Amazon has inked a deal with HBO to bring popular shows like True Blood and The Wire to Prime Instant Video subscribers without an HBO subscription. The deal will also see an HBO GO app brought to the new Amazon Fire TV, but it’ll be exclusive to customers in the U.S.
Browsing the App Store can be a bit overwhelming. Which apps are new? Which ones are good? Are the paid ones worth paying for, or do they have a free, lite version that will work well enough?
Every week, we highlight some of the most interesting new apps and collect them here for your consideration. This time, our picks include a timer inside of another timer, something to keep track of where you’ve been, and some fancy new fonts for your iWork.
Here you go:
It’s nice having some record of the places you’ve visited, but FourSquare is a little granular for my liking.
Traveler’s Badges keeps it simple and broad. You just let it detect your location, and it generates a unique badge for your current city that you can collect and add to your collection. It even logs the date and time you were there, in case anyone asks.
If you want to get all global with it, you can even display all of your badges on a map. It’s not the most practical app, but it is pretty cute (and free). And it’ll kill like five seconds of a layover. Every bit helps.
Traveler’s Badges – Free | Yangfan Qi
If you’re doing interval training or something else that requires you to time one thing and then another thing, like, right away, you might be interested in Practice Time. It’s a new app that lets you set up two countdowns and then run them consecutively. You can also tell it how many cycles to go through once you start.
It’s handy for timing exercise and then rest or if you want to be really persnickety about those instructions that tell you to leave soup in the microwave for a minute after it’s done cooking. And if you also timed the cooking concurrently with the microwave.
Nevermind; just use it for intervals.
Practice Time – Free | Mal Function
Sometimes, you’re just typing an e-mail or note on your iPhone, and you realize that you have no idea how to spell the next word you want to use. It could be genuine ignorance, it could be a brain fart, but the person on the other end isn’t going to care why; they’ll just notice the mistake.
Spell Checker wants to help you out. It accesses your onboard dictionary to keep you from looking dumb. And because it uses the built-in resources, it even works offline.
You know, in case you’re writing an e-mail in a cave that you would want to send after you left the cave. It could happen.
Spell Checker – Free | Paradigm Agnostic
Your iPhone and iPad already have some fonts on board, but what if you want to make something that looks like it was stenciled or written in cursive? Or maybe you just like knowing that you have like 800 typefaces to choose from, just in case? Install New Fonts has you covered with enough options to keep you out of trouble for a while.
It’s free to download, but most of it is locked behind a $2.99 in-app purchase. But everything’s licensed for commercial use, so think of it as an investment.
Install New Fonts – Free | Denis Tokarev
Every once in a while, I find an app that shows me just how much I need it. This time, it’s Keep Calm and Breathe On, which offers you seven guided breathing exercises (based on cycles per minute). The goal is to relax you and “calm your heart activity,” and when I tried it out for this write-up, I realized that I’m apparently really bad at breathing.
It has two sounds to accompany your oxygenation: Wind and River. I preferred the wind. It just made more sense because if I’m in a river, breathing might be a problem. And that’s less than calming.
Every once in a while, I find an app that shows me just how much I need it. This time, it’s Keep Calm and Breathe On, which offers you seven guided breathing exercises (based on cycles per minute). The goal is to relax you and “calm your heart activity,” and when I tried it out for this write-up, I realized that I’m apparently really bad at breathing.
It has two sounds to accompany your oxygenation: Wind and River. I preferred the wind. It just made more sense because if I’m in a river, breathing might be a problem. And that’s less than calming.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with Burds, and yet I’ve never been so confused about why I continued to play a game.
It’s a little heavy on in-app purchases, but I can ignore those with only a touch of annoyance. And while Burds is shallow, fairly mindless, and dumb, it doesn’t take that long to play.
So I’m a little conflicted.
The iPod might be a dying business, but “dying” businesses for Apple are still businesses the competition would kill to have.
