Sometimes a solid, old idea can be livened up with a little something extra. Horizon Calendar—a $2 calendar app for the iPhone by developer Kyle Rosenbluth—offers a little something extra, and it’s a beauty: The weather.

Once you’ve entered the time and place of an upcoming appointment in your Horizon calendar, the app shows you what the weather will be like at the location of that entry. While the forecasts only appear for the two weeks closest to the current date, it’s a feature that makes Horizon very helpful for parents wondering whether to pack an umbrella for that field trip, or business travelers unsure how to pack their bags for that weeklong trip to the coast.

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The first rule of online auctions is that you need be constantly connected—if not, how will you be able to bid on a desired item last minute if you’re away from your computer?  Thanks to eBay’s iOS app, you don’t have to worry about ever missing an auction. This full-fledged app allows you to do just about anything eBay’s full website does.

eBay is a free download for iOS devices running iOS 4.3 and later. The app lets you track items that you’re watching, bidding on, or selling. If you’re a buyer, you can review and submit best offers, bid on items at the last minute, and send messages and questions to sellers. If you’re a seller, you can review submitted best offers, track your sold and unsold items, list new items with your own item images, relist unsold items, and create and schedule auctions.

The eBay app lets you search for items to purchase (or, if you’re just curious—say, if you’re looking at an item for resale and you want to know how much it’s selling for) using a rather comprehensive search feature. You can search for an item using keywords or by scanning a UPC, EAN, or QR code, or you can refine your search to show completed listings, sold items, and items with free shipping. Items can be sorted by category, condition (new or used), price range, and buying format (auction or buy it now).

Once you find what you’re looking for, you can place a bid, opt to Buy it Now, or add it to your Watch List, all through the app. You can also share the item via Facebook, Twitter, text message, or email, or sell an item similar to the one you’ve found.

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This Is Not An App is, despite its name, a $5 app from Penguin Group, authored by writer and illustrator Keri Smith. Like much of Smith's work, the app’s focus is on artistic creation and freedom. As an app, it’s cleverly executed. As an experience, it left me wanting.

This Is Not An App is clearly a successor to Smith’s book This Is Not a Book. The reason Smith labels the app and book as, respectively, not an app and not a book, is this: Each consists of a series of loosely guided prompts, meant to motivate you to create something.

When you first launch the app, which runs nicely on iOS devices of every size, presents a typewritten note urging you to enjoy This Is Not An App pretty much however you’d like. And you’ll discover, likely accidentally, that you can actually scribble all over the note. At first, your scribbles are just made with a virtual black pencil, but then you’ll spot the scrollable bar at the bottom containing oodles of other tools: a paint brush, a smudge tool, a typing tool, the camera and your photo roll, a marker, and more. Among the “more” is an innovative, dripping wet brush of sorts; it streaks down the screen in whatever direction you tilt the device.

When you’re done mucking about with and defacing that typewritten intro, you’ll eventually spot the page-turn curls near the bottom of the screen. When you tap on those, you’ll realize that you’re on the first page of a virtual book, and advance to the next one: “This is a dare: Write a list of things you would like to try in your lifetime.”

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At first glance, the free Houzz Interior Design Ideas for iPhone and iPad looks like a home design-oriented variation of Pinterest, the hot social networking service that lets you collect, view, and share interesting items. But Houzz (pronounced How-zz) is a richer resource than that visual inspiration site du jour. While you can scroll through its hundreds of thousands of photos and products and add them to your own virtual lookbooks, otherwise known as Ideabooks, you can also peruse informational content, buy products, and find professional home-design services in your local area directly through the app.

The heart of Houzz is its Ideabooks, where you collect and organize images (pinboards, in Pinterest parlance). When you spot something you like—whether photos from an article, an interior design project, or images from the Photos or Products sections—you can place it in your Ideabook, for which you have to be a registered user. The process is simple: Just tap the item, then tap the Add to Ideabook icon. You can also type in your own comments. When you’re done, tap Save.

Photos galore

Houzz contains a robust database of home design images, all of which are attributed to specific companies and individuals. The casual browser can scroll through the Photos section, narrowing down results by selecting one of 24 categories—from bedrooms and kitchens to home gyms and wine cellars—further sorted by style and metropolitan area, if desired.

