11 Hidden Best iPhone Apps of 2012

Apple has released its own list of best apps of 2012, which contains the 10 most-downloaded free apps and 10 most-downloaded paid apps of the year. Rather than popular apps based on total download counts, we have collected a list of hidden gems that you may have missed out on in the app store in 2012.

Khan Academy give you free access to Khan Academy’s complete library of over 3,500 videos. Khan Academy covers a large number of topics including maths, science, finance & economics and even humanities. Spare some of your free time and you can learn about the fundamentals of computer science or prepare for SAT.

Rechner is a simple and elegant calculator. Rechner is the first calculator taking advantage of the finger gesture on iPhone. All you need to do is to remember a few simple swipes and then you can use this sexy calculator.

Snapguide allows anyone to submit step-by-step guides. It covers a wide range of topics including beauty, cooking, gardening, pets and even automotive. You can create your own guides and share your interests on Twitter, Facebook or other social networks. By using Snapguide, you can discover people who share the same interests as you.

Time machine contains over 10,000 hand-picked videos from 1860 to 2012. You can easily waste spend your whole afternoon on specific categories including TV, Music, Sports and Advertisements. You may even find all the epic videos of your youth. Try video time machine and I am sure you will lose many hours to it.

Mr Mood use a simple method to keep track of your mood everyday. If you find that you are consistently depressed or unhappy, it’s time to make some changes.

Feedly is the most stylish app among all of the RSS reader apps in App store. Feedly also transforms web site content into beautiful cards which are easy to read and load extremely quickly. You can save your articles via other read it later apps such as Buffer, Pocket and Instapaper.

Showyou is the best way for you to explore videos on YouTube, TED Vimeo and other video sites. The videos on Showyou are selected by your friends and people that you know. Thanks to air-play mirroring, you can now stream Showyou videos to your TV. Enjoy your new TV channel!

Fantastical is the most user-friendly calendar app on iPhone. Simply type in a sentence such as “Lunch with Greyson in Cupertino on Friday” and this app will schedule it automatically. This app also supports voice dictation. If you can speak the details of your events, Fantastical will handle the rest of the input.

Manga-camera can convert whatever photos you take into a comic-like image. There are more then 20 frames built-into the app. You can also download new frames from the in-app frame store. All the frames are FREE at the moment.

Although Zinio was first launched in 2009, the developer has been updating the apps to optimize the performance of the app. It is a better way than any other reading apps to explore, read and shop for more than 4000 magazines in the world. The interface of the app has been revamped since version 2.0 and the new UI make it easier to read your favorite magazines anytime and anywhere.

Launched in 2011, it has been updated most recently in December of this year. It’s still better than other photo labeling apps, and the revamped version has a label store which provides access to many more labels. The app itself, is ideal for labelling photos with an easy to use UI that has kept this app popular.

Brian Lee is the manager of Lifehack.org who covers all sorts of tips for life. Brian has lived and studied in USA, Canada, China and Hong Kong and holds his BA in Global Business.

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The hidden history of lobotomy’s non-inventor

A fascinating snippet on the notorious supposed inventor of the frontal lobotomy, Egas Moniz, from an article in the Polish Journal of Neurology and Neurosurgery:

Egas Moniz: a genius, unlucky looser or a Nobel Committee error?

Neurol Neurochir Pol. 2012;46(1):96-103.

Lass P, Slawek J, Sitek E.

Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz is one of the most intriguing figures in the history of medicine. While an invention of angiography in 1927 is his acknowledged merit, lobotomy, invented in 1935 became a black legend of psychiatry, although sporadically it is performed also today. There are even postulates to withdraw the Nobel Prize, which Moniz received in 1949 for inventing the lobotomy. Moniz in fact re-invented lobotomy, primarily introduced in 1888 by a Swiss psychiatrist Gottlieb Burckhardt and later forgotten. Its popularisation, including its abuses was chiefly done by American neurologists Walter Freeman and James Watts.

Aside the science, Moniz was an exceptionally colourful person, a merited politician, Portuguese minister of foreign affairs, the head of its delegation at Versailles in 1918, in 1951 he was even proposed a position of a Presidentof Portugal. He was a versatile humanist and a writer, even a gambling expert. His person is hard for black and white evaluation, definitely deserving a re-evaluation from today’s historical perspective.

Link to abstract of article on PubMed.

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The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement

Guest Reviewer: Walter Isaacson on The Social Animal

Walter Isaacson, the CEO of the Aspen Institute, has been chairman of CNN and the managing editor of Time magazine. He is the author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life and of Kissinger: A Biography, and the coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and daughter.

David Brooks has written an absolutely fascinating book about how we form our emotions and character. Standing at the intersection of brain science and sociology, and writing with the wry wit of a James Thurber, he explores the unconscious mind and how it shapes the way we eat, love, live, vacation, and relate to other people. In The Social Animal, he makes the recent revolution in neuroscience understandable, and he applies it to those things we have the most trouble knowing how to teach: What is the best way to build true relationships? How do we instill imaginative thinking? How do we develop our moral intuitions and wisdom and character? Brooks has always been a keen observer of the way we live. Now he takes us one layer down, to why we live that way.

