Last October, Steve Jobs gave us a sneak peek at the next major update to Mac OS X, codenamed “Lion.” The theme for this update is bringing the best iPhone and iPad features “back to the Mac.” Features such as the Mac App Store, a home screen for apps, and a new full screen mode. But this sneak peak only scratched the surface of the possibilities for Lion. Here’s my top 10 wish list. If you’ve got any better ideas, let’s hear them in the comments at the bottom of the page.
At long last, ladies and gentlemen, after all these years of waiting, we finally have it: an app that puts cheese on your head.
Other folks have been waiting for Duke Nukem Forever, or for a 15-inch MacBook Air, or for democracy in their dictatorships, or even for basic stuff like world peace and an end to disease. Oh, and flying cars, people are still waiting for those.
But for the rest of us – for those of us who have longed for an app that puts cheese on our head – the waiting is over. iCheeseHead fulfils all our virtual cheese-on-head needs, and costs less than most real cheese.
Rupert Murdoch can keep his $30 million iPad newspaper. We can all have cheese on our heads now, and nothing else matters.
What with Apple and TV both as American as pecan pie (which, ironically, is actually way more American than apple pie), you’d think the U.S. would have a chokehold on TV-iPhone innovation. Nope — besides Al-Jazeera now streaming live news on the iPhone for free, last week Germans had a chance to watch and interact with the world’s first augmented-reality TV show.
Viewers of Galileo, a quiz show that airs on the German ProSieben channel, were able to interact with the questions on the TV screen by viewing and interacting with augmented reality versions of the questions on their iPhone screens, courtesy of augmented-reality app Junaio (For a visual demo, suffer through a short ad and watch the cute video). Not to worry though — Metaio, the German-based developer that makes Junaio, says similar stuff is on it’s way to the U.S. soon. Fantastisch!
Back in the web’s Dark Ages, before anyone even dreamed of creating a logo for a markup language, and when messing around with default link colors was adventurous web design, the closest thing anyone had to online video was the animated GIF.
It was just a small series of still image files glued together, but when played in sequence they looked like movement. A million “UNDER CONSTRUCTION” animated signs bloomed across the early web.
Since then, the animated GIF has gone out of fashion. You don’t see them so much. But you might see more soon, and enjoy making your own, thanks to a new photo toy for iPhone called GIFvid.
This week’s must-have iOS apps features the impressive new BEP360application from the Black Eyed Peas, which boasts the first jaw-dropping ‘3D360’ mobile music video, as well as access to each band member’s Twitter feed, an addictive little mini-game, and more.
Task Eateris a beautifully simple task management application that helps you to stay organized with the help of your iPhone. It offers all of the great features you need to manage your todo list, including notes; color highlighting; and due dates with alarms, and its minimalistic user interface makes everything very easy.
Essayis a rich text editor that provides only the most essential formatting options to keep you focussed on your document. It uses the HTML file format and offers a wealth of features that make it a fantastic writing application for any writer.
Find out more about the applications above and check out the rest of this week’s must-haves, including 3D Audio Illusionsand CelebrityBooth, after the break!
One of the most impressive iOS games included in our must-haves this week is the much anticipated Dead Spacefrom Electronic Arts. Delve into an all-new Dead Space story three years on from the destruction of Marker in the first Dead Space release, and find yourself on a mission of uncertain purpose in the Mines of Titan. Experience first-hand the events that unleash Necromorph hordes once again in the first ever Dead Space storyline devised for iOS.
Zombie Cafeis a unique cafe management sim in which you use zombies for your workers as opposed to living humans. In a town where it’s hard to find good employees, you’ve partnered up with an evil corporation to use zombies as free labor to build your cafe empire. What’s great about Zombie Cafe is that when your local competition gets too fierce, you can summon your team of zombie workers to attack your neighboring rivals and steal their secret recipes.
In Grim Joggersyou have control of a group of 15 joggers and your mission it to take them as far as you can before each and every one of them faces their gruesome end. This arcade-style survival game sees casual jogging become a gory bloodsport.
