The latest update to Facebook’s Messenger app will let you use it even if you don’t have (or want) an account for the social-media platform.
It’s still Facebook, though, so you’re going to have to cough up some personal info.
Apple Watch might not be waterproof, but it will help Maryland residents get sailing, anyway.
The state of Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) has launched a companion Apple Watch app to help residents find waterways to explore. This makes Maryland the first state government with an official app for Apple’s recently released smartwatch.
If you have an extra $11.5 million sitting around, and you’ve always wanted to live somewhere that looks like a great place to plan a heist while your robot butler serves you drinks, we may have found your new home.
The house at 535 Haynes Avenue in Beverly Hills once belonged to tycoon, filmmaker, and real-life Iron Man, Howard Hughes. And if its classic charm and amazing views weren’t enough for you, it’s also entirely automated and runs from an iPad.
You can see more of the swanky house in the video below.
It might be kind of hard to keep up with all of the Final Fantasy news that’s suddenly everywhere. We have a high-definition remake and an iOS port of PlayStation 1 classic role-playing game Final Fantasy VII in the works, the weird and cute-ish World of Final Fantasy, and trailers everywhere.
Oh, and if you’re looking for a hub that will make keeping track of all of this stuff way easier, developer Square Enix is ready to help you out with that too, thanks to the new Final Fantasy Portal app coming out for iOS
If you love the Kingdom Hearts series of role-playing games, which is a sprawling adventure set in a series of worlds from classic Disney films — or if you’ve never heard of it but think that what I just said sounds like the best thing ever — we have some good news for you: It’s coming to mobile.
Developer Square Enix debuted the new entry in its incredibly nerdy series during its event at the Electronic Entertainment Expo tradeshow today, and while the series is already super cute, the iOS installment really kicks that up a few pegs.
Check it out in the trailer below.
Fans of the Tomb Raider game series will be able to bring the adventure along with them with an upcoming game from developer Square Enix Montréal.
Lara Croft Go is a turn-based puzzle game with a bright, stylized visual style. Square Enix announced it during its Electronic Entertainment Expo event earlier today, and you can get your first look in the trailer below.
Developer Bethesda had a surprise or two for its showcase at the Electronics Entertainment Expo trade show last night. But the biggest one was a previously unannounced game called Fallout Shelter, a resource-management title for iOS that puts you in charge of a subterranean colony after the nuclear holocaust.
Most surprising of all: It’s out right now, and it’s free.
We’ve all had terrible neighbors who throw loud parties that last all night, even on Mondays. Party Hard, an upcoming game for iOS, is about bringing those annoying gatherings to a halt. With a knife.
Developer Pinokl Games has released a new trailer for its “third-person urban conflict simulator” ahead of the Electronics Entertainment Expo trade show next week, and you can check it out below.
Uber, the disruptive (and controversial) ride-sharing service, has a real problem. If you want to corner the market on the backs of a global workforce of what are essentially freelancers, how do you ensure that they all know how to use your system? And, more importantly, how do you replenish your supply of willing Uber drivers.
The San Fransisco company thinks that a video game may be the answer. Called UberDrive, it will be available on the App Store for anyone who wants to take a virtual trip as an Uber driver.
“UberDRIVE is a compelling representation of what it’s like to be an Uber driver-partner on the platform,” said Mike Truong, a senior product manager at Uber, in a statement. “Through the course of playing the game you can get a sense of how much money you can make using your own car and driving on your own time. With the sign-up flow embedded directly into the game it makes it really easy to start the sign-up and screening process right then and there.”
If you’ve ever hopped onto Wikipedia just to “look one thing up really quick” and then come to an hour later with a comprehensive knowledge of the various forms of lightsaber combat, WikiLinks 3 might very well be your Kryptonite.
And even if you’re not the type to fall into a Wiki-hole of cross-references and endless chains of links, it’s still a cool app that offers an interesting way to get lost on the Internet.
A post on Apple’s site for its Maps app heavily suggests that it’s hard at work on a feature to rival Google’s Street View, which lets users zoom into maps to explore areas from ground level. The company hasn’t officially announced that that is what it’s doing with those camera vans, but we’re running increasingly low on alternative theories.
Online auction site eBay has updated its iOS app to include Apple Watch functionality.
Now, sellers and bidders can keep an eye on their transactions wherever they are.
A social-media campaign hopes to put pressure on Apple to release the Pebble Time smartwatch app for iOS.
The to-do started after an update on the Time’s Kickstarter page yesterday.
An upcoming mobile game will throw players into the struggle immediately following the death of the Emperor in Return of the Jedi.
Star Wars: Uprising, which is due out later this year for iOS and Android, is a real-time strategy game that picks up after the destruction of the second Death Star at the end of the third film as the decapitated Empire struggles to maintain control over the galaxy.
Check out the announcement trailer below.
If you’ve ever tried to book a cruise through a portal like Cruise.com or — heaven forbid — via a cruise line’s website, you know that it can be an incredibly confusing and costly experience.
