Fans of strategy simulation games can rejoice at the news that the popular Anno series — which first arrived on PC back in 1998 and has continued as a successful franchise to the present day — has landed on iPad.
Called Anno: Build an Empire, the games starts with you colonizing an uninhabited island, which you harvest for resources, before building your way up to a fully-fledged, bonafide civilization — featuring various colonized islands under your control.
There are some incredibly clever examples of people painting masterpieces using their iPad, but a new 3-D painting app called Psykopaint is promising to provide the most authentic painting experience yet.
Psykopaint gives you an astonishing variety of materials and options to work with: ranging from different textures and opacities of paint types, to a selection of papers and canvases, each with their own absorption rates, textures, and amount of grain. You can paint freestyle, or choose to work within an accepted artistic style like Impressionism and Impasto — courtesy of custom brushes that imitate the brushstrokes of artists like Monet, Van Gogh, and Gauguin.
In short, it’s the closest thing you’ll get to feeling like a real artist.
The iPhone comes preloaded with many stock applications, but not all are as powerful as you wish they’d be. Luckily there are tons of developers pushing new apps into the App Store, and many of their creations upstage the stock iOS applications.
In today’s video we take a look at five iOS apps that can easily replace baked-in Apple apps and enhance your iPhone experience. Look at weather in more detail, refresh your music player and more with these powerful apps.
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Facebook’s ‘make a bunch of apps and see which ones stick’ strategy for mobile has unleashed a new app for the iPhone this morning, and it’s supposed to make interacting with famous people on Mark Zuckerburg’s social network easier than ever, but you’re probably not cool enough to use it.
So long as we live in a world where WhatsApp can be bought for $19 billion and even an ultra-simple novelty app like Yo manages to scrape together $1 million in venture funding, people are going to go right on creating messaging apps.
One of the latest is La-La Messenger, which promises users the possibility of conducting entire conversations out of song snippets. A greeting, for instance, might be “Hello” by Lionel Richie, while “the world is a dark place if this is the future of communication” could be Sean Paul’s “Gimme the Light.”
Apple has been waging a fierce war against Flash ever since the iPhone debuted without the power to run Adobe’s battery hungry, multimedia software. Finally, seven years into the battle, Google is adding another blow by flagging Flash content in mobile search results with a warning that sites might not work properly.
With so many people in the world having iPhones with the same ringtones, hearing a ringer go off can be irritating and confusing. The iTunes Store sells ringtones, but they can become quite expensive if you like switching things up a lot.
In today’s video, we show you how to solve this annoying problem by creating your own free ringtones in iTunes. Just follow these simple steps to separate yourself from the crowd instantly.
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iOS users have proven they have an uncanny ability to waste obscene amount of coin on silly in-app purchases, and the latest tech-titan to cash in on all that spending is none other than reality star Kim Kardashian.
Kim launched her first iOS game at the end of June to surprisingly great reviews, but the bigger surprise is the mountain of cash Kardashian and developers Glu Mobile are about to make off of all the fans flocking to download a piece of Kim’s Hollywood life.
Earlier today we reported on how Apple’s new iTunes Pass feature hints at Apple’s interest in mobile payments. However, Apple’s not the only company interested in this area.
Last night, PayPal updated its iOS client with one important new feature, allowing it to support loyalty cards. That means that PayPal’s app can become your one-stop-shop for payments and checkins for some of your favorite stores, including Starbucks, CVS, and others.
When I was a kid, we used to label everything: toys, boxes, file folders. My parents used one of those manual rotary label dispensers, the kind you had to squeeze hard enough to make each individual letter poke up through the hard plastic label tape. It was a good day when my brother and I got to use the label maker to title our shelves, toys and books (“Rob’s Stuff” was a common theme).
These days, printing labels is a lot easier thanks to computers and label printers like the ones from Dymo and Brother. Typically, you’ve got to connect these to a Mac or PC, and then use special software to send labels to the label printer.
The Brother P-Touch P750W (printer makers really need to work on their model names) is a label printer that can connect to your computer via USB, sure, but also connect either to your existing Wi-Fi network or create its own Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n network to print labels from any device, including iPhones, iPads, Android devices, Windows PCs and Macs.
Yeah, I’ve already labeled some shelves around the house. Old habits, it appears, die hard.
CloudMagic, the best third-party email client for mobile, just got even better thanks to a major new update that’s available right now on Android and iOS. In addition to adding quick filters for things like unread and starred messages, the release brings customizable alert tones, account nicknames, access to spam folders, and lots more.
When Yo, an app which lets you send out one word messages (hint: they all read “yo!”), hit the App Store and raised $1 million in the process, it seemed that messaging apps had reached their minimalist bottom.
Not so, according to the makers of TAP: a new check-in app looking to snatch Yo’s status as the world’s fastest messaging app. TAP lets you broadcast your location to friends by simply tapping twice on your phone, without even having to unlock it. The location update lasts just ten minutes before disappearing — making this something along the lines of the “Snapchat for Location.”
Spend any time watching trailers for new iOS games, and quickly you’ll find that one merges into the other: all stock music, quick gameplay snapshots, and (if the title’s any good) a stream of title cards reading things like “Brilliant” and “You’ve Never Seen Anything Like This Before.”
