apps - page 74

Christmas day has historically been a record shattering day in terms of new device activations and app downloads. This Christmas was no different according to these recent stats published by Flurry Analytics. Using a baseline average taken from the first 20 days of December, Flurry showed that new Android and iOS device activations rose 353% on Christmas day. While averaging around 1.5 million activations during the month of December, activations jumped to more than 6.8 million on Christmas day. Ho, ho, ho — ly rising reindeer! That’s a staggering increase and to get a better feel for just how impressive those numbers are, only 2.8 million devices were activated last Christmas day.

Just got an iPad for the holidays? You lucky sod! You scored the crown jewel, the Big Tamale — the most marvelous gadget Apple has ever made. Yes, go ahead, pick up its slim aluminum frame and dive right in — Steve knew that’s what you wanted to do, and he designed the iPad so you could do just that.

We want to make sure you get everything right though, and we know there are a few key setup tricks along the way that new (and even some not-so-new) iPad users miss. So take a look at the short list of steps we’ve lined up here. They won’t take long, and they’ll make sure you get the best out of your iPad 2. Ready? Here we go.

With iOS 5, iPhone and iPad users started noticing a new curious behavior: app icons that suddenly started “Cleaning…” themselves. Facebook does it. Instapaper does it. Even Twitter does it. But what the heck does it mean?

Here’s a quick trick that lets you open files in the application you want, even the app in question thinks it can’t understand that file type. This can be useful with some older word processing files, for example.

Apple has never shown favor to emulators in its App Store (with the exception of examples like the Commodore 64 app), so it’s surprising to see iMAME available in the App Store for free right now. iMAME allows you to run thousands of classic arcade titles if you’re lucky enough to have the original ROMs.

The emulator app includes 9 less-than-popular arcade games to run, but the possibilities are pretty endless if you know what you’re doing.

If you buy books through Amazon and use their Kindle app, a nice update was just pushed to the App Store bringing the option to subscribe on your iPad to any of the magazines offered on the Kindle Fire

Back in the 80s, slacking off at the office was no more rare than it is today, but while these days most of our time that we should be working is spent on Twitter, Facebook and blogs (thanks for that, by the way), in the 80s, it was more often than not spent gaming on your company PC.

Enter the Boss Key, a wonderful relic of covert 80s slacking. Let’s say you were playing a game on your company PC, and your boss walked by. By simply hitting a key on your button, you could instantly replace what was on the screen with a quasi-official looking spreadsheet, full of boring figures and dry analysis. When your boss left the environs of your cubicle, pushing the Boss Key again would allow you to plunge back into the game.

Neat, huh? Well, think of CovertChirp kind of like a Boss Key for iOS, except it doesn’t help your gaming stay undetected… it helps you covertly tweet.

Pulse is one of our favorite personalized news aggregating apps, but the latest app made it even better than ever, adding a redesigned catalogue with sexy coverflow action, an improved UI and even a new Zite-like Smart Dock to supercharge an already great app.

Proceeds from of a pile of great Mac and iOS apps sold today (December 20th) will be donated to a charity working to provide clean water to those who don’t have it.

VoxOx’s free telephony app was already heavy on features when it launched earlier this year. Now it adds two more big features: outbound faxing capability (previously the app only had the ability to receive faxes) and two-way, realtime SMS translations.

Earlier this month, Orbotix apologized for dropped the ball (all puns intended) on their shipment deadline of pre-holiday arrival. They blamed themselves entirely and promised to “ramp up” production. Thankfully they’ve gotten the ball moving and have rolled out their first batch of Spheros. We’re not entirely sure how many Spheros have gone out but some of you may have the opportunity to play with your balls right before for Christmas.

That’s right — rumors surrounding an “iPad mini” have been resurrected by DigiTimes, which claims Apple is really going to give Amazon’s Kindle Fire something to worry about next year with an 7.85-inch model of it’s hugely successful tablet.

Last week, we asked you to vote for your choice of the best iOS apps of 2011. Big thanks to everyone who contributed. Here are the results.
Let’s go through the list in detail; at the end, we’d like you to vote on the best app of the year, for inclusion in Cult of Mac’s annual Best of 2011 list. Let’s go!

When Google first released their native Gmail app for iOS, it was just a total mess: an HTML5 web app that not only had less innate functionality than loading up Gmail in Mobile Safari, but couldn’t even do its one selling point — push notifications — right. Heck, it even gave error messages at boot. Iit was so bad Gmail pulled the app within hours of release.

