We’re not sure why Google just doesn’t change the name of their Google Search app for iOS, as it does pretty much everything Google Now does on Android, but this new update is pretty fantastic, whatever you want to call it.
Google Search is “now” updated to version 3.1.0, with a whole new set of features, including Notifications, Reminders, new Cards, and a Siri-like Handsfree voice. This last bit lets you command your iPhone to do stuff with the phrase, “OK Google.”
How cool is that?
Cocktail Academy — Food & Drink — $3.99
Cocktail Academy is a new app for people who would like to make their favorite drinks themselves or try some new ones without embarrassing themselves in front of their friends. It has directions to create 110 cocktails and even includes video tutorials in which international-award-winning bartender Giancarlo Di Niso shows you exactly what to do (spoiler alert: It involves a lot of measuring and shaking and/or stirring). You can search for drinks several ways including alphabetically and by percentage of alcohol, and the app even lists caloric content for each concoction for your dieting convenience. Grog, for example, has 186 calories, and I never realized I was curious about that until just now.
Maps© — Social Networking — Free
If you want to use Google’s Street View function without having to go into Apple’s occasionally dodgy Maps, you might want to check out Maps©. In addition to letting you look at people’s lawns like you’re there, you can also drop pins between two points to calculate distance (this gets less accurate the farther apart your points are), check traffic, and get directions. And if you want to see where your friends live (which is creepy, but I’m sure you might have innocent reasons), you can import their addresses from your contacts and drop pins there.
It does a bit of everything, really.
My Mountain of Debt — Finance — $0.99 (50%-off launch sale price)
My Mountain of Debt, a new financial app by developer Fun with Data, believes that paying off your debt is as hard as removing a giant pile of bricks from over the opening to your anthill. At the start, you enter your total debt in up to four categories, and then adjust the amounts as needed. Each time your debt shrinks, the formic hero mounts the pile with his trusty pickaxe and whittles down the stack. It could be a valuable tool to keep your debt in perspective and show your progress — plus that ant looks pretty cute in his little miner’s helmet.
InstaPhotoBlend – Photo & Video – $1.99
If you’ve ever looked at two of your photos and wished that you could somehow transmogrify them into one Frankenphoto, you might want to check out InstaPhotoBlend. It’s image-editing software for your iOS device that uses a simple interface to let you combine and blend two photos together. You start by selecting two pictures — one top layer and one bottom layer — and then fiddle around with the controls to control opacity and adjust color until you’ve created the perfect thing that used to be two things. After that, you can post your masterpiece to social media, email or text it, or just hang onto it until the time is right. It’s a fun little app to play with, and it’s not hard to create some interesting effects.
Love Dropbox, but hate the mobile app on your iPhone? Join the club; while having access to my Dropbox folder on all of my iOS devices is a fantastic productivity booster, the user experience of the default app is pretty bare bones.
What’s a Dropbox loving tech writer to do, then, to enjoy his Dropbox experience even more? Boxie thinks it has the answer, with a brand new Dropbox client app. Boxie connects to Dropbox, lets you access and use all the files in there, and promises to be much prettier and intuitive than the official app.
Sounds good, right?
LitBound has made the jump from Android, and is now available on iOS. If you’re a fan of books, or just a library geek at heart, this game offers you hours of trivia fun, testing your knowledge of best sellers, great works of literature, children’s books, and genre fiction like science fiction, fantasy, and graphic novels. Oh, yes, and movies.
The now 14-year-old app developer we introduced to you last year, Nicholas G, has just released a second app, putting all of us adults to shame yet again.
This year, Nicholas has put together a rather impressive looking tip calculator that makes it super easy to figure out an accurate tip without all that pesky math.
Called Quick Tips!! (yes, the exclamation marks are part of the charm), Nicholas’ latest app uses all the visual style of iOS 7 and it looks to be pretty as well as functional.
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.
Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities is one of the few analysts who routinely predicts Apple’s moves correctly. Yesterday, Kuo sent out a research note to investors that was filled with details about the iPhone 5S, including Kuo’s belief that we will see a gold-colored iPhone 5S available with 128GB of storage.
So, the dude who said he’d quit rock and roll when he turned 33 just turned 70. This is a guy that typically covers 12 miles during a Stone’s show as he leaps about the stage, running and dancing. Mick Jagger has been on the cover of Rolling Stone (no relation) twenty times, the first time in 1968.
To celebrate this fairly amazing milestone for the quintessential rock and roll superstar, This Day In Music apps has made its Rolling Stones tribute app, This Day In The Rolling Stones, free.
If you’re a Stones fan, and let’s face it, most of us are in some way, you should check this one out. According to the developers, This Day In The Rolling Stones is going to remain free forever. Bravo!
Do you like to Bang With Friends? The Facebook app, I mean, which lets you arrange hookups with your Facebook friends if both of you are anonymously up for banging. One rarely bangs with enemies, and even then, only under a “keep your enemies closer” mantra.
Well, if you do, bad news, chum. Zynga — the avatar of all that is unholy about mobile gaming — is suing Bang With Friends. Why? Because the “With Friends” part is similar to many of their game app titles, like Chess With Friends and Words With Friends.
Some space geeks are calling today “The Day the Earth Smiled,” because the Cassini probe is set to take a picture of our planet as seen from Saturn later this afternoon. To honor this momentous occasion, the maker of astronomy software SkySafari is giving away basic versions for iOS and OS X (and discounting the Android version) through Sunday.
