apps - page 45

https://youtu.be/gW2D_Votd2Y

It is often said that Japan is a weird country.

Case in point, can you imagine any other country in which Domino’s Pizza Japanese president Scott Oelkers would make a commercial in which, over the course of a two minute period, he shills a new iPhone app featuring a virtual anime girlfriend named Hatsune Miku who “exists in a software called Vocaloid which enables you to create songs” that Hatsune Miku then sings.

Not that the Domino’s app does any of this, mind you. It just allows you order pizza online and listen to Vocaloid songs written by the wage-slavers who heat up your pie. You can also, apparently, insert Hitsune Miku into photos of your choosing, the perfect way to simulate the experience of having a cartoom girlfriend who will do whatever you want.

“Have fun with Miku!” trills Scott Oelkers with wild, manic eyes. If you choose to do so, you can download the app here (Japan only).

Via: MacGasm

The Philips Hue LED lightbulbs were one of our favorite new gadgets of 2012. You can use your iPhone to turn the bulbs on, change colors, and create different themes.

Utilizing the power of Philips Hue, an iOS developer has made a crazy new app called Ambify which changes the color of your bulbs in tune with the music you’re listening to. It’s either the most fun thing to happen to your music since iTunes Visualizer, or the best way to self-induce a seizure. Or both.

If you’ve been catching our Daily Freebie posts, you’ve no doubt snagged some of the fantastic free apps out there — or been alert enough to snag an amazing deal when this or that killer app goes free for a short time. But there are other tools that help make sure you don’t miss out on all those great free apps. Hubbl is one of those tools and we’ve mentioned it in the past — but now it’s got a cool new trick that we’ve never seen before.

Prepare to riot. Facebook — the social network you obviously spend every single second of every single day upon — is about to change their Newsfeed… and it’ll never be the same again! Up is down! Left is right! Zig is zag! Ahhhhhhh!

Just kidding. It’s not that bad, although those who fear change won’t be fond. The new design is “mobile-inspired” and is basically aimed at making it easier for you to filter the kinds of things your friends are sharing with you, and making them look better and less cluttered when you do.

Marvel Unlimited is a subscription service that offers access to a catalog of 13,000+ comics spanning a period of 70 years. After a newer comic has been in circulation for 6 months, it makes its way to Marvel Unlimited in digital form. The service costs $10 per month or $60 for a yearly subscription.

In the past you could only access Marvel Unlimited through an ugly Flash-based reader on the desktop or a clunky HTML5 app. Now Marvel has released a native iOS app for the subscription service. You can also read previews and browse dozens of full issues for free.

Have you ever written this in a forum, addressed to a software developer: “I have $50 here which I’ll totally give you if you make this app”? No, of course not, because that would make you a thoughtless individual — we all know that software costs way more than that to develop.

Take NumLock, for example. It’s exactly the kind of app that forum-begging is made for. It turns back on the num-lock that Apple removed from its keyboards for seemingly no reason other than the aesthetic. How much would you promise a developer that you’d “totally pay” for an app to re-enable the number keypad? Well, now you can put that money where your, uh, keyboard is, and pitch in to DenVog’s cheap-as-chips Kickstarter campaign.

Flexibits’ fantastic calendar app Fantastical has reached v1.1. In numerical terms, this is just the addition of 0.1 to the original 1.0. But in terms of app goodness, it’s much more hugerer.

Do you present a lot? Maybe PowerPoint or Keynote presentations in front of lots of busy professionals? Have you ever had that nightmare where you get to your hotel and realize that you forgot to make the presentation you give the next morning? Yeah, me neither.

However, if I did wake up to that horrifying reality, I’d grab Stitch, an iPhone app that lets you make video presentations using your own pictures and text in minutes, right from your iPhone. Here’s how.

Hot on the heels of a hack over the weekend that compromised Evernote users’ emails, usernames and passwords — and resulted in the company initiating a password reset on all accounts — Evernote’s hurrying through a new two-factor authentication process, which would allow you to authorize your account in a variety of ways, like entering a code you receive by SMS message.

Evernote’s not the only company to roll out two-factor authentication after a breach: Dropbox also introduced two-factor authentication after a hack last year. If Evernote uses Dropbox’s method, it won’t be obligatory, but instead something you turn on optionally in your account. Better safe than sorry.

Source: Information Week

Cult of Mac’s vote for the best all-around fitness app for the iPhone is Runkeeper, and it just got a fantastic new update that makes your running preferences more customizable than ever, including a brilliant new ‘night color’ mode which makes the display easier on the eyes, even if you are not a night runner.

