I’ve had a blog on Tumblr for years, and I’ve never been able to really get into using it on my iPhone until recently. A platform’s mobile presence is so important, and it’s been nice to see Tumblr work on drastically improving its mobile web and iPhone apps in recent months.
For some unfathomable reason, Tumblr has never had an official iPad app—well, until today. It just went live in the App Store.
If you use the official Time Warner TV iPad app, then you’re in luck. A big update has brought the ability to view On Demand content, including 4,000 TV and movie titles from 91 different providers.
Content is available in HD and standard def depending on the provider, and you have full power to search and browse the catalog right from the comfort of your iPad.
SantaKid, a children’s picture book by an author more known for his prolific career as a thriller writer, James Patterson, is now coming to the iPad.
It’s been released by the Hachette Book Group for Little, Brown publishers, the iPad-only app is available for $2.99 in the iTunes App Store, just in time for…well, you know.
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I love everything about Foldify, except that fact that it isn’t available yet. I love the name, the promo video, the only-possible-on-an-iPad interface, and even the icon (or maybe, especially the icon). Foldify is an app that lets you design and print 3-D papercraft models, but that description makes it sound a lot lamer than it really is.
Want to make like Elton John and Billy Joel, dueling across from each other on two pianos, playing the hits from both of your huge ouvre of pop tunes? Well, except for the whole you’re-not-either-one-of-those-guys part, you can play two piano-like keyboards across from another friend on your iPad, with new free app, Duette.
It’s all come down to this. Today is Election Day, and your vote is going to help determine the United States’s destiny over the next four years. This is one of the most important elections in years, and that means it’s more important than ever for you to stay organized with supporters around you and live on the cutting edge to keep up-to-date with all the latest Election News.
Here are Cult of Mac’s top picks for conservative readers who want to follow the 2012 elections with their iPhones and iPads… and influence them too. If you’re looking for Cult of Mac’s Election Day App Guide for Democrats, click here.
The Washington Post’s WP Politics app for the iPad is an excellent resource for anyone interested in United States politics. I spent a few days with this free app and found it to be an excellent tool for tracking and understanding the 2012 election season. While not without its flaws, this app does two critical things exceedingly well. First, it aggregates media and information from a broad range of sources into one tool. Whether you’re looking for the latest news about a particular candidate or economic data from years ago, it’s all here. Second, it organizes and contextualizes the information in a way that helps the casual user to understand it. It classifies news articles by genre, organizes Twitter feeds by source, and breaks candidates down by their stances on the issues. If you’re looking for an app to help you follow the upcoming election, or politics in general, look no further.
Ever since Google gobbled up the developers of Sparrow to put them to work on a Gmail app, the future of my favorite iOS email client has been in question, but the lack of iPhone 5 support was a particularly hard pill for me to swallow as I reviewed Apple’s latest handset.
Luckily, it appears that while Sparrow may not see many updates going forward, it will get iPhone 5 support, taking full advantage of the 1136 x 640 display.
Ah, fall. When the days grow shorter, the air gets crisper, and we finally get American football back after a purgatory of endless midseason baseball games and Olympics roundups about Bob Costas’s dimples. I’ve been obsessed with football — both college and the NFL — since I was a little kid, so this is unquestionably my favorite time of year. And there’s never been a better time to be a fan. Apps galore for iPhones and iPads have now made it possible to watch games on the go — and out of original broadcast market. A word of warning: several of these applications only work in the U.S. market and with a subscription to cable or satellite. So no fair complaining about that like the App Store critics do.
Finding stuff on the web is pretty easy. Finding stuff you don’t already know about, surprising stuff, is hard. That’s what the developers behind Trapit are trying to fix.
Trapit for iPad allows you to discover things you’re already interested in as well as stuff you may not even know you’re looking for using algorithms that run in the app behind the scenes. What that means is that once you start using Trapit, it will learn what you’re into, and start finding stuff that might be of interest to you, based on what you’re already checking out as well as new stuff that might be cool for you to see.
The app also curates its own content into a Featured Traps section, which will help you discover even more content for that surprise factor.
Dark Sky started as a Kickstarter project and turned into a gorgeous, functional iOS weather app. Cult of Mac’s Charlie Sorrel praised the app when it launched back in April, and Dark Sky has since seen great success.
The key feature of Dark Sky is its ability to quickly tell you when it’s going to storm. In a huge 2.0 update, Dark Sky has gotten even better with several improvements, including the ability to send you a push notification before it starts raining.
The newly updated iPad app Easy Strum by Glaswegian developer Poorly Dressed Ape describes itself as “one of the easiest musical instruments in the world.” And it surely is. Just download the app from the Apple store, then play it.
It was recently revealed that jailbroken iPads are not able to use Amazon’s new Instant Video app. The issue is a common one that similar apps, like HBO GO and DirectTV, have dealt with in the past. The reason jailbroken iPads couldn’t access Amazon’s video streams seemed to be related to DRM. Amazon may or may update the Instant Video iPad app with a fix, but in the meantime, there’s an easy way for jailbroken iPad users to get around the restriction right now.
