The App Store in iOS 7 has an new ‘Wish List’ feature designed to help you keep track of all the paid-apps you’re lusting after.
You can access Wish List from anywhere inside the new iOS 7 App Store by tapping on the Wish List icon in the upper-right corner. Apple’s put the Wish List icon on pretty much every page in the new App Store so it looks like they’re hoping users will really get into the new feature and buy more apps.
Here’s how Wish List works:
Yahoo has bought the developer of the fantastic iOS apps PhotoForge and KitCam. Ghostbird’s software team will now work for Yahoo, helping to make Flickr even better. And – as ever with these things – development on both apps will stop.
Do you like the look of the new iOS 7 AirDrop feature that lets you beam things from iDevice to iDevice? Me too. But even if you have iOS 7 installed, you still can’t beam things to and from a Mac, which is arguably a more common need for basement-bound, friendless nerds like you and I.
Enter BeamApp, which does what it says on the virtual, HTML-based tin.
Nestled under the Updates window in the iOS 7 App Store, you can find your purchased apps. Like iOS 6, you can choose to look through all previously purchased apps and only the apps that aren’t currently installed on your iPhone.
For some weird reason, Apple never put a search bar in in this part of the iOS 6 App Store. Now it’s there in iOS 7.
Years ago, I submitted a bug report to Apple. The problem? Teeny, tiny subtitles in the iOS Videos app, so small that even an eagle with binoculars couldn’t read them. I got a mail from Apple to follow up, and then, just one or two releases later, subtitles got big enough to read (the Lady and I have different native tongues so we usually watch everything with subs).
Now, in iOS 7, they’re not only big but completely customizable.
You know what I’m hearing a lot of today? “Whine whine whine. Don’t like the icons. This really is kind of a mess.” And this, from our very own chatroom: “It hurts the eyes,” and “The hideousness of this is blowing my mind.”
It seems that a lot of people don’t like the look of iOS 7. But you know what? I love it. Sure, some of those icons are a little garish, but in iOS 6, all of the native Apple icons were hideous. And whatever you want to say about the new look, you have to admit that it is now way more consistent.
Every time Apple releases new versions of iOS and OS X, you can guarantee Apple will take aim to destroy some popular third-party apps by aping their most popular features into Apple’s core services.
With iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks, Apple has its sights on some really strong competition. 1Password is in danger of becoming obsolete, along with a number of other notable powerhouses. Here’s who Apple aimed in its sights today:
IOS 7 looks fantastic, and the good news is that photographers haven’t been left out of the updates. There’s new stuff in both the Camera app as well as Photos: a neat combination of flashy new features and great little fixes that will make both apps what they probably should have been to begin with.
If there’s one note that’s almost guaranteed not to be in any of the zillions of to-do apps spread across your devices, it’s “Find new to-do list app.” However, should you actually have that entry scribbled down somewhere that you can actually find, then you can now cross it off the list: The app in question is called Silo, and it’s pretty slick stuff.
People talk a lot of crap about their minimalist apps, promising “distraction-free” interfaces as if distraction had anything to do with how many buttons you can see on the screen. In the future I will send those people a link to download Slicereader, a reading app so truly minimal that it doesn’t even have an open/save dialog.
Launchbar users can enjoy a brand new feature in v5.5 of the find-everything Mac app. Launchbar – if you’re not familiar with it – is an app that you trigger with a shortcut (I use ⌘-Space) and then type into the pop-up window. Launchbar instantly presents results, letting you launch apps, send emails, play music, browse your iPhoto library and a whole lot more. And now it has snippets.
Lightroom 5 is now officially official, and you can grab the final version from Adobe for $150 (there’s a one-month trial built in if you want it). Should you upgrade from v4? Probably. Unlike Photoshop, which adds more and more flashy-but-pointless features just to keep people upgrading, Lightroom is still young enough that the new features are super useful and – ironically – they also make it less and less likely you’ll need to resort to Photoshop to polish and fix your images.
How much interest is there in Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference?
Enough to stage an alternative free five-day conference with over 40 speakers and hands-on labs that WWDC attendees may want to check out for all the topics Apple isn’t likely to cover. For the second year running, AltWWDC will be hosting the have-nots (as in have no WWDC tickets) for a gathering cloned from the official conference.
Just a few blocks from Moscone Center at the San Francisco State downtown campus, devs from around the world will be hanging out and helping each other out. There will be a volunteer lab to tackle things like crash debugging as well as talks on game development and “marketing you won’t hate.”
