apps - page 67

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.

Back when I first moved back from Germany to the United States, one of the things I initially missed most about my previously Euro-centric digital lifestyle was, of course, Spotify. Depressed that the streaming music service hadn’t launched yet in the United States, I tried Rdio, a U.S. only analog.

Over the last year and a half, I’ve completely come around to Rdio as the superior service. It’s got a better interface — one that doesn’t look like it was designed as a Winamp skin circa 1997 — and really makes sharing and music discovery easy. It also, unlike Spotify, has a native iPad app.

The only problem with Rdio was that it was a fantastic music streaming service that I couldn’t recommend to my European friends. But now that’s all changed, or at least in the process of changing, because Rdio is coming to Europe.

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I shoot a bunch of video these days. It’s so easy, as everything from my iPod to my iPad to even my camera shoots HD video. And editing it is a blast using iMovie on iOS. But what I don’t like, and what keeps me from editing much of the video I shoot, is dragging through the footage to find the good parts.

Enter Highlight Hunter, a Mac (and PC) app which runs tirelessly through any amount of video and separates out the highlights into discrete 30-second clips, ready for further editing.

Loren Brichter, the developer behind Tweetie and its hugely popular pull-to-refresh gesture, which has now made its way into countless iOS apps, has spoken out about Twitter’s recent move to patent the feature. Speaking on the One More Thing podcast, Brichter said that there’s really no need for people to worry about it.

Alltop, you may already know, is a web news aggregator from serial lame-e-preneur Guy Kawasaki. Now, this questionably-useful service has been ported to the iPad as an app. And it’s even worse.

If further proof were needed that Instagram integration is the new Dropbox integration, then the updated Camera Awesome is it. The iPhone app, from photo-sharing site SmugMug, doesn’t post direct to Instagram like the recently updated Hipstamatic, but it will send your photo to the Instagram app at the touch of a button.

One of the neatest things about running Photoshop on a the iPad is that it is both portable, and it has has cameras. That might not sound like much, but it lets you do a lot more than just take pictures. Photoshop Touch lets you shoot into the current project right from either camera, and you can use this to add some pretty amazing analog effects to your image.

Today we’ll take a look at two cool tricks, one using each camera. One needs a flashlight, and one needs a textured surface or a piece of paper. Go get your tools and follow along.

Do you like the pull-to-refresh feature found in many popular iOS apps? Well, you might want to prepare to see it go the way of the dodo, as Twitter is now trying to patent it.

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These iPhone-powered doggies are ridiculously cute. The little fellas use iPhones for their faces and brains, and can shuffle around the table (or neighborhood, we guess), barking, blinking and even sneezing. It’s a little like a virtual pet, only real.

Watching movies on the new iPad is pretty great. Getting those movies onto the iPad isn’t quite so great, especially if you live in a country that doesn’t sell iTunes movies, or if you rip your own DVDs. The forthcoming 3.0 version of It’s Playing for iPad, though, not only plays pretty much any movie format without having to re-encode it on your computer first, it also puts in some amazing new features not seen anywhere else.

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The video above is probably enough to make iPad 3 owners rush out and buy a copy of AirServer for your big-screen Mac. It shows the difference in the speed of video mirroring natively to the the Apple TV 3 and mirroring to the Mac using AirServer. The first is dreadfully laggy. The second is like playing with a wired controller. But that’s not all: The newest version of AirServer processes the video before displaying it, making for much better results on the big screen.

On “Them, Robot”, last Sunday’s episode of The Simpsons, Mr. Burns briefly pulled out his iPad and gave us all a quick glimpse of his homescreen. So what kind of apps does an old coot like Burns download? Medical apps like Am I Alive and Google Naps, home automation apps like Trap Door and games like Ukelele Hero and Captain Billy’s Whiz-Bang.

My favorite, though? Angry Burns. Fox should actually make that game happen.

[via Gizmodo]

If you thought interest in the slingshotting hit Angry Birds has faded over the years, you’d be sorely mistaken. In fact, it seems to be even more popular according to the latest numbers announced by Rovio. According to Rovio, their latest Angry Birds Space netted 10 million downloads in less than three day. That’s quite an accomplishment, and to put things into perspective, it took Angry Birds Rio ten days to reach 10 million downloads.

A truly awesome deal like this only comes around every once in a while…but a truly awesome deal like this also won’t last for very long either! In fact, the Mac Spring 2012 Bundle is around for less than 24 hours, so you’d better grab these amazing 10 Mac apps while you can!

This latest Cult of Mac Deals offer includes apps that are valued at over $800.00 – and there’s something for everyone to be found in it. But for the next few hours you’ll get them all for an exclusive price of just $49.99! That’s a savings of over 90%!

You know the drill. You take a walk around a nearby neighborhood at dusk, when it’s dark enough that people have switched their lights on, but not late enough that they have closed their drapes. You glance through the windows and get a tiny, thrilling glimpse into their private world.

But what if you want to get even creepier? How many bedrooms does that house have? How much is it worth? Does it have heating? The answers to these questions can be had using an iPhone app called HomeSnap. Just snap a photo of the home, and it will pull up the details in seconds.

Process is a new take on photo editing apps. It’s simple, fast, powerful and has some very clever ideas about how we edit our photos. The in-app introduction describes it as a “non-linear editor for photos,” and that’s not far from the mark.

Porthole is a Mac app which will stream all the audio coming from your computer to AirPlay speakers, instead of just the music from iTunes. It’s kind of like Rogue Amoeba’s excellent AirFoil, only much less fine-grained in terms of control.

Lightroom 4 isn’t nearly as big of an update as versions 2 or 3, but that’s more of a sign of a mature product than anything else. There are a few all-new features, but the one thing that will really, really want to upgrade is the new Highlights and Shadows section. It really is good enough to justify this point-release upgrade all by itself.

The world’s favorite music streaming service Spotify has just added a bunch of new music apps. Spotify apps are widgets that run inside Spotify and let you access the music in various ways. The first apps launched a few months ago on the Mac (they’re still not on the iPhone), and the second wave has just dropped. I have taken a quick look, and there are a few gems in there.

Adobe’s next version of Photoshop — CS6 — is now available as a free download in beta form. The update packs in a lot of new features, but it really feels more like a reboot, with a redesigned interface and several features ported back from Photoshop’s sister product, Lightroom.

I’m a dead treeware holdout when it comes to cookbooks, and as such any recipes I save from the web are scattered across Pinboard, Instapaper and Simplenote. But Basil is the app that might just change all that. Yes, it’s another recipe organization app, but there’s a difference. Basil lets you throw in recipes from just about anywhere, formats them and categorizes them ready to use.

Do you use your iPad as a second monitor using Air Display to wirelessly extend your desktop? If so, bet you wish you could harness your new iPad’s retina display, don’t you? Unfortunately, the functionality currently isn’t baked into Air Display, but that’ll soon change… and for the first time let millions of OS X users experiment with the hidden HiDPI mode in Lion and Mountain Lion.