iPhone apps - page 29

BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — When I first spotted the Aurasma booth, I thought it was yet another annoying app to serve ads on top of the real world, using augmented reality. And it actually is. Only before I could walk away, I got caught by the enthusiastic marketing folks and found out that the app is actually very cool indeed.

Aurasma is a kind of cross between augmented reality and Instagram. It works like this: You point the app at anything: a painting, a product package, a building, and Aurasma will remember it. You then pick a video or photo or a 3-D rendering to show up over that real-world scene whenever you point your iPhone’s camera at it again.

BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — On Voicefeed is a neat new iPhone app which takes over your voicemail account and turns it into a kind of personalized everything box for your communications. The headline feature is being able to record personalized voicemail greetings for everyone you know, individually or by group. But there’s a lot more to it than that.

We’re huge fans of the simplistic to-do app called Clear here at Cult of Mac. We’ve been captivated by its entrancing gestures and sexy design ever since we saw it at Macworld last month.

Following the highly-anticpated release of Clear in the App Store, Realmac Software has confirmed that the app has moved a staggering 350,000 copies since its launch on February 14th. Nice!

Are you a fan of Instagram? Of course you are. And are you also a fan of those frustrating memory games where you have to flip over cards and match the pictures? I thought not. But if you are — you freak, you — then InstaMatch might be right up your alley.

Along with iTunes (ten minutes to transfer a TV show to my iPad?), the iTunes Apps Store is possibly the worst experience one can have while using Apple products. You can never find anything good; all the listings are clogged with scam software and other crap; and it is slow, slow, slow. The good news is that Apple looks set to fix it, with the purchase of Chomp.

After nearly a year of private beta testing, Cultured Code has finally implemented cloud sync in its popular to-do app Things. Now available as a public beta for the Mac, iPhone and iPad, Things Cloud can be enabled and tested for free by any customer.

When task management apps started adding cloud sync over a year ago, Things users were left behind while the developers at Cultured Code took a laboriously long time to get their sync solution off the ground. Now that iCloud is out and cloud sync is a staple feature of nearly every productivity app, has Things missed the bandwagon?

Update: We have selected our winners and would like to CONGRATULATE Selena Gannon (@SeleneGannon) and Teodora Yodar (@TeodoraYoder). Please email us at deals@cultofmac.com to get your goods — and thanks to everyone for entering!

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The iPhone App Game Plan Bundle offers one of those rare opportunities to save a ton of cash and also gain the opportunity to make a ton of cash with the results of following through with what’s being offered. How’s that? Well, you get a killer training program that allows you to plan, launch and market an app that you’ve worked hard at making – and the training you’ll receive has stellar odds to pay you back over and over again. It’s a real win-win!

Speaking of “win”, we’re about to up the ante on this Cult of Mac Deal even more.

Way back in the mists of 1991, in the dark days when Kevin Costner somehow beat Martin Scorsese for the Best Director Oscar (Dances with Wolves vs. Goodfellas. Seriously?), WinZip was first launched. The frustrating, hard-to-use piece of shareware is still going today, and has just elbowed its way into the iOS App Store. That’s right: WinZip is now available for the iPhone and iPad.

ZOMG! Never lose your iPhone again with the ZOMM Wireless Leash Plus, a hardware/software combo that wirelessly ties your iPhone to a needy dongle that cries whenever the two are separated. It can help you to remember your phone, your keys, or even where you parked Grandma.

Your iPhone and iPad are great paper replacements, but they couldn’t actively stop it. Until now: PaperKarma is an iPhone app which lets you stop paper junk mail, just by snapping a photo of it.

Last week, the web exploded with the news that social iOS app Path was uploading your entire address book to its servers, and then keeping it there. Worse, it was sending and storing them in plain text (although the connection was at least SSL-encrypted). Clearly, having Path notify you when your friends join the service is handy, but is there a way to do this without compromising your privacy? According to Edinburgh iOS supremo Matt Gemmell, there is.

Instagram 2.1, which launched at the end of last week, has fixed up the frankly horrible interface of v2.0, and added in some significant new features. Other things — like the proliferation of scantily-clad ladies and (normally-clad) pets in the “popular” section — remain just the same.

Instagram has been updated to version 2.1 in the App Store. The update brings several improvements, including a revamped interface. More photo editing features have been added, like the “Lux” editing tool and the new “Sierra” filter.

Tapbots released Tweetbot 2.0 for iPhone in the App Store today. The update brings
 several significant improvements, including one-tap links, image preview thumbnails, 
faster performance, and a UI facelift.

