The app isn’t available just yet. But Realmac put up a website today with a very brief video showing how it works and what it will look like.

Realmac founder Dan Counsell told me via email that the camera app “was built with the same principles of Clear in mind.” That means employing a very simple user interface, flat, uncluttered design and an app that’s focused on one main thing; in this case taking and sharing photos.

Analog Camera is a good-looking app. Yes, it includes filters like every other photo app, but it also allows for a quick succession of shots to be taken. Then there’s a grid for helping to more easily select the best shot taken and best filter.

Analog Camera also includes easy sharing within the app to Facebook and Twitter; so it’s a camera app with social features, but unlike Instagram does not come with its own attached social network.

Realmac expects Analog Camera to hit the iOS App Store “later this month.”

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Create an original photo collage – Shape Collage ($1.99, Universal, $24.99 Mac) will arrange your photos into just about any shape imaginable. You could arrange your photos to resemble a word, phrase or sentence. You can even arrange your photos into different shapes like flowers, symbols and hearts.  The Mac version will even allow you to save the collage as a Photoshop file, where you can re-arrange each photo individually.

Shape a mosaic of your own – Mosaics take every day objects and create an image by placing different size, shape and colored versions of the objects next to each other. cf/x also does this with their Mosaic ($19.99 Mac) app. Take a photo of your mom’s favorite garden or landscape and use it to creat a really cool image that looks like you put it together yourself by hand.  The controls let you choose how realistic, or artistic you want the piece to be.

Discover a photo mosaic – Take a large set of photos from your childhood and have them arranged to resemble a single more recent photo of yourself — it is a magical process to witness. AndreaMosaic (donation, Mac) has been doing just this for just over 10 years now. AndreaMosaic also has the ability to create your own library of photos to make the final mosaic from rather than use stock photos from a shared online repository.

Remember a comic moment – Take one of your favorite scenes from your life that you love to talk about and document it with Comic Life 2 ($4.99 iPad, $29.99 Mac).  You can even cartoon-ize the photos and distort the images for dramatic effect.  Comic life also has a library of speech bubbles to help you bring the photos to life.

Craft some thoughtful text – What you want to say is up to you, how you say it is another matter entirely. With Art Text 2 ($19.99 Mac) you can express yourself with an endless arrangement of textual options.  Make your words glow with style by adding layers of borders, shadows and even adda glossy effect to the font itself.

Print it all out – When all is said and done you may be looking for some place to print out your masterpiece. Using your iPhone, iPad or Safari on your Mac, you can send your photos directly to a nearby Walgreens (free on iPhone, iPad and Safari) for same-day processing. This same-day processing includes creating Posters, Canvas Prints and even Photo Books.

Any one of these apps can be used to create a single piece of artwork worthy of framing for Mom. You can consider combining several techniques together and craft your own card to accompany whatever else you are getting for Mom this year. Even when the mother on your shopping list is your spouse, the above can be great art projects you can do with the kids. Show them how they can use their iPhone, iPad or iMac to create something really special this Mother’s Day.

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In total, Mailbox has taken 1.3 million reservations and is processing 60 million emails per day, according to Mailbox’s own blog post Friday. Right now, the app is only available to iOS users who have Gmail accounts. But they eventually want to be more email providers and mobile devices and that’s why they agreed to the Drobox acquisition. To scale the service more quickly they decided to join Dropbox, the company said.

Dropbox co-founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi wrote on the Dropbox blog that they liked that Mailbox is “simple, delightful and beautifully engineered”:

After spending time with Gentry, Scott, and the team, it became clear that their calling was the same as ours at Dropbox—to solve life’s hidden problems and reimagine the things we do every day. We all quickly realized that together we could save millions of people a lot of pain.

Dropbox doesn’t replace your folders or your hard drive: it makes them better. The same is true with Mailbox, it doesn’t replace your email: it makes it better. Whether it’s your Dropbox or your Mailbox, we want to find ways to simplify your life.

One of the hallmarks of Mailbox’s debut was clever marketing: they put users in a queue and only let in a few at a time. This had the effect of a velvet rope outside an exclusive club, causing hundreds of thousands of people to sign up and wait to be let into the service right away.

But the popularity is also due to a huge problem that almost everyone shares: email. Mailbox is just one of many startups  trying to solve the problem of too much email.

This post was updated with background information at 10:24 a.m. PT and again at 10:44 a.m. PT.

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But recently I’ve also come to rely on several news aggregation apps (most of which are really just RSS readers with special features). Real RSS readers will still be around when Reader’s gone, especially given the market opportunity Reader’s demise presents for companies like Digg — which announced Thursday it would pick up where Google Reader leaves off — but it can’t hurt to have options for consuming news on your  mobile device. Sometimes I’ll find articles in these apps that I wouldn’t have found in my more focused list of RSS feeds.

