If you like Instant Markup on iOS, then you’re going to love ShotBox. It’s a free app, available from the Mac App Store, that automatically pops up a panel of markup tools whenever you take a screenshot. It’s almost exactly like the Instant Markup tools built into iOS 11.
On the Mac, you can type any character available in there Unicode standard, just by opening up the Emoji & Symbols viewer (Control-Command-Space) and picking the one you want. The selection on iOS is much more limited. Even finding an ellipsis is such an odyssey I can never remember whether it’s available or not. But UniChar changes that. It’s a Universal iOS app that brings every single Unicode character to your device.
Does your podcast player app have too many options? Do you spend more time curating playlists than actually listening? Is it a struggle to add a new podcast, or just listen to the latest episode of a favorite? Then you may appreciate Sodes, an ultra-simple new podcast app from minimalist app developer Jared Sinclair.
As promised, YouTube’s $35-per-month YouTube TV service has landed on Apple TV.
The premium package, which offers a skinny bundle of 40+ live TV channels, has previously only been available on Apple TV if users ran it via AirPlay from an iPhone or iPad. Today marks the first time there has been a native Apple TV app.
iOS is getting to be a serious platform for musicians. Lots of musicians already know that, but now some amazing hardware is appearing that takes advantage of the little devices. The latest is Positive Grid’s Bias Mini, for guitar and bass, 300-watt guitar amplifier that takes its sounds from an iPhone, iPad, or Mac app.
Users of chatroom (and time-wasting tool) Slack will be familiar with typing out emoji reactions. To insert a smiley face, for example, you just type :smile:, and your text will be replaced by a smiley-face emoji when you hit enter.
If you ever find yourself missing this handy feature anywhere else on your Mac, you should take Rocket for a spin. It’s a macOS app that exists to make emojis easier.
2017 was a great year to be an app developer, based on new data that show smartphone users spent more money than ever on apps last year.
According to a new report from Sensor Tower, customers spent $58.6 billion on apps and games in 2017 on the App Store and Google Play. And iOS developers took away the most cash.
With all the fuss about depleted old batteries slowing down iPhones, it might be a good idea to at least check the health of your iPhone’s battery. To do this, you can use a free tool called coconutBattery. This handy app digs into your iOS and Mac devices to tell you how old they are, and how strong your battery is compared to when it was new.
First responder apps may help save your life, but they’re in drastic need of a security overhaul, a new report the Department of Homeland Security says.
Released this week, the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate “Securing Mobile Applications for First Responders” report said that discovered glaring security flaws on almost every app that it examined.
A unique selfie app, created by Google, that summons up your inner supermodel is just of one of the picks for this week’s “Awesome Apps” roundup.
In addition, we’ve got part one of an excellent episodic adventure finally available on iOS, a sound-matching app for any guitar players out there, and an augmented reality-focused update to Facebook Messenger. Check out our picks below.
With Christmas coming, it’s probably not the time of year to be spending a whole lot of money on yourself — knowing that there’s plenty of other things you may need to splash your cash on.
Which is why it’s great news that Layton’s Mystery Journey: Katrielle and the Millionaires’ Conspiracy, one of my previously recommended best games of the year, has slashed its $15.99 price tag for the holidays.
It’s not just Apple that’s excited about the possibilities of augmented reality! In its latest Snapchat-inspired update, Facebook has added new AR features to its Messenger app.
Called “World Effects,” the feature lets you place emoji-style 3D objects in three-dimensional space via your iPhone’s rear camera. Objects added include a heart, an arrow, and a robot — along with word bubbles with messages like “love,” “heart,” “miss you,” and — making us feel old — ““bae.”
Apple has released its yearly “Best of” list, highlighting its picks for the top apps, games, albums, movies, podcasts, books, and TV shows — just in time for your holiday purchasing!
As is always the case, the lists combine Apple’s own hand-curated picks and popularity-driven charts, based on purchases in Apple’s various services such as iTunes, the App Store, iBooks Store, and Apple Music.
