BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — What if you could swipe your credit card and then — moments later — have the transaction details appear on your phone. Better still, what if all of your payments could be organized in a beautiful app, an app which could actually make managing your money fun. This service now exists for your iPhone, and it’s called Boku.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — Scalado, most recently seen removing people from photos like a cold-war-era dictatorship, today showed me some of its other fancy photo-processing apps. Scattered across Android, Windows Phone and Symbian, but mostly Android, there is an embarrassment of cleverness in fast photo processing.
Remember when we told you about Evi, a Siri clone in the App Store? While the iPhone app mimicked much of the features found in Apple’s digital assistant, there seemed to be enough differences to keep it safe from the watchdogs in Cupertino. For instance, you can ask “Where’s a good place to eat Mexican?” and Evi will use Yelp’s API to provide you results in-app.
According to new reports, Apple has threatened to yank Evi from the App Store. The app has been downloaded over 200,000 times and costs $0.99 in the App Store.
We’ve been offering a slew of Cult of Mac Deals for some time now, and now we’re offering a deal that’s going to be tough to resist… a FREE iPhone App WordPress theme.
So, why is this professional iPhone App WordPress theme free? Let’s just say it’s a token of appreciation to all of our supporters out there — because without you there is no “us”.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — One of the things that first inspired me to be a professional writer was sharing my early fiction experiments as a 10 year old on the discussion boards of the old dial-up service, Prodigy. The instantaneous feedback, the helpful advice, the suggestions from other people about what should happen next to my character (a monster-killing, Nazi-loathing private dick named Dr. Crypt, a name which I still use as my Twitter handle): all of this was a formative experience for me, and without it, I never would have dared to dream that someday, I would make my living putting words down on paper.
Prodigy’s bulletin boards aren’t around anymore, but a new start up is trying to encourage kids and teenagers to write the same way. The company’s called Movellas, and it’s taking the concepts of Twitter, LiveJournal, Kickstarter and the Kindle self-publishing platform to help identify and nurture the next Stephanie Mayer or Stephen King when he or she is still a kid. And, of course, they have an app for that.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — When I first spotted the Aurasma booth, I thought it was yet another annoying app to serve ads on top of the real world, using augmented reality. And it actually is. Only before I could walk away, I got caught by the enthusiastic marketing folks and found out that the app is actually very cool indeed.
Aurasma is a kind of cross between augmented reality and Instagram. It works like this: You point the app at anything: a painting, a product package, a building, and Aurasma will remember it. You then pick a video or photo or a 3-D rendering to show up over that real-world scene whenever you point your iPhone’s camera at it again.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — On Voicefeed is a neat new iPhone app which takes over your voicemail account and turns it into a kind of personalized everything box for your communications. The headline feature is being able to record personalized voicemail greetings for everyone you know, individually or by group. But there’s a lot more to it than that.
Spectacular and a little spooky; Ban.jo, an iOS/Android app that launched last summer, is startling in what it’s able to give the user: the realtime whereabouts of any friends who have location services active for any of (now five) different social media platforms.
Hey, iPhone users with death wish: We have just the thing to tantalize your suicidal tendencies. It’s called the Xappr, and it’s an augmented reality gun for your beloved iPhone 4. Simply pre order the Xappr for $30, hop on the plane to any decent-sized U.S city and wait for the cops to see you and mow you down in a glorious rain of lead.
Are you a fan of Instagram? Of course you are. And are you also a fan of those frustrating memory games where you have to flip over cards and match the pictures? I thought not. But if you are — you freak, you — then InstaMatch might be right up your alley.
A brand new update from Spotify adds a couple of great new features. The Mac and Windows versions of the subscription music service both now support gapless playback and crossfading of songs. There is also a scattering of other tweaks and improvements.
Photo of Andrew Lansley looking at apps from Department of Health Flickr feed; used with permission
Doctors in the UK might soon be able to prescribe apps as well as drugs, following a government study that asked the public to nominate their own favorite health-related apps.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was some kind of iPhone accessory that let you toss your $650+ device around, abusing it by bouncing it off walls and floors? If you answered a sensible “no” to that question, then congratulations. You are a responsible adult with a sense of perspective. If you answered “yes,” then you might be interested in The O, a foam ball with — you guessed it — custom apps.