Since all photos link back to a professional profile, you can learn more about the people who created an object or design you like: There is contact information, product reviews, and other projects from the same person. If you see a green tag hanging over any of the objects you’re drooling over, click on it for more information, and to go directly to the vendor website. While it might act as a shopaholic enabler, it’s a nice tool to have.

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Nostalgiqa is a baffling social media app that, in theory, enables you to capture your memories and share them (or compile them privately, if you wish) with other users of the app. According to developer HumanSpot, after you save your photos and text in the cloud-based app, “you can access your up-to-date memories on any device you own without any need for synchronization.”

While it is true that you can access your account—and all the photos and text you've entered using Nostalgiqa—from any iOS device without any extra steps required for syincing, there is no apparent way to access your account from your Mac or PC—or any non-iOS device for that matter. I also couldn't find an obvious way to delete a Nostalgiqa account, though I could make memories private and delete material. Contrast that with the photo-sharing app Instagram, which similarly does not provide Web access to photos but automatically saves images to your photo roll on your iPhone; Instagram’s help section also provides a link to a Web page where you can delete your account.

Another mystery is the nature of Nostalgiqa’s social aspect. You can make your memories “public,” meaning that others using the app can view photos and read material you’ve posted. This is as far as it goes, though—Nostalgiqa does not provide any capability for “friending” or following other users, and the search function only allows you to search by time, location, or “Emotiqa” (emotions that are associated with memories). Unlike Instagram, which, when you sign up, helps you find friends via your contact list, Facebook account, Twitter, and via searches, Nostalgiqa does not provide similar capabilities. It does provide the ability to share with friends via Facebook and Twitter.

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As God is my witness, I thought the phrase was “waiting with baited breath.”

Thanks to Phrase Wit—a snarky, funny, educational iPad and iPhone app from Ballpoint—I now know better. The correct phrase is “bated breath,” with the the first word being a shortening of “abate.” “You’re holding your breath in tense anticipation of some outcome,” the app advises. “If you’re looking to attract fish, you might have baited breath.”

Phrase Wit’s job is to take commonly mangled phrases—“all for naught” is right, “all for not” is wrong—and teach users the correct version. It does this several ways: There’s a list of the correct phrases and their mangled cousins; tap on any entry and you’ll get an explanation. You can also spin a wheel on the touchscreen, so that random phrases will appear and peak… er, pique your interest.

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Apple’s new Cards app lets you send photo postcards in the mail, using only your iPhone—and your wallet. The idea is nice, but the execution strikes me as just a smidgen less brilliant than you might expect from the folks in Cupertino.

Perhaps it’s not fair to Cards, but I spent a lot of time comparing it with Postage ( ), an app I adored when I first reviewed it almost two-and-a-half years ago. On the surface, the apps are similar: Each allows you to choose a theme, add a photo, customize text, and send your finished creation off to someone else. Cards, however, is limited to sending letterpress cards through the mail, while Postage instead focuses exclusively on sending e-cards via the Internet. That’s not the only massive difference, though: Postage, as I wrote in 2009, feels like Apple developed it. Cards doesn’t.

Cards only works in landscape mode, unless you’re reading the Help text. To create a card, you begin by choosing a template. You choose among six categories: Thank You, Holiday, Baby, Birthday, Love, and Travel. Oddly, the additional All option lists only 21 choices, and at first glance doesn’t seem to include all the templates from the individual categories. That’s because many of the templates get reused in different categories; only the pre-suggested text changes. (For example, “Thank You” on one template becomes “Happy Holidays” on another; otherwise, it’s an identical design.)

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Alfred wants to help you find some place nearby to eat. And the free iPhone and iPad app from Clever Sense does a pretty solid job of it—if you’re willing to take the time to teach Alfred about your likes and dislikes.

Like a plethora of restaurant finders on the App Store, Alfred taps into iOS’s geo-location features to produce a list of nearby eateries. But those apps just base their results on what’s nearby and maybe—if they’re among the best App Store offerings—a few search criteria that you provide. Alfred—which should not be confused with the Mac utility of the same name—stands out by basing its recommendations on places you’ve told the app that you enjoy.

You train Alfred by answering a series of questions—your favorite place to have a weeknight dinner, for example. Once you provide an answer, Alfred pulls up a list of other eateries in the area broken down by categories like breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert; you tap the names of places you’ve enjoyed in the past to give Alfred even more information on where you like to go. (Alfred’s database of restaurants is fairly impressive—it even included a nondescript hot dog stand near my house where I’ve been known to enjoy the occasional Polish sausage.) An individual training session usually requires about six steps of answering questions and sifting through Alfred’s additional results. When you’re done, Alfred tells you how much smarter it’s become, with the goal of reaching 100 percent.

