While most of Apple’s stock iOS apps are pretty handy, there are a few that the large majority of us probably never open. I’m talking about apps like Stocks, Voice Memos, and Weather (which always seems to be inaccurate in the U.K.). Unfortunately, the Cupertino company doesn’t allow us to remove these, so the only way to do it was to jailbreak. Until now.
Thanks to a nifty new web app, you can temporarily remove stock iOS icons from your device without jailbreaking. Here’s how.
A wonderful new news app from Reuters kicks off this week’s must-have apps list, providing you with an “unprecedented photography experience” that allows you to immerse yourself in the biggest news stories from around the world. Also included in the roundup is a terrific app for making mobile websites from your iPhone, a new weather app, and more.
I’m a borderline weather geek. I don’t just like to know the temperature — both inside and out — I even keep a hydrometer in my home so I can keep tabs on the humidity, cause you know, that’s important.
So naturally, when I found out about the Netatmo Weather Station ($179), I was a little excited. With its indoor and outdoor weather modules, the Netatmo tracks a lot more than just the current temperature. Plus, unlike my crappy $5 hydrometer, it relays all its readings in a unified way, presented beautifully in an iOS app optimized for both my iPhone and iPad.
Here’s how it works.
Siri has been updated along with the rest of the iOS in the new iteration from Apple. The personal voice assistant can take dictation, help you plan your wardrobe around the weather, keep track of your buddies, inform you on all sorts of sports information, and help you choose the best movie to go see, all using basic spoken English.
Of course, it helps to know what kinds of questions and commands you can actually say to produce the desired results. Here’s five things you can do with Siri the right way, so you can spend less time repeating yourself and more time going to those movies and meeting up with those friends.
When I was a cub scout, I made my own backyard weather station. It was to get my science badge, or weather nerd badge, or whatever, and it mainly consisted of counting the millimeters of rain in a jamjar with an oversized plastic funnel perched on the top. And there was always rain: This was England.
If I’d had access to the wonderful technology of today, though, I could have stayed in watching TV and let the Netatmo do the work for me. The Netatmo is a weather station for both indoors and outdoors, and is sold as something that will stop you from worrying about your children and — therefore — the future.
Dark Sky started as a Kickstarter project and turned into a gorgeous, functional iOS weather app. Cult of Mac’s Charlie Sorrel praised the app when it launched back in April, and Dark Sky has since seen great success.
The key feature of Dark Sky is its ability to quickly tell you when it’s going to storm. In a huge 2.0 update, Dark Sky has gotten even better with several improvements, including the ability to send you a push notification before it starts raining.
Minimalist weather apps must be the current hot trend among developers right now because we’ve seen a slew of pretty new iOS weather apps hit the App Store recently. If the last three weather apps we covered haven’t quite done it for you, maybe Partly Cloudy will.
Partly Cloudy is different from most weather apps in that it displays all the information you would need to know for a single day in one unique and compelling infographic. Modeled on a traditional clock face, Partly Cloudy’s infographic presents weather data in a fun new way that’s also very useful.
Kicking off this week’s must-have apps roundup is a stunning new weather app called Solar, which boasts a simple, intuitive user interface and a no frills approach that doesn’t suffocate you with information you’re not interested in. There’s also a great new drawing and animation app from Disney that you and your kids will love; a great new photography app that adds bokeh light effects to your photos; and updates to Google Earth and Yelp.
If you’ve recently typed “weather” into Google search on your mobile phone, you may have noticed Google’s neat little interactive weather visualizations. The new weather visualizations give you a look at the current forecast, precipitation, wind direction/speeds, as well as an hourly and ten-day forecast. And now, these same cool visualizations are available in search on tablets.
Despite months of speculation, many doubted Google would ever bring its terrific Chrome browser to iOS. But the search giant has put an end to the rumors by finally releasing it, and it’s kicking off this week’s must-have apps roundup. We also have a new weather app for those who like to keep it simple, arguably the best Google Analytics client for iOS, and more.
Want to quickly check the weather on your iPhone? Want to have your eyes soothed by wonderful, minimal design at the same time as you’re informed of the temperature outside? Then you need WTHR, an iPhone app which could have been designed by Dieter Rams himself.
