Good news for Brits: the new iOS 7 beta 4 has changed the colors of motorways and A-roads to match the long established scheme used in all other UK maps. Now the motorways (freeways) are drawn in blue and the A-roads (main roads, with one or two-lanes) are green.
One of the many big, tattery holes in Apple’s Maps app is the lack of transit data. At launch, Apple wisely allowed third-party transit apps to plug into Maps to supplement their own subway and bus directions — perhaps the first bonafide example of Apple allowing iOS users to set their default app for anything — but it was obviously just a stopgap, because just last week, Apple scooped up Hopstop, one of the biggest transit apps around.
Unlike other Apple acquisitions, though, Cupertino hasn’t shut Hopstop down. In fact, the app was just updated with a beefy 2.6 update that makes it even better, including real time delay and incident reporting.
Loom is yet another app that promises to organize your photos for you, just like the amazing Everpix. Unlike Everpix, though, which shows the Apple heritage of its engineers in its oversimplified and sometimes frustratingly opaque user interface, Loom looks to be a little more accessible. And controllable.
Back at the end of May I wrote about a great Kickstarter project which updated the Camera Lucida. The Neo Lucida is a prism on a bendy stick that you can use to superimpose the scene in front of you onto a sheet of paper so you can “trace” around real objects.
In the post I wondered if there was an app that would use your iPhone’s camera to do the same thing, but then – as usual – I didn’t read any comments. Reader Golan pointed out that the app is called Camera Lucida, and as of this weekend it has updated to v7.0.
Wunderlist v2.2 adds two big new features to the rather beautiful cross-platform todo app; one great improvement and a slew of fixes. And it might even change how you use the app.
You know those trackers you see in movies, the ones that beep and point to wherever you should be going? Heroes and villains alike use them to track bags of stolen money, and space marines use them to avoid aliens.
Now you can use one to get, well, to get wherever it is you want to go. The app is called Crowsflight, and it is just about as simple as navigation apps can get.
Everpix – already the best slightly-confusing service for keeping all your photos ever in one place – has updated to add support for Mosaic. And lest you – like me at 2AM this morning – go searching through the app’s settings to find some cool new grid view, let me tell you now that Mosaic is a separate service for printing photo books.
Ever wondered which episodes of our own CultCast feature conversations about WWDC? Or which episodes of the original The Talk Show have Dan Benjamin and John Gruber discussing a Bond movie?
Then try Poodle.FM, an experimental search engine for podcasts from the folks behind the podcatcher app Instacast.
Unlike pictures, sound is ambient – you can hear it even when you’re not listening “at” it the same way you have to look at something to see it. And this goes for recording, too. While you have to point a camera at a thing to tape it, you can record sound even if the mic is in your pocket.
And this in turn makes possible an app like Heard, which lets you record any sound you hear, even after you hear it.
Every time I’m about to rich Evernote, something like Lightly comes along to stop me. Lightly is an iPhone app from Ignition Soft, who you may know from such awesome iOS apps as Everclip and Everclip HD, and it lets you clip and highlight parts of a webpage, and save them to your Evernote account.
Landcam comes from the folks behind Currency, a currency-converter app which manages to be more beautiful, easier to use and – somewhat paradoxically – more information-rich than its rivals.
The legacy is clear. Landcam is also beautifully uncluttered, and yet easily as powerful as most other iPhoneography apps in the store. And all this for $1.
One of the best things in the new iOS7 beta is Command Center, which lets you toggle Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, the flashlight (on the iPhone anyway), AirDrop and others from one quick-to-access place. Fast Toggles wants to do the same and more, only on your Mac.
Manything turns a spare iOS device into a cloud-connected security camera. Install the app, sign up for an account and leave the iPhone, iPad or iPod touch with its camera pointing at your desk, your yard or hidden in a plastic bag and pointing up from the bowl of your toilet.
For any unsuspecting visitors, it will be too late. You’ll have seen everything.
Some space geeks are calling today “The Day the Earth Smiled,” because the Cassini probe is set to take a picture of our planet as seen from Saturn later this afternoon. To honor this momentous occasion, the maker of astronomy software SkySafari is giving away basic versions for iOS and OS X (and discounting the Android version) through Sunday.
Instants is a great new iPhone app for browsing your photos. It brings several of iOS7’s organizational ideas to the current iPhone, but does it in a much cleaner and more intuitive way. Plus, it’s free (with an in-app purchase for one extra feature).
Savvy Apps makes Agenda, one of the most popular third-party calendar apps for iOS. Today Agenda hit version 4.0 with a complete redesign, new gestures, and integration with other great third-party apps.
“With over 3 million updates since launch, we did something right with Agenda,” said Savvy Apps. “That’s why Agenda Calendar 4 is a brand new app that maintains the spirit of what everyone has loved, while reimagining every last detail of what makes a great calendar app.”
If you asked most people what the average price of an iPhone app is, they’d probably say $0.99. But nope. As of April, the average price of an iPhone app is even lower. Shockingly low, even: a mere $0.19. And iPad’s a little higher, but not by much.
You might not know the name, but you definitely know the work. If you have seen Star Wars, or Robocop, or Jurassic Park[1], you’ve seen Phil Tippet’s stop-motion (and go-motion) animation. Tauntaun? Tippet. ED–209? Tippet again.
And now you can buy 3-D character animations by the Tippett Creature Shop right inside a new storefront in the Efexio iPad app.
Briefly gets the award for most-appropriately-named app of the week. It lets you create neat little videos from your photos, and it does it really, really briefly.
I’m on the verge of giving up on using my iPad as my main photo machine, but one brand new app is keeping me from switching back to the Mac. It’s called Photospector, it lets you organize and edit your pictures, and it’s pretty much the iPad photos app Apple should have made all along.
One of my most-used Mac apps is Rogue Amoeba’s Airfoil, a utility which hijacks the audio from any app you like and pipes it to your AirPlay speakers. It synced audio and video over AirPlay before Apple added the feature (back when it was called AirTunes), and is a great way to send the same music to every one of the stack of wireless speakers I’m testing at any one time (it’s like a bad disco in here).
Now, there is Airfoil Remote, which lets you control Airfoil for Mac from your iPhone.
Muku Shuttr is a tiny, keychain-sized (and keychain-mountable) remote shutter release for your iPhone. OR your iPad. Or your giant Android “phablet.” For just $29, you’l never have to see another “selfie arm” disappearing from the side of your self portraits ever again.
Google Maps has been updated to 2.0 for iOS, which means that it finally has a native iPad interface. No longer will iPad users have to deal with stupidly-oversized navigation elements on the 2x pixel-doubled screen.
Spendee looks like the kind of finance-tracking app I might actually use: It’s dead simple, great looking and works great with cash. It even has a nice flat design that’ll be at home in iOS 7 – although that icon will have to go — it’s 100% Forstallian.
Ole Zorn, the super-villain[1] behind the amazing Pythonista for iOS, has just started teasing his newest app – a Markdown text editor for the iPad. Only unlike all the other Markdown editors, this one is looks like it’s as programmable as Pythonista. I’m getting pretty excited.