apps - page 16

My math-averse daughter wanted to cheat on her algebra homework. So we downloaded PhotoMath, a free app that lets you take a picture of your mathematical and algebraic equations, solving them for you and showing the steps to the solution.

PhotoMath has been at the top of the App Store charts for a couple of weeks, hitting number one on the Education, Kids Games and Top Apps lists. Small wonder, as it seems like a great way to get out of doing homework.

However, despite the concerns of some parents and teachers, apps like PhotoMath just won’t help when it comes to cheating — they’re far too limited. Still, it’s a promising technology that, once it matures, might actually turn into the type of wonder tool for education we’ve long been promised, turning our iOS devices into useful educational tools that will help kids actually learn math, rather than simply giving them a shortcut to homework answers.

I love interactive Notification Center widgets. Widgets that let me use Notification Center like a quick entry form for my best used apps. Stuff like PCalc’s calculator widget that gives functionality to users that Apple seems conflicted about.

That’s why I love Neato. It’s a quick jot notepad for Notification Center that lets you speedily enter notes no matter where you are in iOS 8.

Two years ago, Nick den Engelsman started a band with a couple of friends. As they worked on recording songs, life got in the way, what with getting jobs, getting married, having babies, and the like.

The group decided it would be really nice to have an app that let them record parts of their songs individually, and then combine all the tracks into one song. They couldn’t find one.

Most multi-track recording apps like GarageBand will let you share files across services like Dropbox, but a simple “record and share” app wasn’t available.

This is how Composr was born. Here’s how it works.

A crucial part of making apps involves the beta testing process, and Apple has released a new tool to help streamline the process for everyone.

After initially previewing TestFlight for third-party developers alongside iOS 8 at WWDC in June, Apple made it available for use today. Developers can now invite up to 1,000 beta testers, including non-developers, to try early builds of their apps before they hit the App Store.

Here’s a confession: I was terrible at math in school. From Algebra 1 on, I just couldn’t keep the various symbols, numbers, and denominators I was faced with straight, and so I flunked pretty much every test.

But I grew up in the 90’s. If I was in high school today, I’d never fail a math test again. I’d use the new iOS app PhotoMath instead, which literally solves math problems like magic.

If you’ve been eagerly awaiting the opportunity to have every episode of The Simpsons ever streamable on your iPhone or iPad, there is no longer any reason to, as a certain yellow-skinned tyke might say, “have a cow.”

You can now stream the complete Simpsons archive over an iOS app, no matter where you are. But there’s a catch.

Tired of being stuck with tiny little Emojis?

Well, the developer for new app LOLy has the solution: huge, animated emoticons that you can send to friends via text message, Facebook, or email. You can also just copy them and send along to any other text-accepting app, like Twitter, Kik, or Whatsapp.

The images are cute and fun to send, and once you’ve used the images included with the free LOLy app, you’ll want to grab a couple more packs for $0.99 each.

“I primarily designed this app for women with a focus on the 30s-50s demographic,” says app developer Gina Pell. “I had a hunch that most emoji were geared towards teens and lacked the sophistication, style, or wit that my friends or I would find interesting.”

Which weighs more? An iPad filled with media and apps, or an iPad with no media or apps installed?

It sounds like a trick question — the digital age equivalent of “What weighs more, a pound of feathers or a pound of rocks?”

But surprisingly, an iPad without anything installed on it does weigh less than an iPad that is full.

iOS 8 introduces a ton of new features and enhancements, including new ways for third-party developers to integrate their apps throughout the iOS experience. With a feature called Extensibility, apps can hook into other apps and areas like Notification Center to enhance their usability and functionality. Third-party keyboards are now possible too, and there are several great ones to choose from already.

Some of the best apps in the App Store are already updated for iOS 8 with new features, and others will be live in the store shortly. Here are Cult of Mac’s best apps that take advantage of what iOS 8 has to offer:

We love Unread, an RSS reader by developer Jared Sinclair. We’re also big fans of Castro, an exquisitely beautiful podcasting app by Supertop. So we’re delighted to hear that both apps are under the same roof, saving one developer from poverty and frustration while making another developer’s catalog ever stronger.

We’re huge fans of Adobe Photoshop Mix for the iPad, but as much as we like it, it had some rough edges.

Our own Charlie Sorrel called it more like a proof of concept than a proper app, that needed some work before it became truly indispensible.

A new update to Photoshop Mix has just helped polish some of the app’s rough edges. The new version adds support for a much-needed Undo/Redo function, as well as local saving, Dropbox support, swapping images, and more.

Many of us want to invest, but don’t know how to start. Acorns is a new, free to try app that makes investing as easy as using your debit card and rounding up the change to the nearest dollar.

Until today, Google had free apps for making documents and spreadsheets on iOS: Google Docs and Google Sheets. To complete the trifecta, Google Slides has been released in the App Store for creating Powerpoint-like presentations.

Google is gunning hard at Apple’s iWork apps and Microsoft’s Office 365 suite. Docs, Sheets and Slides are not only completely free, but they have offline mode and the ability to convert and edit Microsoft Office files.

One sad limitation of Instagram is you can’t post photos to the service from your Mac, only your iPhone. It’s by design, of course — Instagram wants to be a more spontaneous photo hosting service than the likes of Flickr — but it can make things annoying when you want to give a more polished shot the Instagram treatment.

Things are about to get a little easier. You still can’t post photos directly from your Mac, but you can make it easier to get them on your iPhone or iPad. Younity, a service that gives you access to your computer’s files through a personal cloud with no syncing necessary, has just added support for publishing Instagram files directly from the service.

It’s hard to know what to make of an app update that promises to “cut crash rates in half.” If you’re a glass-half-full kind of guy, you’re happy with the increased stability. If you’re a glass-half-empty guy, though, you wonder why the hell they can’t get around to fixing the other 50 percent of unexpected software crashes.

I’m sort of a glass-half-empty kind of guy, at least when it comes to Facebook. So when they announce that their latest update to the Facebook for iPhone and iPad app has “solved a long-term mobile debugging problem and reduced the crash rate for people using the Facebook for iOS app by more than 50%,” I wonder why the hell a multibillion dollar corporation can’t fix the other half.

Vesper, the note-taking app developed in part by John Gruber of Daring Fireball, has been updated with a cool new feature that allows you to easily see the timestamp, character, or word count for a Vesper note… without adding a lot of on-screen clutter.

If you love playing XCOM on your Mac or your iPad, you’ll love this. Fantasy Flight Games in cooperation with 2K Games have announced that XCOM is coming to a game chest near you. Called XCOM: The Board Game, it’s basically RISK for alien hunters. But don’t think this is just analog: you’ll need your iPad or iPhone to play.

If I had to list the apps I couldn’t live without, Plex would be high up on the list. Think of it like a Netflix for your local video. A multimedia server client for Mac with a slick iOS app, Plex allows you to stream your local television shows and movies on demand to any device on your local WiFi network, or even away from home. It even works on the Apple TV.

Now, Plex for iOS version 3.5 is here, and it brings some cool new features to the already feature-packed app, including the ability to play movie trailers before your movie!

Can’t get enough of NPR? Literally? Have we got an app for you. It’s called NPR One, and it’s an infinite stream of personalized radio stories that will keep you going all day long.

If you’re like me, you hate OS X’s Dock. While a useful UI innovation on Apple’s part, the dock takes up a surprising amount of screen real estate on what, in the end, adds up to a superfluous amount of visual fluff.

You can hide your dock, sure, but isn’t there a better alternative to dock? As it turns out, there is… and thanks to a cheap Mac app, that alternative is the Menu Bar.