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This past weekend—a holiday weekend here in the U.S.—my family had a packed schedule, so we opted for take-out on two different evenings. Rather than call in our orders, I decided to try take-out-ordering apps from a couple well-known chains, Baja Fresh and Five Guys. As with most restaurant apps, the idea behind these is that, rather than trying to browse the restaurant’s website while placing an order by telephone, you can launch an easy-to-use app, choose your items right from the menu, and then place your order without ever having to talk to a person. And hopefully, by letting you input your own order, you can avoid mistakes—at least the ones caused by a bad connection or background noise on either end of the phone call. In practice, however, only one of the two apps fulfilled its potential. The other actually drove me back to the telephone.

In the mood for some relatively healthy Mexican food, we tried the Baja Fresh app, for the chain of “fresh”-focused restaurants. Launch the iPhone/iPod touch app, and you’re prompted to Find Nearby Restaurants (based on your phone’s location), enter a zipcode to find restaurants in that area, or view previous orders. (Like most restaurant apps, you need to set up an account before you can place an order or view previous orders.)

That’s where the problems started for me. The closest Baja Fresh restaurant, just a few miles away in Cupertino, Calif., wasn’t listed. (Perhaps it doesn’t participate in the app-ordering service? Whatever the case, its omission makes the app confusing and less useful.) Since we were headed towards Palo Alto, I instead chose a Palo Alto location, which, according to the app, was about 5.5 miles away. Choosing a restaurant displays its address and phone number. You can tap the phone number to call the location, or tap View Map to view its location on a map, but the latter option quits the Baja Fresh app and switches to the iPhone’s Maps app. This would be fine except that whenever you switch out of the Baja Fresh app, you must start over the next time you launch it—it doesn’t remember where you were in the ordering process. Saved app states were introduced with iOS 4.0, Baja Fresh.

I should also point out that the app frequently suffered from connectivity issues: Despite the fact that I had allowed the Baja Fresh app to use my location, it often claimed “Location Unavailable,” so I had to enter a zip code each time. And while using the app, I frequently received errors that the app couldn’t proceed because my phone wasn’t connected to the Internet, even though it clearly was.

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It’s the mobile device equivalent of showing up at a social event in the same outfit: Carrying around an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad that sports the same wallpaper as everybody else. With Pimp Your Screen from Apalon, you can minimize the chances that your iOS device will look indistinguishable from everyone else’s. The $1 app offers a broad selection of well-designed wallpapers for iOS devices of all sizes, making it easy to customize your new look.

Pimp Your Screen runs on iOS 3.0 or later, but note that if you’re using the older operating system, you’re limited to adding wallpaper to your lock screen. To customize your home screen wallpaper, you’ll need to run iOS 4 on your device.

Here’s how it works: you swipe through Pimp Your Screen’s exclusive wallpapers, and if you find one you’d like to use, tap Save. The app will save the image to your camera roll (the same place that photos are saved when you take a photo); you then set that new image as your wallpaper, just like you would with any other photo.

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I own a well-stocked liquor cabinet. Perhaps too well-stocked. Hidden among the bottles of spirits I regularly enjoy are once-tasted, quickly forgotten adult beverages. Some arrived as well-meaning gifts from well-wishers, others as the base ingredients in cocktail experimentation gone horribly awry. Whatever the reason, they’re taking up space that could be occupied by stuff I actually like to drink.

Childhood lessons about the dangers of alcohol apparently never took, but admonitions about the importance of thrift certainly did. Pouring perfectly good booze down the drain or into my flower garden just because I haven’t yet found a cocktail that pleases me seems a tad wasteful. Besides, how else does one find enticing new beverages without a little trial-and-error?

InMyBar, a cocktail recipe app from Quintal Technologies, could be the solution to my twin dilemmas of discovering new cocktails and finding a use for otherwise neglected spirits in my liquor cabinet. You input all the ingredients you have on hand—spirits, mixers, garnishes—and the app will not only show you what items you still need to make certain cocktails, but suggest drinks you can make with what’s already available.

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Amazon has more experience with optimizing the online shopping experience than any other company in the world, and this experience is evident on its Website as well as in its Amazon Mobile app for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. The online retailer has expanded its iOS offerings with an iPad-only entry—Windowshop, which proves to be an intriguing addition.

