Giles Turnbull - page 2

For those of you who simply must have all your devices – and a few on loan from a friend too – by your bedside all night, every night, here’s a new thing you’ll see at CES this year: the Easy-Doks CR19.

You like robots? You’re gonna love this. This is an iPad app all about robots. Just robots, nothing but robots, loads and loads and loads of robots. It’s made of robots, in the same way we are made of meat. It’s fantastic.

Our readers have spoken. The best iOS app of 2012 has been selected. And the winner, by a considerable margin, is: Google Maps. Woot!

Raise your hand if you think spelling and grammar are fun. Raise it up. A little higher. Aha, I see you there. And your friend! Both of you, come closer and listen, because I need to tell you about this unique new iOS game where you win points by spotting spelling mistakes.

With your help, we’ve narrowed down the list of best iOS apps of 2012 to a handful of favorites: Clear, Temple Run, Angry Birds Star Wars, Google Maps, Letterpress, and Paper.

Big thanks to everyone who voted so far. Now’s your chance to pick a winner from the shortlisted finalists.

Lekh Diagram is a clever and potentially useful diagramming app for iPad, “free” on the App Store, but not if you want to make serious use of it.

New on the App Store, and just in time for a Christmas gift to a Beatles fan, is this rather lovely app collating 250 of John Lennon’s letters. It’s been made with affection for the great man, and provides an interesting insight into his mind.

What was the best iOS app of 2012? We need your help to find out. Read on to see our longlist of candidates, and cast your vote for a shortlist later in the week.

One of the better Yuletide traditions is the venerable holiday Advent Calendar, in which each day of December leading up to Christmas is marked off on a special calendar by opening its corresponding door to find a small gift, toy or chocolate squirreled away inside.

This year, we here at Cult of Mac decided we wanted to give our readers their very own Apple-themed advent calendar, filled with the year’s best apps, gadgets, stories and other curios. So each day in December, we’re going to lovingly peel back the door on the Cult of Mac 2012 Advent Calendar to reveal another delicious morsel, something really special that came out this year that we think every one of you should enjoy.

What’s the prize for Day 14? A wonderful little app called Hueless that will drain all the color from your photos..

It’s that time of year again, time to look back at a year of new apps and highlight the ones we liked the most.

So we’d like some help from you, gorgeous Cult of Mac readers – who are all looking particularly good today, might I add? We need to draw up a shortlist of candidates, apps that made a splash on your home screens during the last 12 months.

Which ones delighted you? Which ones entertained you? Which ones left you giggling like a little kid? What about the free apps you wished you could pay for? Or the paid-for apps that you thought were ridiculously cheap? Which were the apps you rushed to tell your friends about, because you were so excited?

Help us out – post your thoughts and suggestions in the comments. Next week we’ll round up your suggestions, mix in a few of our own, and run a poll in which you can vote and decide the winner.

Thanks folks! We’re looking forward to seeing your recommendations.

Every now and then – less often these days – you hear about an app that’s really new, genuinely new. It does something you’ve not seen done before. It’s a whole new idea. Foldify is one those apps: it’s fun for kids and grown-ups alike, it’s reasonably-priced, and above all it smacks of genius.

Three months after the release of iOS 6 and the subsequent PR disaster that was Apple’s renewed (and Google-less) Maps app, Google has got a replacement back into the App Store. It’s slick, speedy and, most importantly, a good deal more accurate than Apple’s data. Thank goodness for that.

A day after Twitter unveiled its first foray into photo filters, here’s a whole new app from the folks at Flickr. They know a thing or two about photography, and this new version of their iOS app is fantastic. It has filters, but who cares? Flickr is about a helluva lot more than just filter effects.

Twitter might have been a bit previous announcing it ahead of its actual appearance in the App Store, but it’s here now: Twitter for iOS 5.2 is out, and comes with Twitter’s very own Instagrammish photo filters. Are they any good?

We liked Cobook first time round, when it appeared on OS X as a clever little contacts database hidden inside a tiny Menu Bar icon. Now it’s on iPhone, and just as clever as before.

Catcha Catcha Aliens calls itself “a mission-based catching game”, which in English means it’s an infinite runner in the style of Temple Run. With a bit of a twist, some great music, and celebrity voiceovers. What’s not to like?

Keen internet users might already be familiar with speedtest.net, the website that lets you check exactly how fast your internet connection is. Now it’s available as an app too.

This is the C.VOX, a coat with a built-in sound system so you can listen to stuff anywhere you go, while you’re going there. It’s kind of cool and kind of weird. I’ve been wearing it for the last wintry week or so here in the UK, and here’s what it’s like to own one.

Gifted is a one dollar gift-management app for iOS, that helps you track all the gifts for all the people at all the events you might have to deal with. It works, no doubt about that; but using it, I found myself shrinking away from the whole idea. This is not what gift-giving is all about, in my opinion.

Marvin is a neat little e-book reader for iOS – free for now, but likely to cost about $2 by next week. It’s packed with useful features for serious readers and students, plus some ingenious new ideas we’ve not seen in other e-book reading apps.

New on the store this week is Etsy for iOS, and it’s beautifully done. Taking cues from apps like Flipboard and sites like Pinterest, Etsy is an exceptionally neat way of browsing and buying from the site that’s full of interesting hand-made things.

So here it is: iTunes 11. A lot has changed, but not so much that you’ll feel lost. Here’s what we’ve found after our first poke around inside.

If you’ve ever wondered precisely what your Mac is connecting to on the internet and when it’s doing it, there’s a new free app called Private Eye to help you out.

Fruitiny is a retro-style memory game for iOS, one of those games that takes about 10 seconds to learn and many hours of tapping to conquer.

Minecraft fans might be interested in Minecraft Reality, a two-dollar app that popped up in the Store last week. It lets you insert Minecraft-created 3D models into the real world, which sounds pretty cool. But it has some limitations.