iPhone apps - page 12

Paper Camera is just plain fun. Plenty of photo apps let you apply filters after the fact, but this one performs its manipulative magic inside your camera, transforming your images in real-time before your dazzled eyes.

The filters are robust, offering a nice variety of cartoon- and painting-style choices to help make even the most uninteresting photographic situations colorful, graphic or both. And Paper Camera supports the same wacky filter set for videos you shoot.

We love the fact that the app saves both the original file and the filtered version to our library so we can do what we want with the original.

My math-averse daughter wanted to cheat on her algebra homework. So we downloaded PhotoMath, a free app that lets you take a picture of your mathematical and algebraic equations, solving them for you and showing the steps to the solution.

PhotoMath has been at the top of the App Store charts for a couple of weeks, hitting number one on the Education, Kids Games and Top Apps lists. Small wonder, as it seems like a great way to get out of doing homework.

However, despite the concerns of some parents and teachers, apps like PhotoMath just won’t help when it comes to cheating — they’re far too limited. Still, it’s a promising technology that, once it matures, might actually turn into the type of wonder tool for education we’ve long been promised, turning our iOS devices into useful educational tools that will help kids actually learn math, rather than simply giving them a shortcut to homework answers.

This post is brought to you by Withings, creator of the Withings Aura smart sleep system.

Every morning when you wake up, do you hit the snooze button? You’re not the only one. According to a Withings sleep survey, over half Americans do. And even more Brits. A lot of people even think about smashing their alarm.

A lack of overall sleep and an abrupt awakening when your alarm clock or smartphone goes off in the morning are causing a lot of people to feel tired and unrested throughout the day, affecting their well-being and productivity.

Most people would prefer not to wake up to the sound of a loud noise, and rather let their internal body clock pull them out of sleep naturally in the morning. Now French connected health company Withings has developed the Aura, a cleverly designed sleep system that is set to provide a smooth wake-up experience and put an end to the snooze button.

Popcorn Time, the service that allows users to stream movie torrents, today makes its debut on iOS. It’s available only to jailbroken devices — there’s no way Apple would have approved it for the App Store — and it can be obtained through Cydia via a dedicated Popcorn Time repository.

If you’ve ever visited the subway platforms in the Big Apple, you know they’re plastered with advertisements. That’s where a free new app called NO AD comes in.

The work of Re+Public, a team of devs who use technology to “alter the current expectations of urban media,” NO AD is an augmented-reality app that strips the New York City subway system of its ads — and replaces them with art.

Just point your iPhone camera at a billboard and, hey presto, you’ll see it vanish and a piece of street art will seamlessly appear where there was once corporate propaganda.

Pretty neat, huh?

UK-based rock band Radiohead just updated their Polyfauna app, originally released at the end of this past January, with all new audio and visual content.

The What’s New section of the iTunes description says, simply, “Entirely new.”

If you’re a fan of the ambient tech-inspired music of Radiohead’s seminal Kid A album, you’re going to love these new tracks. Here’s a video (below) to whet your appetite.

Hyperlapse, the new time-lapse video app from Instagram, is taking the Web by storm. In today’s video, Cult of Mac goes hands-on with the free app to show you exactly how to use it to make incredible videos.

We also explain why Hyperlapse beats out iOS 8’s built-in time-lapse feature, and we’ll show you some of the best videos made with Instagram’s new app so far.

Subscribe to Cult of Mac TV on YouTube to catch all our latest videos.

Our iPhones are known to help make our everyday activities easier and when it comes to fitness, it’s no different. Getting up and exercising is difficult, but downloading applications to help you along your fitness journey definitely isn’t.

In today’s video take a look at our top three apps that will transform your iPhone into the ultimate fitness trainer. Keep track of your movement, prevent dehydration and do so much more, just by using these super-fitness apps.

Subscribe to Cult of Mac TV on YouTube to catch all our latest videos.

This post is brought to you by MobiPast.

Nowadays more and more kids are asking for an iPhone, maybe yours as well. But are you worried about their receiving nuisance calls, bullying, contact from strangers, endless spam and trolls? These commonplace tricksters can soon rack up a huge phone bill — and you’ll be the one asked to pay it.

