apps - page 46

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.

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.

[polldaddy poll=6894415]

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.

And then came Del.icio.us.

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.

The problem with inboxes isn’t just that the mail piles up in them. Without constant vigilance, inboxes fester.

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…