Don’t you just hate messy text? Text with extra spaces between words. Text with carriage returns inserted in the middles of lines. Text with lots of %-encodes and %nbsp mixed in. Text with > symbols at the beginning of every line. Filthy, dirty, unclean text? What you need is Clean Text, the smiter of hinky formatting, and quasher of non-smart punctuation.
An Apple Watch app that could actually save your life by watching for irregular heart rhythms is just of one of the picks for this week’s “Awesome Apps of the Week.”
In addition, we’ve got a console-quality racing game, a new iOS web browser, and an app that will let you stream video to your Apple TV by simply dropping a video onto your Mac. Check out our picks below.
You can snap photos of your iPhone, edit them on your iPad, and view them on your giant-screen iMac, with everything almost instantaneously in sync. But what if you have a video clip that you want to watch on your Apple TV? Oh man, maybe it’s best not to even ask. Now, though, there’s an app that lets you do just that: DropStream.
DropStream’s function is right there in its name. You drop a movie onto its Mac window, and the movie starts playing on your Apple TV (or Chromecast). You don’t have to convert it to the right format, or add it to iTunes, or anything like that. It just, as they say, works.
Instagram is continuing its competition with Snapchat with its latest update, which lets user remix friends’ photos and then send them back.
To use the feature, when you view a photo message from friends, hit the camera icon at the bottom of the screen and capture a reply. Your reply then contains a sticker of the original message, which you can then move and resize, or add additional stickers, text, and drawings to.
If you ever missed a full-featured spell-and-grammar checker on iOS then you should check out Grammarly. Grammarly is a replacement keyboard for iOS which not only offers auto-correction as you type, but can also run through the entire text and suggest changes, just like you can do on the Mac.
But Grammarly goes one better than that. Its grammar engine picks up on errors of punctuation, grammar, and even spots double spaces. I just ran it on the previous article I wrote today and it flagged up all kinds of small errors that a regular spell checker would never catch.
A brilliantly spooky, story-driven augmented reality game in which you search for your missing child in a new house is just one of our picks for this week’s “Awesome Apps of the Week.”
In addition, we’ve got a great app for teaching you Mandarin, another ARKit title that lets you get a closer look at some of the world’s top supercars, and a brilliant photo app for getting the most out of your iPhone or iPad.
Check our selections below. You won’t regret it!
It’s time for Apple to think different when it comes to the Mac mini.
Even though it’s been over 1,000 days since Apple last updated its smallest Mac machine, Tim Cook insists it’s still an important part of Apple’s product line. Apple fans are desperate for an update, but if it looks anything like this concept it’ll have been well worth the wait.
Take a closer look:
Hate the notch? Then you need Notcho, a free app that creates wallpapers that hide the black camera-and-sensor array on the iPhone X, making it look like a black bezel instead.
Now that the iPhone X is out and into the hands of customers, developers are eager to roll out new app updates, taking advantage of the handset’s new TrueDepth camera system.
One of the first is glasses manufacturer Warby Parker, which is already employing the Face ID facial mapping data feature to make suggestions about which glasses would suit people’s face shape.
Did you ever wonder how Face ID sees you? After all, it has an incredibly complex set of eyes that project invisible dots onto your face, and then turns the results into a 3D representation of your head. If you want to know what that representation might look like, then check out the new Face Mesh tool in the latest update to MeasureKit, the AR measuring app.
It just got a whole lot easier to find odd items on eBay. Now, instead of typing in your search criteria, you can just snap a photo of an object, and eBay will search across the site and return any results that look like your photo.
This is great for those times that you have no idea how to describe something, but you totally have to buy it. Or when you see something in an image and don’t know how search for it on Amazon. Or when you see a super-cool vintage blouse/jacket/bag and want to find something similar.
Just in time for Halloween, Pushpin is back from the dead! Pushpin was the best Pinboard bookmarking app on the iPhone and iPad, but it withered and sat in the store without updates since the iOS 9 days thanks, the developer says, to the arrival of a baby. Now, Pushpin is back, and with a few tweaks, it is just as great as ever.