compose

Incredimail is an elegant way to manage your e-mail on the iPad. You start by signing in to your e-mail accounts and Incredimail gives you a brief tutorial to show you the major features of the app. The app has full IMAP support so you can add your Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, or any other IMAP accounts. A menu button in the upper left lets you quickly switch accounts, and you can also filter by categories within an inbox to look at starred messages, drafts, sent messages, and other mail you have assigned filters.

The beauty of Incredimail is all about … Read more

Apple's latest iTunes update mostly offers bug fixes and performance enhancements but throws in one new feature.

Released yesterday afternoon, iTunes 11.0.2 adds a new Composers view by which you can sort and see your music. After applying the update, open the Preferences window in iTunes. In the Views section, click on the checkbox to Show Composers and then close the Preferences window.

You'll see a new option at the top of your music library for Composers. Click on that option, and you'll be able to select the names of different composers to see just … Read more

Wax is a video special effects and editing tool. While not as complicated as some of the larger video-editing and special effects suites on the market, Wax is intended to be general purpose, easy to work with, and powerful enough to satisfy most users' requirements for video creation and manipulation. Wax installs cleanly and easily.

The Wax interface presents a list of files and effects in the top left, a feed of the video in the top right, a timeline and track display in the bottom right, and some controls in the bottom left. It takes only a few minutes … Read more

Sparrow is an attempt to get away from supercomplex, feature-packed e-mail clients in favor of a simpler e-mail experience on iOS. The interface is elegant while remaining very straightforward: e-mails are listed with the newest on top, and all your actions can be completed with simple gestures. Setup only requires that you add accounts; then you can get started right away.

Though the interface is sparse you still get plenty of the common actions and options you'd expect from a basic e-mail app in Sparrow. You can save your draft e-mails; Star (or mark as favorite) specific conversations; add … Read more

Gmail for iOS is the official e-mail client from Google for iOS, and it's mostly a solid offering with only a couple of issues. The initial release got off to a rocky start with notification errors, but a subsequent release seems to have ironed out the major problems.

Obviously, the Mail app that comes with your iPhone lets you connect to Gmail accounts, but with the official app from Google, you'll get a few more options that you may have come to rely on when using Gmail. Get started by creating a new Gmail account or logging in … Read more

Siri is turning out to be a great assistant for iPhone 4S owners.

Using Siri to compose e-mails or messages for you while on the go is fairly easy and straightforward. One thing that can be a bit of a pain, though, is the lack of punctuation used by Siri while composing those messages for you.

While Siri may not be able to insert punctuation automatically, you can tell Siri where and what type of punctuation you want to use in your messages.

To get Siri to use punctuation, you only need to speak the punctuation during the composition of … Read more

Links from Wednesday's episode of Loaded:

Facebook set to launch "something awesome"later today

Google to drop Blogger and Picasa brands

Adobe and Avid offer deals to switchers

Steve Jobs biography gets title

iPad 2 jailbreak is live

CNET infringement case dropped

For people who aren't musical, the process of composing and playing music seems almost magical. Virtual Musical Composer is a program that aims to bring the joys of musical creation to the tone-deaf masses. Although the program is fun to play with, be prepared to have very little control over the actual results.

The program's interface is somewhat abstruse, without any obvious menus or buttons. We finally realized that tiny arrows within the interface were what we were supposed to use to select our settings. To create a piece of music, we used the arrows to select our … Read more

Image editors are a dime a dozen these days, and a lot of them just aren't worth messing with. Image Editor and Converter Pro, however, is. It's not going to replace Photoshop, but it's a well-designed program that puts the most common photo-editing functions at your fingertips.

The program's interface is clearly modeled after Office 2007, which makes it extremely easy to navigate. Users simply open the image they want to edit and access the program's various tools through a set of well-organized tabs. The Edit tab contains basics, such as rotation, flipping, cropping, and … Read more