Here are five good iOS apps — all of them are free — that you can personalize to help you keep up with the news:

Zite

Zite bills itself as a personalized digital magazine, and it’s actually been around for awhile (it was acquired by CNN in 2011). Zite’s interface is kind of boring, but it’s also straightforward. When you first start Zite, you can choose from a list of default topics for it to pull articles from. You can also add your own topics through the search interface. A newsfeed displays rectangular article previews for your top news. You can like or dislike the articles Zite shows you, and that data is used to find other articles you might like. You can switch between topics by swiping left or right, and view which topics an article has attached to it by swiping up.

Flud

Flud is unique in that you can follow articles that other users are sharing. Each user also gets a Flud iQ score, which measures your influence on the service based on your activity. Besides following other users, you can also search for new sources to draw from, which are added to a favorites menu. Flud’s interface is more interesting than Zite’s, with large article previews and pretty red buttons. However, the large previews mean only two article previews can fit on the screen at one time, so scrolling through them ends up feeling tedious at times.

Circa

Unlike the others on this list, Circa doesn’t show you full articles from a source. Instead, Circa has editors that condense articles into nuggets of information called “points.” Rather than reading the full text of the article, you swipe through a list of points. Because the articles have to be condensed by humans, Circa has a feature where you can follow an article, so you’ll get notified whenever a new point is added to it. You can’t add new sources or topics to Circa, and it only comes with four topics by default. If you’re fine with that caveat and like things straight to the point, Circa’s worth checking out.

Flipboard

Flipboard’s been pretty widely covered by now, but it can’t hurt to throw it in. Flipboard has a sort of homescreen where you can add and arrange topics. As implied in its name, you “flip” through articles rather than scrolling a list, which means you also have to flip through the ones you might not be interested in.The biggest strength of Flipboard is that you can add a multitude of social networks as sources, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google+. You can even add your Google Reader account as a source — until it shuts down.

Pulse

The thing that stands out about Pulse’s app is its interface. Instead of a list of articles, you’re shown a vertically scrolling list of sources and under each is a horizontally scrolling list of articles from that source. The advantage of this is that it allows Pulse to fit nine article previews in one view. Flud only fits two, for comparison. The disadvantage is that it requires a little more scrolling to get through your articles, since they’re arranged horizontally. The headline text is rather small too, and there’s no way to change it. Old eyes beware.

What’s your favorite news aggregator? Are there any you’ve tried that aren’t on the list? Tell us in the comments. 

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It was created by Niantic Labs, which acts as a startup within Google. The premise of Field Trip is very practical: Whether you’re interested in random historical or architectural trivia, are looking for fun things to do with your kids, want to see what local stores are offering deals, or just where the new speakeasy or hipster donut shop is that everyone’s been talking about, Field Trip can show you. Using the iPhone’s location services, the app will show you stuff as you pass by it. You can set your preferences for how often you get the notifications and how much or little you see of each source’s content.

But what it’s doing is basically augmented reality: the phone is using location data to help us interpret the physical world around us. Here’s a quick look at the iOS version:

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Capture for iPad and iPad mini comes with quick editing tools, has image stabilization and color correction, and the ability to add music to a clip, all within the app. Sharing options include Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

There is no such dedicated app for Android phones or tablets, but that’s likely because direct-to-YouTube uploading is already supported in Android.

The folks at YouTube are aware that filming with a device that is so large it requires two hands can be physically and socially awkward — it reminded users of the iPad app to “film wisely so your iPad isn’t blocking everyone’s view.” But mobile is a huge chunk of its business these days — 1 in 4 YouTube video views come from a mobile device, the company says. So supporting as many popular devices as possible is an important priority.

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Sunrise was initially launched as an email newsletter by a duo of former Foursquare user interface designers last year. But they decided to take the same idea — an overview of your day created by aggregating all the various calendars you  have, whether from Google, LinkedIN or Facebook — and make it into an app that users can go back to throughout the day to check on their upcoming schedule and appointments.

Below is a video where I walk through how the app works and why I think it’s a good app for those hunting for a mobile calendar app that’s slightly more sophisticated than the default app that comes standard on the iPhone.

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It comes with a few new features this year, including access to a lot of classic game footage. There are a couple of different subscription levels and pricing available, depending on your interest level/obsession with the game.

Here’s a video overview of what’s new in At Bat for the 2013 season.

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All Gojee needs to know is what staples or ingredients you have on hand, what meal or category of food you’d like to cook, and anything you absolutely won’t or can’t eat. Once this information is plugged in, Gojee produces not just recipes, but beautiful photos of food for users to swipe through and get inspired for an upcoming meal.

After being recommended to me by one of my colleagues, Gojee has been my go-to cooking app for several months. These days, I end up preparing at least two meals per week with this app and have rarely made the same thing twice, thanks to the sheer variety of food blogs it pulls recipes from. I think it could be a good fit for anyone, no matter their skill in the kitchen.

Here’s a quick tour of Gojee’s food recommendation app.

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The app, called Fantastical, is available for both the Mac ($14.99) and the iPhone ($3.99). The iOS version of the app arrived about a month ago, and received glowing reviews. Downloads spiked soon after: the iOS app managed to beat Angry Birds Star Wars for a time as Apple’s No. 1 paid iPhone app.