Find out more about the games above and check out the rest of this week’s must-haves, including Pocket Dinosaurs 2and Aerial Assault, after the break!
Flying is always a bit of a conflicted experience for me. On the one hand, I’m off on an adventure; on the other, I have to deal with unpredictable flight schedules, labyrinthine terminals and $9 burritos. But FlightTrack Pro — with its attractive, clean-looking pages offering an abundance of detailed information — makes everything better (except the burrito prices).
It’s only been active for a matter of hours as far as I can tell, but already at the time of writing, the official App Store Twitter account has over 36,000 followers and I expect it will soon attract many more.
This appears to be an account for the old skool iOS App Store. No doubt the newer Mac App Store will get an account of its own in due course.
Did you promise yourself that 2011 would be the year that you would take control of your finances and start saving money? Are you having trouble sticking to your new year’s resolution? Well maybe there’s an iOS app that will make things a little easier for you. Here’s our list of the best iOS apps that may help you succeed on your mission to save money.
So that you don’t just forget about your resolution by the end of January, we’ve compiled a great list of apps that will help you stick to your targets and achieve your goals. We’ve divided them up in to the most popular resolutions, and in this post we’ll look at the best iOS apps to help you save money. We’ve chosen apps that will help you track where your money is going, apps that will help you create a budget and stick to it, and apps that will help you find the best deals in town.
Check them out after the break and get help to save money!
Precorder (on sale now for $1) from Airship Software constantly buffers a few seconds of video before you hit the record button, effectively eliminating “shutter lag.” It’s a brilliant idea that the developers say they borrowed from the Planet Earth team — who used it to film this amazing spectacle of great whites breaching (note: Your results may vary. A lot).
Did you promise yourself that 2011 would be the year that you would quit smoking? Are you having trouble sticking to your new year’s resolution? Well maybe there’s an iOS app that will make it a little easier for you. Here’s our list of the best iOS apps that may help you succeed in your quest to quit this year.
The apps we’ve selected will help you find the motivation you need to stamp out those nicotine cravings. Quickly calculate how much money you spend on cigarettes each week and see how much you could save as a non-smoker; create personalized plans that are tailored to help you quit in a way that suits you; and even estimate how much of your life you might be saving by saying no to cigarettes. If that’s not enough motivation, we don’t know what is!
Check them out after the break and get help to kick the habit in 2011.
It’s a problem I’m sure you’ll be familiar with: whenever you want to take a picture of your cat, said cat suddenly becomes utterly disinterested in you and everything you stand for.
Will the cat humor you, and turn its face to the camera? Will it hell.
What you need in situations like this is Cat Camera, the camera app that makes a reasonable stab at meeowing like a cat, in the hope that this provocative sound will make your cat turn its head in the right direction. It’s a bit basic and rather buggy, but hey, it’s a start.
I tried it on my neighbour’s cat, it still continued to ignore the hell out of me, despite Cat Camera’s fake meeowings:
It’s not a live feature in the recently released iOS 4.3 dev beta, but it looks as if Apple will be adding a new feature to its MobileMe service sometime soon, making it easy to see where your friends — or, at least, their iPhones and iPads — are when they’re late for dinner and drinks.
Spotted by MacRumors, several strings in the new Settings app reference a “Find My Friends” feature.
If you saw our previous posts about light painting using an iPhone or iPad, you’ll enjoy this brief video demonstration of how to make a very cool New Year greeting.
The lightpainting was done using Penki, an app developed by the people who sparked off this idea in the first place, Dentsu London/BERG.
All that’s needed in addition is a ruler, a camera with a flash (for the portraits), and a shiny table. And perhaps a few rehearsals to get the timing right. There’s a pile more lightpainting images in the Penki Flickr pool, if you feel the need for some further inspiration.
LAS VEGAS, CES 2011 — Check out this simply stunning 3D-mapping technology from Swedish-based C3 Technologies that elicited a uniform reaction of “holy %$*@!” from us when we saw it. One reason for its precision is that it was developed from recently declassified missile targeting technology originally developed by Swedish aerospace powerhouse Saab.
