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 Halloween-themed Costume Quest from Double Fine Productions. Here’s what our Kid APProved reporter thinks.
There are a ton of apps out there, both free and paid, that may or may not be worth your time and money.
Why waste either one? With over 600,000 apps to choose from, finding the most interesting and worthwhile apps is, at best, a tricky activity and, at worst, a fool’s errand.
Might as well let us find the cool ones for you.
Here are a few of the favorites to come across our home screens this week — including a running app, PumaTrac, photography apps Spark Camera and Perfect Shot and more.
Check ’em out:
PumaTrac – Health & Fitness – Free
For a change of pace from bloated running apps, try PumaTrac. It’s made just for runners, and it will track distance, pace, and calories burned over time. It also keeps a log of outside conditions like weather, day of the week, and location as well as music choices and social media activity to help you figure out how these things affect your running performance. Share your routes with your running buddies, as well, or just find routes other locals are using to keep your routine fresh. Oh, and it supports the Pebble watch, too.
If you’ve played with Vine, you’ll get Spark Camera right away. Here you get a 30-second limit for your mini video masterpiece. Adding a soundtrack via your iTunes library is also super easy and so is sharing with your friends across social media like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, as well as via email and SMS. Just press and hold anywhere to record 720 p HD video then release to stop recording. Flip through a variety of live filter effects and then tap the note symbol to choose music.
Listastic is a great little collaborative to-do list app with an intuitive interface that’s easy on the eyes. It’s simple to use, too, so you can share a grocery list with a roommate or life partner, a gift list with friends and family, or plan a project at work with a group of co-workers. You can become a Listastic premium member for a small fee, which lets you share any list with other Listastic members, free or paid. Free members can use Listastic on their own device, or join and edit shared lists from premium members. New users get a free two-week trial of Premium service, as well.
Aside from the unfortunate spelling of the name, WherezMyStuff is pretty handy. I have a habit of putting things away safely only to discover, many months later, that my perfect hiding place is unknown to even me. WherezMyStuff is a mini-inventory to prevent this common mind melt. You simply name the item, type in (or record via the mic) where you’re putting it, and snap a picture. When you want to find your stuff again, tap the name or search and voila’ your treasures are found.
Ever taken a picture of a large group of people? It’s a huge a pain to get them all to smile at the same time, let alone refrain from blinking. Perfect Shot aims to make sure everyone in your group photo is smiling and their eyes are open with its face-detection technology. Aim your iPhone at the happy group and Perfect Shot will detect every face in the group choose the right moment and take the perfect picture–you don’t even have to press a button. Automagical, indeed.
Chart Source: EFF.org Note: Companies are listed in alphabetical order.
When we share our innermost thoughts on a blog, send pictures of loved ones through Facebook, or even divulge the unhealthy foods we ate for dinner from our iPhone, we trust the companies that run those services with our data. Companies like Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Companies like Dropbox, AT&T, Foursquare, and Linked In.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), initially funded by three big donors in 1990 including Apple’s own Steve Wozniak, published its third yearly report on the best and worst of these companies.
The results may surprise you: Apple has one of the worst scores on the chart.
The Cupertino company gets only one star – on par with internet behemoth Yahoo and telcom giant AT&T – and that was awarded for fighting for privacy rights in congress. (It’s worth noting that Yahoo’s one star gets an extra sparkly patina due to the company’s “silent battle for user privacy” in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court).
The report examined the public policies of major internet companies, including service providers, cloud storage companies, blogging platforms, social networking sites, and the like, to figure out whether they were committed to backing us up when our own government wants access to our data. The point of the report is to motivate companies to be more transparent, and do better.
EFF’s scorecard was released in the spring, before NSA and PRISM were in the spotlight, but the criteria were prescient.
Companies were rated by whether they:
Require a warrant for content of communications.
Tell users about government data requests.
Publish transparency reports.
Publish law enforcement guidelines.
Fight for users’ privacy rights in courts.
Fight for users’ privacy in Congress.
Apple earned its lone star for joining the Digital Due Process Coalition. However it does not require a warrant, tell users about government data requests, publish transparent reports or law enforcement guidelines, nor does it fight for users’ privacy rights in court.
Compare this to a company like Twitter, which does all of these things. The microblogging service scores favorably across all the EFF categories, as does internet provider Sonic.net.
Google rates a five out of six, falling short a star for not telling users about government access requests; Dropbox ranks the same, demoted a star for not fighting for users’ privacy rights in court.
