What do you get when you combine flying cities, re-fictionalized American history, an arsenal of weaponry, genetic engineering and quantum mechanics? One of the best games of 2013, that’s what.
If you haven’t played it by now, you owe it to yourself and your laptop to get BioShock: Infinite. It’s the perfect gift for yourself this holiday season – and you can get it right now from Cult of Mac Deals without putting a huge dent in your pocketbook, either. That’s because BioShock: Infinite is available for only $9.99 – a savings of 75% – during this special holiday promotion.
Look, gaming is a big thing, right? You can’t swing a dead cat in an ugly holiday sweater without hitting someone who’s busily involved in some kind of gaming screen these days, and iOS has the clear advantage with the hundreds of thousands of games on offer, all of which are fairly inexpensive or free to play.
We’ve taken some of the effort out of finding the best games of the past year, with this mega-list of over 20 iOS games (in no particular order) that you really should check out right away. Except where noted, all these games will work on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad. Because, really, there’s no excuse for not making a game work universally these days.
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Soon, a doctor could prescribe you an app. Photo: Flickr/Jason A. Howie
Your iPhone isn’t capable of the instant diagnosis and treatment of illnesses yet, but in time it may rival the Tricorder of Star Trek fame.
Whether you’ve made a New Year’s resolution to lose weight, to keep better track of your kids’ immunization schedule, or to provide more help to your aging parents, there’s a florid universe of apps in 2014 to help you to do it all.
Last year, more and more people used devices such as Jawbone UP, Nike Fuel or the FitBit Flex to track their health, fitness and dietary habits. But in 2014 and beyond, mobile health apps are going to expand well beyond that to become, as David Albert, CEO and Founder of San Francisco startup AliveCor puts it: “physician-guided self-management,” systems.
Soon, the worried — well quantified-self fans — and the rest of us are increasingly going to be able to collect more kinds of information about ourselves on our mobile devices. Once those daily habits and vitals are tracked, algorithms will be able to make recommendations on actions to take, or they will whisk that data straight back to the doctor for a more informed discussion during a later visit.
Already, smartphone owners in the United States and the United Kingdom can produce their own electrocardiograms with AliveCor and send them off for instant analysis. In the coming year, some doctors will be prescribing Type 2 diabetes patients a digital health product that incorporates an app called BlueStar from Baltimore, MD startup WellDoc to manage their conditions. Both products have been examined and cleared for the U.S. market by the Food and Drug Administration. They’ve also been through extensive use and testing in clinical trials.
“We see AliveCor [eventually] becoming your personal healthcare portal,” beyond ECGs, Albert said in an interview. “You’ll use it to analyze yourself, and to communicate with the doctor, and your healthcare providers will use it to provide you with feedback, guidance and coaching.”
The general hope is that digital technology, wireless sensors and cloud storage can make healthcare management more efficient, reduce costs and shift much of the balance of managing individuals’ health back to the individual from the doctor’s office.
While anyone can buy AliveCor’s sensors, access to WellDoc’s BlueStar Type 2 diabetes management product will only be available with a prescription. A half-hour in-person product installation and training session accompanies the prescription. Once installed, the BlueStar software uses the information that’s entered into the system to make personalized recommendations on how users should regulate their blood sugar levels.
A randomized controlled trial of the WellDoc Bluestar system published in the American Diabetes Association’s journal in 2011 showed that there was a significant two-point reduction in users’ three-month average glucose levels, said Chris Bergstrom, Welldoc’s chief strategy and commercial officer in an interview. That means that the chances of those users’ diabetes getting worse are also significantly reduced.
WellDoc’s BlueStar algorithms will coach people with Type 2 Diabetes on how to better manage their conditions.
The hope from the medical community is that individuals will use apps not only to keep fit, but to better manage their chronic conditions so that they don’t progress to the next stage.
It’s a significant goal both here in the U. S. and globally. The World Health Organization estimates that two thirds of the 55 million people who died in 2011 suffered either from some form of cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes or a chronic lung disease.
In the U.S. alone, almost 24 million people suffer from diabetes and someone has a heart attack every 34 seconds.
For more people than ever before, there’s an increased financial incentive to live healthily: A new Obama administration rule that became effective at the beginning of the year allows employers to either reward employees for meeting certain health-related goals, or to penalize them.
The incentives are designed to get people to stop smoking, exercise more, lose weight and maintain certain levels of cholesterol, blood pressure and a healthy body mass index. According to the Pew Research Center, a quarter of adult Americans have high blood pressure, 13 percent have some sort of chronic lung condition such as asthma, bronchitis or emphysema, and 11 percent have diabetes. Employers can now start offering their employees up to a 30 percent discount on their healthcare premiums if they participate in specific programs to help them to achieve their health goals.
