Brett Terpstra’s Marked app started out as a quick way to preview any Markdown file as it would appear when rendered into rich text or HTML. It still does that as well as any of the apps that have their own built-in Markdown preview, but Marked is now arguably something else entirely. It analyzes your text and gives detailed statistics, as well as suggestions on how to improve your prose.
The latest version detects the passive voice.
What? Yes. AnyFont is a proper, available-in-the-App-Store iOS app that lets you install fonts system-wide, for use by any app that allows access to the full list of iOS system fonts. How does it manage this sandbox-skipping magic? Installation profiles.
Did you ever try to write a blog post on your iPad? It’s easy, right? But did you ever try to add an image to that post? It’s a major pain in the ass. Plink is here to fix that. It’s an iOS app that will upload a photo to its own storage cloud, and generate a URL that is automatically copied to your clipboard. All you need to do is switch back to your writing app and paste it in.
And of course this isn’t just for bloggers. Anywhere you need to link an image – forum posts for example – you can use Plink.
Although Google bought social mapping service Waze in June of last year, the iOS app is still getting impressive new updates.
The latest? Waze for iOS has just gained Calendar integration. It might not seem useful at first glance, but it’s actually a great addition.
Did you miss the Flappy Bird phenomenon?
Well, if you’re a Twitterific user, no need to download one of the seemingly infinite number of clones: an Easter egg within the popular Twitter app lets you play a great 8-bit Flappy Bird clone with just a gesture.
The TopoCharger is an odd little device, but it could be useful for some. It’s an iPhone GPS case. What? Yes. A GPS-less GPS that comes with on-board storage for maps, and a big fat battery pack so you can use your iPhone in GPS mode without killing its own battery dead. If you’re wondering why you’d bother with this instead of just using a regular battery case, then keep wondering, because I have no idea. Yet. Let’s check it out.
Mural.ly is a mood-board app, or white-board app, or cork-board app, or whatever you want to call it, and it works in the browser and as an iOS app. I’ve been testing it out (briefly) and so far it’s pretty great. It even lets you access your Evernote notes and drop them into a “mural.”
Flickr’s 1TB storage “limit” is great and all, but getting even 1/100th of that up to Flickr in the form of photos is still tricky. The iOS Flickr app takes care of new pictures on your iPhone, and now a new app called Uppr, from friend of Cult of Mac Robert Miles (not, not that Robert Miles). And boy is it slick.
Text selection on iOS is still a pain in the ass. Some apps fix it up with extra buttons above the virtual keyboard, but Thoughts 2, an iPhone notes app, adds extra buttons to the text selection itself. This makes it easy to expand and contract the selection one character at a time which – given the fickle nature of text fields in iOS – should help a lot.
Remember Photosmith? Yes, it’s the excellent iPad app that hooks up to your Mac’s Lightroom collection and lets you rate, reject, tag and manage your photo library from the comfort of your couch. That’s the promise, anyway. In practice, it crashes far too often, and it is confuddling (confusing and befuddling) as hell to use.
Ever since v3, though, Photosmith has been a lot easier to use. And now in v3.1, the LR sync part has also been improved, with a whole new sync dashboard. Oh, and the app also adds support for RAW photos.
MarginNotes is an interesting app that may just be a little too confusing to use, or may be the perfect document markup app ever. I still can’t figure out which.
The app will open EPUB and PDF files and let you mark them up, adding comments, margin notes, sketches and anything else, and also lets you add entire outlines, or turn the document into an outline – I’m not quote sure. Let’s take a quick look:
Between your iPhone, your iPad and your Mac, it’s hard to imagine a time when you’d be online and need to edit a photo, but somehow not have access to an app like Snapseed (which has its own browser version BTW).
But should you find yourself trapped at a PC, while nestled deep in bowels of a government building that has confiscated your iPhone and iPad at the gate (to be root-kitted and infected with spyware no doubt), and with a desperate need to add some pop to that cute cat photo you found, then head for Pics.io.
