There’s a lot of things you have to keep track of in outer space. How much oxygen you have. Whether cosmic rays are irradiating your fellow crewmen. Which of your fellow astronauts are possible Russian saboteurs. How much murderous sentience your onboard space computer is exhibiting. And, of course, whether or not you are maintaining a balanced diet.
Right now, there’s not an app for that, believe it or not… but NASA and TopCoder, a program competition company, are working on that. And they need your help.
Everpix is my new favorite photo app. Or rather, photo service. Grab the apps for your iPhone, iPad, Mac and PC and Everpix will upload all your photos (except screenshots) to its servers and then perform some special magic upon them. For instance, the Highlights view will only show you the very best of your pictures. It’s pretty neat.
Did you ever paint miniatures when you were kid? Or as my mother called them, “toy soldiers,” even though they were obviously space marines and orcs. Did you ever wish you could also design the plastic or lead models underneath your amazing ink-wash and dry-brushing technique?
Then – if you also dreamed of never getting a lick of paint on your thumb ever again – I have just the app for you. It’s from the awesome boffins at Sketchbook, and it’s called 123D Creature.
Ever wish that you could sort the photos on your iPad by… well, by anything? The Photos app lists everything by date, and won’t even tell you which pictures are JPGs and which are GIFs. And forget about sorting by camera model for your imported photos.
SmartAlbum, on the other hand, will do just that. And a more.
Yesterday, Amazon’s iOS Kindle app was updated to add multicolor highlights, “Book End Actions” (rate, review, share, see recommendations) and to fix the brightness control, which now stays set across app switching or sleep.
At first I thought “Meh, iBooks has had most of that since forever.” And then I thought “Wait, are there any differences left between these two apps?”
The answer is — of course — yes. But it’s more complicated than that…
Vimeo — one of the last true alternatives to YouTube left in this crazy digital world — has just acquired Echograph, a nifty app to make animated GIFs, in an attempt to go to head with Twitter’s Vine, an app that deals entirely in six-second video snips.
If you’re one of those people who still uses Pandora, you’re missing out on some really great music apps that have a deeper catalogs of music. Yes, Spotify and Rdio are pretty much the frontrunners in the streaming music scene, but Slacker Radio just got a brand new look that makes it worthy to be oogled at.
The biggest problems with Spotify and Rdio is that most people (like me) are lazy and don’t want to be forced to comb through 11 million songs to find an artist to listen to for the next 42 minutes. Slacker Radio wants to step in and take that pain away by offering 250 DJ curated stations so you can just kick back and enjoy the music without thinking about what to play next.
One of the more intriguing and, in our minds, controversial comments Tim Cook made during his interview at Goldman Sach’s conference:
“The innovation has moved away from PC development to the tablets and smartphones. Who is making PC apps now? No one, except the usual suspects.”
That’s a bold thing to say. When Cook refers to “PC development” the context of this question makes it clear the’s also referring to Mac development. That’s a strange comment to make when one of the legs on Apple’s stool of businesses is the Mac App Store, which is a lucrative business in its own right for Apple.
But is Tim Cook right? Have Mac and PC developers stopped innovating? Are all the innovators working on iPhone and iPad apps now? Take part in our poll, then please feel free to give us your thoughts in the comments.
Oh man. Writing any kind of text on iOS is easy thanks to Markdown and the profusion of plain text editors in the App Store. But revising that text? Making edits and tracking them between author and editor? You need Microsoft Word for that. You need a computer for that.
But what if there were a Markdown-like markup syntax for plain text copyediting? You know where I’m going with this don’t you? That tool is here, and it’s called Critic Markup.
If you were ever a dork like me, goofing off in Trig class to play Wolfenstein 3D on your graphing calculator, this will be exciting: Texas Instruments has brought their graphing calculator software to the iPad.
The new software mimics the functionality of TI’s TI-Nspire calculator, and it’s Texas Instrument’s first entry into the graphing calculator app world.
Ever need to quickly send a file over to your iPad from your Mac. Or from your iPad to your Mac? Or between iOS devices? Then you need Instashare, an app which also has the distinction of completing the hat-trick of Insta-apps on your iDevice (Instapaper and Instagram being the other two).
Remember bookmarks? It’s how we used to save sites to go back to later. In theory anyway. Browser bookmark search was pretty terrible, and you had to remember the name of the site to find it again. So we mostly just used Google to search for a site every time we wanted to go there.
We’ve already enthused at length about Mailbox, Orchestra’s incredible new e-mail app for the iPhone, but if you want to see it in action or don’t have the time to read our full review, we’ve got you covered. Here’s a quick five minute walkthrough of Mailbox in action.
That message you meant to get back to gets buried in a pile of PR pitches, or deal mailers, or unsolicited spam, until the prospect of doing something as simple as writing back to an email from a week ago becomes as onerous a task as snorkeling in a sewage tank. In a day and age where walking away from a computer for just a few hours can result in dozens of emails piling up, all of which have different priorities, email has undergone a horrible mutagenic transformation in the minds of most users: from a supremely useful communication tool to a digital black hole where information, once trapped, inescapably leaves the universe forever.