Overall, it’s great to know how private our communications are. (Or not, as the case may be.) Reports like this one are a step towards transparency and understanding of our own ability to interact privately, at least within the realm of the law. If a company we trust is cavalier about our own data, perhaps we should contact them and ask them why they aren’t scoring so well. Maybe the companies will make some changes in policy, or maybe they’ll lose some customers when they don’t.
Either way, if privacy is important to you, you can see above exactly how important it isn’t, and the companies it isn’t important to.
The new mobile Safari app built in to iOS 7 has a whole new multi-windowed interface, which allows for a near limitless number of windows that you can open at once. Simply hit the icon in the far right-hand bottom corner to bring up the “tabs” interface, and then tap the big central Plus button to add a new page to the list.
But what about closing those windows? They’ve got an X icon in the upper left of each tab/window, but the X is super tiny, and not always easy to tap. Sometimes I end up activating a window instead of closing it. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
Rather than slogging through a lake of reviews to find something you’re just going to put down after 30 minutes, Cult of Mac has compiled this list of the best new movies, albums and books to come out this week.
Enjoy!
Best New Albums
Cults – Static
A lot has changed with Cults since the New York-based boyfriend-girlfriend duo released their highly-acclaimed debut album in 2011. For one thing, they decided to break-up after dating for four years and as a result their new album centers around their sadly dissolved relationship.
Produced with Shane Stoneback and Ben Allen the subject matter of Static is a bummer, but Cults has been able to effectively recreate the alluring low-fi retro sounds that made the their first record so enjoyable. Bottomline: it’s a solid breakup album that sounds surprisingly happy.
Pusha’s album really came out a week ago so this isn’t a new new album, but My Name Is My Name is one of the best albums I’ve heard in months.
Pusha T may not be a household name, but you’ve probably heard him rapping on tracks for Justin Timberlake, Kanye West, 2Chainz and more. This is Pusha T’s debut solo album after splitting from No Malice as the rapping duo Clipse. Push’s unique storytelling weaves with some of the best modern production and features tons of guest appearances from the likes of Kendrick Lamar, Big Sean, Chris Brown, Rick Ross and Kelly Rowland.
If you’re looking for a great new rap album that’s not by a dude named Drake, try My Name Is My Name.
Pearl Jam is here to let you know that they’re still kicking out the jams like it’s 1992. Lightning Bolt is the 10th studio album from the Seattle rockers and its pretty much everything you’ve come to expect form the band with heavy doses of reverb, ballards, distortion and thrashing.
“The Circle” is the latest from Dave Eggers, best-selling author of “A Hologram for the King,” a finalist for the National Book Award.
The plot involves Mae Holland, who is hired to work for the world’s most powerful internet company called the Circle. Run out of a sprawling California campus, the company links users’ personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency. As Mae tours the open-plan office spaces, the towering glass dining facilities, the cozy dorms for those who spend nights at work, she is thrilled with the company’s whirlwind of activity. There are parties til dawn, famous musicians playing on the lawn, athletic activities and clubs and brunches and even an aquarium of rare fish. What begins as the captivating story of one woman’s ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge.
“I Am Malala”is the remarkable tale of a family uprooted by global terrorism, of the fight for girls’ education, of a father who, himself a school owner, championed and encouraged his daughter to write and attend school, and of brave parents who have a fierce love for their daughter in a society that prizes sons.
When the Taliban took control of the Swat Valley in Pakistan, one girl spoke out. Malala Yousafzai refused to be silenced and fought for her right to an education.
On Tuesday, October 9, 2012, when she was fifteen, she almost paid the ultimate price. She was shot in the head at point-blank range while riding the bus home from school, and few expected her to survive.
Instead, Malala’s miraculous recovery has taken her on an extraordinary journey from a remote valley in northern Pakistan to the halls of the United Nations in New York. At sixteen, she has become a global symbol of peaceful protest and the youngest nominee ever for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Don Tillman is a brilliant yet socially challenged genetics professor , who has decided it’s time to marry. And so, in the orderly, evidence-based manner with which Don approaches all things, he designs the Wife Project to find his perfect partner: a sixteen-page, scientifically valid survey to filter out the drinkers, the smokers, the late arrivers.
