apps - page 19

As the old song goes, “Google Maps and QuizUp, sitting in a tree, now both visible from low-Earth orbit.” It’s not catchy, but it is true – now the super-addictive trivia game has a Google Maps channel.

Spotify seems to have solved one major problem with its apps. Until now, the music streaming service has been focussed on playlists, forcing you to organize your music in order to “save” it for later.

Compare this to Rdio, which concentrates on albums and songs, letting your save them to an iTunes-like collection.

Spotify now offers “Your Music,” which is pretty much a copy of Rdio’s collections, and is a very welcome addition.

This story first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine.

Games make up more than 65 percent of downloads in the App Store and Google Play, and a whopping 90 percent of mobile gaming revenue is generated by a freemium business model, according to Bertrand Schmitt, CEO of App Annie.

These are just two of the insights that came from a trends panel at the Game Developers Conference last month in San Francisco. The panel also included folks from gaming engine Unity and publisher/developer Pocket Gems.

Ultrakam is a video-shooting app that uses more of the iPhone’s pixels than the stock camera app to capture something like 2K video from the iPhone 5, 5S and compatible iPads. Yup, 2K video on your iPhone, and a lot more besides.

Handy Photo has gone from v1 to v2, and has changed from an app I apparently installed and then discarded to something that looks very useful indeed for the mobile photographer.

The update brings iOS 7 support, a complete redesign of the interface, and some sweet new features.

If you’re a big fan of Rdio — after Spotify, the other major streaming music subscription service, which just happens to have much better iOS apps — and you also have a Google Chromecast, good news: Rdio for iOS now supports Google’s streaming HDTV dongle.

Oh man, soon you won’t even be able to break into an old abandoned building without running into a bunch of other folks who are doing the same thing, only instead of being all cool and “urban” and fearless like you, they just got guided there by an app.

Which is my way of complaining about Kamino, an app which lets you share “Urban Hikes” (seriously) using your iPhone, and forces to use Facebook to do it.

Along with the new Office Suite that launched on the iPad yesterday, Microsoft has updated its OneNote app to look like a proper iOS 7 app. OneNote is Microsoft’s Evernote competitor, and now it looks better than ever,

Quick – guess what the “Multiple Attachments” App does. Correctamundo! It lets you add multiple attachments to an email on iOS.

Transporter just took another step towards being a viable alternative to Dropbox for mobile users. Now the private cloud has become a “platform.” Don’t worry though – this just means that app makers are now free to add Transporter support to their apps, letting you sync and save your data from your iPad and iPhone.

BusyCal from BusyMac, the app that saved busy people by being a way better calendar than the junk Apple ships with the Mac, now makes BusyContacts. Or has at least announced BusyContacts. Like BusyCal before it, BusyContacts takes your local address book and syncs it with any online contacts lists you may be using. The public beta should launch this summer.

Can we all agree that iTunes’ App Store search is truly, truly awful? That you can not only never find what you’re looking for, but you have to wait forever for the results to load?

Good. Then you’re going to love Fnd, a web-based search tool for the whole iTunes Store. It’s accurate, fast and not at all annoying.

Sharebox adds a feature to Dropbox that should probably already have been there: it lets you drag and drop files onto the Dropbox icon in your Mac’s menubar, and have them upload to Dropbox. The neatest part is that it works using the existing icon, keeping your menubar clear.

Twitter will now let you attach up to four images to a Tweet, and tag the people in those photos, all without counting towards your 140-character limit. This is a pretty obvious attempt to beat Instagram and make Twitter your go-to sharing service.

BlinkMail is a great new OS X mail app that lets you speed through your inbox using just the arrow keys. It also integrates with other services like Evernote, and Dropbox, Things and Omnifocus support is on the way.

Next time you are traveling somewhere or commuting your way to work, look around you. It’s evident that the number of book lovers who have taken to reading on a digital format has risen significantly over the years. In 2011 and 2012, Amazon said it sold 105 books for its Kindle e-reader for every 100 hardcover and paperback books, excluding free eBooks.

Though it has become apparent in recent years that there is a slight fall in the growth of eBook sales (particularly so in 2013), eBooks are still far too compelling to die out, and today we tend to use more than one medium to consume the same thing. So next time you’re hesitating to pull out your Kindle or iPad mini on the bus or train due to the watchful eyes of a “book snob,” just remember that it’s not possible to please everyone, and that there are still thousands of benefits to the electronic book format.

Mailtracker is an app that lets you snoop on the folks you send email to. It tells you if and when your mails were read, what device they read it on and what city they are in. Sounds pretty creepy right?

Apple has added a new “related apps” feature to the app store when viewed on an iOS device. Now, along the top of the screen, over the details of an app, you’ll see the breadcrumb trail in the picture above.

The already-great GeoTagr app has been updated to v4.4. This doesn’t sound like much, but there’s one huge new feature in this update: support for geotagging photos stored in your iPhone or iPad’s local photo library.

RoomScan is a crazy app that seems like it should never work. It lets you use your iPhone to measure the rooms in your home and turn them into floor plans, and all you have to do is walk around and tap the iPhone on the walls.

Of the endless barrage of clones that emerged after Flappy Bird’s surprise success, Flapthulhu is the one that I go back to over and over again. Not only is it a clever parody of both the works of H.P. Lovecraft and the Flappy Bird phenomenon in general, but it’s a genuinely better game than Flappy Bird, with a subverseive sense of humor, fantastic 8-bit style graphics great style. Now, Flapthulhu has gotten better thanks to a version 2.0 update, which adds to major new features.

What was your first Tweet? Now you can find out with a cool new tool from Twitter that shows you the first public Tweet of any user. My opus is above, and not as embarrassing as I’d expected.

To use the tool, just follow the link and tap in a user name. That’s it, so without further ado, let’s embarrass the rest of the Cult of Mac morning crew by publishing what they wrote, and seeing who joined Twitter earliest.

Byword on iOS just got around 100 times more rad, and way easier to use, with the addition of one single feature: keyboard shortcuts. It doesn’t sound like much, but in addition to adding bold and italics using just the keyboard, you can also control pretty much every aspect of the app, all without reaching up to touch the screen.

If you spend a lot of time on the App Store, you’ve probably wondered if app icons are colored the way they are for a reason. Are certain shades more likely to correspond to certain app types than others? And what are the most over- and under-represented Pantone swatches in the App Store pallette?

If these are the sort of questions you have ever asked yourself, you’ll probably enjoy this great infographic by Brandisty, who crawled the iOS App Store, grabbed the top 5 app icons from each category, and then ran a hisogram analysis to find out which colors were used most often.

I wish they’d polled more apps, but this is great. Business apps are just as blue and boring as I thought they were! Check out the complete infographic after the jump.

Jot is an iOS text editor that adds a red trackball nubbin to the iPhone keyboard. No kidding – it’s just like a ThinkPad, only in software not hardware. And it also looks like a fantastic way to solve the frustrations of iPhone text selection.