The idea behind Orchestra’s new iOS emailing app, Mailbox, is simple. As we know, inboxes fester without constant vigilance… so why not make remaining vigilant as easy and satisfying as ticking off items on a to-do list? That’s what Mailbox is in a nut shell: an app that takes the GTD ethos and gesture-based interface of an app like Clear and applies it to your inbox.
How well does it work? So well that we’re comfortable saying that if you get any volume of email, Mailbox is worth throwing any other iOS email client in the trash.
It’s finally here! Mailbox — the incredible new e-mail client from Orchesta, that is one part Sparrow and one part Clear — has finally dropped on the iTunes App Store after months of buzz. And boy, is it worth it.
I was thinking that I’d make an incredibly clever play on the Wash’n’Go ads here, drawing a comparison between the new Horizon app, which lets you check the weather and your calendar at the same time. “Use two apps when you leave the house?” I would ask, before wrestling with the punchline, and somehow turning the original “Not me – I just want to Wash… And Go!” into something clever and calendar/weather related.
But as you can plainly see, I failed. I made a cup of delicious coffee instead, and then typed the code to add the break to this post…
Some have the mad iPhone movie-making skillz of an Anderson or a Scorsese. Others, not so much. If you fall in the latter category, don’t worry — just jam some fancy graphics in there with the free Jollyfy app and you’re good to go.
It’s a pretty simple process. Fire up the app, pick a theme (the app’s App Store page says there are hundreds to choose from) and start shooting.
BlackBerry — previously Research in Motion — launched the new BlackBerry Z10 last week, the first smartphone to run the company’s new BlackBerry 10 operating system. Originally set to launch in late 2012, the Z10 has been a long time coming for BlackBerry fans, and it’s a hugely important milestone for the Canadian company.
Many see this as BlackBerry’s last hope of survival in today’s cutthroat smartphone market. It’s been rapidly losing market share to Android and iOS devices over the past five years, and it hasn’t evolved quick enough to put up any sort of a fight. But it’s better later than never.
BlackBerry 10’s here now, and with the help of the Z10 — and later the Q10 — it’s going to be trying to persuade you to give up your iPhone or Android-powered smartphone in favor of a brand new platform. But is it good enough?
I’m a long-time iOS user who recently made the switch to Android, and I’ve been really curious to see if the Z10 is any good. I’ve been using the device almost exclusively since its release; here’s Cult Of Android’s review.
MultiMarkdown, the (surprise!) MultiMarkdown editor for OS X, has just launched its new 2.0 version, and it’s fantastic. If you write articles in MarkDown on your Mac, or even on your iPad, then you should probably just go spend the $5 right now.
Pinbook is an excellent iOS client for the excellent paid anti-social bookmarking service Pinboard. Imagine if De.licio.us had never been sold to Yahoo and had instead started charging money to keep your bookmarks tagged and organized online. Further, imagine that the developer kept a Twitter stream that read something like the crotchety ramblings of your drunken (and outspoken) uncle. That service would be Pinboard.
The (non-affiliated) Pinbook client has just been updated to v1.3, and with the update come some fantastic new features. Let’s take a look:
Evad3rs figured out that the jailbreak screws up some files like com.apple.mobile.installation.plist. It’s not a big deal, and every jailbreak has its little quirks, but if you can’t wait for evad3rs to push their fix to Cydia you can fix the problem on your own manually.
The new 128GB iPad with Retina display is now available to order from the Apple online store. The device is priced from $799, and it’s currently shipping in 1-3 business days. You’ll also be able to find it in your local Apple retail store.
I have a history of losing money when I bet on my own predictions, so if you’re smart you should probably ignore this one: Vine – Twitter’s video-sharing app – will wither and die. Animated GIFs, on the other hand, have already managed to outlive MySpace and GeoCities, so it’s a safe bet (even for me) that they’ll keep on keeping on.
Which is all a rather roundabout way of introducing VineGifR, a Mac app which will take your futureless Vines and GIF-ify them.
If your iPad doodles are a little primitive, there are a few apps that can get you canvasing the art greats from Caravaggio to Picasso and creating some deft original strokes of your own.
So says Sumit Vishwakarma in a talk for Macworld/iWorld 2013, adding that if you’re willing to forgo one cinnamon latte at Starbuck’s, that money spent in apps will take your work to the next level.
Vishwakarma is an iPad art advocate whose work has been featured at the first Mobile Art Festival in Los Angeles, the Apple flagship store in San Francisco, and the Mobile Creativity & Innovation Symposium. He also teaches free workshops to promote iPad art and animation to kids, teens and adults.
Along with Evernote’s big Penultimate announcement yesterday came another big update. Evernote Hello, the person-remembering app, is now at version 2.0. It adds two great features: business-card scanning and a tie-in with social networks.
Yes, you’ve seen both these before, but not quite as slick as this.