The thing is, though, that it doesn’t have to be. Cruisable is a startup that hopes to take the obfuscation away and let you find affordable and/or incredibly fantastic cruise vacations with a website and app that won’t try to trick you.
“Cruises can be cheaper than other getaways,” said CTO and co-founder Giacomo Balli, “as low as a couple hundred dollars.”
Patient iOS developers haven’t had long to wait for their time with Apple’s new App Analytics tool; the beta is now open to everyone with an iTunes Connect Admin, Finance, or Sales account.
The New York Times recently updated its NYT Now app for the iPhone to version 2.0. It was already an excellent app for staying on top of the day’s news, and now it’s the best.
Many smartphone photographers use Hipstamatic as a way to articulate their personal vision. But the quest for beautiful photos need not be so solitary.
The iPhone app that lets you apply a vintage aesthetic from any era of photography now has a social component called DSPO.
The Instagram faithful churns out 70 million photos daily. But if you weren’t able to share your meal or tell the story of your quirky cat in a single picture, you had to post multiple photos.
That changed Monday. Instagram introduced Layout, a new free app that lets you combine images into a single post. The news was announced on the Instagram blog.
Users can open Layout and drag and drop photos from their camera roll to any of the custom templates. Flip, rotate, resize and create mirror effects in your layouts.
We grew up in homes with robust photo albums, reels of 8 mm home movies and stacks of VHS tapes. These represent the branches and blossoms of our growing family trees.
In the digital age, we’ve filled out the branches, capturing millions of pictures and video clips almost out of concern we will miss something.
And we rarely look at any of it.
Mok Oh wants to change that with Moju, an iPhone app that distills the essence of a life moment by taking a sequence of photos and creating seamless motion in a file that comes to life with a simple twist of your phone.
Chris Toy was an Everquest geek in the early days, playing the addictive open-world video game somewhat obsessively.
It wasn’t slaying the monsters or leveling up that really motivated Toy, but the social aspects of the game.
“I was honestly pretty isolated,” the Hong Kong native told Cult of Mac by phone, “and talking to people via Everquest or World of Warcraft felt better than talking to real people.”
That’s when he realized that being able to text chat with other people wherever they were was the future of messaging, and perhaps even communication itself. Fast-forward to now, and Toy and a high-tech team living in San Francisco have created Bindle, a new group-messaging app designed to create this very same future.
I don’t watch cable TV. I pay a little more each month to purchase stand-alone Internet from my provider. I watch Netflix, Amazon, stream via my PS4, Apple TV and on my iOS devices. I hate commercial TV with a passion.
In 2013, 6.5 percent of American households quit watching cable or satellite TV, instead opting for a streaming-only experience, a 4.5 percent jump over the number of households that cut the cord in 2010. This is an audience that continues to grow.
Now Reuters TV, a fascinating new service from a reputable news outlet, promises to provide mobile TV news via an iOS app. Will other news empires follow suit?
Karen Koch Rasmussen navigates life just fine without sight. Developing systems to identify the tangibles in life come to her naturally, from how to stock her canned goods to labeling her music collection so she can listen to which ever genre strikes her.
She even has a strategy for when there’s a glitch in her systems, like when a canned item goes in the wrong place. If she grabs tomatoes instead of beans, she may adjust her recipe and roll with the inconvenience.
So when an iPhone app to assist the blind came into her life, thus offering a solution to those occasional challenges, Rasmussen, 26, didn’t quite know how to use a set of eyes that were easily at her disposal.
“I’ve been blind since birth so you learn to get along without seeing,” said Rasmussen, a graduate student in political science in Aarhus, Denmark. “I’m not use to having the opportunity so I would forget there is a solution.”
Paper Camera is just plain fun. Plenty of photo apps let you apply filters after the fact, but this one performs its manipulative magic inside your camera, transforming your images in real-time before your dazzled eyes.
The filters are robust, offering a nice variety of cartoon- and painting-style choices to help make even the most uninteresting photographic situations colorful, graphic or both. And Paper Camera supports the same wacky filter set for videos you shoot.
We love the fact that the app saves both the original file and the filtered version to our library so we can do what we want with the original.
My math-averse daughter wanted to cheat on her algebra homework. So we downloaded PhotoMath, a free app that lets you take a picture of your mathematical and algebraic equations, solving them for you and showing the steps to the solution.
PhotoMath has been at the top of the App Store charts for a couple of weeks, hitting number one on the Education, Kids Games and Top Apps lists. Small wonder, as it seems like a great way to get out of doing homework.
However, despite the concerns of some parents and teachers, apps like PhotoMath just won’t help when it comes to cheating — they’re far too limited. Still, it’s a promising technology that, once it matures, might actually turn into the type of wonder tool for education we’ve long been promised, turning our iOS devices into useful educational tools that will help kids actually learn math, rather than simply giving them a shortcut to homework answers.