MobiPast is a new monitoring app that allows you to see just whom your kids contact on their phones — and who contacts them. It’s not spying exactly. It’s for their and your safety and peace of mind. To see how MobiPast allows you to remotely track your kids’ calls, texts, contacts, internet surfing, social media activities — and GPS locations — read on.

SAN FRANCISCO — Sébastien Leidgens wants to put a new angle on the business card.

His invention, Cubr, is a six-sided die that connects people through private mobile web chat. When a red, blue or green Cubr is tossed your way, you hit the website or download the app, then enter the code to start your instant message convo or share photos with the person who gave you the die. The enterprising Belgian, a former project manager at a digital marketing agency, is taking a gamble on the idea that people are tired of handing out one-dimensional cards.

“It’s a business card for non-business people,” Leidgens says in an English heavily influenced by his native French. “Young people don’t have business cards. This you can use for private situations in everyday life. It’s a lot more fun and outside of the usual public circles.”

I was pretty pumped about UpWord Notes when it came out back in February, and it’s still the first place I go when I need to jot something down. Meanwhile, my iPhone’s onboard Notes app just languishes in a folder marked “Trash” because I can’t delete it.

Developer Lau Brothers is dropping Version 2.0 of UpWord Notes on us today, and it includes several new features that make the app even more fun and useful.

I know that TwoDots, the followup to last year’s megahit Dots, has been out for a little while, but I have a pretty good excuse for not having reviewed it yet: I’ve been playing it this whole time.

It’s taken me so long to get to this article, in fact, that the developer has since released an update with a bunch more levels, and now this review is timely again. So take that, Time.

Anyway, TwoDots is a lot of fun. Provided you’re incredibly lucky.

Apple relies heavily on caffeine. A recent company job listing advertised a role for an iCup technician, with the important task of providing “a fresh brew coffee to all Apple employees within their department.”

Jony Ive’s design team is especially obsessed with the black stuff: For years they kept a $3,000-plus Italian Grimac espresso machine, despite the fact that it leaked all the time. For a while in the 1990s, the design team was even mockingly dubbed “Espresso” for their unabashed love of caffeine culture.

Apple’s not alone in its coffee snob behavior. The rise of coffee shops — with seemingly hundreds of variations on the old coffee standards — have infiltrated every city across the United States: Americans spend $18 billion per year on specialty coffee alone.

But how much do we actually know about it?

The iPhone comes preloaded with many stock applications, but not all are as powerful as you wish they’d be. Luckily there are tons of developers pushing new apps into the App Store, and many of their creations upstage the stock iOS applications.

In today’s video we take a look at five iOS apps that can easily replace baked-in Apple apps and enhance your iPhone experience. Look at weather in more detail, refresh your music player and more with these powerful apps.

Subscribe to Cult of Mac TV on YouTube to catch all our latest videos.

SAN FRANCISCO — You can buy and sell a lot of things in this boom town, just not public parking spaces. All three parking apps called out by the city attorney for auctioning or selling public spaces have backed off.

City Attorney Dennis Herrera slapped MonkeyParking with a cease-and-desist on June 23 and mentioned that similar apps Sweetch and ParkModo were next in line. Each took a different tack — defiant, conciliatory, quiet — but in the end, all three are on hiatus.

While sitting in on a session at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference last year, Nick Frey, Chris Galzerano, and Veeral Patel got an itch to make something. As part of iOS 7, Apple had introduced “Multipeer Connectivity,” a framework for communicating with nearby devices.

Frey and his friends were at WWDC on student scholarships given by Apple, a tradition that provides the opportunity for hundreds of grade school and college students to attend the expensive conference for free each year.

Nearly a year later, the result of their shared itch is Audibly, a nifty iPhone app that can chain together iPhones to create a wireless sound system.

If you use Twitter a lot on your iPhone, you’ve probably heard of the Tweetbot app, a popular iOS Twitter client that was recently redesigned from the ground up for iOS 7.

