apps - page 14

The worst part about vacationing is coming back home and getting hit in the face with cold, hard reality. Excessive food consumption, relaxing atmospheres and sugary alcoholic beverages are out of your life and work is back in. But what if you take the travel part (not to mention the cost) completely out of equation? You get Flyover in Apple Maps.

Why vacation in this costly, unforgiving world when you can live vicariously through your iPhone, iPad or Mac?

Flyover, the immersive 3-D view in Apple Maps, now supports hundreds of cities around the world and Apple adds more all the time. In fact, seven more were added to the list just today so we thought it would be fun to take a look at the hottest vacationing spots of 2015, without even leaving the couch.

Get your summer vacay on at these hot Flyover spots:

Looking for an app or two to while away the weekend? Then you’ve come to the right place, my friend!

From reading apps to Terminator navigation tools to gorgeous RPGs, we’ve got everything you need to know about the latest must-have apps.

Check out our top picks below:

Color blindness is an extremely prevalent disability, especially amongst men: according to official statistics, 1 in 12 men are color blind (although women fare better, at a rate of only 1 in 200). These rates of color blindness are part of the reason why Google places such importance in their Material Design guidelines on designing with color blindness in mind. For example, by not relying on color alone to relay critical information within an app.

But no matter how well programmed an app is, it’s not going to help someone who is color blind see colors… or is it? Red Stripe is a new app by developer Michel Fortin that aims to do just that.

Sean Parker — the rogue Silicon Valley investor behind Napster, and a formative part of Facebook’s early development — has a new iOS app out. It’s called Brigade, and it’s got good election timing: it’s an app devoted to sharing and polling people on their political opinions.

Apple’s iOS 9 News app hasn’t even seen the light of day yet, but publishers are already heavily discontent with the email Apple sent out to them regarding its terms and conditions. The email essentially tells publishers what they’re agreeing to by opting in to the News app and assumes they agree unless they explicitly state otherwise.

Even if publishers don’t like the terms and conditions Apple lays out, Apple is basically forcing their hands unless they later specify that they don’t agree. In that case, of course, they also don’t get to be a part of the News app. The terms and conditions themselves don’t entirely appear to be causing the uproar, but rather the odd presumption that all the publishers are automatically willing to participate even in total silence.

For years, Apple’s software engineers have played a cat-and-mouse game, closing loopholes that let non-developers install unsigned apps on their devices. But it looks like they’re finally giving up and will let any user install anything on any Apple device — as long as they’re using Xcode 7 to do it.

Developers are churning out the Apple Watch apps way faster than the first wave of iPhone apps that launched with the App Store. According to new data provided by App Annie to Cult of Mac, the number of Apple Watch apps has double since the device debuted on April 22nd.

If you’ve ever tried to book a cruise through a portal like Cruise.com or — heaven forbid — via a cruise line’s website, you know that it can be an incredibly confusing and costly experience.

The thing is, though, that it doesn’t have to be. Cruisable is a startup that hopes to take the obfuscation away and let you find affordable and/or incredibly fantastic cruise vacations with a website and app that won’t try to trick you.

“Cruises can be cheaper than other getaways,” said CTO and co-founder Giacomo Balli, “as low as a couple hundred dollars.”

Apple Watch is the most personal device you’ll ever use, and it’s not just because you wear it all day.

This is the most customizable Apple product we’ve ever seen. Everything from clock faces to the app homescreen can be tweaked to your personal tastes. Early Apple Watch owners have already come up with a myriad of different ways to change the app homescreen so that it’s just not a giant blob of randomness. Some are a bit crazy, while others are down right brilliant.

Check out out some of the best custom layouts below:

Apple Watch, inbound! And now that it is, we’ll take a look at some of the most useful Watch apps available, and just for fun, some of the stinkiest. Plus: the noteworthy differences between the Sport and steel editions; why those “scratch test” videos shouldn’t trouble you; and finally, you’ll never believe what our ol’ pal and ex-Apple exec Scott Forstall is up to now…

Our thanks for Freshbooks for supporting this episode. FreshBooks is the easy-to-use invoicing software designed to help small business owners get organized, save time invoicing and get paid faster. It also makes tax time a cinch. Get started now with a 30-day free trial.

Full show notes ahead!

Those of you who were hoping the Apple Watch would usher in a new era of flatulence apps, prepare to be disappointed: Apple has already rejected the first app that serves no purpose other than to allow people to make fart sounds from their wrist.

The first wave of Apple Watch are finally here just  in time for Friday’s big release. The Apple Watch App Store went live yesterday with over 3,000 apps that are sure to delight users, as developers try to create the first must-have Apple Watch app.