When you first launch the free app, you’re presented with an orderly but dense array of product images (with brief descriptions) across different categories. You can browse bestsellers, new releases, “most gifted,” and “most wished for” by category and subcategory, or use a search box to seek something specific. You can also explore items more closely (with customer comments, details on the products, prices, and so on), put them in your cart, and of course, purchase items, all from within the app.

Windowshop is, ultimately, unlike sidewalk-surface window shopping, because it simply presents too many options (and too many product results). This is not as much a complaint as it is an observation—Amazon may simply be too big to emulate the experience of casually focusing on and perhaps discussing with friends the few outstanding or unusual items a shopkeeper has chosen to display in a storefront window.

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Editor’s Note: The following review is adapted from Five Star Apps: The Best iPhone and iPad Apps for Work and Play by Glenn Fleishman. (2010, Pearson Education and Peachpit Press).

Off Remote from Hobbyist Software is a switch for remotely changing the active status of a Mac OS X or Windows system; some simple software needs to be installed on the desktop server. It only works on devices connected to the same home or office router, whether connected via Wi-Fi or Ethernet.

With Off Remote, you can be at the other end of the house or office and turn off a computer from your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad. Or you can restart it, put it to sleep, lock it, or log out of the active account. The commands can also be set to occur after a chosen period of time.

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Decide, the Seattle-based company behind decide.com launched an iPad edition of its shopping app on Thursday, which aims to help shoppers get the best deals on consumer electronics and home appliances.

Decide gives users the ability to shop for and compare prices of more than half a million household products from tablets and televisions to vacuums and refrigerators.

The free app gives users buying advice based on its own data-driven price predictions. Browse by category or search for a specific product. Decide will give you a price along with a recommendation of either "Buy" or "Wait" based on whether prices are likely to rise or fall within the next two weeks, and whether a newer model is currently available or on the way.

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Does it seem like iBooks is asking you to sign in with your Apple ID unexpectedly? Are you tearing your hair out because you’ve used every single template in Apple’s Cards app? Do you feel like you’re losing your mind and your patience? Well, a pair of updates from Apple can help you with those first two problems—which may in turn deal with that third one.

Released on Monday, iBooks 2.1.1 fixes that issue with the Apple ID login dialog that pops up like a hockey-masked slasher in a horror movie. Just fire up iBooks after you’ve installed the update, and the problem should be all ironed out. For kicks, Apple has also thrown in some minor stability and performance improvements to make iBooks even iBookier.

If you’re less into reading sentiments than writing them, the latest update to Apple’s Cards, also released on Monday, might hold the key to your heart. Top amongst the additions in Version 1.1 are templates for Mother’s Day—less than a month away—which take advantage of Cards’s typical letterpress stylings. New Get Well designs let you express your sympathies on 100-percent cotton paper, and the app has also rolled in additional options for birthdays and thank you cards, among others. Overall, there are now 34 templates to choose from in Cards, an increase from the 21 included at launch.

Nice as those extra templates are, Apple also spent some time improving the process of using Cards: Checking out once you’ve designed your card is now simpler, and verifying an address for the envelope is more accurate than previously.

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Textfree Voice + VM—the app that lets iPhone users make calls and send free texts over Wi-Fi—has been upgraded with a new voicemail feature.

Pinger launched version 5.0.1 of the app earlier this month in the App Store. The addition of voicemail rounds out a set of features that help iPhone users avoid using up the talk minutes and paid texts under their wireless contracts; it also enables iPod touch users to use that device as a phone in Wi-Fi environments.

Textfree is similar to Google Voice, Skype ( ), and Talkatone—apps that also enable voice and text communication. Users can make free calls to other devices that are also running the Textfree app, and the app offers unlimited free texts; inbound calls to the app are also free. Users pay to call numbers outside the Pinger network ($2 for 100 minutes of talk time), but they can earn free minutes by watching videos or "completing offers" within the app.

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Exacting foodies use the LocalEats restaurant finder on their iPhone to track down the best places to eat in a particular city. Thanks to the latest update to the app, they’ll also have a pretty good idea of what will be on the menu when they get there.

Version 2.4 of the mobile restaurant finder, which hit the App Store Wednesday, adds menus to many of the restaurants listed in LocalEats. The developer of LocalEats struck a partnership with SinglePlatform, a company that specializes in promoting local businesses, to add that information to the iPhone app.

