Rob LeFebvre is an Anchorage, Alaska-based writer and editor who has contributed to various tech, gaming and iOS sites, including 148Apps, Creative Screenwriting, Shelf-Awareness, VentureBeat, and Paste Magazine. Feel free to find Rob on Twitter @roblef, and send him a cookie once in a while; he'll really appreciate it.
Fleksy, the alternative keyboard for iOS and Android, has just been updated to allow any developer of iOS apps to easily implement its streamlined features for free. The software development kit (SDK) will allow any app that needs a keyboard effortlessly include Fleksy’s system without making any changes to the app itself.
“We’re very excited to finally make our SDK available to hundreds of thousands of developers around the world. We learned a lot from the private beta and today’s release brings the most beautiful, streamlined 3rd-party keyboard experience yet for iOS” said Ioannis Verdelis, COO of Fleksy.
Well hello, fine sir. Might you have some loot we can stab out of you?
What’s that, you say? You’ve been longing for a retro, old school, three dimensional dungeon crawler to take with you on your iPhone and iPad?
Look no further than Coldfire Keep, a brand new first person dungeon crawler from Steve Jarman and Crescent Moon Games. You’ll have to make your way through this beautifully rendered 3D dungeon, full of monsters, puzzles, hidden secrets and–natch–tons of loot.
It should be in the App Store tonight (February 19) by 11 pm Eastern time here in the US, if all goes according to plan, and it’s looking pretty sweet, if the video below is to be trusted.
For all but the absolute purists, our iPhones have taken over as the camera of choice. We’ve dedicated an upcoming issue of our weekly mag to taking even better photographs with our iPhones.
Here’s where you come in: Send us your best pics on the theme of “Silver.” Yeah, that can be anything from a close-up on your Space Gray iPad (kind of recursive, but why not?) to glittering ice on the sidewalk. Make sure you take the picture with an iPhone – any model will do.
Update: We’re actually offering a whole ton of stuff for winners of our contest, with Olloclip willing to send along the following prizes for our first, second and third place winners:
1st place – You’ll get Olloclip telephoto , 4-in-1, macro 3-in-1 lenses and a quick-flip case.
2nd place – 2 lenses of choice plus case
3rd – lens of choice plus case
You’ll also get to see the top photo and the runner ups showcased in an upcoming Cult of Mac Magazine Newsstand issue.
To enter, just take the most creative iPhone photo that matches the topic “Silver” that you can think of — and you can also submit pics you’ve snapped that fit the theme. Then upload your photo to Twitter or Instagram with the hashtag – #CoMSilver.
The contest ends on Thursday, February 20 at 8 a.m. PT, but there’s no limit to how many times you can enter, so get snapping, you amazing creative types.
I’ve long been a fan of minimalist protection for my personal iPads, using a green Smart Cover for the non-retina iPad mini I still favor as my main reading and web surfing device.
Macleay Folio by Toffee Category: iPad Cases Works With: iPad mini, iPad mini with Retina Price: $49.95
When I got the Toffee case in the mail, however, I might have detected a bit of jealousy from the Smart Cover, which has gotten rather grimy and well-used over the past several months as I move the iPad mini from bag to bag, house to car seat, bag to coffee house table, and such.
The Macleay Folio comes in a very classy box, all recycled cardboard and slide out inner pieces. The folio itself peeks out through the clear front of the packaging with a classy style that promises a higher-class iPad mini experience. It’s ostensibly marketed for the iPad mini with Retina display, but as both models of iPad mini are essentially the same, the Folio will work with either.
I took some time with the Folio to figure out if the classiness was worth hiding my mini inside of.
Here’s a handy little tip if you shut down your Mac with the options in the Apple Menu.
Typically, when you choose Restart or Shut Down from these menu options, you’ll get a dialog box that checks to see if you’re absolutely, positively sure you meant to choose the menu option that you just…chose…sigh.