A little while later, Google released an updated version that fixed everything wrong with the old Gmail app, but it was still a total snoozer of an app. But today’s update to Gmail for iOS actually brings some cool new features to the table that might persuade some folks to switch from Mail.app.

If you’re anything like me, you often sit around and wonder what the people and animals you know look like with their skin and musculature pulled off to reveal the screaming skulls beneath. Unfortunately, pulling the faces off of actual living creatures to stare at their skeletons tends to be considered, as I understand it, somewhat declasse amongst the bourgeoise, so until society reconsiders its values, there’s this: the Skulls app by Simon Winchester.

Solar Walk is an excellent educational app about space and everything in it. With Earth as your home base, you wander the Solar System, cruising the planets and moons and making discoveries along the way.

For the exhibitionist, the free I Made Love app allows you to “check in” to places you have boned, down to the GPS location and sexual position.

Alarmingly, there is a high concentration of activity in I Made Love at the Market Basket parking lot across the street from me. I always thought those guys were just practicing wrestling moves in the back seat of their cars.

[via Gizmodo]

Spotlight search on an iOS device is a fantastic feature. If, like me, you have pages and pages filled with apps, it’s easy to find the one you’re looking for simply by typing the first few letters of its name into Spotlight. You can do the same with songs, contacts, messages, emails, reminders, events, and lots, lots more.

However, there may be some things you don’t want to show in Spotlight. That doesn’t mean you should avoid the feature altogether — just customize its results to suit you. It’s incredibly easy, and not only will this remove items you don’t want to see, it’ll also make it faster to find what you’re looking for.

There’s over half a million apps on the App Store at this point, but that’s not to say that apps can’t still stand out from the crowd. Choosing the cream of the crop, though, can be a daunting and contentious task.

That’s why we need your help. A week from now, we’re going to announce our ten favorite iOS apps of 2011, then later in the month declare our vote for the best app of the year. Hence this poll; we need you to tell us which app you think qualifies as the best of the best.

We’ve had some great response to the Winter 2011 Mac Phenom Bundle over the past week. We’re really happy to see so many readers enjoying the apps. As a reminder to all those who have been debating whether or not to purchase the bundle, the deal ends tonight at 11PM PST, so get it while you can!

The Holiday season is here, and you can get all your holiday shopping done while sitting in your pajamas sippin’ eggnog in front of your computer screen. With the Winter 2011 Phenom Bundle you can either gift individual apps from your own bundle, or better yet, get the entire lineup for your friends and family! We’re really excited to be able to bring you 11 amazing apps for a tasty price of $50. Individually these little gems would cost a total of $486, but we’ve been able to negotiate a great deal for you just in time for the holidays.

This great bundle of Mac OS X apps includes:

Nisus Writer Pro
Motion Composer
Bellhop
PhotoStyler
Tidy Up!
MacGourmet Deluxe
Rubbernet
Boom
AppDelete
Remote Buddy
MacScan

Got a new Mac? You’ve probably realised that OS X provides an excellent out-of-the-box experience. Unlike with Windows, few add-ons are required. There’s a great browser, for example, and full PDF support. But there’s still some tools that most experienced Mac users download the minute they boot-up a new Mac. Here they are, listed for possibly the first time…

Half a million. Most app stores would be happy to have half a million users, but that’s just the number of apps Apple has in the App Store. And while they are bragging about their big swinging stats, Cupertino’s got another one to announce: over 100 million apps have been downloaded from the Mac App Store since its debut in early November last year. Wow.

2011 is quickly drawing to a close, and before we shut down our computers and get drunk for Christmas, we thought it would be a good idea to celebrate some of this year’s finest iOS games. We’ve compiled a list of our favorites and we’d like you to vote for the game the you think is this year’s greatest.

Following their annual holiday tradition, Apple has just published iTunes Rewind 2011, their list of their own personal best apps and games across twenty-one categories. And as usual, there’s some surprising choices.

During an interview at the Le Web expo in Paris this week, Google chairman Eric Schmidt took a stab at Apple and insisted his company’s Android operating system is way ahead of iOS in a number of ways, including affordability and choice. What’s more, Schmidt claims that in six months, Ice Cream Sandwich will offer better functionality.