Around 1,500 people have signed up, meaning, yeah, even free/freewheeling AltWWDC is technically “sold out.” No worries: if you don’t have a ticket, as long as there’s room to plant your laptop, you’re in.
Cult of Mac talked to Rob Elkin, a London-based software engineer and one of the four founders of AltWWDC about what constitutes an “alt” keynote breakfast, talks Apple doesn’t want you to hear and sponsors.
Arrrr! Avast, ye scurrilous sea quims! Why are you even reading this? Go download Scurvy Scallywags right now! It’s hilarious, addictive, cheap and the best game to come to iOS in recent memory.
Oh man, does Mischief ever look amazing. It’s a Mac (or Windows) drawing app which feels like it uses pixels, but stores your strokes as vectors. This means that you can daub away with your favorite pressure-sensitive stylus, but enjoy the infinite zooming and tiny file sizes of vectors. Adobe Ideas does something similar on iOS, but this is a whole lot bigger.
You’ve all used those personal guided museum tours, right? The ones that use a button-covered box and a pair of filthy headphones to tell you all about the painting/sculpture/diorama in front of you?
Well, imagine that instead of a stupid box and worn out headphones you got to use your own iPhone. And instead of having to tap in a number to hear the guide, you just relied on GPS to know what you’re looking at. And finally, imagine that instead of being a guide to a dusty old museum, the “museum” was instead the whole of New York.
That’s Urban Wonderer.
Tall Chess might as well have been called “LetterChess:” it’s like a cross between the amazingly addictive Letterpress and actual, you know, chess. It’s an iPhone 5 game (hence the “tall” part – it uses the whole of the iPhone’s screen to show the board), and it lets you play the great game against folks you’ll find on Game Center.
I’m not going to list all the problems with Apple’s iPhotos for OS X. I’ll just say that it’s clunky, slow, the library bloats as fast as a mob informer that’s been dumped in the Hudson, Photo Stream doesn’t work reliably and – every frikkin time I switch back to the app – it flips to the “Last Import” section in the source list. So I set out to find an alternative. This article will tell you all about my final choice – called Pixa – and a little bit about the alternatives.
When we talk about the Android/iOS wars, we often talk about it as a purely binary conflict. If one side wins, the other side must lose.
According to the latest Flurry Mobile Report, though, that simply isn’t true. There’s room for two kings, and while Android has surpassed iOS in overall marketshare, people spend much more time in-app on iOS.
https://youtu.be/2Azoteu5nzs
I am a snorer. This should not be taken to mean that I make soft, puppy-like growling sounds in the back of my throat as I sleep. In fact, if you happened to hold that puppy up within six inches of my face while I sawed logs, it is likely that all of the flesh, fur and musculature of that baby dog would be vortexed off its skeleton only to become lodged in the yawning chasms of my throat and nostrils. My snore is the sound of the Seventh Seal being opened, or the universe tearing itself asunder. In all probability? You have never heard anything like me.
So imagine my poor girlfriend, who sleeps next to me every night as the bed vibrates, the house shakes and the ceiling buckles with my snoring. As you might well imagine, she’s eager for me to do something about my snoring.
And what do you know? There’s a new app for just that. It’s called Snorelab.
Amazon’s Kindle app for iPhone and iPad got a great update today, which adds a couple of much needed features.
First, you can now set line spacing for your ebooks between three options: loose, normal and tight. Kindle has allowed you change the margins on e-books for a while, but this new option makes it even easier to change the settings for optimum readability.
A smaller change, but a welcome one, is that you can now highlight long passages that span multiple pages. I rarely use this functionality, but that’s still a level up.
You can download Kindle for iOS here.
Shelfy is a new iPhone app which lets you quickly and easily keep a record of the books you have read, and the books you want to read. And unlike apps like Delicious Library, it doesn’t assume that you have a stack of physical paper books to scan: Input is strictly via search, and all the better for it.
Dispatch is the iPhone e-mail client I have been looking for for years. It’s kind of like Drafts for email, only in reverse – the emails come in from pretty much any service you like, then you quickly triage them. Then, you send the results off to another app or service on your iPhone.
Angry Birds fishing! Nope, it’s not the name of an awesome cross between Angry Birds and Ridiculous Fishing. Instead, it’s what you could do IRL with these ridiculous Angry Birds fishing lures. That’s right: Angry Birds fishing lures.
Camera Noir is just about the most basic B&W photo app I have ever seen. And yet, miraculously, it seems to have included just the right features. I can tell you in two words what you can tweak: almost nothing. And yet the results are fantastic.