One of our favorite games, FTL, is getting a massive update, plus an iPad version. That’s pretty darn exciting.
The update includes new advanced weaponry, new systems and subsystems, new drones and equipment, new music, and new story content. Best of all, it’s going to be a free update. In a tweet earlier today, the FTL team updated fans on what’s new, including new features like the clone bay, mind control, and hacking systems. The iPad version will include all of these things, too, in a game that will now be called FTL: Advanced Edition.
Wondering what we've been up to? Check out our new post detailing some of the features of FTL: AE – https://t.co/9HAsO2ELcA
One of the cool things that your iPhone can do is tag your photos with geolocations. That way, you’ll know where you took the photo in addition to having the photo.
With iOS 7, you can also see your photos on a map, which is all sorts of fun if you travel a bit and like to take vacation photos while you’re there.
It’s easy to enable and access, too, which is a good thing.
When you’re using iTunes in list view to see all your songs listed in order, you can sort that list by the columns across the top.
If you notice, there’s a little checkbox to the left of each track. These checkboxes tell iTunes when to use the tracks or not, like when you’re ripping CDs, using the Match Only Checked Items Smart Playlist option, and when syncing to your iPhone. If you uncheck a song, it won’t be burned to a CD, added to a specific Playlist, or synced to your iPhone. To make that happen, simply click on the checkbox to the left of any track and it will be unchecked.
But what if you want to uncheck more than one track at once?
When you’re typing in Terminal, it’s easy to access the commands you’ve previously typed with the Up arrow on your keyboard. This can be handy when you have to re-type a long, complicated command. Simply hit the up-arrow and you’ll get the previously entered command.
Hit the up-arrow again, and you’ll get the command you entered before that, and so on, cycling through in reverse order until you get to the very first command entered in that particular Terminal window.
Turns out, you can do a similar thing in Messages, too.
Sure, those don’t all go together, but Twelve South’s new iPad Air and iPad mini stand looks like nothing you’ve seen before. It might as well find a place in a kitchen drawer, next to all the Pampered Chef gizmos you’ve got in there.
This new iPad stand — made for the iPad Air and iPad mini — is foldable, easy to use, and just plain sweet looking.
This poor soul on the Apple discussion forums has just lost his iPhone, in Bangladesh of all places. He’s asking how to block the thieves from accessing his personal data.
Unfortunately for him, he didn’t have Find My Phone enabled on the device. He’s out of luck, in Bangladesh of all places.
See that? That’s the excellent looking retro action platform from Levels or Lives, Super Fun Games, and Crescent Moon Games. It’s called Crystal Catacombs, and was successfully funded on Kickstarter in July of 2012.
To continue the process, the developers want to get Crystal Catacombs on Steam, which is perhaps the most well-known gaming distribution platform for Mac, Windows, and Linux games. The process there is known as Project Greenlight, and Steam members all vote on the games they’d like to see on Steam.
There are quite a few web sites these days that will send you notifications when you visit them via Safari. Sites like NBA.com and the New York Times will drop you a dialog box when you visit them for the first time to ask you if you would like to receive the push notifications.
If you allow them, all hope is not lost should you reconsider your decision. You can drop right into System Preferences and disable them on a site by site basis.
Browsing the App Store can be a bit overwhelming. Which apps are new? Which ones are good? Are the paid ones worth paying for, or do they have a free, lite version that will work well enough?
Well, if you stop interrogating us for a second, hypothetical App Store shopper, we can tell you about this thing we do here.
Every week, we highlight some of the most interesting new apps and collect them here for your consideration. This time, our picks include a fancy number trivia app, an bed-bug checker, a photo editing and filter app for the obsessive in all of us, a new update to iDraw that brings some Photoshop-style features to the already-fantastic iPad app, and a fashion blogger app for heaps of style.
Check them all out:
Numerus is one of those weird apps that shouldn’t be as interesting as it is. But once you spend a little time clicking around, you will feel the random knowledge dropping into your head.