Rosie Jarman is all these things. She also is strangely beguiling, fiery, and intelligent. And while Don quickly disqualifies her as a candidate for the Wife Project, as a DNA expert Don is particularly suited to help Rosie on her own quest: identifying her biological father. When an unlikely relationship develops as they collaborate on the Father Project, Don is forced to confront the spontaneous whirlwind that is Rosie—and the realization that, despite your best scientific efforts, you don’t find love, it finds you.
Arrestingly endearing and entirely unconventional, Graeme Simsion’s distinctive debut will resonate with anyone who has ever tenaciously gone after life or love in the face of great challenges. The Rosie Project is a rare find: a book that restores our optimism in the power of human connection.
This comedy comes to you from the studio that brought you Little Miss Sunshine and Juno! While 14-year-old Duncan (Liam James) is being dragged on a family trip with his mom (Toni Collette) and her overbearing boyfriend (Steve Carell), he befriends the gregarious manager (Sam Rockwell) of a local water park. The two form a powerful bond, resulting in a vacation Duncan will never forget.
Disney•Pixar presents the hilarious story of two mismatched monsters who became lifelong friends. Ever since college-bound Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal) was a little monster, he’s dreamed of becoming a Scarer—and he knows better than anyone that the best Scarers come from Monsters University (MU). But during his first semester at MU, Mike’s plans are derailed when he crosses paths with hotshot James P. Sullivan, “Sulley” (John Goodman), a natural-born Scarer. The pair’s out-of-control competitive spirit gets them both kicked out of the University’s elite Scare Program. With their dreams temporarily dashed, they realize they will have to work together, along with an odd bunch of misfit monsters, if they ever hope to make things right.
Artist Johannes P. Osterhoff documents getting clean.
For a whole year, Johannes P. Osterhoff broadcast what came across his iPhone screen to an open internet page.
Anyone who stumbled onto his iPhone Live website could spy on how much beer he was drinking, who called him, what games he was playing, his email inbox, how long his showers took, see what gigs he had lined up, his Twitter exchanges and what his moods were. As you can imagine, there were some interesting consequences for his friends and a few worried conversations with his mom.
Calling himself an interface artist, this project was less playful than some of his previous efforts. It grew from being “concerned about the growing amount of personal data that was stored on smartphones and that users lose control over it,” he told Cult of Mac.
With the stranger-than-science fiction story of the National Security Agency coming to light at the tail end of his iPhone Live year, the experiment has added resonance. While Americans disapprove of surveillance programs – about 53% were against spying in a Gallup poll taken after the Edward Snowden story broke – our participation in social media and the traces we leave publicly has skyrocketed. In 2008, just 12 million of us were “heavy” social media users – now that figure is 71 million, or about six times as many people, according to Edison research. That’s a lot of status updates.
Osterhoff’s wife, Mi Sun, goes live.
The Peek-A-Boo Challenge
In a way, Osterhoff is simply going bigger with what we all do, every day. You may laugh at lifecasters, but that’s what you do with every tweet, Facebook update, FourSquare check-in and Flickr snap. We don’t do it for money, though — and maybe we should stop sneering at those who do. At least they get paid for it. We do it to stay in touch. To prove we matter.
Osterhoff’s unease – and impetus – for the project came with the realization that “interaction with our smartphones serves the companies who provide platforms and apps more than it serves us, the actual users and the originators of information and data.” He wanted to share his information but keep control over what he was providing. This proved his biggest challenge.
When the project captured media attention, there were a flurry of visitors peering into his daily life on the web. Osterhoff tried to shield his friends and acquaintances from making unwanted cameos. He rigged up his jailbroken phone so that every time he hit the “home” button it would take a screen shot and upload it online. This gave him the flexibility to avoid capturing anything that might be better left private.
“Luckily apps provided me with more freedom than I had expected,” he said. “If I did not want to show the content of an email for example, I usually navigated back and showed the folder structure of my inbox instead. On the other hand, I wanted to entertain my visitors, so I used Camera+, Instagram, Google Maps more frequently to tell stories about my life. I would not have done this without an audience.”
His beer consumption prompted a few calls from mom.
When Your Peeps Want More Privacy
Osterhoff’s wife, Mi Sun, gladly participated in the project. The pair even enjoyed documenting their trip to Korea, “staging” the more interesting and photogenic parts of the journey to keep friends and family in the loop, he said. His mom, who voiced concern initially about the project, checked up on him after she thought he’d logged too many beers the night before — but she did like being able to stay abreast of his everyday doings any time she wanted. For his friends, it was different.
