Scanner Pro is my new favorite scanning app for the iPad. It doesn’t do OCR, it doesn’t grab phone numbers from business cards. It just scans, stores, shares and searches your paper documents, and it does it with a beautifully simple interface.
The app is actually an update to the old iPhone version, but this new version (4.0) is completely redesigned and is now a universal app. And just in time, too, as the new iPad’s 5MP autofocus camera makes it a pretty great scanner.
Adobe Reader for Android and iOS received a hefty update today, adding a slew of new features and enhancing performance across the board. We’ll highlight these new features for you below and then send you over to the Adobe blog where they have done an excellent job at explaining what has been added and improved in the latest Adobe Reader update.
When I first heard about Drafts, I thought “What’s the point?” After all, who needs an app in which to draft messages before sending them off to Twitter, or mailing them, or otherwise disseminating them to the world at large? My Twitter and mail apps take care of that already.
And then I used it, and it has turned into possibly the handiest little note-taking app I have on my iPod Touch.
We’re a big fan of BareBones Software here and endorse their incredible BBEdit app whenever we have the chance, but if you don’t want to parcel out fifty bones for it, BareBones has just done everyone a solid and brought over many of the new features from BBEdit 4.0 to their free, powerful text editing software, TextWrangler.
Banjo is an iPhone app that aggregates pretty much all of your social networks’ data in one place. And a new update has just added Instagram, making it pretty much the most comprehensive option yet. There is a problem, however: While the app itself is dead easy to set up, and even works with iOS 5’s own Twitter integration, it is a complete mess in use.
Here, ladies and gentlemen, for your viewing pleasure, is an example of open-source “design” at its finest. From the retro desktop-style interface through to the clunky name — Documents Unlimited PDF & Office Editor Apps for iPad — not a single aspect of this experience has been left untouched by the clunky hand of open-source UI design committees.
In fact, I would like to award it the newly-minted title of Ugliest iPad App, Like, Ever (or UiALE for short).
Papermill launched on Android several weeks ago. Developed by Ryan Bateman and designed with the help of Matt Legaspi, the app is a beautiful Instapaper client for Android devices. Papermill received high praise from the community and widespread media coverage when it launched, and the developer has since broken down its success based on sales. The conclusions he draws about Android users in general are particularly interesting.
Bateman says that, “Android users not being willing to pay for an apps whose focus is quality and whose price reflects this.” Is this true only for the average Android user, or should the average iPhone user be considered as well? How can one make the blanket argument that people don’t want to pay for quality apps? I think it comes down to the basic issue of supply and demand.
As a Mac user, I’ve always been a fan of Activity Monitor. It keeps track of RAM and hard disk memory, CPU and Disk usage, and Network activity. It’s a handy app to have, on my Mac.
But what about the iPhone? Doesn’t it deserve some sort of activity monitor of it’s own? Well, todays’ tip offers one such app, called Activity Monitor Touch.
You can add another name to the list of companies dropping Google Maps in favor of OpenStreetMap. When Wikipedia announced its new app for iOS today, they also announced that they would be using OpenStreetMap exclusively for the nearby view in both their iOS and Android mobile apps. Wikipedia feels this change will be a better fit for their goal of making knowledge available in a free and open manner to everyone.
This also means we no longer have to use proprietary Google APIs in our code, which helps it run on the millions of cheap Android handsets that are purely open source and do not have the proprietary Google applications.
When the App Store first launched on iOS, the need for an alternative marketplace quickly arose. Jailbreakers and power-users wanted a way to download and install apps that gave them more control over their devices than what Apple would allow.
That was how Cydia was born. Created by Jay ‘saurik‘ Freeman, the Cydia app store allows users with jailbroken devices to not only install apps that bypass a number of iOS’s built-in restrictions, but to more easily discover them.
On the Mac, there’s obviously no jailbreaking, but given the sandboxing restrictions placed upon App Store developers, there’s still a need for a Cydia-like alternative: an easy-to-use, curated catalog for apps that give power-users too much control over their systems for Apple’s comfort.
Enter the HackStore, which hopes one day to be as synonymous with user-empowered Macs as Cydia is with jailbroken iOS devices.
I have some great news for users of the popular cloud storage service Dropbox. Earlier today, the Dropbox team announced that they would be doubling the amount of free storage awarded in their referral program. That’s right, from now on, any friend you get to install Dropbox, you’ll both get 500 MB of free space. For those with a free account, you have the ability to invite up to 32 people for a total of 16 GB of extra storage. Those with Pro accounts will now earn 1 GB per referral, for a total of 32 GB of extra space. Now isn’t that just doubletastic!
Social network Path came under great scrutiny after it was discovered that the app would upload a user’s entire address book to Path’s servers. The worst part, for iOS users at least, was Path never let them know. After a public apology, Path worked diligently to remedy the issue and came up with a few enhancements to the way they handle user privacy. Today, Path has rolled out an update to both its Android and iOS apps reflecting the changes and assuring users that they take their privacy seriously (or at least now they do).
How awesome is Instagram for Android? Well, just take a look at the photo above. Instagram may not be stable, but at least you’ll have hipster filters to make every random crash, well… hip! This photo, taken by reader Alan Liddell, is aptly named “functionality,” and shows that not every app launch goes off without a hitch and perhaps Instagram should have spent a little extra time in the dark room filtering its code for Android.
