iOS - page 39

Robots are pretty cool, but have you ever wanted to create your own iPhone controlled cyborg? Backyard Brains is banking that a lot of kids are interested in cyborg technology and neuroscience (ethical dilemmas be damned), so after three years of R&D they’ve come up with the RoboRoach – a small electronic surgery kit that lets you turn a real-life cockroach, into an iPhone-controlled cyborg for a few minutes.

The kit comes with a backpack that contains a battery and receiver you superglue to the cockroach after sanding down a patch of shell.  You have to jab a groundwire into the cockroaches thorax, and then after that you carefully trim the antenna so you can stick some small electrodes onto both of them and receive signals from your iPhone. Don’t worry, the iPhone app and the cockroaches come free with the $99 kit, so you don’t have to go hunting for some behind your supermarket’s dumpster.

If there’s one group of people who could seriously do with less wires — or in this case, cables — it’s guitarists. Walking around with two grand worth of Fender in your hands, trying avoiding a snake-pit of cables and simultaneously tapping out Van Halen’s Eruption probably takes some concentration (I wouldn’t know; I’ve never been on stage with anything but an air guitar, which was completely wireless).

IK Multimedia’s new four-pedal iRig BlueBoard pedalboard de-clutters the floor a little, as it’s the first completely wireless pedalboard for iOS and Macs. The board connects to its companion app on an accompanying iDevice (or to a Mac) through a Bluetooth connection.

Foxconn, the Taiwanese company that assembles almost all of Apple’s most popular devices, has admitted that it has forced student interns to work illegal shift patterns.

Thousands of students from the Xi’an Institute of Technology were made to work overtime and night shifts at the plant in violation of company policies. And if they refused to do so, they were in danger of losing their degree certificate.

Your swanky new iPhone 5s may be significantly faster than its predecessors, but it’s twice as likely to crash when running third-party apps as the iPhone 5 and the iPhone 5c. New research from Crittercism, a company that monitors mobile app performance, has found that apps crash around 2% on the iPhone 5s, but under 1% on its siblings.

Instagram announced new versions of its app on Android and iOS are now available. The Android 4.2 update adds the intelligent photo straightening tool that iOS users have been enjoying for a few months now.

The iOS 4.2.1 update doesn’t contain any major new features, although Instragam did add new settings that let you mute the playback of video with your ringer switch, or leave it always on. You can also choose to preload videos over Wi-Fi only or leave it always on as well. Unfortunately, there’s still no slo-mo support.

The free updates are available for free in the App Store and Google Play.

Note: This article originally appeared in the Newsstand magazine” target=”_blank”>Cult of Mac Newsstand issue, Game On!. Grab yourself a copy or subscribe today.

Michael Frauenhofer is an indie developer who currently lives in Pennsylvania. He and his mom made Demon Chic, a story-based, decidedly indie game available for iPad. The game focuses on three roommates trying to live life while battling monsters, giant babies, and floating heads. It’s an experience that turns the traditional idea of monster battles on its head, as the main characters all are really fighting their own inner demons.

Demon Chic is a hallucinogenic trip through the lives of three ordinary people who must learn to live with their illness, not cure it, and find some sort of fulfilling life while doing so.

This ain’t no Angry Birds sequel, folks, so buckle up.

Fitbit has today announced its new fitness tracker, the Force, which combines all of the features found in the original Fitbit Flex with some of the more advanced features found in the Fitbit One tracker. It costs $129.95, slightly more than the $99 Flex, and it’s available today.

Readdle has this week updated two of its most popular productivity apps for iOS, adding next-generation image processing to Scanner Pro, and a number of new features to Calendars 5. You can now enjoy much-improved scans with better legibility in the former, as well as task creation and an app icon badge in the latter.

In a move that’s sure to upset some third-party app developers, Microsoft is planning to launch official Remote Desktop apps for Android and iOS later this month. Like the Remote Desktop solutions for Windows and OS X, the apps will allow you to connect to your PC and control it remotely from your smartphone and tablet.

I remember a few tech bloggers going nuts over Vine when it hit the street back in January. I wasn’t convinced; it seemed too limiting, felt too gimmicky. Vine turned out to be a more creative tool than I’d imagined — at least for others. But the concept never really hooked me enough to want to use it.

Cameo, on the other hand, had my juices flowing almost immediately. Like Vine, Cameo shoots short, six-second HD (720p) clips that can be uploaded to Cameo’s website or shared via social media and email. Unlike Vine, multiple six second shots can be combined into a two-minute (maxiumum) clip, with light editing tools, effects and music added to the mix. And Cameo even lets you collaborate with friends.

It seems to me that we do a lot of unnecessary worrying in our lives. There’s a lot of generalized anxiety floating out there, and–absent a clinical diagnosis of anxiety–perhaps we could all benefit from keeping track of what we worry about, and how often. If nothing else, it’s a good way to figure out whether we truly have issues to stress over, or if we’re maybe creating a bunch of it for our own need to feel worried.

In addition, we might also have some moments when we realize that our worries are nothing more than irrational fears of our own making. The problem is, we forget these moments when gripped by worry again the next time.

The developer behind iOS app Worry Watch has created a gorgeous and useful way to track our anxious moments as well as the moments when we realize that our worries might be irrational.

