Builders seem to be having fun. My advice? Do like me and pick up this free app and apply for Builder status now, because Oink provides a useful service in a slick, smart package, so I expect membership requests to start flooding in quickly.

Disclosure: Milk, which created Oink, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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QMx Interactive has some experience at making tie-in apps for media properties that go beyond simple promotion. It’s the team that brought us the Super 8 app, which was so effective as standalone software that I wasn’t even aware it was a cross-promotional effort when I checked it out back in January.

Like Super 8, Farnsworth has a strong video component. That’s because the app takes its name and concept from the Farnsworth device from Warehouse 13, which fans of the show will know is the basic video communication device used by the agents who track down the supernatural objects I mentioned above. The Farnsworth communicators have a retro, steampunk vibe, and the design of the app captures that, as does the grainy, black and white video with a fisheye effect it records.

The app costs 99 cents, which may seem steep to some for a promotional app, but it makes more sense when you realize that QMx has taken things a bit further than most. The Farnsworth app is based on QMx’s own proprietary messaging system, which it plans to roll out in other future apps. That means that you’ll be able to send cross-app video and audio messages from Farnsworth video communicator to other apps that use the same protocol.

Even without cross-app functionality, you can still use the app to send and receive video messages using Wi-Fi, 3G or EDGE network connectivity, and also post video updates directly to Facebook, as well as send them via email. As a tool for non-real-time video and audio communication, Farnsworth communicator could fill a handy niche between something like Skype and your phone’s own voicemail.

Finally, fans are the key audience for this app, and there’s fan service content on board. It ships with two pre-recorded messages from actors in the series, the look, feel and control interface are all as faithful as you’d expect from actual sci-fi prop designers.

The Farnsworth Video Communicator might not develop a groundswell following beyond fans of the show, but QMx is showing that it isn’t interested in making the same old boring tie-ins that often aren’t even worth the time you take to download them.

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1. Choose your jack-o-lantern face

First, you want to create a face that you can then use as a stencil. We’ve found several pumpkin-design apps that we like and that work in different ways.

Swipe and shake. Our favorite pumpkin-design app, Crazy Pumpkin, happens to be on the iPhone ($.99, Ezone, iTunes Link). Crazy Pumpkin gives you endless combinations of eyes, noses and mouths to choose from, and all you have to do is swipe to change the feature. Shake the iPhone to change the color of the design and hear a spooky noise.

Unfortunately Crazy Pumpkin is not available for iPad. The closest iPad app I’ve found is Halloween Pumpkin Creator ($.99, A3MG, iTunes Link).

Pinch and draw. If you are looking to get a little more sophisticated, Parents magazine has created Carve-a-Pumpkin for the iPad and is available for free in the app store (free, iTunes link).  Carve-a-Pumpkin gives you a little more control of the elements that you place on the pumpkin. You can pinch to grow or shrink the design.  However, while there are a lot of designs to choose from, you still do not have complete control over the design with this app.

If you want complete control over exactly how you want your pumpkin to look, try ABCya’s CarveIt! for both the iPhone and iPad ($.99, ABCya, iTunes Link).  CarveIt! has a limited number of pumpkin “heads” to choose from, but it will allow you to draw freehand any face you want.

2. Print out your pumpkin masterpiece as a stencil

Now comes the fun part, taking your virtual iOS design and turning it into a real pumpkin. The next step is printing out the design to make a stencil.

• Transfer your design to an image file. Some of the aforementioned apps will save the image your photo library for you. If the app you’ve chosen does’t do that, you can always take a screenshot to get a printable image file of your final design.
• Print the image out. You can either sync your image to your computer and print it out from there or you can use AirPrint to print the image directly to the printer. If you do not have a printer that supports Apple’s AirPrint feature, there are a number of ways you can get around this limitation. My favorite happens to be Printopia

Transfer your design and carve your pumpkin

Once you have the stencil printed out, tape the sheet of paper to the pumpkin. Use a pushpin, awl, straight needle or other tool to poke holes in the outlines of the eyes, nose, and mouth into the pumpkin’s outer skin. This will create a connect-the-dots outline of the design right on the surface of the pumpkin. From here, use the outlines to carve the pumpkin.