Get ready to save Springfield from a horrific nuclear explosion caused by none other than the bumbling Homer Simpson in what Electronics Arts expects to be one of the biggest freemium hits of the year. Expected to be released in the coming weeks on iOS (and then later on Android – D’oh!), The Simpsons: Tapped Out will be a free download for users but will follow the success of other freemium apps by offering optional in-app purchases. This virtual currency will of course come in the form of doughnuts and while not necessary to complete the game, will give impatient users a way to speed things up.
Twitter has pushed out an update for both the Android and iOS mobile apps which brings back a few popular features as well as adding a couple new ones. Also, owners of the Kindle Fire will be happy to know that the Twitter app is now available via the Amazon App Store, and if you happen to own a Barnes & Noble NOOK Color or NOOK Tablet, you can expect to receive the app on February 23rd. So what’s new? According to the Twitter Blog, here’s what you can expect:
Next month, students at the Kensington and Chelsea College in West London will be able to sign up for a course on iPhoneography. Anyone can do the course: all you need is an iPhone, £115 ($182) for the course and all your Thursday nights free throughout March.
Sometimes the morass of Mail windows on a Mac can just become too much. Various apps have tried to help manage this in various ways: Sparrow by bringing the streamlined Tweetie aesthetic to mail, Postbox by in-line quick replies, and so on.
Even so, more often than not, when I close Mail for the day, I’m closing about a dozen or two blank or half-written email windows that have been opened during the day, then forgotten. Why can’t sending an email be as painlessly fire-and-forget as sending an IM? Enter QuickMailer.
If you went ahead and loaded the developer preview of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion onto your Mac, you likely already played around with the new Notification Center. Until you got bored and fired up Growl once again so you could enjoy notifications from all your apps, not just Mail and Calendar. Wouldn’t it be great, though, if all those Growl-capable apps could talk to Notification Center instead? With Hiss, they can.
Valentine’s Day may have come and gone, but you still have a few hours left to show your Mac how much you love what it does for you with The Mac Love Bundle.
You’ll get over $300 worth of stellar Mac apps for only $39 — and your Mac will love you for it!
Apple has announced another promotion celebrating the 25 billionth download from the App Store. As the huge milestone draws near, Apple is encouraging customers to enter to win a $10,000 App Store gift card for hitting the lucky number.
If you’re fortunate enough to download the 23 billionth app, you could win $10,000 to spend in the App Store!
Can’t get enough of whizzing those Angry Birds through the air using your trusty catapult, knocking down the fortifications of those adorably cute, wonderfully evil, egg-guzzling Green Piggies?
Well, how are you going to do that without gravity in outer space, hmmm, smart guy?
Yup, that’s right, Rovio has just announced their upcoming Angry Birds sequel, Angry Birds Space.
One of the big new Mountain Lion features is AirPlay Mirroring. This will let you beam your Mac’s desktop, videos and Keynote presentations to any screen connected to the Apple TV. This feature alone will probably sell zillions of Apple TVs into conference rooms the world over. But who wants to wait until OS X 10.8’s summer launch? With a couple of apps, you can use AirPlay on your Mac right now.
Knock, Knock!
Who’s there?
Doctor.
Doctor who?
Doctor who owns an iPad, along with 26 percent of my peers.
A good pun it’s not, but the facts are worth my terrible setup: Fully one quarter of European doctors own an iPad, according to a survey of “1,207 practicing physicians in Germany, France, Spain, Italy and the UK.”
Apple’s new version of OS X, 10.8 Mountain Lion, bakes in a lot of new features that may make existing third-party apps obsolete. Notification Center, Reminders, Messages and Twitter all step on the toes of independent developers. And worst of all, these apps come from some of the most popular categories in the App Store.
Apple has officially responded to the contact sharing debacle that was highlighted by the Path iPhone app last week. After it was discovered that Path secretly uploaded a user’s entire contact database to its own servers, the controversy sparked more discussion about how Apple needs to enforce its user privacy guidelines more to protect customers.
Third-party apps will have to ask for permission to access contact data from a user, according to Apple. The issue will be remedied with an upcoming iOS update.