apps - page 39

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.

Every year thousands of Apple developers flock to San Francisco to attend Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference to be educated in all things Apple. Over the past decade the conference has undergone some big changes as Apple has introduced products like the iPhone, Mac Pro, Intel Processors, Mac OS X operating systems, and much more.

An event that used to be lightly attended has now become the most popular developers conference in the world and sold out within 2 hours this years

Here’s a look at the many banners that have decorated the halls of WWDC over the past 11 years:

Following Gmail’s snazzy addition of categories for easily filtering your inbox mail, the Gmail iOS app has also been updated to support the functionality.

There isn’t a much sadder sight in the modern urban landscape than a pair of friends walking together, both isolated by their own music playing on their own headphones. Why even bother meeting your friend i all you’re going to do is ignore each other?

Now, it gets a little better – and quite a lot cuter – when those friends share one pair of earbuds, maybe to listen to the same piece of music.

And then Double Music comes along and ruins everything again. Double Music is an app that will play a different track into each bud, severing the couple’s connection even as they’re physically joined by white wires.

Every once in a while an app comes along that looks – at first glance – to be just like every other app in its category. Then, when you take it for a spin, it blows you away. Tayasui Sketches is such an app. It’s a painting and drawing app for the iPad, and it does just what you’d expect: multiple brushes, colors and a few control gestures. But when you use it the slick feel, high level of polish and great results will win you over.

Remember when it seemed like some special future high-tech magic to edit video in the web-browser? Now it’s almost as mundane as composing an e-mail inside Safari. But Pics.io is about to let you edit RAW photos in the browser. The site is currently in private alpha testing, but the promise is of fast online RAW editing on your iPad.

Pixter is an interesting idea, although one which is – possibly – doomed. Here’s the elevator pitch: Pixter is a for-pay Instagram.

Brett “I just built this” Terpstra has been at it again. Inspired by Evernote’s new reminders feature, launched last week, Brett decided to add something similar to his app NValt, itself a fork of the notable Notational Velocity. It’s called “nvremind,” and it’s pretty awesome.

Now, just by tagging a note with “@remind,” you’ll be sent a notification or an e-mail at the chosen time, and in Mountain Lion, clicking the notification will take you to the note in NValt.

If you use Google’s maps app on your iPad, you’ll know that it kinda sucks. Search is great, and the fancy maps look ok, but the UI elements are comically big when blown up to fit the iPad screen, and they cover most of what you really want to see – the maps. And Street View isn’t much better.

Enter Streets 2.0, an update to – you guessed it – Streets, which brings Googles vector map tiles and live traffic as well as big-screen Street View.

Oh man, those guys at Everpix sure know how to have some fun. *Nerd* fun, that is. When they;re not busy making my favorite photo-looking-after-and-looking-at app for the web, Mac and iOS, they’re adding little nuggets of gold like the new Mac Memories app. And no, it has nothing to do with RAM. Unless “you”ewe” take lots of pictures of male sheep — ba-dum-tish!

Remember Merek Davis’ Mextures? They were a bunch of image files for adding textures to your iOS photos using Photoshop Touch or other layering and blending apps. Now Merek, who was so proud of these textures that he named them for himself, has made an app.

While speaking today at the All Things D conference, Nuance CEO Paul Ricci confirmed that Nuance does indeed help power the voice recognition service for Siri.

Since Siri’s launch in 2011, many people assumed that Apple had formed a partnership with Nuance, but neither company has officially confirmed the relationship.

During the his interview, Ricci was asked whether it’s his company’s fault if the iPhone doesn’t understand a user’s voice. Ricci confirmed that Nuance does power the voice part of Siri, but the company is not involved in speech-recognition efforts with Google.

Evernote, one of our favorite digital trunks for our virtual documents and notes have just announced that they are taking security on their service to the next level, rolling out two step authentication to all users, along with a couple other features to make sure that you’re the only person accessing your Evernote account.