Two other reasons that we’re likely to see more and more mobile healthcare apps: The Obama administration has been incentivizing healthcare systems to digitize their patient records in order to make doctor-patient interactions between office visits easier, and to encourage patients to manage their own health between visits, says Priyanka Agarwal, an assistant clinical professor of medicine at the University of California School of Medicine in San Francisco.
And the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, also encourages the formation of “Accountable Care Organizations,” which will flip the financial incentive system to compensate doctors for keeping their patients healthy, rather than rewarding them for treating patients when they’re in a health crisis.
Nevertheless, the potential of the app universe has so far been stymied by the legacy healthcare systems, says Michael Wasser, an independent software developer and co-creator of HealthSherpa, the indie web site that helps people comparison-shop for insurance plans offered through the federal healthcare insurance exchange.
That means that it’s hard for third-party developers to build apps that can help family members to easily access and manage information relating to either their kids or elderly parents.
“The problem with these types of apps is that they frequently require health records to be useful (which most electronic medical record systems wall off),” he said. “In my opinion, this lack of information availability is why Google Health was shutdown and why Microsoft HealthVault hasn’t been very successful. I personally believe there’s a category of app could exist that we currently see very little to none of at the moment.”
A survey of the more than 40,000 healthcare-related apps in the U.S. iTunes store conducted last Fall by the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics in Parsippany, New Jersey, found that most apps fall in the diet, exercise and wellness category.
Agarwal, for her part, says that we’ll see more usage of healthcare apps once more of them have been clinically tested, like drugs, so that more doctors can start recommending them.
The IMS report also notes there are legal liability issues that need to be sorted out, in addition to other questions relating to privacy and security.
Below are some apps rated highly for their functionality and popularity by IMS, and other doctor-recommended apps (listed on HealthTap:)
DIET/FITNESS
Calorie Counter and Diet Tracker by MyFitnessPal HD Cost: Free. This is probably the most popular diet and exercise logging app that comes with a huge database of three million different kinds of foods (including ethnic foods like dim sum dishes.) Unlike other apps, if what you’re eating is not in there, it allows you to add it. Once you’ve created a fitness profile and goal, the app establishes a daily food and exercise budget for you. Users can track their food and water intake, log their exercise routine, connect with friends, and track their progress.
The advantage of this app is that everything is in one place: it also syncs up to the Jawbone UP system. The problem with using a lot of different exercise and dieting apps is that you have to re-enter the same information over and over again.
Quit It 3.0: If you’re still smoking but want to quit, this is a $0.99 cent motivational program that constantly reminds you of how much money you saved, and how much your lungs benefited from not inhaling all those chemicals.
BodyWeight Training Cost: $2.99. This app provides its users with more than 200 video demonstrations of exercises that can be completed at home. The 10-week fitness program of half-hour workouts is based on the book You Are Your Own Gym by the military trainer Mark Lauren. A lot of doctors on Healthtap recommended this app.
GENERAL INFORMATION
HealthTap This is a free app that lets you pose health questions to a network of 50,000 doctors licensed to practice medicine in the U. S. The Palo-Alto-based company received a second round of venture funding this spring from the high profile venture companies Khosla Ventures, the Mayfield Fund and Mohr Davidow Ventures.
Users can pose short questions to the network on an anonymous basis. You can pay to speed up the response time by sending a “charitable donation” of $0.99 cents. But before that happens, you are shown a list of other previously-asked questions and answers that may answer your own.
You can also use the app as your personal health record in that there’s a profile to fill out that lists your contact and insurance information, your medications, your allergies, the medical procedures you’ve had, your immunizations, and so forth.
The app also helps users find doctors, look up symptoms, and find out about health conditions (what does it mean to be obese, technically, anyway?) It even features other doctor-recommended apps.
iTriage Cost: Free. This app lets you look up symptoms by tapping on a naked avatar corresponding to your gender. I found this app to be overwhelming and clunky. For example, tapping on the lower back pulled up a menu of everything from “Backache or pain” to “Urinary retention.” Tapping on “Backache or pain,” gave me a massive list of potential ills that ranged from lumbago to a bladder infection to cancer. Tapping on low back pain (lumbago) provided me with a description of the problem, symptoms, potential tests and treatment. The experience was the equivalent of trying to figure out what the problem is myself by opening a medical encyclopedia. In other words, not very helpful.
