Shaoshupai Review Spotlights Very Good Camera, Controller for HomeKit 10, X Gestures and Dots

Very Good Camera, an iOS app from Very Good Co., is designed to mimic film-stock color and handling. It offers three presets: VG400 for daily, street and travel photography; VG800 for low-light, indoor and night shots; and VGTX for black-and-white images built on contrast, lines and texture. Users can switch presets from the lower-left corner of the camera screen and preview the effect before shooting. It supports 4:3, 2:3 and XPAN aspect ratios, and its control dial adjusts exposure, saturation, contrast and color temperature. Exposure can be automatic or manual, with ISO and shutter-speed controls. It records JPG, HEIC and RAW files and offers 12MP and 48MP options depending on iPhone model and shooting mode. According to the review, the app has three camera interfaces—full, basic and simple—plus grid, level and histogram tools and white, black or film-style viewfinder borders. It costs 68 yuan in the App Store.

Controller for HomeKit 10, available on iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, macOS and tvOS, adds custom dashboards and family sharing. Users can build dashboards with weather, clock, camera, floor plan, scene and workflow cards, arrange them by room and resize cards or change backgrounds. Cards and sections can be set to appear only under conditions such as a temperature threshold. The app also uses AI to adjust layouts from natural-language requests, and users can refine the result manually. On iPhone, the update adds home-screen and Control Center widgets for opening a specific dashboard; the side Action button can be assigned to a Controller dashboard. Family sharing lets users share the whole configuration or selected dashboards, though device and room access remains managed by Apple’s Home app. The update also adds image-based floor plans and global search that finds scenes and workflows containing a device. Controller is free to download with subscription and one-time purchase options; Essentials and Plus include dashboards and family sharing, and the subscription has a seven-day trial. Features that previously required a separate Plus subscription are now available in the one-time purchase version, the review said.

X Gestures, an open-source Android app, extends edge swipes into shortcuts and includes floating controls. Users can adjust trigger strips on the left and right edges and bind horizontal or diagonal swipes to more than 50 actions, including screenshots, locking the screen, switching to the previous app, music controls, an app launch panel, Shell commands and some app activities. Swiping up or down on an edge opens a drawer-like app panel that can be searched by name or initial. The app also offers a floating pointer that works as a virtual mouse and a floating ball with multi-direction swipe, tap and long-press actions. Holding the ball and sliding horizontally picks up text on screen; pausing turns the selection into a box for editing, copying, screenshots, translation or image search. Long-pressing the ball opens a ring launcher. The app supports shake gestures such as flipping, swinging, face-down placement and back taps, and adds notification filters, verification-code extraction and other extensions. It can be downloaded free from GitHub; the full version bundles offline OCR and word-segmentation engines, while the Lite version downloads dependencies on demand.

Dots is a macOS utility that turns the MacBook notch into a small workspace. Users can place music controls, to-dos, notes and other widgets on the notch panel and adjust each widget’s style and information density. The review highlighted configurable height and selective widgets, with the panel opening when the cursor moves to the notch and closing automatically. Dots also includes a long-screenshot tool, drag-and-drop file format conversion, a whiteboard for sketching and monitoring for coding tasks, including SSH session progress and GitHub pull-request reviews. Most features are free, according to the review, including YouTube, the Pomodoro timer and long screenshots. A Pro membership costs $5 as a one-time purchase and adds features including SSH, the review said.