How much time have you wasted watching YouTube videos this week? It’s really easy to find out, thanks to a helpful tool built into the YouTube app on iOS. Here’s how to use it to uncover hard truths you probably aren’t ready for.
What could be better than a mobile app that lets you play masses of games, like an old-school arcade squeezed onto your iPhone? A mobile app that lets you play masses of games and make your own new ones.
That’s what Swedish developer Martin Magni created with Fancade, a new iOS app launching Thursday. It offers a huge collection of mini-games, all created using the app itself, along with a drag-and-drop game-maker that lets you create your own.
COVID-19 lockdown certainly brought a swift change from the norm for many people. We’re dealing with the added stress of different working situations, the struggle to get groceries, and in many cases, even acting as teachers or child care providers.
All of that can make it really challenging to feel accomplished and productive. Luckily, I finally found my groove in the last week or so, thanks to a couple of really useful apps (and some self-imposed rules).
Google Translate is great, but good luck if you want to read anything more than an email or a short article. Recordings, websites and images often show up in languages we can’t read. A tool that deciphers them all is handy indeed.
A pandemic that kills thousands offers no silver linings.
But stay-at-home orders to slow the spread of COVID-19 shows us a window for what living with clean air is like.
An air quality tech company, whose global measurements can be monitored on an iOS app, says greenhouse gas emissions are so low right now, Los Angeles has the cleanest air of all metropolitans areas in the U.S.
Facebook Messenger Kids, the free chat app designed specifically for your little ones, on Wednesday expanded its reach to more than 70 new markets and added a number of helpful new features.
It’s now possible for parents to give kids control over their contacts (if they wish), and for kids to join approved groups. The changes come at a time when many children are out of school and unable to see friends.
Quibi, the new smartphone streaming service with 10-minute program, keeps wracking up the downloads and may give viewers a choice to watch its “quick-bite” shows on streaming TV.
CEO Meg Whitman told an interviewer Monday that Quibi has had more than 1.7 million downloads since launching one week ago.
This week we edit photos using the iPad’s trackpad, solve math problems with a Mac keyboard shortcut, add dynamic complications to our watches with Watchsmith, and more.
Facebook wants to give you and your boo some space, so it created a chat app for iPhone users in love.
Tuned is the product of Facebook’s New Product Experimentation Team. The engineers designed the new iOS app to give couples the tools to build a “digital scrapbook.” This is not a dating app, but an app for two people who are already dating.
A new streaming service started Monday — but put down the remote. You won’t find Quibi on your television.
Instead, Quibi – its title a mashup of the words quick and bites – brings short-form entertainment through an app downloaded to an iPhone or iPad. If you are just hearing about Quibi, here’s a quick primer on the new streaming service.
If you’re having trouble sleeping these days, you’re not alone. Stress is high, schedules are screwy, and the future is uncertain — but a good night’s sleep is as important as ever. Plenty of us are staring at our phones instead of sacking out, but now your phone can actually help get much-needed Zzs.
If you sit in front of an iPad typing up Apple-related how-tos all day long, then working from home is no problem. In fact, it’s simply the next step up from “working from bed.” But for some professions, like musicians, working from home is difficult if not impossible. You might have a home studio, but you still need to get the band together to record them.
Or do you? ConnectionOpen is an app that lets musicians play together over the internet. The wild thing is, it’s a standard plugin for Logic, Ableton, Pro Tools and other audio-editing apps. And now, it’s also available for the iPad.
The code sharing and publishing service GitHub released iOS and Android apps today. These enable users to check code, talk to team members and even merge code right from their phone or tablet.
YouTube’s latest change on mobile swaps the familiar “Trending” tab with a new “Explore” tab. As of Friday, it’s available to all users on iPhone and iPad (and Android) following a lengthy test. It hopes to make great content from popular categories easier to find.
The Cult of Mac Store is full of so many deals that some must leave for others to come in. Among our outgoing deals you will find deep discounts on language lessons, cloud backup, six-month phone plans and intuitive website-building tools.
Microsoft Outlook’s newest update is out on iOS with new text formatting options. It’s now possible to use bold, italic, and underlined text — as well as inline links — in your emails.
By default, Safari on iOS downloads all files to a folder in your iCloud. This means you can access those files from all your devices. But it also means those files fill up your iCloud Drive. Worse, every megabyte you download also gets uploaded back to iCloud, doubling your bandwidth usage.
Today we’ll see how to change the location of your Safari downloads folder in iOS 13.
Your iPhone’s Mail app is pretty good. It does most of what you need, and you can be sure that it doesn’t steal your email password, or send details from your incoming mail to Apple. There are even a bunch of very powerful smart folders and features hidden in its sidebar. But getting basic stuff done is sometimes awkward, thanks to Apple’s insistence on hiding everything in the name of minimalism.
That includes marking an email as spam. It’s actually easy, but you might not know how to do it. Today we’ll look at three ways to mark email as junk mail.
WhatsApp’s much-anticipated dark mode is finally available to all iPhone users after months of beta testing. It looks great — particularly on OLED displays — and you can enjoy it today by downloading the latest WhatsApp update.
WhatsApp’s newest beta release is out with password protection for your chat backups. The feature provides an additional layer of security — and added peace of mind — that ensures only you can access your conversation history.
Shortcutify is a free iOS app that lets you use web-based services in your Shortcuts. For instance, it can connect with Spotify, Todoist, AirTable and more, and provides an easy bridge between these services’ complicated APIs and the Shortcuts app on your iPhone or iPad.
If you use any of the supported services, you’re going to totally love Shortcutify. If not? More app integrations are planned for the future.
This week we read the news with NewsBlur and Unread 2, shoot faux 8mm footage with Rtro, and spend $20 on Tot, a notes app with just seven pages.
Ever since its launch, people have mostly been dismissive about Apple News on iPhone, iPad and Mac. One big reason is the way it interacts with links on the web, boxing users into the News app instead of letting them visit the open web.
For me, that’s actually a pretty desirable thing, because I really like the News app. It’s much cleaner-looking than many ad-bloated websites, and far less emotional and combative than getting your news on social media.
But making the News app show you the things you care about, with less clutter and noise, requires one simple trick.
Here at Cult of Mac, we’re big fans of VPNs. That’s because they not only keep us secure and private online, they also bypass annoying location-based content restrictions, so you can stream your favorite content anywhere you go. With this great deal, you can get VPN protection on all your devices for three whole years.
Like almost all of Apple’s built-in iOS apps, the Music app is capable but hard to use. Apple’s habit of hiding key functions behind multiple button-taps is in full force here, and it’s getting worse. Want to “heart” a track? You used to be able to do it from the lock screen player. Now you have to access the Music app’s share menu, and find it there.
And what if you want to view your recently added items as a list, or your list of songs as a grid? Tough. On the other hand, if you use features like the For You… playlists, and Apple Music’s excellent More by… recommendations, many alternative music apps don’t support them.
The answer to this digital music conundrum is Marvis Pro, a 1-year-old music app that offers everything you need — and nothing you don’t.