Amazon released its Instant Video iPad app yesterday. The app allows Amazon Prime members to stream and download movies and TV shows on the iPad over a WiFi connection.
If your iPad is jailbroken, you won’t be able to watch anything in the Amazon Instant Video app. This isn’t the first time a content provider has blocked access to jailbreakers, but it’s certainly still disappointing.
If you’ve never been to a Cracker Barrel restaurant, then I feel sorry for you. Where I live, Cracker Barrel is where you go for hearty, good ol’ fashioned, country cooking. Breakfast is always especially good.
The only times I ever played checkers growing up was at Cracker Barrel. While you wait for your food, there are boards set up around the restaurant with rocking chairs. There’s something about sitting down with a friend or loved one to just play a simple game of checkers. In the age of Xbox LIVE, Draw Something and Scrabble apps, face-to-face gameplay is sadly becoming a thing of the past.
A new iPad game called Checkers blends traditional board gaming with pixel-perfect digital charm.
It’s not often that a jaded veteran like me falls in love with an app. But it happened this week with a new app called Chirp. It’s based on one of those rare technologies like HTTP or XML that at first seems trifling, but ends up changing everything.
To oversimplify, Chirp uses sound to transmit words, pictures and URLs from one phone to another.
It’s called Chirp, because its data transmission sounds like a robotic bird.
First, I’ll tell you how Chirp works. Then I’ll tell you why I think this bird has wings and could change how we all share data.
Read the column and get the app here.
Back in March, Max Petriv tweeted some images of a Spotify iPad app he had been working on. Not only was the app optimized for the iPad’s larger display (at that time there had not been a Spotify client even teased for the iPad), but the design and interface of Petriv’s app looked downright gorgeous.
The New York-based designer had no clue that his pictures would cause such a stir, with many publications, including Cult of Mac, reporting that an unofficial Spotify app was finally in the works. You see, Spotify had been promising the world an official iPad client for months and months, but when pressed, the music streaming juggernaut would only give vague hints, like “it’s definitely coming.” Hardly a satisfactory answer for iPad users wanting their own Spotify experience.
After showing off his early work on a Spotify iPad app, Petriv was blindsided by Spotify suddenly coming out of the woodwork to release its highly anticipated official app in May. The timing of Spotify’s announcement was interesting given that Petriv had just asked for help developing his own app less than two months prior.
Petriv is now publicly working on his own Spotify app again, but due to the restrictions Spotify imposes on developers, he needs your help.
Quick! If you have any need for an iOS screen-recording app, and you don’t mind wasting $2, then go download Display Recorder right now. Don’t worry – I’ll wait.
I love e-books. I love them so much that I’m considering buying a double-sided, sheet-feed scanner, chopping the spines of all my dead-treeware books and having an OCR frenzy on their asses.
What I don’t like is DRM. Not for any idealistic reasons (well, maybe a few) but for practical ones. My bookseller of choice is Amazon, as it has the best range and Kindle books work on any device. But the Kindle app for the iPad sucks, and with an update this week it is almost unusable. If only I could read my Kindle books in the beautiful iBooks app. Well, it turns out that I can. And what’s more, I can keep all of my books in a DRM-free format in the cloud, ready to be downloaded to any device, whenever I like. Here’s how.
Writing Kit, every iPad-toting bloggers’ best friend, just got a small but significant update to v3.3. In addition to bug fixes (although not all of them) and some nice interface tweaks (sharing destinations now have service icons to help identify them quickly), the app now has support for URL schemes, letting other apps interact with it.
The Kindle app has been updated to – supposedly – improve the reading experience on the iPad, and to add support for books with pictures: essentially kids books and graphic novels. And while the second is welcome the first – -to my eyes – actually looks worse.
When the iPad launched, there was an inexplicable lack of a couple of core Apple-made apps. There was no Clock, no Weather app and (thankfully) no Stocks. Now, Clocks has been added to the iPad in iOS6, and weather is also in there – kinda.
Tyype, a new ultra-simple text-editing app for the iPad, could point the way to better text manipulation in iOS 6, due to be announced today at Apple’s WWDC in San Francisco. And while we don’t think for a moment that Tyype’s gestures will make actually be in the new OS, it certainly shows that not only is Apple’s way not the sole way to do things, it isn’t even the best way.
Noteshelf — the best writing and scrawling app available for the iPad — has at last gotten a Retina update for the new iPad. And boy was it worth the wait.
If the actual Alien Sky app is as good as this awesome teaser video, then it deserves to be a sell-out success. Who doesn’t love pictures of planets married to dramatic, movie-score music?
Sadly, it might end up just being a little tacky. Like a nightclub after the house lights are switched on, take away the spectacular soundtrack and all you’re left with is an app that lets you add planets, more planets, planets with rings and lens flare to your photos — it’ll get old and tawdry pretty fast.
I do like the lens-flare aspect, though. And for this, I would probably download the Alien Sky developer’s existing app, aptly named LensFlare.
Via: iPhoneography