Inventive platformer Leo’s Fortune has just received a new trailer and, wouldn’t you know it, it’s every bit as original as you’d hope for from the recipient of a 2014 Apple Design Award. In fact, dare we say it, it’s worth watching even if iOS gaming isn’t really your bag.
Apple sure is making us wait for the iWatch, and if recent rumors are to be believed, that wait isn’t about to end any time soon. If you’ve decided to spend your cash on an LG G Watch or Samsung Gear Live instead, then why not add a touch of iOS to it yourself with the free iWatch theme for Android Wear.
As you can see from the exclusive “making of” feature I wrote a few months back, I’m a massive fan of Monument Valley, the surrealistic M.C. Escher-inspired iOS puzzle game that rocked the App Store earlier this year.
A recent winner of Apple’s Design Awards at WWDC, Monument Valley is a triumph of isometric design, in which you guide a white-clad princess through a series of impossible structures in a game Apple describes as “akin to a walk through a museum or listening to a music album.”
While the game was already a bargain at $3.99, it’s just been the recipient of a slashed pricetag — meaning that you can now pick it up for the bargain price of $1.99.
The latest iOS 8 beta serves up many minor tweaks that put a friendly, usable face on the major improvements at the heart of the mobile operating system. In today’s video, we take a quick look at iOS 8 beta 3. We’ll show you the latest upgrades to the software to give you an idea what to expect to see on your own device this fall, when Apple releases iOS 8 to the public.
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Uber has just poached one of Apple’s senior engineering manager, who worked on both the company’s Maps app and its iPhone software, says subscription website The Information.
The senior iOS engineer in question, Chris Blumenberg, was among the first engineers to work on the iPhone’s software — joining Apple in 2000 initially to help Microsoft port Internet Explorer and Office over to Mac OS X.
The Information editor Jessica Lessin claims that three sources familiar with Blumenberg’s jump to Uber confirmed the situation with her.
iOS 8’s Handoff feature looks totally rad. Imagine starting off a task on your Mac and then being able to continue where you left off on your iPhone or iPad without waiting. Just pick up the device and everything has already synced.
But wait! There’s no need to imagine this, because you can already do it right now, and you don’t even need iCloud. Handoff looks truly useful, and will blur the lines between our devices more than ever before, but let’s take a look at some apps that already work seamlessly between platforms.
Happy July 4! While you’ve probably got plans with friends and family — or a date with a BBQ — appmakers are hoping you’ll have a bit of time for iOS gaming over the holiday, too.
I’ve written before about how 2014 is shaping up to be a golden age of mobile gaming for Apple users, and to make the deal a little bit sweeter, various popular games are currently being discounted in the App Store to give you something to play over the long weekend.
Which games? Check out our list below for the full details.
Disney need to be a bit quicker off the mark than this!
With both the U.S. and England now knocked out of the FIFA World Cup, Disney has just now taken the opportunity to release an iOS version of Bola, the hugely popular Facebook soccer game developed by Three Melons and acquired by Playdom back in March 2010.
Now called Disney Bola Soccer (or Disney Bola Football if you live somewhere where football is used to describe a game in which players kick a ball with their feet), the game is a whole lot of fun — utilizing simple swipe and tap gestures — and is well worth checking out.
This post is brought to you by StartApp.
Are you a developer or advertiser looking to make a profitable app? The best way to do so is integrate a mobile monetization platform that inserts ads for other apps in your app. Recently moving into iOS operating environment, one of Google Android’s biggest and most successful ad networks to date, StartApp, now offers the first SDK to support Apple’s new programming language, Swift.
Watch the video showing how StartApp can help monetize your iOS app here.
I’m a massive fan of Sometimes You Die, the weirdly existential platformer with the banging soundtrack, which topped the iOS game charts earlier this year.
For those who have played and completed the game, there’s some good news today because as of this morning creator Philipp Stollenmayer released the so-called Prologue Update, which adds a whole new chapter to the game, plus new unlockables, and even a German translation.
Shortly after updating Spotify with the ability to search for downloaded music offline, Spotify’s iOS app has just received a notable new update.
Spotify now lets users view play queues on their iPhone. This can be done by tapping the queue icon on the top right corner of the “Now Playing” screen. The update also features a new dialog box, which appears each time you try to add a song to a playlist which already includes it: a great way of avoiding duplicating songs without you realizing it.
Future Apple devices may be able to dynamically modify user interface elements, security levels, and other types of behavior based on location, according to a new patent application published Thursday.
Referred to as “Location-sensitive security levels and setting profiles based on detected location,” Apple’s application describes a setup in which both the hardware and software of your iPhone, iPad, and whatever other mobile devices Apple releases in future can seamlessly work together to automatically adjust various UI and device behavior settings.
It may be painfully average as a kart game, but the uber popular Angry Birds Go! iOS racer has just upped the ante by finally adding a much-requested multiplayer mode.
Letting you race against other players from around the world to determine the fastest bird or piggy on the track, the presence of multiplayer was first teased by developers Rovio all the way back in December, when they asked: “Who wants to see multiplayer in Angry Birds Go!? It’s coming in spring!”
As it turned out, Rovio missed the spring deadline, but hopefully the extra time to work on the update will have been well-spent.