With the release of AirPrint late last year, Apple finally gave iDevice users what they’d been clamoring for (and quite loudly, since the iPad’s debut): the easy ability to print from a wifi connected printer. Hurrah! Problem is, it only works with printers made by HP — owners of Epsons, Canons and the rest were left out in the cold.
However, for Epson owners willing to shell out $10, Thinxtream‘s PrintJinni app already provided a means to print to select Epson wifi-connected printers. In late December PrintJinni became a free download to put itself on even footing with AirPrint, pricewise — question is, how good of a solution is it?
The father of a five year old boy born with a rare genetic disorder that delays the development of speech has designed a new iPad app that aims to help the speechless communicate.
The Cherokee Language isn’t one that doesn’t get a lot of play off of the reservation, but you’re probably carrying around at least one terminal for it in your pocket: the Cherokee Language is now a part of iOS.
It’s actually been on iOS for a while now, since iOS 4.1, but the road to getting there was long: three years ago, the Cherokee Nation made a request of Apple that they would add their language to those supported on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. In September, though, Apple finally baked it into their mobile operating system along with approximately fifty other languages.
Cherokee Nation’s language technology representative Joseph Erb was pretty excited to see it added. “There are countries vying to get on these devices for languages, so we are pretty excited we were included.”
Cherokee is a dying language, and only 8,000 members of the approximately 300,000 strong tribe still speak it. Perhaps a few more will be turned on now that it’s a part of the most respected mobile operating system on Earth.
In defiance of Apple’s will, you can already stream AirPlay media to your Mac and Ubuntu… and now, if you’re on a Windows machine, the trifecta is complete.
We haven’t played it yet, but we look forward to, because Papa Sangre for iOS devices has one of the most intriguing central conceits of any app we’ve seen to date: it’s a video game with no video.
Square Enix just released a iOS port of one classic JRPG from the SNES era, Secret of Mana, and now it appears that they’re teasing another: Joystiq just sussed out a cryptic new teaser site for what appears to be a smartphone compatible (and hopefully iOS specific) port of Chrono Trigger, their famous 16-bit time travel RPG first released way back in 1995.
Chrono Trigger is still one of my favorite games. The site says “Spring 2011.” Oh please, oh please, oh please.
You probably know of Instagram, the hipster app du jour which allows you to easily apply a number of attractive, quasi-Polaroid-esque filters that spruce up your iPhone or iPod Touch pictures to give them a more artistic and sometimes twee look.
But you probably know more than of Instagram. You probably use it. After all, they just racked up one million users.
According to Instragram co-founder Kevin Systrom, Instagram started with just 80 users, and their ultimate “audacious goal” was just to let people share media in open community. The growth they’ve seen is phenomal, though: since mid-October, they’ve lured in over a million souls.
“We’ve just been amazed at the growth of the service,” Mr. Systrom said in a phone interview. “My partner and I had a bet the first day about how many downloads we would get and I was off by an order magnitude.”
How big is Instagram? Users are now collectively uploading three photos per second, to contribute to a library of almost ten million photos.
I may sound dismissive, but I’m not: Instagram undeniably allows users to take more interesting looking photos than the iPhone’s built-in sensor can natively produce. I guess I just wish that the iPhone and iPod Touch’s camera hardware was capable of taking interesting images without needing a filter app. It can’t, but that’s not Apple’s failure: it’s a limitation on the technology of digital sensors. Here’s hoping that changes.
Considering the depths that Apple fans will plump into a new version of iOS even before it’s released — let alone a month later — we’re amazed to hear that developers are still stumbling upon new features of iOS 4.2… especially when those features are as buzzworthy as augmented reality. Yet that’s just what Occipital has discovered lurking in the firmware of Apple’s latest iteration of its popular mobile operating system.
Although Adobe itself is hardly on the ropes, having just scored their first billion dollar year in revenue, Apple continues to pummel Flash into the ground, like a berserker rabbit punching the occipital lobe of a downed enemy.
The latest blow? Apple has just launched iAd Producer, a new tool for online advertisers that allows them to create interactive iAd content in an easy, streamlined manner that would have previously required Adobe’s Flash developer tools.
