apps - page 42

FocusTwist attempts to turn your iPhone into a Lytro Light Field camera, complete with photos that can be focussed after you take them. How does it perform this technological magic? It cheats.

Timebar is an ultra-simple timer app for your Mac. Click! its icon up in the menubar, drag! to select a period of time and then Go About Your Life! as it ticks the seconds away by running a blue progress bar across your menubar.

But there’s more.

Yahoo! has been undertaking something of an iOS App Store renaissance lately. First, they made their Flickr app into a bonafide Instragam challenger; then their new Yahoo! Weather app effortlessly fused beautifully wrought weather information with the best photographs on Flickr; and now Yahoo! has updated its iOS app with natural language summaries of all the news likely to be of interest to you.

My girlfriend and I aren’t so much collectors of books and records as we are black hole like vortexes to which books and records are inescapably drawn, gravitational wells from which any media that passes our event horizons can not escape.

As such, we’re constantly trying to keep track of the books and records we already have. One of our favorite apps to do so is Delicious Library, a fantastic media cataloging application that lets you keep track of your stuff by using a webcam as a barcode scanner (as well as manual entry), but it hasn’t really seen a serious update in years.

Thankfully, that’s about to change. Delicious Library 3 is coming soon, and it apparently will have some pretty rad new functionality: a recommendation engine, and a corresponding iOS app.

Remember when we used to switch resolutions on our computers? No, probably not. That’s because only old people experienced the pain of doing such a thing manually – these days our monitors are built in to our computers, and the pixel-mapping is done by the OS.

Unless you have a new Retina MacBook Pro that is. Now there might actually be a reason to switch resolutions. But who wants to dig around in System Preferences? Instead, you can use Pupil.

We get ca-rayyy-zee on this week’s CultCast, takin’ ’bout iPhone 5S’ rumored new camera; why megapixels don’t matter; Facebook Home coming to iOS; why teens really love Snapchat; and we review the new iSteve mockumentary—it’s either way better or way worse than you heard. Plus more!

Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing now on iTunes, or hit play below and let the good times roll.

Be excellent to each other, and party on through for the show notes.

Evernote has just updated Skitch for both the Mac and iOS. And what an update! The headline feature is PDF annotation (premium account required, 30-day trial for new users), a feature which could make the app useful to more than just bloggers marking up screenshots.

Slugline is a new app for screenwriters from Stu Maschwitz (movie maker, visual effects superstar and guy named Stu). It’s a Fountain-based app for writing movies and outputting them in industry-standard Final Draft format, but in use it’s more like a simple plain-text Markdown editor.

Got one of Fujifilm’s shiny new X100S rangefinder-style cameras? Or another of the company’s digicams with the fancy X-Trans sensor inside? Then go hit up your Software Update and install the new Digital Camera RAW Compatibility Update.

When we’ve grown tired of flinging Angry Birds through space, Hoth, Brazil, and everywhere else, Cut the Rope has always been a great fallback option for a quick, fun iOS game. Now it’s getting even better with time travel.

ZeptoLabs just released the latest installment in its Cut the Rope series called Cut the Rope: Time Travel. The new game adds the dimension of time travel to increase the complexity of ways to get your little Om Nom’s some candy. Now instead of having one Om Nom to feed, you get an ancient ancestor to worry about too while you explore locations like the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, a Pirate Ship, Ancient Egypt, Greece, and the Stone Age.

Here’s a gameplay trailer:

Once you get on Apple’s bad side, it’s hard to climb back into its good graces, and AppGratis is starting to learn that the hard way. After pulling AppGratis’ app from the Apple Store last week, Apple has also decided to kill push notifications on the app for users that still have it installed.

This is the first time we’ve seen Apple kill certain functionality on an app after users have already installed it. AppGratis was banned from the App Store after Apple decided violated multiple rules of the App Store, but AppGratis says its already working on a comeback.

My favorite read-later app, Pocket, has revamped its sharing options to make it way easier to send articles and snippets to other people. It’s powered by email, although once you’ve set it up you wouldn’t know it. And yes, for those who have been following along, it totally lets you save your favorite passages as highlights, although you’ll need to hack things to get that working.