Tweetbot was already one of the best third-party Twitter clients in the App Store, and it 
just got even better with version 2.0.

It seems as if everyone and their uncle are building iPhone apps these days. As a result, the competition is getting fiercer and fiercer by the day, and it’s becoming tougher to stand out amongst the crowd.

That said, there are a ton of apps that just don’t “cut the mustard” and the user experience suffers because of that lack of care and quality. David Sparks, the man behind the popular MacSparky blog, said the following about what he calls “speculative developers”:

If you want to develop apps, take your time and make something awesome. Make it fast. Make it beautiful. Make something you’re proud of. Don’t make 60 crappy apps: Make one really good one.

I couldn’t agree more, but when you’re faced with the haze of substandard apps that claim to be able to deliver the goods, how can a developer get their app noticed — and adopted — over the long-term?

The latest Cult of Mac Deal may have the solution to that problem.

Last week we told you about Evi, an iPhone app that challenges Apple’s own Siri voice control technology. Powered by the same Nuance backend, Evi and Siri offer similar voice control/assistant features. The main difference between the two is that Evi is available on the iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS, while Siri is only available natively for iPhone 4S owners.

Another App Store app has come to our attention, and its name is vokul. As the first and only 100% handsfree voice control app for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad, vokul allows users to dictate text messages, make calls, and play music without ever having to lift a finger.

Since carriers aren’t allowed to install their own crapware on iPhones the way they do on other smartphones, their forced to release their own apps on the App Store. There’s myAT&T for AT&T customers and My Verizon Mobile for Verizon customers, but up until now, Sprint customers haven’t had a companion app to manage their mobile and data plans.

If you’re a Sprint customer, then, you’ll be glad to know that there’s now an official Sprint app on the App Store called Sprint Mobile Zone, which lets you manage your online account. It also sprays you with promotions and Sprint-related news articles, as well as gives you information about your device, including battery stats, data info, space remaining and more.

Thrillsville, I know, but these apps are occasionally useful to have floating around on your device, so if you’re a Sprint customer, you may as well get downloading.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD / iWORLD 2012 — Those brainstorming sessions that we’d all like to eavesdrop on at Apple are managed using an iPad system.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD / iWORLD 2012 — If you want to create great photos from your iPhone, start by shooting everywhere. Including the dentist’s office or out the window of a friend’s bathroom.

Photographer Jonathan Marks has snapped his evocative pics in both those places, plus waiting at a traffic light and at a Whole Foods parking lot. He shoots and processes everything directly on his iPhone, thanks to a handful of key apps.

The App Store is a morass of to-do list managers, but there’s reason to perk up your ears about Clear. It might seem like just another to-do list manager from another new studio, but it’s neither. Clear is something special.

Last August, Spotify launched a public API for mobile developers to piggy back off of their system and release their own apps. The hope was the abiogenesis of a series of cool new music apps that pushed the boundaries of how we discover music, with Spotify’s library of 15 million tracks as the lifeblood.

The first app to really come from Spotify’s initiative and impress? SpotON Radio, a Pandora-like service built upon Spotify that allows you to create custom tailored music stations, share them with friends and sync them across the iCloud. Plus, it’s got a really swank visual aesthetic that just sings on iOS devices.

Siri has a new competitor, and her name is Evi. Developed by True Knowledge and powered by the same Nuance-based backend as Apple’s virtual assistant, Evi is available for all iPhones in the App Store. There’s also a beta app available for Android handsets.

While Evi doesn’t have the integrated advantage that Siri wields, she is perhaps the first clone that’s just as smart, if not smarter, than Siri.

Help on those tricky algebra problems could be a touchscreen away thanks to a new iPhone app.

A company called Does That Make Sense? (DTMS, for short) plans to offer live help to students using Apple’s smartphones.

Psychotherapist Marcos Quinones has got streamlining a one-man office down to a science.

Quinones, a former software developer, is a New York City-based cognitive behavioral therapist and licensed clinical social worker who runs his entire office on Apple gear.

He credits the iPad with making a big impact in the smooth running of his sole practice.

As part of our continuing series about businesses using the iPad, he shares a few key apps that help him process payments and help with patient records, saving time and money.

Comparing uprisings in the Middle East to what happens when a manager brings his or her own iPhone to work seems like a bit of a stretch, but IT executives say the effect has provoked a similar shake-up.

The people (read: employees) have brought about a groundswell of change in the corporate world by opting to bring-your-own-device (BYOD) and choosing their own apps. This has upended the “regime” of IT departments, who used to be able to control what devices employees used and what ran on them.