Great news for corrupt restaurant employees and criminal scum everywhere: you can now use the latest Google Wallet app to skim credit cards right into your iPhone. In theory at least. And without actually recording the magnetic strip. But “Google Wallet update allows easy addition of credit cards using the iPhone camera” doesn’t have the same link-baiting ring to it. So scum and villainy it is.
Bokeh is an iPhone app (and web service) for easily “lifeblogging” your photos and thoughts. And because nobody but you really cares about the mundane details of your days, Bokeh can be used as a private diary, too, albeit a private diary that you access via the web. So what’s the gimmick? What sets Bokeh apart from all the other lifeblogging apps out there? It has a great calendar view, making it easy to browse and zero-in on the exact memory you forgot.
RotoView is an app that lets you zoom in super close on your iPhone photos, and then scroll around them by tilting the iPhone itself. It is also a great example of how iOS 7-native design can help an app look great, when otherwise it would very likely look awful.
Jottacloud, the “Norwegian Dropbox,” has added automatic photo uploads to its iOS apps. This means that you can not only access your desktop files on the go, but you can also backup and browse your mobile photos, too. Better still, it backs up all you pictures, not just your Camera Roll.
Great news for Lightroom users who both own iPads and love the Java runtime: The Mosaic app can now do two-way sync with Lightroom on your Mac, letting you load photos onto your computer and then sit down in your favorite easy chair with a cup of coffee to rate and reject your pictures using the iPad.
Liquid looks set to be a fixture on my Mac. It’s an app which lets you carry out transformations and operations on any selected text, which doesn’t sound like much unless you write for a living, or just have to wrangle lots of letters. It’s actually been around for quite a while (the current version is 4.3), but I figured that if I hadn’t heard of it yet, then maybe you hadn’t either.
Lost for photo inspiration? Fear not. Instead of just firing up Instagram and looking at great photos taken by other folks, you should launch the new OKDOTHIS app and follow along. The app tells you what to take a photo of, right there, and you just have to do what you’re told.
I love Cyber Monday, but not for the reasons you think: I don’t give gifts, not do I buy yet more crap to fill my apartment. I love it because it’s the only place that the word “cyber” can still be used without people ridiculing you. Hell, I even cringe when I read Neuromancer these days.
By way of celebration, we bring news of the Apps for Snaps Cyber Monday deal, a collection of iOS photo apps which can be bought today for just a buck apiece.
Imagine that your task list was made up of a bunch of little slips of paper that you can slide around in any order, only these slips can’t blow away. That’s the central metaphor for Gneo, a universal task manager app which starts out looking like the ultra-simple Clear app, but hides a lot of power under the hood.
Ever wished that there was an app like Diptic, only it let you put videos together in a grid instead of just photos? No, me neither, but if we had, then we’d love Diptic video.
Boxer, my current and all-time favorite iOS e-mail client, has now added Sanebox to its list of features. Sanebox, if you don’t know it, is a service that weeds out the crap from your e-mail inbox and presses it into a solid nugget that can be easily disposed of, after you’ve picked it over for anything good. And you can now try it out without signing up, right inside Boxer itself.
Reeder 2– the best RSS reader on iOS — is getting a beefy new update soon, hopefully in time for holidays. The app’s developer has just submitted an update to Apple for approval that adds some big new features — including themes, Safari Reading List support, and more — as well as tweaked features and a load of bug fixes.
Here’s what you can expect when Reeder 2.1 hits the App Store.
Few companies are better at keeping their games updated than Rovio, who’ve released more updates for its Angry Birds games than one can count. Add another grain of sand to the beaches of infinity, then, because the bird-vs.-pig physics strategy game has just gotten a new update, adding 30 levels to the core game as well as giving the bomb bird a new electric power.
Procreate is pretty much my favorite drawing and painting app for the iPad, and v2.0 blows the metaphorical, Cockney-accented doors off the previous version. Yes, it’s now iOS 7-ready, but it’s also now an absurdly powerful images editor, with a whole new interface design to boot.
Remember Mac font managing apps? I do: I hated them. Extensis Suitcase caused more problems with my old G5 PowerMac than anything else, ever, and I was fairly conservative in my font use back when I worked as a designer.