--Walter Isaacson

An Amazon Interview with David Brooks

We talked with David Brooks about, among other things, Jonathan Franzen, Freud, and Brooks's own unfamiliar emotions, just before the publication of The Social Animal. You can read the full interview on Omnivoracious, the Amazon books blog, including this exchange:

Amazon.com: Speaking of Tolstoy, I bet a lot of people are going to quoting the first line of Anna Karenina to you: "Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Is there a consistency between what makes a family happy, the way that this family turns out to be?

Brooks: You know, I never bought Tolstoy's line.

Amazon.com: I didn't either.

Brooks: I didn't know many happy families that were alike. One of the things you learn is that we're all so much more complex. We all contain multitudes, so someone who might be a bully in one circumstance is incredibly compassionate in other circumstances. We have multiple selves, and the idea that we can have a very simple view of who we are, what our character is, that's actually not right.

One of the things all this research shows you is how humble you have to be in the face of the complexity of human nature. We've got a 100 billion neurons in the brain, and it's just phenomenally complicated. You take a little child who says, "I'm a tiger," and pretends to be a tiger. Well that act of imagination--conflating this thing "I" with this thing "tiger"--is phenomenally complicated. No computer could ever do that, but it's happening below the level of awareness. It seems so easy to us. And so one of the things these people learn is they contain these hidden strengths, but at the same time they have to be consciously aware of how modest they can be in understanding themselves and proceed on that basis.

A Letter from Author David Brooks

© Josh Haner, The New York Times

Several years ago I did some reporting on why so many kids drop out of high school, despite all rational incentives. That took me quickly to studies of early childhood and research on brain formation. Once I started poking around that realm, I found that people who study the mind are giving us an entirely new perspective on who we are and what it takes to flourish.

We’re used to a certain story of success, one that emphasizes getting good grades, getting the right job skills and making the right decisions. But these scientists were peering into the innermost mind and shedding light on the process one level down, in the realm of emotions, intuitions, perceptions, genetic dispositions and unconscious longings.

I’ve spent several years with their work now, and it’s changed my perspective on everything. In this book, I try to take their various findings and weave them together into one story.

This is not a science book. I don’t answer how the brain does things. I try to answer what it all means. I try to explain how these findings about the deepest recesses of our minds should change the way we see ourselves, raise our kids, conduct business, teach, manage our relationships and practice politics. This story is based on scientific research, but it is really about emotion, character, virtue and love. We’re not rational animals, or laboring animals; we’re social animals. We emerge out of relationships and live to bond with each other and connect to larger ideas.

Price: $27.00

Click here to buy from Amazon

The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement

Guest Reviewer: Walter Isaacson on The Social Animal

Walter Isaacson, the CEO of the Aspen Institute, has been chairman of CNN and the managing editor of Time magazine. He is the author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life and of Kissinger: A Biography, and the coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and daughter.

David Brooks has written an absolutely fascinating book about how we form our emotions and character. Standing at the intersection of brain science and sociology, and writing with the wry wit of a James Thurber, he explores the unconscious mind and how it shapes the way we eat, love, live, vacation, and relate to other people. In The Social Animal, he makes the recent revolution in neuroscience understandable, and he applies it to those things we have the most trouble knowing how to teach: What is the best way to build true relationships? How do we instill imaginative thinking? How do we develop our moral intuitions and wisdom and character? Brooks has always been a keen observer of the way we live. Now he takes us one layer down, to why we live that way.

--Walter Isaacson

A Letter from Author David Brooks

© Josh Haner, The New York Times

Several years ago I did some reporting on why so many kids drop out of high school, despite all rational incentives. That took me quickly to studies of early childhood and research on brain formation. Once I started poking around that realm, I found that people who study the mind are giving us an entirely new perspective on who we are and what it takes to flourish.

We’re used to a certain story of success, one that emphasizes getting good grades, getting the right job skills and making the right decisions. But these scientists were peering into the innermost mind and shedding light on the process one level down, in the realm of emotions, intuitions, perceptions, genetic dispositions and unconscious longings.

I’ve spent several years with their work now, and it’s changed my perspective on everything. In this book, I try to take their various findings and weave them together into one story.

This is not a science book. I don’t answer how the brain does things. I try to answer what it all means. I try to explain how these findings about the deepest recesses of our minds should change the way we see ourselves, raise our kids, conduct business, teach, manage our relationships and practice politics. This story is based on scientific research, but it is really about emotion, character, virtue and love. We’re not rational animals, or laboring animals; we’re social animals. We emerge out of relationships and live to bond with each other and connect to larger ideas.

Price: $27.00

Click here to buy from Amazon