appstore - page 2

Dark Sky, A Gorgeous Weather App Predicts The Next Hour’s Rain

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For a few people, Dark Sky is going to be the most useful weather app ever

As an Englishman, I know all about rain. I’m intimate with sleet, drizzle, and driving rain both horizontal and vertical. I know about rain that slowly soaks you even though it seems that none is falling, about freezing rain that stings as hard as hail, about the rain that seems to ignore your umbrella and creep into even the best-sealed seams of your clothes.

Other countries might have spectacular monsoons, or driving rainstorms that flow for days, but for variety and ubiquity of precipitation, it’s hard to beat the British Isles. Which is why I’m sad that Dark Sky — an app that predicts the rain forecast for the next hour only — currently only works in the continental United States.

PicPlayPost Makes Video Dyptics And 1980s TV-Series Title Sequences

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PicPlayPost makes diptycs from your photos and movies

PicPlayPost is supposedly a way to make video diptychs of your precious moments, and then share them via the usual social networks. But if you grew up in (or otherwise managed to live through) the 1980s, you’ll know exactly what this app is for: remaking the cheesy title sequences of 1980s TV shows like Dallas.

OnCue Is The Music Player Your iDevice Will Thank You For

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Apple should be embarrassed by the awful iOS music app. Fix it with OnCue

Unless you really hate yourself, or are just plain weird, you probably throw up in your mouth a little every time you launch the iPad’s music app. Ugly, with tiny controls and no way to customize the various navigation buttons on the bottom row (terrible for podcast or audio book fans), it is worse in almost every way than the player it replaced.

So why not ditch it altogether? There are plenty of alternate players in the app store, but OnCue 5 has a great drag-and-drop interface, and will let you create (as its name suggests) play queues, along with a lot of other neat features.

Capcom Cuts Street Fighter IV To 99c, Donates Profits To Tsunami Victims

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This is great. Japanese games giant Capcom has slashed the price of Street Fighter IV for iOS to just one dollar (59p in the UK) until March 22nd. Sega is doing something similar for Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic 2.

Every penny from those sales will be donated to relief funds for the victims of the Japanese tsunami and earthquake. Street Fighter has already knocked Tiny Wings off the top of the UK Top 25 list as a result.

Capcom says: “We can never thank you enough for all the support each one of you are giving to us. People from all over the world, please unite with us to help people in the disaster-struck area.”

You heard ’em, kids. Grab your bargains now, and send a dollar to help people who need it.

Apple Launches App Store Subscriptions

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Apple has just announced the launch of App Store Subscriptions, a service “for all publishers of content-based apps”.

It’s the same system used for News Corp’s much-hyped The Daily.

The deal is simple: Apple takes 30% of all subs bought through the App Store. Publishers are allowed to sell subs via other channels if they wish, and keep all the money.

Or in a comment attributed to Steve Jobs in the official press release:

“Our philosophy is simple—when Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30 percent share; when the publisher brings an existing or new subscriber to the app, the publisher keeps 100 percent and Apple earns nothing.”

Follow The iOS App Store On Twitter

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It’s only been active for a matter of hours as far as I can tell, but already at the time of writing, the official App Store Twitter account has over 36,000 followers and I expect it will soon attract many more.

This appears to be an account for the old skool iOS App Store. No doubt the newer Mac App Store will get an account of its own in due course.

WTF App Of The Week: Cat Camera

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It’s a problem I’m sure you’ll be familiar with: whenever you want to take a picture of your cat, said cat suddenly becomes utterly disinterested in you and everything you stand for.

Will the cat humor you, and turn its face to the camera? Will it hell.

What you need in situations like this is Cat Camera, the camera app that makes a reasonable stab at meeowing like a cat, in the hope that this provocative sound will make your cat turn its head in the right direction. It’s a bit basic and rather buggy, but hey, it’s a start.

I tried it on my neighbour’s cat, it still continued to ignore the hell out of me, despite Cat Camera’s fake meeowings:

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Your milage, as well as your cats, may vary.

Mac App Store: What Do Apple’s A-List Developers Think?

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So there’s going to be an App Store for the Mac, just like the App Store we’re all used to on iOS.

What do OS X developers think of this?

I got in touch with a bunch of devs to ask them what they make of it. Many of them are still reading through the official documentation, and some of the questions they ask below may well be answered there. But here are some of their very first impressions…