“I received less text messages then I did before the performance,” Osterhoff remarked. “My friends preferred to call me directly. The topic then would not be tracked and the call would only be listed in the call history.”
Life After the Truman Show
He logged in 13.575 screenshots of his home screen during the project, where anyone could participate by using his phone number at the top of the site or sending him an email. Osterhoff took the performance live, too, participating in events like Berlin’s Transmediale Festival where his iPhone screen was projected behind him as people live tweeted or emailed him comments and questions.
The apps taking up most of the limelight were Instagram, Mail, Phone and Safari, with a few guest spots from players like Pizza.de, Shazam, Cut The Rope, Angry Birds and Ikea. After an initial burst of energy, Osterhoff’s postings fell off about two-thirds of the way through the show. A broken dock connector (lint turned out to be the culprit) meant he had to cool his heels and wait for a replacement part to finish the experiment.
So, what happens after you’ve bared all for a year?
“Currently, using my iPhone feels pretty boring,” Osterhoff told us a few weeks after the end of the experiment. “I realized that I did a lot of stuff only due to the performance — tracking my showers, beers and mood for example. I have already stopped doing that, since it is pointless without an audience.” He’s back to heavy usage of the basics, namely: calls, Mobile Safari and Google Maps.
Osterhoff hasn’t walked out on lifecasting altogether, though. His latest project, called “Dear Jeff Bezos,” also centers around privacy by documenting what he’s reading on an Amazon Kindle. He jailbroke the device so that it every time he sets a bookmark, it sends an email to the Amazon CEO.
“Not so long ago it was very simple to read a book in private, Osterhoff said. “Companies like Amazon are interested in exclusive ownership of data, because with this exclusivity comes value. As a user of such services, one loses not only control but also authorship of the data one generated. To make the data I generate public is to devalue it. This is why I prefer to share data in an open format.”
The iPhone Live project also exposed his own ignorance – when a friend asked him over Twitter about spy operation PRISM, Osterhoff mistakenly replied on screen about the puzzle game of the same name. Perhaps too engrossed in tracking his own doings – using apps like iBeer, Mr.Mood and ShowerTimer – he hadn’t paid that much attention to the news.
Still, broadcasting our own data may be the way to go. “Screenshots contain a lot of information for humans, but it is still difficult to extract machine-readable data from them,” he said. “So actually, iPhone live also shows how we could share information with friends only and make it difficult for others, such as the NSA, to extract meaningful data.”
Sometimes you want to play a game on your iPhone, but you’re also carrying groceries or a bouquet of flowers or a sandwich.
Rotato by Floor 27 Industries Category: iOS Games Works With: iPhone, iPad Price: Free
Seriously, it happens.
And when it happens, it’s usually impossible. Some games demand two hands, or you can only play them in landscape mode, which is unwieldy. You end up looking like a person in the black-and-white clips of an infomercial, for whom opening a can of tuna or dusting are the most difficult acts imaginable. And nobody wants to be a black-and-white infomercial person.
But Rotato by Floor 27 Industries solves all of that by being easily playable with one hand. And ridiculous analogies aside, it’s actually pretty fun and addictive.
Luxury Pocket Book byPad&Quill Category: cases Works With:iPhone 5/S Price: $85
My friends and family love Pad & Quill cases, mostly because Brian, the P&Q founder, keeps sending me cases to review, and I keep testing them for a month or so and then giving them away.
The Luxury Pocket Book is another of the bookbindery iPhone cases, this time with an absurdly luxurious list of materials (hence the name I guess). It’s also likely to cause fights to break out amongst my family and friends as they battle for ownership.
Apple’s next big media event is taking place this coming Tuesday, October 22nd at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco. Banners for the event have started going up today, and they match the colorful invites Apple sent out to the press earlier this week.
Veteran pop artist David Hockney took to sketching with the iPhone and iPad a few years ago, using his fingers to brush out works that he sent daily to friends and family.
Hockney’s works brought a new sheen to art on Apple’s devices, making them more than just instruments for amateurs. His forthcoming show which includes the digital works at San Francisco’s de Young Museum will have so many works, curators can’t even count them.
The official release of OS X Mavericks is just around the corner, but if you’re looking to bring a bit of iOS 7 to your Mac, check out this wallpaper created by Deviantart user filipe-ps, that looks similar to an expanded version of the gorgeous nebula wallpaper Apple created as the default for iOS 7.
