There are a bunch of apps out on iOS for kids, from educational apps to sports apps and more. Sure, you can get reviews of these games by adults, sometimes even from parents of kids who use them.
We thought it’d be fun, though, to ask the kids themselves.
Welcome to Kid APProved, a series of videos in which we ask our own children what they think of apps on the App Store that they’re using.
This week, it’s a game about an acrobatic hedgehog, Wide Sky from Marcus Eckert. Here’s what our Kid APProved reporter Nadine thinks.
Sometimes the name of an app is a woeful understatement.
Cake Ideas doesn’t contain “ideas” so much as the most complicated baking projects I’ve ever seen. Some of the recipes contained within include lists of things you must pick up at a hardware store because the cakes in question are so badass that they have freaking skeletons. It won’t show you how to make all of them — instructions for the one shaped like a wedding gown would probably melt your phone — but if you’re planning a wedding or just like looking at fancy cakes, prepare to be impressed.
The universe has a problem: It has all these planets lying around with no life on them. So obviously, the solution is some kind of forced cosmic osmosis to spread vitality throughout the void.
Abductor Pro by Delicious Toys Category: iOS Games Works With: iPhone, iPad Price: $2.99
That’s the premise of Abductor Pro, anyway. It’s a new iOS title that puts players in the space boots of Antaris, a green alien tasked with grabbing humans from Earth for transplantation to other, less human-y planets. But the planets are picky, and possibly racist*, and they’re very particular about who gets to live on them.
Your job as Antaris is to make sure the right people get to the right place.
Upgraded to the iPhone 5S or 5C but still have a speaker dock with a 30-pin connector? The folks at Auris feel your pain. That’s why they’ve designed a way for you to enjoy your music without ever worrying about dock compatibility again.
The Auris freeDa is a small Bluetooth® receiver that connects to any speaker system via 30-pin connection (old-gen Apple devices) or auxiliary input – providing an elegant, compact way to wirelessly play and control your music from any Bluetooth-enabled device. And Cult of Mac Deals has it for only $44.99 during this limited time offer.
When you launch Safari these days, you’ll get the Top Sites page, showing all the sites you visit most frequently in Safari. If you’ve disabled this default view, you can get to it with a quick Option-Command-1 in Safari.
Did you know, however, that you can rearrange these Top Sites more to your liking? You can even delete sites you don’t want appearing there, as well.
Steve Jobs introduces the smartphone that changed smartphones. Photo: Apple
Here’s an idea: take one subject like tech with a massive built-in fanbase, and another — like Broadway musicals — with a similarly rabid audience.
Put them together and what do you get? Well, the hope is obviously for a hit, but right now the specific answer is “Nerds” — a new musical from the Philadelphia Theatre Company, telling the oft-repeated story of Bill Gates vs. Steve Jobs.
Yesterday, AT&T announced new Mobile Share Value plans that were pitched as making subscriber’s monthly rates cheaper if you already own a smartphone.
It seemed like a pretty honest move. Most carriers bill you a set monthly that includes a fee designed to pay off your smartphone’s full prive over a two year period, which is common knowledge. What isn’t common knowledge is that on most carriers, even if you bring your own smartphone to your contract or fully pay off your device, the carrier will continue to bill you for that smartphone subsidy in perpetuity. It’s super sleazy, so AT&T’s move seemed like a refreshing dose of honesty.
Apple has filed a patent for a “smart dock” which greatly extends the range and capabilities of Siri to give it a far bigger role in your home life.
Entitled “Smart Dock for Activating a Voice Recognition Mode of a Portable Electronic Device” the patent was filed in May last year, but only published now.
Right now, Apple has over $156 billion in its war chest, prompting investors like Carl Icahn to pretty much riot to try to get at some or all of it.
Compared to $156 billion, $16 million is a drop in the ocean of Apple’s money, an amount so small that Tim Cook wouldn’t think twice to even sign the check. But when it comes to Samsung, Apple’s intellectual property arch rival, Cupertino wants to wring out every drop of money it can.
Many of the stats we have about iOS marketshare and demographics come from third-party companies, most of whom are tracking ad impressions within their network. As such, their stats have the potential of being inaccurate, and need to be taken with at least a little bit of salt.
Looks like online ad network Chitika can be trusted though. Earlier this week, we reported that Chitika was now tracking 74.1% of all devices as running iOS 7. Now, Apple is backing those numbers up, and it makes Google look pathetic.
Good news, my friends! If you want to get someone in your life an iPhone 5s in time for Christmas, or just splurge on a new iPhone yourself, good news: in the United States, Canada, and several other countries, you can now get an iPhone 5s shipped to you in just 1-3 business days. Even in gold!
Ah, to be ten years old again — and arrested for stealing £400,000 ($654,000) worth of Apple products.
That is the news coming out of Coventry, in the UK, where a dawn raid saw police arrest a boy and a 37-year-old man for their part in a series of commercial and domestic burglaries.
The Rumor: Retina iMacs really are on the way soon, according to some info in Apple's new Xcode 6 program.
The Verdict: Looks promising. WWDC came and went without a single hardware announcement, meaning Apple has gone over 8 months without a significant new product. Based on code found in the Yosemite beta, it looks like we won't have to wait much longer for sharper iMacs to land on our desks, thanks to a file that lists scaled-up resolutions for such a display. The structure of the list is identical to resolution listings for the Retina MacBook Pro, making this rumor feel more like a sure-thing now.
A new report from analysts Park Associates has placed Apple at the top of the list for most desirable brand in the desktop computer category.
Apple has previously topped the survey for most desired brand in tablets, smartphones, MP3 players, and streaming devices — but this adds one more platform to the list.
