Makego is a cool new app that makes your kids’ real world creations come to life.
The two-dollar app comes with three virtual vehicles – a racing car, an ice cream truck, and a river boat. All you have to do is make one (out of Lego, paper, or anything else you can think of), plop your device inside, and run the app.
O2, once Apple’s exclusive cell phone company reseller of iPhones in the UK, has been caught exposing user phone numbers in the headers sent to websites its customers visit while using its 3G network.
Apple seems to be pushing its “store-within-a-store” concept this year. The Cupertino company has already established stores within Best Buy in the U.S., and it has plans for a further 25 to be installed within Target stores. But it seems the concept is going international, with plans for an Apple retail store within the world famous Harrods department store in London.
I rather like the look of these handmade wooden iPad stands from Woodpad here in the UK.
I’m lucky: the real Stonehenge is only about 40 minutes’ drive from my front door, so I can go and visit whenever I like. For students of prehistoric monuments who live further afield, the Stonehenge Experience app for iPad offers a tiny glimpse of what this ancient English stone circle is all about.
If you are looking for the best online deals from an Apple Store, it would pay to head to the United States, or any English-speaking store, a new analysis finds.
In the war between Apple and Android, there are no holiday breaks. That incessant back-and-forth could be seen in how many devices were activated during the Christmas weekend. According to a mobile analytics firm, Apple destroyed Android in places like the U.S., the U.K. and Germany, often spearheaded by the iPod touch and iPad.
Does talk of the Euro economic crisis make your eyes glaze over? Perhaps this will get your attention: The down European economy is costing the iPhone marketshare as consumers keep a tight hold on their cash. The bright side: the U.S. and U.K. love of everything Apple has become stronger.
(Parliamentary copyright images are reproduced with the permission of Parliament, under Creative Commons license.)
The UK Parliament spent £17,000 (about $26,000) on a total of 34 iPads for official use this year.
London based design consultancy BERG have surpassed themselves with their latest idea, simply called Little Printer.
This is iF Poems, a new educational app aimed at children, but with much to offer to grown-ups too.
Iconic Brit kids comic The Beano has made its debut on the iOS App Store, with a hidden treat inside for kids: five free issues for the grabbing.
Today’s – probably this week’s – Best Thing Ever is the amazing, ear-exploding wonder that is Brian Blessed Alarm Clock.
(Photo by Adam Riggall, used with thanks under Creative Commons license)
Former Englishman-in-New-York Sting has been speaking to journalists to plug his solo career retrospective album, the 25 Years box set. And in his opinion, the music industry is facing another big change. The CD is dead. And its replacement is apps.
Making an album of new songs seems to be too much like hard work for bands these days. It’s so much easier to pay some developers to make an app instead.
Not many opera companies have ventured on to the App Store, but London’s Royal Opera House has and the result is something unexpected: not a listings app, not a tickets app, not anything you’d normally associate with opera. It’s a game. And it’s great.
The new Doctor Who Encyclopedia for iOS claims to offer everything a Who fan might need to know about the three most recent incarnations of TV’s best-known time traveller. But this is one app that could do with a zap from a sonic screwdriver: although it’s stuffed full of facts, the presentation could be improved.
UK newspaper The Independent launched an iPad app this morning, but it still needs a little work.
The free app is a far cry from the offering by The Guardian, which we raved about recently, but The Indie (as it is affectionately known by UK hacks) has had to struggle by on a tiny budget for decades. It’s not going to have the same sort of cash to spend on digital news projects.
Sadly, that shows in this morning’s newly-launched app. It’s functional, but very basic. There’s no access to an archive of issues; you get today’s paper, swiftly downloaded to your device when you open the app (so offline reading is possible).
But as a newspaper reading experience, it’s disappointing. You can’t swipe your way between articles. The primary navigation tool is an icon of a bullet list in the top left corner – tap this and you’ll see links to section front pages, and from those you can reach individual stories. The upshot is a lot of tapping to move around, which soon feels like hard work.
Stranger still, today’s launch issue shows signs of being released before it’s ready. On story pages, the newspaper’s masthead graphic doesn’t quite fit into the space allocated for it, so the line immediately below cuts through the graphic. Worse still, there are broken images all over the place, even on the front page. Teething problems, no doubt, but a shame they weren’t spotted before the app was made public.
If you’re a regular reader of The Indie and like reading news on your iPad, you’ll probably jump to get this app. But as it stands right now, there’s little on offer here to tempt people away from other news apps.
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The BBC’s technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones wanted to find out which smartphone was the best listener, so he conducted a quick test of his own.
He spoke the same text into a Siri-equipped iPhone 4S and a Samsung Galaxy Tab, and compared the transcribed results.
The Guardian‘s new iPad app is a triumph. It’s an excellent daily newspaper in tablet form, designed to make the most of the tablet format without over-indulging in it.
I confess: when I first looked at Apple’s new Newsstand app when iOS5 was released last week, I felt nonplussed. There didn’t seem to be any content in the store that I’d want to subscribe to. I became one of the many people who tried to find ways to hide the Newsstand icon altogether.
Apple’s release of iOS5 caused “the highest ever traffic” over the UK broadband network, BT has confirmed.
We reported yesterday that demand for iOS5 caused “unprecendented” broadband traffic for some UK internet service providers – but today, BT (which manages the entire national broadband network as well as running its own ISP business, BT Retail) sent the following statement to Cult of Mac:
Over the last two nights, BT has experienced the highest ever traffic levels over the UK broadband network.
Demand for yesterday’s iOS 5 release combined with all the associated updates for OS X and other apps caused “unprecedented levels” of traffic over one UK broadband network.
Writing on their own network status alerts site, engineers at UK ISP AAISP reported that “something was up” at 8.48pm UK time last night.
Here in the UK, the BBC has released a beta version of a redesigned website, and what’s striking about it is how much it owes to the Beeb’s iPlayer app for iPad.
There’s a treat for photography fans this morning, with the launch of the British Journal of Photography‘s official iPad app.