Now in its third incarnation, Tweetbot 3 has just received a big update, adding a fistful of handy new features — including support for posting and viewing multiple images (although Tweetbot’s creators point out that these won’t show up on streaming timelines until Twitter adds support).

The app update also means that image detail views show the corresponding tweet when relevant, while Instagram videos are marked with a new “play” icon to make the user interface clearer.

Maybe you’ve just seen the latest X-Men film. A lot of people have, so odds are pretty good. And if it left you wanting to know more about the original Days of Future Past storyline, but tracking down the trade paperback and then, like, reading it sounds like a lot of work, here’s a game you’ll want to check out.

Uncanny X-Men: Days of Future Past is out now for your favorite iOS device, and it aims to faithfully re-create the source material the way it originally appeared. This means that it’s the assassination of Senator Kelley that brings forth the robopocalypse (that character died in the first film, so he wasn’t available to die in the new one), and it’s Kitty Pryde, not Wolverine, who goes back in time to set things right.

Sure, you can play the whole game as Wolverine if you want, but if you’re a purist, you have a chance to do it “right.”

Whether you’re watching television at home or a new feature film at the movie theaters, popcorn always serves to be a tasty viewing companion. While popcorn is delicious there’s nothing more frustrating than smelling the buttery cooking kernels only to find it burnt when finished. Luckily the app Perfect Pop can save you from destroying your snack and filling your home with unpleasant smells.

Take a look at the video to see what you think.

I suck at table tennis. Like, it’s embarrassing.

I’m alright at serving, and I can usually return, but if anyone smashes at all or puts any spin on the ball, I fold faster than a laundry robot. I still like the idea of table tennis, though, which is why I’m glad we have video-game versions.

And Table Tennis Touch, which is out now for all of your iOS devices, is easily the best one I’ve ever played.

Maybe you have a busy life, and you need some help making time for the things that matter. Like, a lot of help. I’m talking about zero willpower here.

PlayTimer is for you. It locks your phone down but good so that you can play with your kid or focus on other things for a while. You just set the interval, press the cute smiley face, and you’re off. If you touch your phone, an alarm sounds unless you show the app your unlock key.

The unlock key is your child’s face, and that’s kinda weird, but I do like the idea.

Source:PlayTimer – Free | UNICEF Sverige

I know I’ve said it before, but video games hate bricks.

And to that end, here’s yet another title about destroying those square bastards. It’s called Bricks, and it has a novel approach to smashing things that gets as fast-paced and exciting as it does embarrassing to be seen playing.

It’s probably not that bad if someone catches you, but you may raise some eyebrows. Here’s why.

With Gesture Alarm Clock, you set wakeup alerts by drawing numbers on the screen. It has a sleep timer that plays a variety of soothing music and sounds to lull you off. Plus, it has three different vibration strengths, several gesture-based snoozes, and if you think you’d wake up easier if your iPhone’s flashlight turned on, it’ll do that for you, too.

It will also automatically wake you up earlier if it detects traffic delays, and it displays the current weather.

But it won’t cook my breakfast, so I can’t really recommend it.

Source:Gesture Alarm Clock – Free ($1.99 upgrade for full features) | RV AppStudios LLC

I really can’t get enough of twin-stick shooters.

I don’t know what it is, but they have a very specific kind of frantic energy that appeals to me without being overwhelming. And I like them so much that every time I have an opportunity to play one on iOS, I give it a chance despite the fact that my iPhone has no sticks to twin, so the touch controls usually suck.

Ekon the Cyborg is a new two-pad shooter that somehow has controls that work. And I’m as shocked as anyone. But beyond that, it’s a nostalgic and colorful romp that is pretty much made of my childhood.

Here’s a fitness app with an interesting extra feature.

BetterFit lets you keep track of when and how you exercise. You can design custom routines from a giant list of activities or make your own. But it also includes a second tracker that lets you measure how much protein you consume during the day. It has a list of preset food items, or you can input it manually and set daily goals to make sure that you’re feeding your muscles properly.

So if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go stock up on lentils because they’re as delicious and full of protein as they are fun to say.

Source:BetterFit – $1.99 | David Price