The BluCub is a lot like the Tempo pebble I reviewed a few weeks back, only instead of measuring just temperature, it also measures humidity, adding another feather to your home-weather-station cap. If you wear a cap and put a feather in it when you buy a Bluetooth sensor, that is.
Snippefy takes the almost-useless highlights from your Kindle and syncs them to Evernote, Dropbox or anywhere that’ll accept text. It’s an iPhone-only app, but as it’s only really there for processing your snippets to use somewhere else, it’s fine for the iPad too.
This story first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine.
Want to watch the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, but don’t have a TV? Or do you have a TV but just prefer the coverage given by other countries?
Then you’re in the right place. Today we’re going to take a look at ways to watch the games on your Mac and iDevices, and which apps you might want to use to follow along with the fun.
Users of Picturelife on iOS can now edit their cloud-stored photos right there in the app, thanks to an update launched yesterday. Picturelife was already one of the most full-featured photo-wrangling services around (it’s my favorite, although I have a bit of a dupe problem at the moment), and now it can serve as a full-on organizing, editing and sharing suite.
IFTTT’s new Evernote action might not seem like much, adding one measly little function, but it’s a biggy. You can take anything, and append it to an Evernote note as to-do item, complete with a checkbox.
Example uses: Send your Foursquare to-dos to an Evernote checklist, or save iOS reminders to Evernote.
Reader 7 is a single-minded app with a single-serve purpose. You know when somebody sends you an MS Word DOC or DOCX file via email and all you want to do is look at it, and maybe track the changes that have been made to it, but then you open in in Pages and all bets are off? That’s what Reader 7 is here to fix.
It’s an app which can accurately display Word documents with complex formatting.
Keeping photos on Instagram, Facebook, iPhoto, Google Drive, Google+, Flickr, Lightroom, Aperture, Picasa, Dropbox or OneDrive? Then you might like StreamNation, an app and service that collects them all together in one place.
What’s more, it also gives you 20GB of free storage to get started, and the upgrade rates aren’t so bad either.
Musx is like Instagram for music. Post tracks you like, add a few words and your followers can check out the same tunes. Why the hell didn’t anyone think of this before?
Pixite’s fantastic Tangent app gets a big update with v1.5, adding in a new “Urban Decay” pack that lets you point your iPhone camera at a building and have it crumble into rubble and dust, and then snap pictures as zombies and wild animals reclaim what us evil humans were only ever borrowing.
Wait, no. Urban Decay is a new set of fancy filters for grungifying your pictures. Just make sure you get the right Tangent app, as the developer has been plagued by a copycat who keeps putting fake versions of the app up on the store.
Command-tab, a keyboard shortcut so ingrained in the Mac user’s finger-memory that it’s easy to find yourself hitting it when using a keyboard with your iPad, or when you’re on a PC (NB: don’t use a PC unless you have been professionally trained and are wearing a tie).
The switcher already lets you flip between apps, quit apps, view recent documents in a cool Exposé view (use the up/down arrows), and to drag and drop documents onto apps to open them. But now there’s SuperTab, an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink-style app which adds even more.
The elusive developer behind the smash-hit app Flappy Bird has other games in the App Store that haven’t yet been pulled. Are they any good?
Take a look at Super Ball Juggling and see if it measures up to the hype and fame of Flappy Bird.
This is a Cult Of Mac video review of the iOS application “Super Ball Juggling” brought to you by Joshua Smith of “TechBytes W/Jsmith.”
Ever wanted to save just one sentence of a web page? Or have you ever bookmarked a page, or sent it to your favorite read-later service, only to come back and wonder what the hell it was you’d wanted to remember?
Then Gloss is for you. It’s a bookmarklet and service that lets you highlight a single line of text on any web page, and it rocks.
Rdio users can now ditch the desktop entirely, thanks to an update which brings playlist editing and reviews to the iOS version of the app. No more booting up that dusty old Mac just to remove an accidentally-added song from your “awesomest songs evah” list.