Apple’s iPod business, for example, is still worth $5 billion. Here’s an interesting metric to show how big the iPod still is in comparison to other companies, though. New mobile ad traffic data from Opera Mediaworks suggests that just a single iPod — the iPod touch — accounts for more web traffic than BlackBerry and Windows Phone combined.
The workplace can be stressful enough, without adding computer snafus to the mix. As an IT consultant, I hear about a lot of them, usually after disaster has struck.
Here’s how to deal with some of the more common workplace issues – email problems, contacts not syncing, WiFi headaches, deleted files – and keep rolling with your Mac.
Last month, we reported that always reliable analyst Ming-Chi Kuo was predicting that when Amazon finally gets into the smartphone business, it challenge the iPhone with a smartphone with as many as six different cameras. Kuo predicted that at least four of these cameras would be used for gesture control, allowing users to operate the smartphone without touching the touch panel.
We had a hard time wrapping our heads around it at the time, but now more data has come to light about how the system will work. And it sounds kind of dumb.
When Apple reveals its Q2 2014 sales numbers later today, few people are expecting any miracles: Mostly, Wall Street expects that growth will have stalled. All the more reason why Apple needs a major new product like the iWatch to give them some of their mojo back.
One business that everyone definitely expects to have declined this quarter, though, is the iPod. Apple CEO Tim Cook has himself said that the iPod is a “declining business” and sales have been dropping ever since 2008.
The bad news for iPod fans is that at least one analyst thinks the iPod business is in such serious decline for Apple that they won’t bother updating the line at all in 2014. But the good news? He thinks the iWatch will replace the iPod.
As rumors start to coalesce into likely fact that the iPhone 6 will come in two larger sizes — a 4.7-inch model and a 5.5-inch ‘iPhone Air’ — one big question that arises is what will happened to the iPhone 5c. Will Apple shelf their ‘budget’ iPhone, based upon poor sales? Or will they reinvent it when the iPhone 6s finally comes around?
Our favorite armchair iDevice designer Martin Hajek thinks the latter. He thinks that the iPhone c-series will live on, and in a stunning series of renders, he shows just how beautiful the iPhone 6c could be while still leaving room for the iPhone 6s to be the ‘luxury’ device with smaller bezels, TouchID and other perks.
More images after the jump. What do you think? Would you buy an iPhone 6c that looks like this?
Nifty free voice call and instant messaging service Viber has upgraded to iOS 7.0 with its latest update — incorporating the flat design we’ve come to expect across all iOS apps.
With more than 100 million monthly active users, and having been recently acquired by e-commerce giant Rakuten for $900 million, the upgrade was definitely in order, and it looks great.
That’s not all the update brings, however. It also adds new features to the app — including the ability to send multiple photos at once, as well as the option to create a list of blocked numbers/contacts.
Police in Milan busted an iPad thief who used the device to take photos of himself, apparently unaware that the images could be accessed remotely.
Another piece of the “when will Apple release the iWatch” puzzle may have fallen in to place, with the news that Apple is actively pursuing the iWatch trademark in dozens of countries around the globe.
Of course, it wouldn’t be Apple if it was that straightforward.
Rather than trademarking the term itself, Apple appears to be using a shell company called Brightflash USA LLC to do the work on its behalf.
The firm is registered in Delaware, and has previously been tied to trademarking efforts by Apple. One indicator of the connection between Apple and Brightflash is that it is using the same IP attorney in several locations.
I keep a movie to-watch list, a plain text list somewhere in my Dropbox. And as you may have guessed, I never read it. What I probably need is an app like Moviedo, a to-do list for movies that runs on your iPhone.
Apple’s latest iPhone 5s ad debuted during last night’s Agents of SHIELD on ABC, and it’s a bit of a mixed bag.
Built around the idea that “You’re more powerful than you think,” the ad shows the iPhone being used to as a tool by people in various lines of work. In this way, it’s very reminiscent of Apple’s recent “Your Verse” campaign for the iPad.
But while it’s good aspirational fare — with absolutely nothing offensive about it — it also comes across as, well, kind of boring really.
