iPhone apps - page 6

Everyone’s favorite mapping service turns 15 on Thursday, and there are gifts in store to celebrate. The latest Google Maps update for iOS brings a revamped icon and brand-new features.

Users can look forward to a fresh new interface that makes exploring and commuting a little bit easier.

New York City police officers will soon use an iPhone application to record their daily activities. The officers previously used paper memo pads for these notes, going back to around 1900.

The NYPD’s switch to an iPhone app for taking notes is yet another step in the force’s modernization using Apple devices.

This week we type on our Apple Watches, scrapbook everything into Notebooks, flex our brains with MoneyBall and more.

This week we trim our SSDs, make PDF statements from our Apple Cards, and drown everything in delicious, springy reverb. These are the apps that got us buzzing this week.

Roland’s new Go Livecast is a pretty fantastic little box for live-streaming with your iPhone. You can hook up microphones, use the companion app to do the streaming, and — get this — you can hook up a second iOS device and switch to its camera.

Let’s check it out.

This week we create music-synced video art with Glitch Clip, import music to our iPhone with Doppler 2, take proper control of Shortcuts with LaunchCuts, and more.

For my job at Cult of Mac, I test a lot of apps. But of course, I also use a lot of apps, for work, for recreation, and for making music. I thought I’d make a short list of my most-used apps this year. Few, if any, of these apps are new this year, although some of them received major updates in 2019. But all of them are excellent, well-made apps, well worth checking out.

So, let’s get started.

This week we boss a metronome around with only our voices, let a music app write our songs for us, and create beats and tunes like little children might. Yes, the only good new apps I’ve seen this week have all been music apps, so try to enjoy it.

Cubasis, the audio workstation app from Steinberg, just got rewritten as a brand new app. Cubasis 3 looks just like the old version, but is all-new, and includes support for the iPhone as well as the iPad. And hopefully, this rewrite also means that in the future, updates that adjust the user interface for new iOS features and screen sizes will be supported a lot faster. It took more than a year for Cubasis to support the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, for example.

So, what’s new in Cubasis 3?

This week we import photos from SD cards straight into Lightroom for iPad, make loops with L7 Looper, find the next bus or subway ride with Transit for Apple Watch, and more.

This week we find a nanny for our kinds, read Twitter on our Apple Watches, restore animations to our Live Photos, and more.

This week we control our AirPods from our Macs, listen to podcasts on our Apple Watches, and listen to our inner selves with our iPhones.

Pure Acid is a bass synthesizer and drum machine app for the iPad, and it might just be the best drum machine app ever. It is, for me, the first app that actually feels like you’re using physical drum machine hardware instead of just another touchscreen app. Part of this is down to the one-screen interface, where everything is (mostly) always in the same spot — just like real buttons. And part is due to the app design genius of Pure Acid’s creator, Dmitrij Pavlov (aka Jim Pavloff).

This week we get healthy with Apple’s Research app, build ridiculously-powerful shortcuts with Toolbox Pro, listen to internet radio with Triode, and scare ourselves silly with Layers of Fear. Shiver.

Apple’s Shortcuts app is already a very powerful tool for automating stuff on your iPhone and iPad, and for creating your own push-button mini-apps. But what if it also could use the deep tools that Apple builds into iOS for app developers? What if Shortcuts could use Face ID, or analyze your photos using iOS’ crazy-powerful machine learning? Or if you could use the OCR to pull text out of photos, all inside Shortcuts?

Thats what Toolbox Pro does. It opens up many of Apple’s amazing under-the-hood technologies, and lets you use them just by dragging a new step into your Shortcuts workflows. Let’s see what it can do.

This week we get editing with Photoshop for iPad, transfer huge files with Dropbox, get private with DuckDuckGo for Safari, and dictate a letter, offline, in privacy.

iPhone and iPad can now take advantage of Dropbox Transfer, which allows users to more easily send and receive up to 100 GB of files.

It doesn’t have the size restrictions of email, and is simpler than Dropbox’s traditional system for sharing files.

This week we stream movies off USB sticks, stay safe with social networks, learn to play guitar with Apple Music, and draw pictures on virtual paper. These are the best apps and updates of the past seven days.

4Pockets’ MultiTrack Recorder Plugin is an audio-recording app that can be loaded inside other music apps. If you’ve ever seen an app like GarageBand or Logic in action, you’ll be familiar with the layout of multiple tracks on a horizontal timeline. MultiTrack Recorder Plugin offers exactly that, only it’s designed to be used inside other music apps. Apps that don’t have their own recording functions.

This week we check the weather, take a nap, edit photos on our Macs using Apple Pencil, and enjoy Catalina’s Catalyst apps.

This week we find new friends to hang out with, shoot video with both iPhone cameras at once, fall for yet another Facebook data-gathering app and more.

Safari’s content blockers effectively block trackers and other Bad Stuff on the web, but that only works in Apple’s browser. Any other app you install on your iPhone or iPad can send all kinds of personal information to anyone, without you ever knowing. Your location, the details of your menstrual cycle, how long you spend asleep — pretty much anything.

So how do you stop this? Well, iOS 13 itself can help limit some abuses. But what you really need is an iOS firewall app that can detect and shut down any unauthorized connections.

Readdle’s PDF Expert is my most-used PDF app, because it’s fast, powerful and doesn’t get in the way. I don’t even use many of the advanced features, but I still prefer it over most other options.

Now it’s even better. The most recent PDF Expert update adds support for the new features in iOS 13 and iPadOS. Let’s run through what’s new.

This week we enjoy lots of new iOS 13 updates and a new super-accurate moon-phase complication for the Apple Watch. Then we add things up with the most comprehensive calculator ever made, and exhume the body of hipster photo app Hipstamatic.

This week we get grooving with EG Pulse, take control of Mission Control, drag stuff around with Yoink, and wonder why we need Pocket Casts.

Read all about the best new and updated apps in this week’s roundup.