Did you know that in 1950, the Canadian postal system processed 1,362,310,155 items? I don’t know why you would, but you do now. Also, the human body has 248 organs, there were 129 episodes of the CBS sitcom Becker, and China contains 56 officially recognized ethnic groups. I can’t stop.
Alright, maybe one more.
Is that a Bill and Ted reference in there? This app is amazing.
America is seeing a resurgence in bed-bug infestations, and here’s an app to help you screen a room and identify the little biters before they introduce themselves.
To be perfectly clear, Bed Bug Proof is an app created in part to sell an anti-bed-bug spray. But the practical information and tools it provides like the inspection guide, comparison photographs, and a magnifier/light to let you use your phone to search for eggs and poop, are useful enough to let it stand on its own.
Although it will make you itchy just looking at it. Seriously.
Photo editing for the obsessive compulsive in all of us.
Sure, the Camera app that came with your iPhone has a few filters, but we all know they’re pretty lame.
Instagram (and before that, Hipstamatic) made the quick filter process a no-brainer and popular to boot.
Jelly Bus’ Rookie, though, has all of them beat, with a veritable boat load of filters, effects, and all the settings you can possibly handle. If that’s not enough, there’s a bunch of stickers and text effects you can add to your photos to make even the most ordinary snapshot into a work of art.
Once you tweak and tap your way to photo-nirvana with Rookie, you can save your photo to pretty much every other photo sharing service out there, including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr.
Get a whole photo shop on your iPad for a tiny amount of cash.
Image editing app iDraw has been around for quite some time, but the new 2.0 version (released this past week) really kicked things into high gear.
If you’re looking for a solid Photoshop-style image editing program for only a little bit of scratch, iDraw 2.0 has it in spades. The app now imports and exports PSD photoshop files with full vector path and effect support, as well as shape layers and layer effects. You can also export your designs as layered PSD files.
The app has been redesigned for iOS 7 as well, and it now takes advantage of the new 64-bit A7 processors on the new iPad Air.
Seriously, there is so much jam-packed into this release as to consider it an entirely new app, which is why we wanted to share it with you now.
Whether you’re a fashionista looking for new sources of inspiration or a tone-deaf jeans and t-shirt kind of dresser, new app Flink will help you connect to the world of fashion blogging.
Flink allows you to see hot new “looks” from the top fashion bloggers around the web, including Garance Doré, La revue de Kenza, Adenorah, Absolutely Glamourous, Mercredie, le blog de Lilou, Modasic, and Blondie Baby. You can also save these looks for later, visit the original blog posts, and “heart” the looks you love.
When you first launch the app, you’ll tap to follow as many of the included bloggers, and then tap your way through each of the photos included in each screen. You can tap through to see what clothes and accessories make up each look, or you can just swipe through and see various images of the different parts.
All in all, if you’re looking to kick up your fashion knowledge, or just find some new looks to recreate in your own life, Flink just might be the free app you’re looking for.
The new iOS 7 Weather app, taking a cue from the gorgeously designed Yahoo! Weather app that came out just before iOS 7 did, has all sorts of neat details and gestures to help you keep track of the meteorological realities around you.
If a list of all the cities you add to the Weather app and the extended 7-day forecast basics aren’t enough, there’s even more to find once you dig into the app a bit.
Stratus by SteelSeries Category: Game Controllers Works With: iPad, iPhone, iPod touch Price: $79.99
The joy of most iOS titles is the ability to play using the touchscreen. The gaming world has benefitted greatly from iOS game developers learning how to best control their games without a physical controller.
However, there are a few games — especially versions of old-school console games — that just cry out for an actual button-filled controlling device that you can use while staring intently at the screen.
The Stratus, and other controllers like it, aims to fill that need with a smaller, super-portable and highly accurate controller that takes advantage Apple’s own iOS game controller code that’s built right into iOS 7.