The iOS Kindle app just got an update, and it’s a good one. The left sidebar that you can summon while reading now has direct access to the table of contents, and you can access X-Ray info just by tapping on a word.
Remember the Elevation Dock? Yeah, me too. The Kickstarter took so long to ship that everybody who’d ordered one had upgraded to the iPhone 5 by the time the dock shipped, so they needed adapters to make them fit their new phones.
Still, that won’t happen with the new Elevation Stand, which is a simple $100 aluminum brick that adds a few inches to the height of your iMac.
DC Comics comic game, Injustice: Gods Among Us, will be getting a new mobile multiplayer mode and tons of new characters, according to reports coming out of WonderCon.
Developed by NetherRealm and published by Warner Brothers, the fighting game is one of a very select few that gets it right on touch-based devices — faithfully translating the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 console game to Apple’s mobile operating system.
Until now, however, playing the game on iOS has been a solitary experience. That looks like it will be rectified in a future game update, as a video from DC All Access reveals a multiplayer mode in the works.
Barely two months after I bought the original, Logitech has updated the Ultrathin Keyboard Cover for iPad, with matching new models for the iPads Air and Mini. The Bluetooth keyboards still work as covers and stands for your iPad, but now they also hold the iPad at an adjustable angle, and have a hidden hinge that pops out when your need it.
Lytro’s new Illum field Camera is the first of its products you’ll want to buy. The original Lytro Field Camera was a nice proof of concept, but the low resolution images were pretty crappy, and the unit itself was one of the least ergonomic camera designs I’ve ever seen.
The Illum still has some ergonomics issues, but promises much better pictures.
Apple has released security patches to fix the Heartbleed bug on AirPort base stations, and SSL-based security updates for Apple TVs and Macs.
You should probably go and update all of them as soon as possible.
Apple has aired a new ad for the iPhone 5s titled “Powerful.” It’s the first TV spot dedicated solely to the 5s since “Metal Mastered” last fall.
This new ad showcases the iPhone helping with creative tasks live music. The song is “Gigantic” by the Pixies, a hit song from the 90s.
Under the watchful eye of Tim Cook Apple’s gone from the most powerful tech company in the world to the most green. Yesterday’s new ad shone the spotlight on Apple’s environmental practices but the true celebrations of going green kicked off today for Earth Day.
Select Apple Stores around the world sprouted green leafed logos to go with new Earth Day shirts and lanyards for Specialists and Geniuses, but rather than driving all the way to your local store we’ve gathered shots of Apple Stores near and far celebrating Apple’s pledge to leave the world better than they found it.
Take a look:
If pangs of jealousy hit you every time developers start waxing poetic about new OS X goodies found in a new beta update, your time has finally come to join in on the fun.
Starting this afternoon Apple has opened up its OS X Mavericks beta testing program to let everyone – not just those slick coding developers – download the latest OS X beta seeds.
Some folks find that the iPhone’s noise-cancellation feature causes a weird, uncomfortable sensation. It’s a product of the way the technology works, as Apple Discussion member KiltedTim says, linking to HowStuffWorks:
“In order to cancel out background noise, the sound is not “eliminated” from the audio stream you’re hearing. It is countered by a second audio stream that basically eliminates your ability to hear it.
Since the sound and the “counter sound” are still hitting your eardrum, this can result in an odd sensation. Your ear is processing the sound, but your brain isn’t registering it. Since the inner ear controls balance, this will produce a dizzying effect in some people.”
If this is bothering you, here’s how to turn off the noise-cancellation feature, which Apple added to iOS 7. (Originally exclusive to the iPhone 5s, noise cancellation is now available to older devices in iOS 7.1.)
Summer’s (nearly) here! And that means we are forced outside to use our devices in places that remain inhospitable to our iPhones and iPads.
The Incipio Atlas ID is a slimline waterproof iPhone case that lets you keep using the iPhone 5s’ Touch ID scanner, even while it’s in the case.