MacHeist — one of the Mac community’s finest deals-mongers — has just gone live with their latest nano bundle: $250 worth of quality Mac software for the song of $9.99.

Apple got a head start on Google with the App Store, but over the last year, Google Play has continued to make up ground, not only with its offerings of apps, but also the amount of revenue it generates.

In Q4 2012, Apple’s App Store was still seeing four times as many sales as Google Play was, but fast forward to Q1 2013 and the App Store is now only making 2.6 times as much as Google Play.

By now you know that Alfred does a lot more than just launch apps, right? You can directly command your Mac OS X system from Alfred as well as launch stuff without ever taking your hands from the keyboard, the true power user position.

Did you also know you can send emails, with or without attachments, from Alfred as well? You need to purchase the £15 PowerPack (~$23 USD) to make it happen, unfortunately, but it seems like a pretty good price for such great functionality.

I have used Mailplane on and off for years. I love that it turns the great Gmail interface into a proper desktop app, complete with drag-and-drop attachments, notifications and an icon in the dock and tab switcher. But I never liked its super power of spinning the CPU of my Mac at all times, even when supposedly idle.

Now v3.0 is out, and it seems to have solved the latter problem, while adding a few new features.

Got a few minutes to read something? Not sure which of your saved Read Later article to pick? Then you need Readtime, a new iPhone app which picks articles based on the time you have available. Dial in the length of your coffee break or the average time taken to clear your bowels in the morning, and Readtime will return a list of appropriately-long articles.

Who knew there was room for yet another iPhone currency converter in the store? The folks behind Currency, that’s who, a conversion app that is as minimal as its name.

Triage is an app which makes it easy to quickly whittle down your incoming messages using your iPhone. The idea is that you can quickly scan (or triage) your mails, archiving anything unimportant and saving the rest for later.

Triage doesn’t try to replace your desktop mail client. It lets you use your downtime to quickly remove the noise and stress.

If you haven’t been using Alfred, the amazing app launcher (and much more) on your Mac, you’ve been missing out. It started out as an app launcher, a la Quicksilver, but continued to get improvements and additions over time until now, version 2.0 can do a ton of things on your Mac, all with a quick hotkey press on the keyboard.

Let’s take a look at one of the most basic things Alfred can do for you: launching apps. Once you’ve upgraded to or downloaded Alfred version 2, you can import your version 1 settings, and be ready to roll.

Ever wanted to save a picture of an entire webpage? I have. Last time I made a style guide for our Cult of Mac reviews, I wanted to take a picture and scrawl notes on it. Could I find an app to help? Could I hell. In the end I resorted to printing PDF on my Mac and…. I can’t really remember. It was so convoluted that my brain has repressed the traumatic memory.

If only I’d had Barry to help me.

When you think about it, it seems absurd that there’s no way to add the currently highlighted text on your Mac to your notes. The Notes app, which is the spiritual successor to Stickies, with the advantage of a) not clogging up your screen with yellow squares and b) syncing with your iPhone and iPad, is pretty great. But it lacks, inexplicably, a way to quickly clip the selected text.

This little System Service, which runs an Applescript, will fix that for you.

LaunchBar power-users should get their virtual asses over to developer Obdev’s nightly builds page and grab the latest version of v5.5. Amongst a whole bunch of neat fixes and tweaks it adds one essential new feature: support for your iCloud documents.

Remember Rego? It’s the place-saving app whose name means “asshole” in Brazil, and which lets you check-into and remember locations without sharing them.

When the app launched a couple of weeks ago, I moaned,whined and complained endlessly about the lack of a search function for places – you just had to swipe and pinch your way there manually. Now v1.1 is here. And it brings search, accessing the Foursquare database, as well as using Apple Maps search and grabbing places from your contacts.

Foursquare has just updated its popular iOS app to version 6.0, and as a point-oh release, it radically ups the ante when it comes to exploring the cityscape around you and finding you cool stuff in your area.