There are two things people care viscerally about in the San Francisco Bay Area: food and tech.
There’s always someone with an iPhone Instagramming dinner or squinting over health scorecards for those taco trucks on Yelp. (See also: “Foodies The Musical,” a local hit.)
But a lot of these apps don’t deliver what food lovers really hunger for, says the organizer of a new app contest. The 8-Hour Food App Challenge wants local residents to sit at their kitchen tables and concoct new apps about all things culinary on Saturday, June 29.
“The kind of food content that makes you salivate isn’t the kind you find in apps designed by engineers,” says Pietro Ferraris, founder of Map2app and sponsor of the Challenge, told Cult of Mac. “Most apps made by engineers about food are pretty boring, so we hope to change that.”
SAN FRANCISCO, CA Collin Donnell wants app developers to learn from his mistakes.
Donnell, a full-time iOS developer since 2008 whose app credits include Pinbook for Pinboard, shared some tips to a packed room at AltWWDC, which we have been all over like an snuggle iPad case. He divided them into practical and philosophical, but they sort of blend together.
Circumstantial evidence may suggest that Apple has acquired the predictive search app Grokr. And if they haven’t done, they should do.
Grokr has been called the “Google Now for iOS.”
With Grokr’s predictive search capability and Siri’s natural language capability combined into a single feature could put Apple in the overall lead in the crucial area of virtual assistant technology.
Here’s why Apple needs to buy Grokr (and why I think they already did).
Have you ever wanted to introduce two super interesting people from different circles of friends, but never really knew how to go about it? Tinder, a new app that helps you discover new people around you in real time, has just updated with an added feature: Matchmaker.
“Introducing two people, whatever the purpose, can be time consuming and often times socially awkward,” says Sean Rad, CEO of Tinder. “Matchmaker gives you an extremely easy and socially acceptable way to make that introduction, while furthering Tinder’s vision to be the platform people use to meet new people.”
If you’re a fan of Lucas Arts and Sierra Games adventure games like Grim Fandango, The Dig, Monkey Island, or King’s Quest, you’ll dig this fun game from Replay Games, Inc. Fester Mudd: Curse of the Gold, Episode 1 is a spot-on tribute to the gaming days of yore, with hilarious writing, painterly-yet-pixelly artwork, and some quirky puzzles to solve with various items needing to be used with various other items.
It’s also by the guys who are working on the upcoming Leisure Suit Larry remake for iOS, so you know it’s gonna be good.
OpenStreetMap is a project that makes and distributes free map data for the world, letting anyone use the data for free, without any legal or technical restrictions.
Startup skobbler uses this global mapping data to create its own set of location-aware mobile apps, like ForeverMap 2, an app that has been on Android for a while now, and which is now available on the App Store for your iOS device.
Although it’s been almost over a week since the carnage of the Boston Marathon Bombings and the related manhunt and shootout came to a close, but there are still a lot more questions than answers about what happened and why.
A new report from Boston.com, though, has filled in some of the blanks in regards to the three hours on April 18th in which the Tsarnaev brothers carjacked a Mercedes driven by a 26-year-old Chinese man… and it looks like an iPhone app helped save his life.
SpeakingPhoto is a new social photography app that lets you connect in real-time with anyone you like, using photos and recorded audio to share your special moments. Competing with Vine, Snapchat, and Digisocial, SpeakingPhoto aims to be a nicer place to be; instead of the party-atmosphere of the latter two apps, this one wants to let you record and archive the “memories, notes, and stories behind milestone moments in your personal and professional lives.”
Pretty heady stuff for a photo sharing app, right?
I don’t know if you have kids or not, but one of the more difficult things to keep track of, at least for me, is their allowance. Yeah, you might say, just write it down on a piece of paper or something. While that may seem to have merit, it rarely works out in my family. Let’s say my son gets $5 every two weeks for allowance. That’s a $5 bill I need to have each and every week.
Honestly? It never works out that way. So we tried using a calendar, on which I created a repeating event, set for every two weeks, figuring we could just count it up when he needed something. Well, that didn’t really work out, either. We’d be at a store, and he’d want something, and it’d be some non-multiple of five, and we’d try to remember to write it down, and so on.
Suffice it to say that I am doing a poor job at helping my kid keep track of his allowance, and an equally poor job of prepping him for real life money management.
So imagine my joy when I saw Allowance Manager for iOS, a Universal app that basically does what we need: tracks allowance on the iPhone or iPad. Win!
In an accident almost too horrifying for words, Jason Koger once ran over a fallen power line with his four-wheeler. 7,200 volts ran through his system, and the accident was so horrifying, he needed to have both his arms amputated. But there’s an app for everything, even robotic hands.
How many times have you seen a trailer for an upcoming movie and thought, “That looks interesting. I’ll have to see that!” Then it hits the theaters, goes to DVD, and you forget about it until it shows up in the Walmart bin months later.
Since I reviewed the original version of TodoMovies last summer, I’ve continued to use the app to keep track of movies I want to watch. Today TodoMovies 2 was released in the App Store with some great feature additions. This is the iPhone app every movie lover needs.
Did you know that Chipotle had an iPhone app? Well it does, and that app allows you to order from your iPhone and skip the line when you arrive to inhale your burrito goodness. It’s a beautiful idea, but the app itself has not been so beautiful for the past few years. Today Chipotle updated its app with iPhone 5 support, the ability to select brown rice, and so, so much more.