Path on is a super-slick new app for writing on your photographs. The gimmick, and the feature which sets it apart from all the other writing-on-photos apps in the store, is that you can put your scrawlings onto an arbitrary path. Hence the name, I guess.

Evernote just released an update for its Mac app, and if you got it from the App Store you mightn’t notice anything new other than being forced to change your password because Evernote got hacked. But if you got the update from outside the MAS, then you can enjoy the fancy new clipper that sits in the menu bar.

The latest App Report from research firm Appthority has found that free apps downloaded onto iOS devices are more likely to collect your personal data than free apps downloaded on Android, with 60% of the top ten App Store downloads sharing data with advertising and analytics networks.

The report suggests that due to the volume of titles in the App Store, iOS developers are more likely to collect your data and pass it on as an alternative revenue stream.

Too cheap to actually buy Tweetbot, Tapbot’s awesome Twitter app for iPhone, iPad and Mac? Are you pirating it despite the fact that it only costs a couple bucks, and Tweetbot has a limited number of tokens that it can distribute before Twitter says they can’t sell their client anymore?

Well, Tweetbot’s not going to force you to do anything, but they have started autofilling the Tweet box in its iOS app to publically broadcast that they are no-good, dirty pirates.

Remember the Socialmatic concept camera? It was an Instagram icon made flesh, and it worked just like a Polaroid, spitting out a printed version of your filtered and light-leaked image.

Now, after extensive boardroom wrangling no doubt, the camera will actually become a real shipping product, and it’ll carry the Polaroid brand.

BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS – I’m willing to bet that you have – at some point – been frustrated by the App Store. More specifically, you have been driven crazy trying to find apps via search. Even apps which you know are there, which you have used before, and about which you know almost everything but their names.

Quixey is a search engine for Apps, and it will ease your App Store pain.

It had to happen eventually: Photoshop for your phone. As of today you can buy Photoshop Touch for the iPhone and Android, and it pretty much does everything you can do on the iPad version.

Apple has been historically fickle about how it lets marketers and developers track iOS users through apps downloaded from the App Store. After all of the privacy concerns were raised about the UDID device identifier back in 2011, a better solution never presented itself.

Apple eventually introduced its own Advertising Identifier for iOS device tracking purposes, but marketers still favored the unique, permanent nature of the UDID. The UDID worked so well because it was a device-specific identifier that could never be changed. Athough developers were technically banned from using the UDID to track iOS devices more than a year ago, many, many apps still use the deprecated method today.

Apple is reportedly starting to reject apps that use web cookies to track user activity in iOS. Could this mean a reinvigorated push towards the Advertising Identifier again?

Jake Marsh is the designer of the stunning, minimalist iOS weather app, Conditions, which costs just $0.99 on the App Store. But because some people are so lame that they would rather go through the trouble of pirating a good app that they like than give the developer a buck for it, Jake decided to program a special ‘Pirate Mode’ into Conditions, in which users who pirate the app always get a weather report of 666 degrees in which fire and brimstone literally hails down upon them.

The prevailing conditions? “ARRRmageddon.” Absolute genius.

Via: Twitter

Basil is just about my favorite iPad cooking app. It doesn’t come loaded with recipes, nor does it feature videos of people slicing and sautéing fancy ingredients. Instead, Basil is a version of your paper notebook, only better. And it’s just about to get a huge makeover.

Ray-Ban, the sunglasses company, has a rather neat take on Instagram-style retrification filters. Instead of releasing yet another photo-filtering app, Ray-Ban’s Ambermatic actually shoots your photos through a real pair of Ambermatic shades.

Flickr’s iOS app, which pretty much relaunched the company into mobile after years of creeping neglect, has gotten a pretty significant update. No, it has’t yet gotten an iPad-native version, but you will like the new features nonetheless.

Spotify is one of the best music services available now and practically negates the need to ever buy music from iTunes. Being able to stream almost any song to your iPhone whenever you want is a dream for most people; the only problem is you have to pay a monthly fee for the app to work.

A new report claims that Spotify is trying to change all that by renegotiating deals with record companies so that you can get Spotify on your iPhone for free.

One of the coolest things about the current version of iOS, and one I show every new iOS user, is the way you can double click the Home button to bring up the multitasking bar. This shows a horizontal list of all the recently closed apps on your iPhone, making switching between their saved states super easy.

If you want something similar on your Mac, then you have to try AppsBar, a $1.99 app in the Mac App Store that does the same thing, only at the top of your screen.

Audible. An amazing service, with the worst app ever. Until now, that is. Not only has Amazon (Audible’s owner) finally made a version for the iPad, it has also tweaked the iPhone version extensively.