PRESCRIPTIONS
Goodrx Cost: Free. Goodrx helps you to comparison shop for your drugs through a mobile app. It provides coupons and discounts on those drugs. As the company says, it’s like an “Orbitz” for prescription drugs. Some of the prices listed for some of the drugs I use were lower than my current co-pay with insurance.
Dosecast Cost: Free. If you’re taking a lot of different medications, this simple, elegant app is a neat way of scheduling your doses, keeping track of when you need a refill, and recording the prescription numbers all in one spot.
SYMPTOM CHECKER
Kids Doc Cost: $1.99. Anyone with a small child can relate to the experience of panicking and not knowing what to do when your child falls off the end of the bed and crashes loudly onto the floor, or when they suddenly develop a rash or a fever. The American Academy of Pediatrics developed an iPhone app called KidsDoc, where you can look up symptoms and then decide what to do based on a matrix of possible listed actions. It also provides dosage tables for common over-the-counter medications and first aid “topics” and illustrations. This would have saved me hours on the phone with nurses over the past four years.
Both of these apps enable you to keep detailed logs of your baby feeding schedules, naps, and diaper changes. They also enable you to chart your child’s growth.
MANAGING KIDS’ DOCTORS SCHEDULES
Baby Health Record. Cost: $3.99 I balk at keeping a social security number in an app, but keeping the rest of my daughter’s information in one portable location instead of a paper file in my study appeals to me. This app is a file of all of her basic information, including her blood type, vaccinations, growth history, doctor and dentist appointments and medical history. Obviously, if you decide to use these and other health-related apps, it’s crucial to password-protect your device.
OTHER
One other interesting app that’s worth mentioning that wasn’t listed by either the IMS Institute or HealthTap: HomeTouch. It’s a system developed in the United Kingdom by a British dementia specialist that uses tablets to help the elderly and their family to stay on top of the parents’ care remotely.
With all the horror stories of in-home nurses and nursing homes abusing or neglecting the elderly, this is an idea that’s definitely worth further exploration anywhere in the world.
Apple is by far the most secretive company in tech, so predicting its next move or the specifics of its next big thing is incredibly difficult. No one in Cupertino will leak this kind of information, so analysts and investors are forced to look a little further afield for scraps.
They usually turn to Apple’s supply chain — the people who are in some way involved with the production of its upcoming products. Sometimes this yields successful results, but other times, it results in some pretty crazy rumors.
Like every other year, there have been many memorable ones throughout 2013, so we thought it might be fun to look back at some of them. Here’s our roundup of the craziest Apple rumors from the last 12 months.
Remember all those stories that accompanied the iPad’s launch about how the device was so straightforward that a person with no previous computer experience could use one? Well, it turns out that they’re so easy that cats can use them too.
A new endeavor from the UK’s Cats Protection charity has seen pictures “painted” by felines, using the Paint For Cats iPad app, sold off to raise money.
Tim Cook, Phil Schiller and others sold Apple stock at a time when it was hitting record highs.
The Rockstar Consortium — a group of several tech companies, including Apple — has reportedly been in talks concerning the sale of a portion of its $4.5 billion worth of patents.
This marks a major turnaround from 2011, when the patents — acquired from the Nortel Networks Corp — were highly sought after. In that instance, Apple and its bidding partners outbid Google for access to more than 4,000 patents.
I was all ready to write a sarcastic post about the Splitter, a little box that allows independent volume control of the two pairs of headphones you jack into it. After all, sharing a music track is something spontaneous – adding a specialist piece of hardware into the mix seems a little like quickly clipping your FitBit to your pubes before making love.
If you thought that “Think Different” was the last time Apple was going to come under fire from the grammar police, think again!
Finland’s linguistic authorities, the Institute for the Languages of Finland — which rules on correct spellings, loan words and usages as the Finnish, Swedish, Romani and Sami languages develop — has decreed that the correct Finnish usage of iPhone is not iPhone, but rather Iphone or I-phone.
Samsung may have been ordered to pay Apple $290 million in patent infringement damages, but one thing the tech company hasn’t managed to steal is Apple’s knack for good advertizing.
In a holiday season in which Apple has released its effective and genuinely tear-jerking “Misunderstood” iPhone ad, the best Samsung can manage is a Galaxy Gear smart watch commercial that would have looked cheesy in 1982 — which is where we presume the creative team behind this campaign must have been summoned from.
As nerds, one of our Christmas holiday duties is to fix the computers of family and friends. And if the past is anything to go by, fixing Macs can mean opening them up for kitchen-table-top surgery. Hell, there’s even something to be done about common iPhone problems, too: switching out a smashed glass back on an iPhone 4/S, for example.
