Popular iOS Twitter client Tweetbot has been updated with several new features and improvements in the App Store. Version 2.3 for iPhone and iPad is available now with more gestures, added timeline thumbnail support, and more. Storify and Droplr integration has also been included for sharing Twitter conversations and media/links with followers.
Bluetooth OnOff, an incredibly useful app which does one thing — toggle your iPhone’s Bluetooth connection on and off — has inevitably been pulled from the App Store. The 99-cent Universal app used private APIs to work its magic, and is now sadly consigned to the trashcan, along with data-tethering apps and other much-missed utilities.
Screenshot Journal was created “with iOS designers and developers in mind,” but it is useful for anyone who takes a lot of screenshots. For instance — and I’ll pick a completely random example here — tech bloggers.
The (universal) app does one thing: gather all the screenshots from your camera roll and organize them for your viewing pleasure.
Rogue Amoeba’s AirFoil started out as a way to stream any non-iTunes audio to your AirPort Express mini-router, back when AirPlay was still called AirTunes. Then it was expanded with a free iOS app which would let you stream music from AirFoil on the Mac to AirFoil on your iPod or iPhone, handy for hooking up to a stereo.
Now we have AirFoil Speakers Touch 3 for iOS, and it adds in proper AirPlay support, letting you send music from pretty much any iDevice you own.
Do you yearn for the time when your music required a hulking great box to play it? When that music came not in convenient playlists but separated out onto various discs and mechanical cartridges (aka “tapes”)? Do you wish to relive those wonderful days of the Midi System, the Mini System and even, back in the depths of the 1970s, the Music Center?
Then you’re in luck. By applying the latest in touch-screen technology and cutting edge software design, you can now have all the inconvenience of old-school recorded music rendered with the convenience of multi-touch. Behold: The BeatBlaster.
Arqball Spin is a curious mix of hardware and software, with a very niche but very cool purpose: to create interactive 3-D photos. By combining an iOS app with a hardware turntable, Arqball is able to “film” a spinning object and then render it as a touchable 3-D model which can be spun using your fingers.
As an Englishman, I know all about rain. I’m intimate with sleet, drizzle, and driving rain both horizontal and vertical. I know about rain that slowly soaks you even though it seems that none is falling, about freezing rain that stings as hard as hail, about the rain that seems to ignore your umbrella and creep into even the best-sealed seams of your clothes.
Other countries might have spectacular monsoons, or driving rainstorms that flow for days, but for variety and ubiquity of precipitation, it’s hard to beat the British Isles. Which is why I’m sad that Dark Sky — an app that predicts the rain forecast for the next hour only — currently only works in the continental United States.
Photoshop Touch is a great iPad app, but it’s tightly focused on quickly gussying up your images and sharing them to the Facebook. To replicate the desktop Photoshop experience on your iPad you need to go somewhere else, and for me that “somewhere else” is Photogene, which this weekend was updated to v3.4. There are a few other additions, but the main new feature is compatibility with the new iPad’s Retina Display.
App studio Two Lives Left has launched its first App Store game for the iPad, called Cargo-Bot. What makes this release different from the thousands of other iPad games that came before it? Well, Cargo-Bot is the world’s first game to be coded entirely on an iPad itself.
Using a coding app for the iPad they created prior to Cargo-Bot, the guys from Two Lives Left designed and coded their new game on the iPad’s 9.7-inch screen.
Update: It appears that the app’s developer has started replacing the channels with ads for “Futubox.” A classic scam. The app did work at one point, but we no longer recommended buying it now.
Update 2: It looks like Apple has yanked it from the App Store.
A $0.99 iOS app has surfaced over the weekend in the App Store called “TV English Premium.” The universal app allows anyone to stream 55 premium TV channels live without paying for a subscription. An iPhone or iPad also does not need to be jailbroken to stream for free. For only $0.99, you can have access to many BBC and premium U.S. TV channels in HD on your iOS device.
PicPlayPost is supposedly a way to make video diptychs of your precious moments, and then share them via the usual social networks. But if you grew up in (or otherwise managed to live through) the 1980s, you’ll know exactly what this app is for: remaking the cheesy title sequences of 1980s TV shows like Dallas.
Popular music recognition app Shazam released a standalone music player for the iPhone back in January. The app lets you scan your iPhone’s library and play back tracks with Shazam’s lyric service, LyricPlay. You can also queue tracks and create playlists specifically for the Shazam Player.