What makes Fantastical so instantly usable and popular is its simplicity. It makes it easier to add events to your calendar — on the Mac it’s a quick dropdown from the menu bar, and on iPhone you click a “+” button — and features a natural language parser. Put together, those features allow users to quickly type in a single box, for example, “Skype with Ian 1/17 at noon” and have the item added to your calendar for 12 p.m. on Jan. 17. That’s it. No flipping dials, hunting for the correct calendar page or setting the time as on Apple’s calendar. It’s also refreshing for a third-party app because it doesn’t try to do too much. The app only does one thing: calendaring; and it does it really well, without trying to be also a contacts repository or a task manager.

The duo behind Fantastical is Michael Simmons and Kent Sutherland. They do great work together, Sutherland told me, because in many ways they are polar opposites. Simmons is 41, lives in San Francisco’s East Bay, and has been coding, designing and marketing products at respected Mac software companies Ambrosia and Cultured Code. Sutherland is a 25-year-old Boston resident just a few years removed from getting his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in quick succession. Simmons talks a lot, and fast; Sutherland is a bit shy, and more of a listener. Simmons does the business development, marketing and design and user experience, while Sutherland does the bulk of the coding. They contract the services of Wolfgang Bartelme to build Fantastical’s graphics. Together, Simmons and Sutherland both conceptualize and very carefully choose what app project they want to tackle.

Michael Simmons

Flexibits is self-funded — and profitable — according to Simmons. They have received offers of outside investment, but he says right now “it’s not something we need.”

Fantastical is the first collaboration that made it to the App Store since Simmons pinged Sutherland and asked him if he wanted to be his partner in the company he was starting. The Mac version was well received, but the iPhone app, launched just after Thanksgiving, has drawn superlative praise. The Verge called it “the iPhone calendar app we’ve been waiting for.” Flexibits doesn’t give out download numbers or active user numbers.

Kent Sutherland

Their arrangement is a bit unusual among the hotshot iOS development teams out there, mostly for its bicoastal, multigeneration arrangement. But the pair is doing great work, mostly because of the balance they provide each other, they said.

The origin story

Simmons had been a big fan of Sutherland’s for years, he told me during a Skype session from somewhere in Italy last week. They’d become online buddies after Simmons started submitting bug reports for a piece of Mac software he found online created by Sutherland. When Simmons was ready to start his own company after leaving Cultured Code (where he worked on another beloved Mac app, Things) he asked Sutherland, who’d just recently gotten his Master’s from Cornell, to join him.

The two started tinkering with a contacts app idea, but it wasn’t until Sutherland mentioned he had a natural language parsing engine he’d worked on in school that they had a lightbulb moment for a different app.

Sutherland wasn’t decided on what to actually do with the language parsing engine. But he knew what he didn’t want: “In school there’s these cool things people work on then they get sucked into some huge enterprise ,” he told me last week. He wanted to build his idea for consumers. A small, indie dev shop, however, represented promise.

Simmons knew exactly what to do with it, he said. “I was certain calendaring was the way to go. I just knew that was the problem to solve” especially if you could make events quickly.

The Mac app came first in May 2011. The iPhone app didn’t appear until the end of 2012. The delay happened because they didn’t know how to redesign the Mac app for the iPhone in a way that was compelling enough for a smaller screen on a mobile device.

Sutherland hit on it first: the Dayticker, which is a sliding calendar bar across the top of an iPhone screen that lets users scroll quickly between days. After deciding on that angle, it took them just “a few months” to get it ready for submission to the iOS App Store.

What Flexibits can do that Apple can’t

The Dayticker, and the event entry are so simple; you wonder why Apple can’t do something like that. Sutherland believes it has to do with a different set of constraints over the Flexibits team and Apple’s developers.

“We’re not Apple. They have to make sure it’s exceedingly obvious for everyone [to use an app] and there’s a button in a visible place for everyone,” he said. “As a third-party app developer you can afford to take a few more chances and try something a bit different.”

Apple also has to make something that ships on time and that works. These guys don’t feel compelled to churn out apps or meet anyone’s deadlines. They’re far more focused on making apps that solve specific problems in daily life.

Fantastical for Mac

For them, that doesn’t necessarily mean mobile either. Mobile is the future, of course. But Sutherland likes the experience of developing for the desktop because “there’s more to think about” and complex problems to solve.

So for those waiting for Flexibits’ next release, don’t be surprised if iOS isn’t the platform they target. It could be for the Mac, or iOS or something not related to Apple too. “We are considering other platforms,” Simmons told me. “We are Apple guys for sure, but we want to make software that betters other people’s lives.”

Simmons was apologetically vague about details of the team’s next collaboration, other than a date: sometime in 2013. But their team of two (or three) could be growing soon too. While updating Fantastical Flexibits plans to to get back to the standalone contacts manager application it put on hold to build Fantastical.

“This year we’re thinking about hiring some people or working with more contractors to open up cycles to do more products,” Simmons said. “We’ll have more than the contacts and address book app this year.”

And if things keep going the way they are, there’s a good chance what they build will need strong consideration as a replacement for your default Contacts app.

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