A blurred version of the nebula is also available and comes with a 2560×1600 resolution, both of which, can be downloaded right here.
When you’re on the move, you don’t want to have to worry about your smartphone running out of juice. When you’re doing important work on your tablet, you don’t want to have to speed through it just to make sure that you’ve got enough battery life.
About the size of a deck of cards, The Portable Enerpak Plus has the best of both worlds. It’s strong enough to power some of your largest electronic devices while still being able to fit in a purse or pocket. And Cult of Mac Deals has it for $35.99 – 54% off the regular price – for a limited time.
Google stock has risen 13% today, surpassing $1,000 for the first time ever. It comes a day after the search giant announced its earnings for last quarter, which beat Wall Street expectations thanks to a surge in mobile and video advertising that helped increase quarterly revenue by 23%.
Apple has assured iMessage users that it does not have easy access to the messages sent through its servers and that it has no desire to read them anyway. The statement comes after security researchers at QuarksLab claimed the Cupertino company could intercept iMessage communications between its users if it wanted to.
Let’s talk about getting around the web quickly. Most likely, you’re using Safari or Chrome on the Mac to surf the information superhighway, and these modern browsers use tabs to open more than one window onto the world wide web at the same time, right?
You probably also have a series of oft-accessed bookmarks that you keep in the toolbar just above the web page and just below the address or URL bar.
Popping back and forth between tabs, or opening up new bookmarks is fairly easy with the mouse, for sure, but here’s a faster way that lets you keep your hands on the keyboard.
Will the new iPad mini have a Retina Display or won’t it? That’s the question everyone wants to know ahead of Apple’s Tuesday iPad event. According to everyone’s favorite goofball analyst, Peter Misek, the answer is yes… but it may hard to get one.
When it comes to smartphone displays, how many pixels is too many? Most of us believe the current crop of 1080p displays shipping with today’s flagships provide more than enough for our handheld devices, but Chinese manufacturer Vivo disagrees.
The company has begun teasing the Xplay3S, its new smartphone that will become the world’s first with a 2K display.
iOS 7’s influence is already extending beyond the bezels of your iPhone or iPad. A new update to Tumblr’s dashboard has been flattened and cleaned up to the extent that it would look at home on your iPad’s screen. And this is the regular site, remember, not an iOS-specific one.
Sources in Apple's Chinese supply chain think the iPhone will shrink again next year. We're not convinced. Photo: Apple
As they are wont to do, J.D. Power Associates has just released its second Wireless Smartphone Satisfaction Study for 2013. Guess what? The iPhone is on top again, the second time since it claimed the title of king of all smartphones in J.D. Power’s previous Wireless Smartphone Satisfaction Study back in May.
With all the hubbub about the iPhone 5s’s wonky accelerometer, which has thrown off the iPhone’s accuracy by a couple of degrees, you’d think that iPhones from the first-generation to the iPhone 5 had perfectly accurate compasses, wouldn’t you? But such is not the case.
It’s been well over a year since the Apple TV received a significant refresh, so we’ve long been wondering whether Apple was planning to unveil a new model at its iPad event this fall. Amazon listings in France and Germany seem to suggest that’s the case, with the $99 set-top box now out of stock until October 23 — a day after Apple’s event.
Asphalt 8: Airborne, the latest high-octane racing game from Gameloft, is now free for a limited time as part of Apple’s App of the Week promotion. The discount comes less than two months after the game made its App Store debut, and it’s usually priced at $0.99.
TeeVee, my go-to TV episode listings app, has just gotten a super-useful update: calendar integration. Now the app not only keeps you updated about airing TV shows via push notifications, it can also integrate them right into your calendar.
I love my Fujifilm X100S, but I’m sure glad I didn’t ditch my Micro Four Thirds Panasonic when I bought it. Why? Because Micro Four Thirds is fast shaping up to be the iOS App Store of camera standards: if you want to make some cool hardware for a big market that will buy new things (hell, they bought into Micro Four Thirds already didn’t they?) then it’s the place to go.
Exhibit, uh… Where are we now? Exhibit D? Exhibit D is the Experimental Lens Kit from Lomo, a three lens kit for your Micro Four Thirds body that costs just $90.
As promised, Microsoft has released its official Remote Desktop app for Android and iOS to coincide with the launch of Windows 8.1. The app is free to download and use, and just like the many third-party remote desktop clients, it allows you to access your Windows PC remotely from your smartphone or tablet.