Whether you’ll find this a successful or not depends a lot on your device, the games you want to play, and how your hands fit on the Stratus itself.
Whether you’re a fashionista looking for new sources of inspiration or a tone-deaf jeans and t-shirt kind of dresser, new app Flink will help you connect to the world of fashion blogging.
Flink allows you to see hot new “looks” from the top fashion bloggers around the web, including Garance Doré, La revue de Kenza, Adenorah, Absolutely Glamourous, Mercredie, le blog de Lilou, Modasic, and Blondie Baby. You can also save these looks for later, visit the original blog posts, and “heart” the looks you love.
When you first launch the app, you’ll tap to follow as many of the included bloggers, and then tap your way through each of the photos included in each screen. You can tap through to see what clothes and accessories make up each look, or you can just swipe through and see various images of the different parts.
All in all, if you’re looking to kick up your fashion knowledge, or just find some new looks to recreate in your own life, Flink just might be the free app you’re looking for.
The buzz continues around Flappy Bird, Dong Nguyen’s scary addictive side-scrolling bird flapping game. The developer pulled the wildly successful app from both iOS and Android App Stores on Sunday, citing the fact that his game was too addictive. There are mobile devices out there on eBay and Craigslist for outrageous prices, and everyone seems to want to talk about the retro-inspired flap-fest.
While many of us have Flappy Bird still installed on our phones, it’s possible many folks didn’t get to the party until now.
We’ve already shown you a straight-up clone of Flappy Bird that you can play on any web browser, but these new ones are odd. And totally cool.
Facebook’s main iOS app has just added a feature to automatically play videos–sans sound–when you swipe the video preview onto your screen.
If you have data caps, or just don’t want to waste your cellular bandwidth on videos you don’t want to see anyway, there’s a simple way to restrict the auto-play feature to only when you’re on a Wi-Fi network.
Sadly, there’s no way to just turn the feature off, though.
Get a whole photo shop on your iPad for a tiny amount of cash.
Image editing app iDraw has been around for quite some time, but the new 2.0 version (released this past week) really kicked things into high gear.
If you’re looking for a solid Photoshop-style image editing program for only a little bit of scratch, iDraw 2.0 has it in spades. The app now imports and exports PSD photoshop files with full vector path and effect support, as well as shape layers and layer effects. You can also export your designs as layered PSD files.
The app has been redesigned for iOS 7 as well, and it now takes advantage of the new 64-bit A7 processors on the new iPad Air.
Seriously, there is so much jam-packed into this release as to consider it an entirely new app, which is why we wanted to share it with you now.
Photo editing for the obsessive compulsive in all of us.
Sure, the Camera app that came with your iPhone has a few filters, but we all know they’re pretty lame.
Instagram (and before that, Hipstamatic) made the quick filter process a no-brainer and popular to boot.
Jelly Bus’ Rookie, though, has all of them beat, with a veritable boat load of filters, effects, and all the settings you can possibly handle. If that’s not enough, there’s a bunch of stickers and text effects you can add to your photos to make even the most ordinary snapshot into a work of art.
Once you tweak and tap your way to photo-nirvana with Rookie, you can save your photo to pretty much every other photo sharing service out there, including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr.
Best of all? It’s a universal app and it’s free. Check it out now.
I was almost out of gas. I was also almost out of cash. I needed to find the cheapest source of fuel for my beat-up ride so I could get downtown to meet a friend for coffee. I pulled up GasBuddy, and within one tap I found the closest, cheapest gas station near me.
Once I gassed up, I hit a sweet parking spot just a few blocks away from the coffee shop. I launched Honk, swiped across the top to set the time on the meter, and took a photo of my car to make sure I could get back to it.
Sure, fine, it’s not a flying car, but this is as close to the future as this old beater is going to get, and it’s all thanks to my iPhone and a suite of apps.