Thankfully, Macs these days don’t need the user to manually switch fonts on and off: our computers are powerful enough to handle it. Which is why Bohemian Coding ditched its old Fontcase app and replaced it with the shiny new Fonts, an app that is dedicated to just organizing and looking at your fonts.
Marvin is an ebook reading app for the iPad that gathers together all your EPUB ebooks in one place. The idea is that you can keep your book files in your Dropbox and access them from anywhere.
It’s EPUB-only, which means it won’t work with your Kindle titles, but that’s no problem, because Marvin also has tight integration with the Calibre e-book app for desktop computers, and as all avid Cult of Mac readers know, it’s pretty easy to use Calibre to rip the DRM from your Kindle books and save them to your Dropbox as EPUBs.
Spoiler: Writing with ink on paper is still way better than stabbing at a hard glass screen with a soft rubbery tip. Double spoiler: writing with a ballpoint pen which records your every stroke for searching and editing on your iPad is amazing, and way better than taking photos of every page you finish just to feed into Evernote. Third spoiler: No matter how good the hardware and the AI behind the scenes, a crappy app lets everything down.
Boxer is another of the new breed of apps that let you swipe your way through e-mail and get to the Zen state known only as “inbox zero.” Mailbox was arguably the first of these apps – which also let you turn your e-mails into to-dos – but it’s Gmail only and the iPad version sucks. Boxer, née Taskbox (which supports pretty much every e-mail service including vanilla IMAP), has just gotten bumped to v4.0, adding in iPad support and a slew of other welcome extras. It’s also $1 instead of $5 for a while, in way of celebration.
Changing a sentence to ALL CAPS on my Mac is dead easy: I just select the words, right click and choose Transformations from the contextual menu. If I want to do anything fancier, like weird Markdown footnotes, or adding bullet points to the start of every line, I can just write an Automator workflow and save it as a System Service.
But on iOS? In the immortal words of Run DMC, “it’s tricky”. Or was tricky: now we can use the $5 TextTool to do it for us.
Smile software’s TextExpander Touch has used hacks to get around the lack of inter-app communication on iOS, but now Apple has stepped in to end the parade. Smile has been told to stop using the Reminders database to store your snippets and figure out some other way to share your data with other apps.
Apple won’t approve any updates until this is done, and third-party apps using the TextExpander SDK may also suffer the same fate.
I like Fetchnotes 3, a new and deceptively simple update to the iOS/web app which lets you take, organize and share notes. At first, it looks a lot like Simplenote, with a very plain and simple UI, plus tags and easy sharing. But it’s actually a lot more powerful than that.
This article first appeared in the Cult of Mac Newsstand magazine
Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you. But short of installing an air-gap, what can you really do to improve security on your iDevices?
The good news is that your iPhone is probably the safest phone you can use, but you would be correct not to trust any U.S-based company with your data, even Apple (which makes its money selling you shiny toys and may therefore be less interested in selling your data).
But if you want to move as much of your data as possible away from iCloud, here are some service and products to help you. You won’t find them as convenient as Apple’s built-in services, but they might keep your data a little safer.
In OS X Mountain Lion, Apple made sharing files between two Macs easier than ever before with AirDrop… but that only works if you’re on the same network. What if you want something as easy to use as AirDrop, but with people outside the range of your Time Capsule?
Enter Infinit, a slick new Mac file-sharing app that makes it effortless to send files to anyone, even if their computer is turned off.
This article first appeared in the Cult of Mac Newsstand magazine
The safest way to use your iPhone is to switch it off, open it up and remove the battery. But this is clearly impractical if you want to do anything more than pretend you have an Android phone.
Some guides have shown us how to increase our security by switching off all manner of services, from iCloud to geotagging for our photos. But if you do that, why buy an iPhone in the first place? And even if you only want to make calls, no amount of on-phone hackery will help you if the folks from The Wire are on your tail.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t be aware of what your iPhone is up to, and with this in mind we bring you a guide to the hidden and not-so-hidden settings you’ll need in iOS 7.
I find the idea of “distraction-free” writing apps to be bunk: after all, why on Earth would the presence or lack of a menubar make any difference to your ability to concentrate? I am, however, a sworn enemy of clutter, and so I immediately downloaded the $0.99 Focus app, which is kind of like a virtual rug under which you can sweep your mess of Mac application windows.