But a real doctor doesn’t go to work without a proper set of tools. I’ve stripped enough screw heads with cheap screwdrivers to know this. What you need is VisionTek’s new “12 Piece Toolkit 900671.”
DeGeo is an app that removes the location data from your photos before sharing them, while leaving non-location metadata intact. As someone who switches off the location option in Instagram whenever I’m at my home or a friend’s home, I’m totally into this $1 data stripper.
Have you ever responded to an e-mail from your boss with some angry knee-jerk reply, then you’ve accidentally sent it, only to regret it later as you sweep the contents of your desk into a cardboard filing box? Me too, but as Leander never reads any of his e-mail, I — unlike you — still have a job.
Let.ter is a brand new app which will help you stay employed next time. It’s a beautifully simple Markdown-based app with one purpose: composing e-mails away from your main e-mail app.
Call it a stocking filler if you want, but Digitimes has one last (?) rumor to take us out of 2013: that Apple is planning to release a 12.9-inch tablet in October 2014, aimed at the North American educational market.
The rumors allegedly come from “sources from the upstream supply chain”.
One of the best things about Instapaper now being owned by Betaworks is that the developers spend their time adding new features and services instead of complaining about things on their personal blogs.
And today that ethic has paid off, bringing us Instapaper Daily, a new site which shows the most popular story in Instapaper today. And of course, because Instapaper is all about reading later, you can browse back to any day in the past and see the headline story form that day, too.
Apple has just posted its iOS 7 Tech Talks videos online for streaming by information-hungry developers. The videos show the full sessions of the roving, mini-WWDC sessions that have been taking place throughout the world since October.
It’s still very early in the life of the new Mac Pro (shipping dates have already slipped to February), but the first review unit reports are starting to seep out — and they’re positive.
Tim Cook has talked about this being an “iPad Christmas”, but plain calling it an Apple Christmas might be altogether more accurate — as Apple surged to a 2013 new stock high following news of the recent China Mobile deal.
Apple stock gained 3.8 percent to end Monday trading at $570.09, reflecting what Creative Technologies analyst Tim Bajarin has called, “a huge deal for Apple.”
Although it hit several year highs over the past several months, Apple stock prices had been depressed for some of 2013 as investors appeared concerned regarding a supposed lack of innovation from the company.
More recently, share prices had wavered as nervous shareholders fretted that the long-reported China Mobile deal wasn’t happening as fast as they hoped.
Although analysts are still arguing over the long-term impact the China Mobile deal is likely to have, this strong year finish nonetheless bodes well for Apple in 2014.
Twitter, Facebook, and Google shares also finished strong after the day’s trading.
Don’t Starve’s intuitive nature from beginning to end makes it a highly addictive and enjoyable game to play, and almost perfectly teeters the edge of becoming a major time drain…without going quite that far. The combination of that well balanced gameplay and it’s super cool overall design makes it one of the best of the year.
I love games like Canabalt, even though a world of tricky endless runners flowed from that simple endless platformer’s success. Last Bunny takes the Canabalt style and introduces tilt controls along with jumping to give you more control over the fearless rabbit bounding over buildings.
Last Bunny by Ultrapped Category: iOS Games Works With: iPhone Price: Free
You play as, well, the last adorable bunny in a world overrun by those grumpy stone blocks from Super Mario Bros. games and missiles. You jump from building to building trying to avoid bombs and pitfalls. Unlike Canabalt, you have control over the speed at which the bunny runs. By tilting your phone to the right or left, you can increase or decrease his movement to make jumping more precise. This is very helpful when blocks fall just outside the rabbit’s jump distance which will ultimately lead you to running into them unless you’re moving at a slower speed.
If you’ve been looking for the ultimate file compression tool, then this offer is for you. Stuffit Deluxe includes Stuffit Archive Manager, Stuffit Scheduler, Stuffit Expander, and StuffIt Destinations™, giving you everything you need to compress and send files.
Ever been surfing the web and find a nice bit of text you want to save? You can highlight the text with your cursor, copy, and paste into an app like Text Edit or Notes, sure, but maybe you just want a quick and easy way to put the bit of text aside to use later.
There’s no need to bother with opening an app and pasting in the text in OS X. Text clipping has been around for quite a while, but it’s a feature that we rarely use, for one reason or another.
Apple’s only Berlin store — — located on the city’s lengthy Kurfuerstendamm shopping avenue — has been broken into, with thieves crashing a stolen Opel Corsa through the attractively minimalist (but sadly overly vulnerable) plate glass entrance way this morning, and making off with MacBooks, iPads and iPhones.