When the iPad launched, there was an inexplicable lack of a couple of core Apple-made apps. There was no Clock, no Weather app and (thankfully) no Stocks. Now, Clocks has been added to the iPad in iOS6, and weather is also in there – kinda.
Leading this week’s must-have apps roundup is a terrific photography app called StillShot, which allows you to extract full-resolution still images from your videos. It breaks your clips down into frames and allows you to save the best ones — all for less than a dollar.
We’ve also got a great note-taking app that claims to be the “word-processor for visual thinking,” an app that will ensure you never forget your grocery shopping list again, plus terrific updates to Flipboard and The Weather Channel.
Instacast, undoubtedly the best podcast manager for iOS, got a great update this week that deserves a place in our must-have apps roundup. We’ve also got an impressive voice translation tool that you just have to try, a social weather app that’s more reliable than the weatherman, plus major updates for Pocket and Google+.
A jailbreak tweak called Forecast presents a handy weather widget on your iPhone’s lock screen for displaying current weather and the weekly forecast. Powered by Apple’s own Weather app, Forecast replaces the standard time and date at the top of your iPhone’s lock screen. Weather info is displayed on the right while the time is still displayed on the top left of the lock screen, giving you the best of both worlds.
If you visited the site yesterday, you’ll already be aware that Cult of Mac’s weekly must-have apps and games roundups are now back. This is where we choose our pick of the best new releases and updates to hit the App Store in the past week.
This week’s feature includes the official Klout app, which has finally made its way to iOS; a great service for storing and syncing your passwords from security specialists Norton; a beautiful weather app, and more.
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.
Weather Pro for iPad has just been updated with hi-definition maps. I know what you’re thinking: Are those dorks at Cult of Mac really going to write a post about every app that gets retina display support? Well, maybe, but this update actually brings something that can make use of all those extra pixels: Super-detailed weather maps.
In Phoenix, Arizona, rain is a commodity scarcer than a purple elephant slowly lumbering down Main Street. Consequently, people go straight up loco when their iPhone’s weather app predicts rain. Most of the time the hours sadly glide past and the clouds and precipitation never show up. A collective mourning rumbles across the city, and meteorologists cower under their desks, ashamed at their disastrous predictions. They never can quite seem to predict the rain.
It’s sad that we can put a man on the moon but still suck at predicting the weather. IBM’s mind-blowing “Deep Thunder” iPad Weather app is seeking to change all that though, by becoming the most insanely accurate weather predicting tool ever.
Some of Apple’s stock iPhone apps would work wonderfully on the iPad, such as Clock, Stocks, Weather, and Calculator. But the Cupertino company seems to have no plans to port these apps over to the larger device. After all, I’m sure if it did we’d already have them by now.
But thanks to a new utility for jailbroken iPads called Belfry, you can port them over yourself.
aTV Flash (black) from FireCore is the ultimate solution for supercharging your jailbroken second-generation Apple TV. It introduces some terrific features that we’d all love to have on the device as standard, including a web browser, weather and RSS feeds, a Last.fm radio, and support for a huge variety of media formats.
But aTV Flash is even better with its latest update, which adds even more features and greatly improves your Apple TV experience.
Weathermob is new and hip on the App Store this week. It’s a weather app with a twist – it’s social. Think of it as Instagram for clouds. Kinda.
aTV Flash (black) from FireCore has now dropped its beta tag and hit version 1.0. The software package is designed to supercharge your second-generation jailbroken Apple TV, introducing a whole host of functionality that isn’t available from Apple. In addition to a media player which supports a huge variety of formats, aTV Flash will also introduce a web browser, weather and RSS feeds, a Last.fm radio, and more to your set-top box.
The Notification Center that ships with iOS 5 is nice. By default, it displays a stock ticker, weather, mail, and calendar entries. It all looks great, but behind the eye candy are some useful secrets. Today, we’ll take a look at the weather widget.
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Since iOS 5 was released two weeks ago, jailbreak tweak developers have been hard at work creating third-party widgets that can be integrated into the new Notification Center. The latest is called WeeTranslate, and offers a quick and easy way to access Google Translate on your iPhone.