The concept behind LocalEats is to help diners find nearby eateries enjoyed by the local populace—nationwide chains need not apply. The app can find restaurants in your vicinity, provide you with directions, and—thanks to partnerships with OpenTable and Taxi Magic—line up a reservation or hail you a cab. The app did include basic information on pricing, cuisine, and other details about its listed eateries, but for a detailed menu, you would have to leave LocalEats and search for that information on the Web.

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Sending your holiday greeting cards and thank-you notes may just have become a smidgen easier. Apple on Tuesday released Cards 1.0.1, a small update to the photo card creation iPhone app that the company unveiled back in October.

Version 1.0.1 of the app includes improvements spanning three areas: text entry, postal address verification, and the checkout process. It’s that first improvement that’s the most significant one: In the 1.0 version of Cards, text editing could become cumbersome, since the app would sometimes struggle to fit the complete text entry box on the screen. With the latest update, however, that problem is nothing but a bitter memory.

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Jawbone’s Up iPhone accessory now has a November 6 ship date, a $100 price tag, and a free iPhone app that help track your steps, sleep cycles, and more.

First announced in July at TED Global, the Up is a slim, electronic bracelet that tracks your movement and sleep, and syncs with an iPhone app that also happens to go by the Up moniker.

Jason Fass, Jawbone’s Director of Product Management, spoke to Macworld on the Up and Up. Up’s goal, Fass said, is making health “cool”—“We want to make people consumers of their own health, so that health becomes a topic of conversation, like the TV show from last night or that new app that you downloaded.”

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Most of the features in Cards ( ), Apple’s new iPhone app for creating and mailing personalized letterpress photo cards, are pretty straightforward. But there are a few tucked-away niceties you might not discover right away.

Push notifications

When you first launch Cards, you see the familiar iOS notification that the app would like to send you push alerts. But why? What could Cards possibly need to notify you about? Sadly, it’s not a reminder about your Aunt Matilda’s upcoming birthday. Instead, Cards can send you a push notification when your mailed greeting is on the U.S. Postal Service mail truck for delivery.

That’s because Apple prints a bar code on the envelope before it sends your card—specifically, a USPS Intelligent Mail code. When your envelope is set to be delivered, the post office scans the code, and your push notification is triggered.

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Online auction service eBay jumped into the Mac App Store on this week, launching a new program that lets users track sales from their desktop.

The eBay desktop application was released on Tuesday. Like its iOS app predecessor, the app is aimed at buyers and not sellers—although eBay has solved that issue in the mobile arena with its new Instant Sale app. Users can’t put items up for auction, but they can create saved searches for products they want to buy, as well as monitor eBay’s Daily Deals. Users can also share links to favored items via email.

Of course, if you’re on your computer already, eBay.com is just a browser window away—and with a broader range of features. The app appears designed for multitasking auction enthusiasts—people who want to keep an eye on eBay’s auctions and deals during the day while they surf the Web or do productive work.

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Buying, writing, and finally getting to the post office to send holiday cards to faraway friends and family can take a good chunk of time. If you’re a connoisseur of greeting cards, then you probably won’t need any help with the process. But if you’re like me—short on time and a bit of a holiday procrastinator—it’s helpful to have an easy and quick way to let people know you’re thinking of them this season.

We’ve covered five different ways to create and send holiday photo cards, but for those who are always on the go, iOS apps are a more convenient option. You can create and send personalized cards in no time, whether it’s during your bus commute to and from work or while on a half-hour lunch break. Apple’s Cards is one of the better available apps (for more information, check out our full review), but if you’re looking for different card designs or less expensive options, here are some alternatives to consider. (All apps are available for free in the App Store, unless otherwise noted.)

Sincerely Ink

Sincerely’s Sincerely Ink app is made specifically for the holiday greeting card season, offering more than 30 Christmas, Hanukkah, and general cold-weather cards. The app has only flat, postcard-style options, but if you’re looking for cute and classy designs, Sincerely Ink offers some of the best. When you launch the app you’re taken to a virtual shelf that displays thumbnails of the card designs, which are organized into three tabs: Photo, Illustrated, and Saved. If you choose to use one of the photo card options, you will be able to resize your own image, as well as apply a black and white or sepia filter. Unfortunately it’s not possible to flip or rotate your photo within the app, so you will need to do this elsewhere before using the photo in Sincerely Ink.

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