Here’s how to do Spotify voice search on the iPhone or iPad.
Alternatively you can buy the new Vela app for $0.99, and skip all the tedious screen tapping.
Oh man, I just can’t wait for this week to be over. First the entire Internet turns out to have been broken for the last two years. Then Dropbox hires Condoleezza “Cruella de Vil” Rice to help out with security. And now Amazon has bought out ComiXology, the digital comic book store/platform.
I’m ready for the weekend.
Apart from “correct horse battery staple,” the most secure passwords aren’t words, they’re phrases. You don’t even need crazy symbols or hard-to-determine numerals (is that an l or a 1, a 0 or an O?) – just a good, longish phrase made out of words.
And now you don’t even have to make one up. Using the XKPasswd generator, based on but not associated with Randall Munroe’s amazing comic strip XKCD, you can generate secure pass phrases easily.
PhotoFlip has the beginnings of a great idea, let down by poor implementation. Here’s the idea: The app lets you add notes to the photos you have in your iPhone camera roll, without copying those images. That is, the pictures stay in your regular photo library, and the app just displays them with your text note added underneath.
It’s a great idea right? It uses almost no storage, and doesn’t double up on picture libraries. You can even snap photos from within the app and they’re saved ion the regular camera roll, and everything is synced via iCloud (if you want anyway).
So what’s wrong?
Ever been on a plane and seen some suit squished into his chair, browning his ThinkPad’s screen with his office breath and lining up some pictures and text on a PowerPoint slide? “Jeez,” you think. “Not only is this dork-o inflicting yet more PowerPain on the world, but he thinks it’s important enough to do on a plane.”
Next time you see one of these sad specimens, you might point them in the direction of Deckset, a slideshow maker that works using Markdown.
Lightroom for the iPad is here. It’s called Lightroom Mobile, and it runs smoothly on anything down to an iPad 2 (or first-gen mini). You can use the app to edit and organize any photos in your Lightroom collections, and it syncs automatically (and near instantly) with Lightroom on your desktop (you’ll need to upgrade to v5.4).
And the price? It’s free, but only if you already subscribe to Adobe’s $10-per-month Photoshop Photography Program, which also gets you the desktop versions of Photoshop and Lightroom. There’s also a 30-day free trial to check it out.
So how does it work? Lets take a nice long look.
Growthy is an app that finally – finally! – replaces the biro-etched notches on your kitchen door frame with a series of in-app purchases, codifying your precious memories as stars on your iPhone screen. Welcome to the future.
Of all the ambient noise apps I’ve tried, myNoise is the best. Based on the well-regarded website of the same name, myNoise for iPhone is a “noise generator,” not just an app that plays recordings of rain and coffee shops.
And it also looks as good as it sounds.
Evernote’s web clipper extension for OS X Safari is a thing of beauty. The Evernote bookmarklet clipper (on iOS and OS X) is a slow piece of crap.
Phillip Gruneich’s bookmarklet, however, is a thing of beauty, a concerto features some of your favorite players: Drafts, Markdown, Readability, and some plain old clever thinking.
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.