We rounded up some of our the coolest apps that are ready for your wrist this morning, but we also couldn’t help but notice there were a lot of apps that would be awesome if they were available today.

Here are 7 killer apps Apple Watch should have, but doesn’t:

Apple is known for placing its fair share of Easter eggs into iOS and OS X, but this is the coolest one we’ve seen in a while.

You know the new Voice Memos icon Apple introduced in iOS 7 Beta 2? It turns out the icon is designed after the waveform representation of someone saying “Apple.”

Adobe’s Behance, Adobe Color CC, and Creative Cloud apps have all been updated to include Apple Watch support in a move designed to both sell more iOS apps as well as inspire their current customers to get outside of the computer and create.

“That’s because designers get a lot of their best ideas,” writes Adobe’s David Macy, “not while sitting at our desks, but from interacting with and observing the world around us.”

IFTTT’s already dead simple Do collection of apps is about to get even better: two of the apps have just been supercharged with Apple Watch support, allowing you to run an IFTTT recipe on your watch face with just a single tap.

After years of examining the Android operating system, the European Commission has launched a formal antitrust investigation into claims that Google unfairly forces competitors into bundling its own apps on their devices.

Today, 1Password developer AgileBits announced that their popular iOS password management app, 1Password, has been updated to the Apple Watch. But 1Password could even be cooler in the updates that follow.

There are self-help books and expensive seminars that can give powerful inspiration to raise your career profile, be a better leader or grow your business.

Then there’s the free app that could potentially be a game-changer in less than three minutes.

The ambitious can gain bits of advice from more than 100 corporate gurus, best-selling authors and motivational speakers with Audvisor, a library of curated expertise brought to IOS and Android users in short audio clips.

The Apple Watch may be good at telling you how healthy you are, tracking your steps, propelling you to move, and reminding you of upcoming appoints, but conventional wisdom says it’s rubbish for reading. The 38mm and 42mm screens are just too tiny to read anything more than a sentence or two long on, and certainly not any longreads.

So on paper (no pun intended), Instapaper for Apple Watch is a terrible idea. Amazingly, though, it looks like the Instapaper team at Betaworks has made it work.

Crowd-sourced navigation app Waze has got a neat little idea for this coming Easter: little eggs you can drive over while using the app for points (three per egg!) and bragging rights.

So, as you drive down the street, headed to the grocery or picking up the kids, you can maximize your route to get as many egg points as possible.

This fun little promotion is happening now (it started last week) and will last through April 5.

Apple Stores won’t have the Apple Watch on display for a few weeks, but anyone eager to see what the world of wrist apps will offer can already download them to their iPhone.

The first wave of Apple Watch-supported apps started hitting iTunes today, with big names like Target, Evernote, WeChat and Expedia being some of the first out of the gate. You can’t actually use the Apple Watch functionality on the apps yet (unless Tim Cook hooked you up with an early unit), but you can get an early glimpse of how some apps will dramatically change your life.

Here are some of the first Apple Watch apps you can download and their features:

Amazon is preparing a new app service for Android. It’s called Unlocked, and think of it as free Amazon Prime for apps. But there’s a catch. Apps that are given freely can also be taken away again.

What will make or break the Apple Watch for most people isn’t a fancy band or the feel of the Digital Crown. It will be the apps they can use.

And after today’s Spring Forward event, it looks like a lot of apps will be ready for Watch on day one.

There won’t be an App Store on the Watch itself, but you’ll be able to install apps directly from a special section of the App Store on a paired iPhone. Here are what the hottest third-party Watch apps will look like, including ones Apple isn’t showing off on its site:

Apple and IBM’s partnership to bring iOS apps into the workplace produced 10 apps last year. Today at Mobile World Congress, IBM announced that it is launching three more MobileFirst apps aimed at the banking, airline, and retail industries.

The three new iOS apps are available for deployment and customization starting today. The apps are part of Tim Cook’s initiative to change the way people work by giving companies access to high-quality iOS apps. IBM says its clients for the MobileFirst apps include American Eagle Outfitters, Sprint, Air Canada, Banorte, and more than 50 others.

Here’s a quick look at the three new apps:

Adobe’s Lightroom app for iOS is actually pretty good, but you have to pay for a Creative Cloud subscription to use it.

What if you could have the power of an editing suite like Lightroom without all of the extra fuss? You want just one app for editing pictures on the go, but it needs to be easy to use and full featured.

Enter Darkroom, the hottest new photography app for iPhone.