3. More ways to create a stencil

There are several variations on this general theme. You can certainly use your favorite iOS drawing application, or even browse the web to select your favorite pumpkin image online. I’ve also used Photoshop to stretch and move some of the features around a bit to better fit our pumpkins.

For more family fun, you can even share the design experience with the entire family by projecting the pumpkin-carving app of your choice to your TV using the new iOS 5 Airplay Wireless Mirroring from your iPad 2 or iPhone 4S to your Apple TV. Carving a pumpkin will never be quite the same again.

How have you used Apple’s products to celebrate Halloween?

Pumpkin-carving and finished pumpkin photos by Geoffrey Goetz.

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Of course, all of that comes with a price, and a recurring one at that. Carousel is a subscription service that ordinarily costs $99 per year (or $9.99 per month) but that is available at an introductory price of $59.99 (or $5.99 per month) annually. Luckily, Carousel also comes with a 30-day free trial subscription so you can see if you’re into what the service is selling.

Isn’t this just Photo Stream?

It’s understandable to assume that Carousel and Photo Stream are basically the same. Both advertise the ability to sync your photos across devices. But Carousel is actually quite a bit more sophisticated. It offers impressive yet easy-to-use editing tools (which use the same tech found in Adobe’s Lightroom program) on any device you happen to be using, as well as ample sharing options.

Editing

Carousel’s editing choices are impressive. There are a number of quick-hit filters you can apply with a single click (17 in total), which act like Instragram filters to give your pictures a stylish and distinctive look. You can also quickly adjust white balance, exposure and contrast (including using auto settings for the first two), and you can crop and rotate your photos on any platform (iPhone, iPad and Mac all have similar but specifically tailored interfaces).

All editing is nondestructive, too, so you can peel back effects at any time and restore your original image. This also allows you to compare various effects with others when applying filters. It’s remarkably powerful and very easy to use.

Sharing

Photo Stream is great for automatically keeping all of your photo libraries the same, but it doesn’t offer you much in the way of sharing photos beyond the service, outside letting you email, tweet or message images. Carousel also lets you share individual photos directly via email and Twitter and also via Facebook and Tumblr.

Also, you can share an entire Carousel (you can create up to five on one account) with a person or up to five people. Users will be notified via email that they’ve received access, and they can then check out the full gallery by downloading and installing one of the Carousel apps on any platform. It’s a huge advantage over Photo Stream in my opinion, and one many MobileMe Gallery users are likely missing from Apple’s iCloud offering. You and people you share Carousels with can also tag images as favorites, so that you can see which they like most and vice versa.

Control

Photo Stream has taken a lot of flak for the absence of a delete option for single photos (you have to reset your stream completely to erase them), and Carousel doesn’t make the same mistake. You can individually delete any photo you add; just hit the share button and a big red delete button also appears.

You also don’t automatically add every photo you take to Carousel, as you do when Photo Stream is turned on for iOS devices. Instead, you select them from your phone’s image gallery and camera roll. Imported photos are then grouped by date (something I do wish could be tweaked). For some who appreciate the automatism of Photo Stream, this will be a drawback, but for people who want control over what does and doesn’t go to the cloud, it’s a plus.

Great service, but is it worth it?

For a just-launched service, I was amazed that Carousel was so easy to pick and jump into, and that it worked out of the box exactly as advertised. There were no launch-day hiccups or syncing issues, and inviting others to check out my shared galleries worked smoothly, too. There’s no doubt, for me, that Adobe has produced something better than Photo Stream (it feels like what Photo Stream should have been), but the only question that remains is, Is it something I’d be willing to pay for long term?

There are lots of free options for sharing and storing photos, and even basic services like Flickr can accomplish a lot of what I want to do with Carousel’s sharing features. But Carousel really impressed with how slick it is and how much control it provides a user over what gets posted and who can see it. Adobe also did a great job of taking the most important Lightroom features and packaging them in a simple, accessible way for the average consumer.