Flickr for iPhone can now automatically upload all the photos in your camera roll, thanks to a new update for devices running iOS 7. There’s also a new auto-straighten feature that fixes your wonky snaps, and the Google sign-in issues that plagued the previous release have been fixed.

Yahoo! has today updated its Yahoo! Mail apps for Android and iOS to introduce support for threaded messages (which it is calling “Conversations”), themes, and 1TB of storage for every user. That’s enough to store 500,000 to 1 million attachments, Yahoo! says, or 6,000 years’ worth of emails for the average user.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has confirmed that Microsoft Office will come to the iPad just as soon as it’s ready for devices with a touchscreen. Speaking at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Florida today, Ballmer said, “iPad will be picked up when there’s a touch first user interface.”

That user interface is “in progress” Ballmer added, but it’s likely to come to the Windows version of Office first.

AT&T has updated its U-verse apps for Android and iOS to add live streaming for over 100 channels, more than 20 of which can be enjoyed “outside the home.” The service is available at no extra cost for AT&T subscribers as part of their existing U-family or U-verse TV package.

Google chairman Eric Schmidt has dismissed claims that Android is insecure by claiming “it’s more secure than the iPhone.” The platform, which has more than a billion users worldwide, goes through rigorous real-world testing, Schmidt said, before promising consumers would be happier with Android “more than you can possibly imagine.”

Evernote announced Monday the availability of Two-Step Verification for all its users, increasing security for everyone, instead of just the premium members.

In a blog post, Evernote’s Andrew Sinkov said that the software company values its users’ data security. The feature was introduced with a few other security measures last month, including Access History and Authorized Applications, but was only available for Evernote Premium and Evernote Business users.

These extra security features are now available to all Evernote users.

Skype for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch has finally been updated for iOS 7. The new release, available to download now from the App Store, introduces a new, “refreshed look and feel,” as well as a number of improvements.

Having a ton of cables all over your house, desk, or charging station is far from ideal. They get tangle,d they got mixed up, ad sometimes they even get misplaced in the mess. That’s why this Cult of Mac Deals offer is worth looking at – especially if you want to save on clutter, time, and money.

The 3-in–1 Lightning/30-Pin/Micro USB to USB Charging Cable replaces three cables with one that simultaneously charges all of your devices at once. And it can be had for a limited time for only $19!

There are a bunch of apps out on iOS for kids, from educational apps to sports apps and more. Sure, you can get reviews of these games by adults, sometimes even from parents of kids who use them.

We thought it’d be fun, though, to ask the kids themselves.

Welcome to Kid APProved, a series of videos in which we ask our own children what they think of apps on the App Store that they’re using.

This week, it’s tons of Disney fun with Disney Infinity: Toy Box, which is free on the app store. Here’s what our Kid APProved reporter thinks.

What if you could duct tape your iPhone to your baseball bat, tennis racquet or 9-iron, and use the iPhone’s motion sensors to plot your swing in your favorite sport? It’d be messy, sure, and awkward, trying to adapt your grip over the slab of phone. And then there’d be the hours of scraping duct-tape residue off the screen when (if) you recovered it from where it landed after it flung itself off during that home-run swing. And after all that you’d need an app that actually made sense of all the data.

Forget all that, and keep your iPhone in your pocket. Zepp Labs has come out with a small, light (1-inch square, 6.3 grams) sensor that attaches, via specialized rubber housings, to golf gloves, baseball bats or a tennis racquets; the sensor records your swing in three dimensions, then sends the data directly to a companion app on your iPhone via Bluetooth. The resulting 3D image of your swing can be viewed from any angle, and gets analyzed by the app.

Just as easy-to-use creative apps like iMovie and GarageBand have made it easier to craft music and videos, so AppSeed is poised to make it much easier to build iOS apps. Simply using the app to snap a photo of a rough sketch scribbled onto a notepad or napkin will turn that sketch into working, interactive interface pieces that can be arranged, re-arranged and tested.

Apple has contacted developers to inform them that Mac applications will soon be eligible for its Volume Purchase Program, which gives businesses and educational institutions the ability to purchase software in bulk at a discounted rates.

Thanks to the popularity of Apple’s iOS devices and the Cupertino company’s knack for product marketing, you don’t have to be a regular Siri user to recognize her voice. Two years ago today, she made her debut alongside the iPhone 4s, and she’s been our virtual personal assistant ever since.

But who is the real Siri? Who provided that voice that we’ve all become so familiar with?

Her name is Susan Bennett, and she’s been a voice actress since she was young. She recorded the Siri voices back in 2005 — six years before Apple unveiled the feature — but she had no idea they would ever end up in the iPhone.

If you’ve ever wanted to code iPhone apps, then join the club. There are plenty of developers already out there delivering content to the App Store every day – and tons of budding developers who are chomping at the bit to do so. If you’re going to compete in this saturated marketplace you’re going to need a solid foundation to build on. And you’re going to need to have it fast.

Cult of Mac Deals has an offer right now that will get you well on your way to building and designing killer apps. For a limited time you can get The iOS Foundations Video Course Bundle for only $69 – a savings of 65% – and this course is geared towards giving you what you need to bring your app ideas to life.