While Spotify can be used without a paid subscription on your desktop, you need to sign up to Spotify Premium at $9.99 a month to enjoy it on mobile. But that could be about to change, with The Wall Street Journal reporting that Spotify is planning a new ad-supported version of its music streaming service for mobile devices.
Apple will begin using iBeacon technology in 254 of its U.S. stores from Friday.
Apple demonstrated the tech this week at its 24-hour Fifth Avenue store in New York City, where the company has installed around 20 iBeacon transmitters.
As ever with many of Quirky’s excellent crowd-sourced designs, the Prop Power Pro inspires me to make my own. I’m pretty sure a regular extension cable plus a bendy wire coat-hanger plus a length of flexible tubing would do the trick. The thing is, by the time I’d bought all the parts (plus a roll of gaffer tape), I’d be in the hole for way more than the $25 Quirky want for its version.
In the market for a new Lightning cable for on-the-go charging purposes? Then consider the awkwardly-named “8-pin Lightning Data Sync (iTune) Blocker” from USB Fever. Not only is is like about a third of the price of Apple’s own cable, but it comes with a switch on the wire that’ll let you plug your iDevice into any charging hole without worrying that it’s going to suck out your data of pump it full of filthy malware.
The Mesh Card is a wallet so small and slim that it’ll fit inside a single card pocket in your own fat wallet. And it’s not just a place to keep cards and cash: it doubles as a neat iPhone stand, and even as a bottle opener.
Mr. Reader, the best RSS news reader app for the iPad, is now fully iOS 7-ready, letting me (finally!) get the last non iOS 7 app out of my dock. As you’d expect, it now looks great, and adds a few neat new features.
Apparently, Americans like to pull up stakes and move to greener pastures more often than almost anyone else — which would explain the swirl of activity at the umpteen websites that help renters find an apartment. As one of the umpteen, RadPad is a relative newcomer to the group that stands out because of its user-friendliness.
RadPad is sort of the graphic novel of the apartment-hunting site breed: It emphasizes big, pretty pictures over a dull jumble of text. RadPad says their staff tries to ensure all listings have at least three up-to-date images by actually calling the author of each listing as they’re posted to verify.
There are really only two obvious solutions for backpackers to keep electronics charged out in the boonies.
There’s the more conventional route of using a solar-powered battery, like the Joos Orange, or Solio’s line of chargers. Or there’s the less common alternative of using one of an increasing number of stoves that can charge gadgets while heating dinner or water for coffee.
The upcoming newest member of the latter group, the PowerPot X (that “X” is a 10, btw), can even charge an iPad.
Spicy Horse Games (Akaneiro), the studio spearheaded by American McGee (American McGee’s Alice), and DeNA (owner of mobile games studios Mobage and ngmoco;), announced today that iOS game The Gate is now ready in the App Store for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.
Originally titled Hell Invaders, The Gate is an innovative mashup of a game that brings a digital collectible card game together with the fun of a real-time strategy (RTS) game into one beautiful package.
I don’t get around much anymore. After moving back to San Francisco from Milan a couple of years ago, most of my jaunts are to and from the Cult of Mac offices in the Mission, which is exactly 3.8 miles from my house. I know the precise distance thanks to Google Maps, which I consult in oracle-like fashion on my computer (and iPhone) since it tends to accurately predict how much misery the trip will involve at any particular time.
At first, determined to take public transportation, I downloaded NextBus, the transit app tasked with telling riders when, you know, the next bus will trundle along to the corner stop. It worked well, until it didn’t (NextBus: 13 minutes. 10 minutes later, it’s 19 minutes. Then it’s 13 minutes again) and the capriciousness of it pushed me into buying a secondhand Vespa. Now I simply calculate whether it’s worth slaloming in traffic or sliding down the less-trafficked hills to get to work.
Starved for adventure, when the chance came to go to Hong Kong, I loaded up my iPhone with paid guidebooks, magazines, maps and a dictionary or two. (When I first hit the States, my phone was a Nokia whose sole killer application – and it was pretty great – were those pre-loaded maps.) I even went a little app-happy, causing my Visa card to trip the “possible fraud” alert due to iTunes purchases.
What did I actually use on the trip? None of the stuff I paid for. Evernote (free version) held all the tips from people about navigating the fragrant harbor — including the address for Shoeman Lau, where I got some beautiful kicks — and every single branch of Din Tai Fung for a daily dumpling fix.
The free, English version of the Metro app is geared towards tourists and proved key for trip planning, maps and general sightseeing. Google Maps helped locate places for restoration during the most strenuous shopping trips. Hootsuite (also the free version) let me communicate with my travel partners when we got separated through direct messages over Twitter. And the free restyled version of the Associated Press app was about all I had time for in terms of reading material.
If you’re like me, you hate buying stuff that you don’t use — and can’t even pass along to someone who might be interested in a Cantonese-English dictionary thanks to those DRM shackles.
In view of the upcoming holidays — and maybe a beach or ski vacation to recover from all that enforced family time? — we sounded out dozens of people who travel extensively for a living to find out what they cannot live with out on their iPhones as they navigate domestic and international trips.
It’s not a folding case like Twelve South’s iconic BookBook, but rather a sleeve that your iPhone slips into that has a large hole in its front for your display, and a little pocket in its back for your credit cards.
It’s an ideal alternative for those who like to keep things simple and don’t want to have to deal with flappy front covers when using their smartphone. It makes everything easy to get to, and it doesn’t cover up any buttons, ports, or speakers.
The Wall St fits both iPhone 5 and iPhone 5s (there’s another version for iPhone 5c, too), and it’s available in a number of pretty colors, including brown, blue, orange, and red. It costs $34.95, so let’s find out whether it’s worth it.