In the end, I’m leaning toward signing up because I can already tell this will be the perfect tool for sharing photos with my far-flung family members in a more private way than other alternatives, and because in addition to the existing iOS and Mac apps, Adobe has promised that Android and Windows versions are in the pipeline, too. True cross-platform photo management, editing and sharing that lives in the cloud and works well is definitely something I can get on board with.

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The setting to turn off Siri when an iPhone is passcode-locked isn’t found in the dedicated Siri settings, where you might expect to see it. Instead, head to the iPhone’s Settings app, the go to General > Passcode Lock. Here, under the setting to choose whether or not to use a simple 4-digit passcode, you’ll see an option called “Siri” next to an on/off slider. As the screen itself says, this tells your phone whether or not to allow access to Siri when your phone is passcode-locked.

Note that you must have a passcode active on your device. Siri is always active from the lock screen on devices without passcodes, which makes sense, since your info isn’t protected anyway in that case.

As a bonus, you can also choose to put Siri behind a parental code lock if you choose. Do this in the Settings > General > Restrictions section, once you’ve enabled restrictions. You can choose to lock Siri out altogether, or just lock out its ability to display profanity and explicit language in the Siri interface screens.

If it garners enough negative attention, we might see Apple make Siri inactive from a passcode-locked device by default with the next iOS update, but in the meantime, following the steps above keeps you covered.

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New looks

The iPad gets a completely redesigned interface for browsing articles, with a grid format instead of a list, providing better at-a-glance summaries of what your saved articles are about. It’s a big change, but a smart one that adds a lot of value without any real drawbacks.

On the iPhone, navigating articles is simplified, with a list view that makes it easier to see at a glance who wrote an article and where it originally came from. Things just look cleaner overall, which makes finding the article you’re looking for much more painless.

Reading views have also been updated. On the iPhone, you won’t see the status bar by default, so you’ll get more viewing space. That puts the focus squarely on the content, which is exactly where it should be with Instapaper. Also new to the iPhone is adjustable brightness control.

The iPad’s reading view is improved, with better source, author and timestamp information that will also improve with time as the Instapaper service encounters more content.

Better features

Instapaper has been the source of very few complaints for me, but one thing that always bothered me was the default Archive action when you attempt to remove an article from your Read Later list or other folders. Now, though, there’s a choice to either archive or delete any time the Archive option appears. Swipe left on an article in list or grid view, and you’ll get Archive, Delete or Sharing options. Tap the trash can icon in reading view on the iPad, and you can choose between Archive and Delete commands.

Definitions in Wikipedia for any selected text, as well as popover Footnotes for websites that use them are awesome additions, and Multi-select allows you to do bulk actions with articles, like mass deletes or moving between folders. You can also now choose to use Apple’s built-in dictionary to define words if you’re using iOS 5.

There’s a great new Search function that is included for those on the subscription plan ($1 per month) which searches the full text of any article you’ve saved to Instapaper, and can be accessed from the main screen. This really helps, since it makes finding that one thing you remember reading somewhere that much easier. Those interested in a subscription can now get one via in-app subscriptions, too.

I’m particularly happy about the new Editors redesign for discovering articles. You can now get lots of great content from Give Me Something to Read, and that content is accessible faster than in previous incarnations of the app, when it was often slow to load. Immediately, the new Editors section provided me with at least five interesting new articles I’ll be reading later, plus, new social sharing features let you see any and all links posted by your Facebook friends and Twitter contacts, and Tumblr users you follow.

And lots more

This really is a massive update, with lots of little changes that really add up to much more than just the sum of their parts. A new App Directory that lists iPhone and iPad apps with Instapaper integration is very handy, and many performance improvements make the app feel a lot quicker, even when you have a long list to download and you’re starting from scratch, as I was with this update.

Long story short, if you weren’t an Instapaper user before, now you have no excuse.

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