As of today Shazam has updated its music player app for the iPad. The latest update packs LyricPlay and Retina graphics.
Those of you waiting for the big Spotify press event today (12 noon EST) in hope that an iPad app will (finally!) be announced, I have something for you in the meantime. It turns out that a Swedish developer already released a free Spotify iPad app — two weeks ago. It’s called Spotable, and while it’s simple, it’s pretty slick.
Spotify is a wonderful platform for streaming music and sharing playlists with your friends, but the service’s lack of an official iPad app has been a great disappoint for Apple users. Spotify’s main competitor, Rdio, boasts a beautiful iPad app that lets its users browse and play music.
Spotify has been saying that an official iPad app is coming for over a year, but the trail has grown cold for many months. There are no unofficial Spotify for iPad app alternatives in the App Store at the moment. But it looks like that’s going to change soon.
Paper, the ultra-simple app that turns your iPad into a piece of paper, has been downloaded 1.5 million times in just two weeks. What’s more, users have created seven million pages in that time. Not bad for an app that is distinguihed more by a lack of features than anything else.
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Splashtop, the company behind various remote desktop apps for the iPad, has really outdone itself by porting the entire Windows 8 tablet Metro UI to the iPad. Kinda. While you can swipe away and use all of Windows 8’s gestures and even run your own Apps on there, you’ll need a Windows 8 PC to actually stream the apps to the iPad. In reality, it’s just like a virtual desktop app, only with its own native iPad interface.
Renowned developer Steven Troughton-Smith has released the iPad version of his popular Speed iPhone app. Thanks to the iPad’s larger 9.7-inch display and Retina resolution, Speed for iPad is the perfect GPS for your automobile. Not only does Speed track your location on a map, but the app tells you how fast you’re going and the distance you’ve traveled.
Procreate, the already excellent iPad drawing app, has been updated to play nice with the iPad 3’s Retina Display. But to dwell on that would be to ignore the massive changes that have gone into this version. Make no mistake: This might be labelled v1.6, but it is much more like a v2.0.
Scanner Pro is my new favorite scanning app for the iPad. It doesn’t do OCR, it doesn’t grab phone numbers from business cards. It just scans, stores, shares and searches your paper documents, and it does it with a beautifully simple interface.
The app is actually an update to the old iPhone version, but this new version (4.0) is completely redesigned and is now a universal app. And just in time, too, as the new iPad’s 5MP autofocus camera makes it a pretty great scanner.
Here, ladies and gentlemen, for your viewing pleasure, is an example of open-source “design” at its finest. From the retro desktop-style interface through to the clunky name — Documents Unlimited PDF & Office Editor Apps for iPad — not a single aspect of this experience has been left untouched by the clunky hand of open-source UI design committees.
In fact, I would like to award it the newly-minted title of Ugliest iPad App, Like, Ever (or UiALE for short).
Aereo is a great service for denizens of New York City. For $12 per month, you get to stream local live TV direct to your iPad, iPhone, Roku box, Apple TV, or just about anything with an internet connection. It’s simple, it does nothing but relay the free-to-air channels already available to any New Yorker, and of course the TV companies are already trying to shut it down.
Sonos is ditching its dedicated CR200 remote control in favor of mobile apps. According to Sonos boss John MacFarlane, this was the plan all along. Now, though, there are enough people with smartphones and tablets to finally make the hardware controller obsolete.
Avatron has released a new version of its popular Air Display iOS app that allows the user to view OS X Lion in hi-res HiDPI mode on the new iPad’s Retina display. Air Display turns your iPad or iPhone into a secondary display for your Mac, and the latest update takes advantage of the new iPad’s 2048×1536 screen resolution by exploiting a super hi-resolution mode in Lion called HiDPI.
The official Facebook for iPad app has finally been updated with Retina graphics for Apple’s third-gen iPad. Version 4.1.1 of the app is available now with offline chat mode, photo bug fixes, added language support and stability improvements.
After years of tweaking and improvement, ioShutter is finally here. ioShutter is a simple cable that connects your iPhone to your camera and allows you to control it using an app. Remote shooting, time-lapse sequences and even photos triggered by sound can all be programmed in easily using the free companion app. And best of all, no fancy dock connectors are required: ioShutter connects through the headphone jack.