There are more iOS text editors in the App Store than there are stupid giant-screen iPhone rumors “sourced” by Digitimes. And this makes it impossible to choose. Does Elements support iCloud? Does Readdle Docs play nice with TextExpander? And have you ever even heard of FastEver XL? The answer to all these questions, plus many you didn’t even think to ask, are in Brett Terpstra’s exhaustive, crowd-sourced iOS Text Editor roundup.
I’m not sure if Kickstarter is the best place for software projects, especially complex ones involving video editing. That said, I like the look of Vival quite a bit. It look like the perfect way to sweep up all those little clips I snap on my iPad and iPod Touch, and automagically turn them into montages.
When we broke the story on Friday about Girls Around Me — an iOS app by Russian-based app developer i-Free that allowed users to stalk women in thee neighborhood without those women’s knowledge, right down to their most personal details — Foursquare was quick to respond within hours, cutting off the API access that the app relied upon to function.
Foursquare’s swift response to the issue effectively killed Girls Around Me, and i-Free quickly yanked the app from the App Store in the aftermath until they could figure out a way to restore service. And for a lot of people, the story ended there. The app’s gone. Why keep talking about it?
That’s exactly the way Foursquare (and Facebook) wants things.
After years of tweaking and improvement, ioShutter is finally here. ioShutter is a simple cable that connects your iPhone to your camera and allows you to control it using an app. Remote shooting, time-lapse sequences and even photos triggered by sound can all be programmed in easily using the free companion app. And best of all, no fancy dock connectors are required: ioShutter connects through the headphone jack.
When the creepy girl stalking app Girls Around Me went missing from the iTunes App Store last night, it wasn’t immediately clear who had pulled it: Russia-based i-Free, the developer behind the app, or Apple itself.
Now i-Free has clarified matters. They pulled the app themselves… but not because they think they did anything wrong. In fact, they’ve gone as far as to say that it is “unethical to pick a scapegoat to talk about the privacy concerns. We see this wave of negative as a serious misunderstanding of the app’s goals, purpose, abilities and restrictions.”
Oh really?
In direct response to our story from earlier today about Girls Around Me, an iOS app by Russian-based app developer i-Free that tracks and gives personal information about women without their knowledge, Foursquare has released a statement announcing that they have officially killed Girls Around Me’s access to their public API.
“Boy, you sure have a lot of apps on your phone.”
“Well, it’s my job.”
“What’s your favorite?”
“Oh, I love Daisy Slots, with so many casino games options, I couldn’t choose. But hey, want to see one to set your skin crawling?”
It was the flush end of a pleasurably hot day — 85 degrees in March — and we were all sipping bitter cocktails out in my friend’s backyard, which was both his smoking room, beer garden, viticetum, opossum parlor and barbecue pit. I was enjoying the warm dusk with a group of six of my best friends, all of whom seemed interested, except for my girlfriend… who immediately grimaced.
“Girls Around Me? Again?” she scolded. “Don’t show them that.”
She turned to our friends, apologetically.
“He’s become obsessed with this app. It’s creepy.”
I sputtered, I nevered, and I denied it, but it was true. I had become obsessed with Girls Around Me, an app that perfectly distills many of the most worrying issues related to social networking, privacy and the rise of the smartphone into a perfect case study that anyone can understand.
It’s an app that can be interpreted many ways. It is as innocent as it is insidious; it is just as likely to be reacted to with laughter as it is with tears; it is as much of a novelty as it has the potential to be used a tool for rapists and stalkers.
And more than anything, it’s a wake-up call about privacy.
Note: Title has been changed to reflect “in-app” revenue
You may have seen this report around the web about the Amazon Appstore generating more in-app revenue than the Google Play Store. While that in itself it impressive, everyone seems to be missing the most important detail of the report: Android is generating more in-app revenue than iOS. At least that’s what this report is claiming.
The immensely popular MMO Pocket Legends is turning two and Spacetime Studios is throwing a celebration to honor all of its milestones and devoted fan base. The now cross-platform global hit, Pocket Legends, was originally launched on iOS April 3rd, 2010. Since then, Pocket Legends has been played in every country on the planet (with the exceptions of Cuba and North Korea) by over five million people. That’s an impressive feat for a mobile MMO! Spacetime Studios thinks so too, that’s why players will now have access to all Pocket Legends premium content areas for free!
Just six months after announcing that developers must stop accessing a device’s unique device identifier (UDID) within their iOS apps, Apple put its rule into practice last week amid increasing privacy concerns surrounding mobile apps. Any app submitted for App Store approval will soon be rejected if its attempts to access a UDID, and developers need an alternative.
That alternative could come from AppRedeem, a mobile advertising platform for app discovery, branding and monetization, which has developed a system called Organizational Specific Device Identifier, or “ODID,” already being used by Groupon.
TiltShift Generator is one of the old school of iPad photo-editing apps, and has just been updated to play nice with the iPad 3’s Retina Display. But that’s not all. You can now shoot images directly into the app, which has the effect of making this one of the first iPad-native, Retina-ready photo shooting apps around. And while the preview of the image is a little weird, it takes some pretty great shots.
2012 Mobile Game of the Year, The Dark Meadow, received a pretty major update on iOS today. Aside from all of the new features, the game has also gone freemium. The freemium version, entitled Dark Meadow: The Pact is a separate download on the App Store and as far as I can tell is exactly the same as the original paid version. The decision to go freemium may benefit the developers over the long term and is the reasoning for the jump. Although it is only available on iOS at the moment, it is scheduled to hit Android next month.