apps - page 69

One of Apple’s biggest announcements yesterday — apart from something about some new iPad — was iPhoto for iOS. We’d suspected that Apple would fill in the hole in its iLife suite, and we were right. What we weren’t expecting was something as fully featured as iPhoto turned out to be. That said, it seems the app was really built with the iPad 3 in mind: It works great on the iPad 2, but it’s a little glitchy in places: just like its desktop cousin.

Just a week after we got Photoshop on the iPad, along comes an app that looks like we all expected Photoshop on the iPad to look. It’s called Laminar, and the best way to describe it is as Lightroom lite.

We told you that Apple announced the stunningly beautiful iPhoto for iPad today during the keynote, and it’s already available for download in the App Store! The $5 app is actually a universal download for the iPhone and iPad, so you get even more bang for your buck!

Apple just announced new apps and updates for its iLife and iWork apps on iOS, as part of today’s new iPad announcement.

Now both collections are available – in full – for the iPad. Here’s an overview of what’s new.

Today’s pre-event rumors say that there may be a version of iPhoto announced for the iPad 3, and it certainly makes sense. Daring Fireball’s John Gruber and Panic’s Neven Mrgan both argue that iPhoto is an obvious candidate for an iPad with a beautiful Retina display, and Gabe Glick, writing at MacStories, makes the case for Aperture. I think at least some of them may be right.

Get your catapults ready: Angry Birds Seasons is back, and this time the 15 new levels are set in Japan. But not the Japan that you or I might visit. This is a Japan populated with pigs wearing rope headbands, nestled amongst giant maki rolls and set in the shadow of the giant Mount Fuji.

If there’s a buzzword for here at the first CITE Conference, it would have to be trust. Virtually every discussion I’ve had over the past two days has boiled down to the level of trust between IT and users.

Trust may be the foundation of all healthy human relationships, but it isn’t something that comes easily to IT professionals in the workplace. That’s the underlying tension that IT staffers have when it comes to the consumerization of IT. It isn’t about devices or public cloud services. It’s about trusting the users that you support.

Valletta is yet another Markdown editor for the Mac, but one with a crucial difference. Instead of using a separate window to preview your document, it converts only the current line you’re editing, leaving the rest as clean and beautiful preview. It’s a clever idea, but we’ll have to see how well it works in practice.

Nerds who use Omni Group’s kick-ass task manager Omnifocus have a little bit of good news today. No, you still can’t export due tasks to a Google calendar shared with coworkers. You can, however, rely on the new non-beta status of the Omni Sync Server, which gets its official launch today. That’s not all: Sync is coming to all Omni’s apps.

A little over a week after pulling Battlefield 3: Aftershock from the App Store for connection issues and a truly disappointing gameplay experience, EA has pulled The Simpsons: Tapped Out, for much the same reasons.

I bet you thought you were pretty cool showing off your X-ray app and farting cat. Well, it’s time to get schooled by some professionals who are going to show you just how amazing your phone could be. Watch as car-hacker/engineer Dr. James Brighton recreates the popular mobile racing game Reckless Racing 2 using two MGF sports cars and an Xperia Play and Xperia S. This was all done in conjunction with Xperia Studio, a project created by Sony which invites people across the globe to test the limits of mobile technology. It never ceases to amaze me what some individuals can accomplish and it’s projects like these that get me excited about the future.

CineXplayer, the go-to iOS app for playing pretty much any kind of video you can throw at it, has been updated to include virtual surround sound. This gives you surround sound in stereo speakers or headphones instead of mixing Dolby Digital 5.1 surround down to a plain stereo signal.

Y’all know Instapaper, right? It’s the amazing read-later service from Marco Arment which lets you save anything your find on the web to read at your leisure on your iPhone, iPad or Kindle. Now a new, free, Mac App Store app called Read Later will let you read your articles on your Mac.

This simple image has become a cliché in the UK in recent years, and is now much parodied and remixed everywhere you look. Now you can remix it yourself, thanks to a variety of (very similar-looking) apps for iOS.

Today would have been Theodor Seuss Geisel’s 108th birthday. Of course we know him as Dr. Seuss, one of the most revered children’s book authors of all time. Many people and organizations will be celebrating his works today and even Hollywood is doing its part by bringing the classic Thorax (auto-correct fail) The Lorax to life in an amazing looking 3-D CGI film (in theaters today). While his books have entertained and educated children for generations, recent technology has breathed new life into his classics via digital interactive children’s books. Oceanhouse Media, a leader in DICBs, has also joined the celebration by discounting their Dr. Seuss apps on both Android and iOS.

BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — This year I decided to cover the Mobile World Congress without a computer. Or at least, without my MacBook. I live in Barcelona, so I knocked out a couple of posts on my iMac when I was at home, but on the show floor and in the press lounge I relied solely on my iPad. And amazingly, it was up to the task. There are some annoyances, but with a combination of perseverance (or just stubbornness) and the right apps, I got a pretty easy system going.

With baseball season nearly upon us, now is the time to download MLB’s brand new iOS app. MLB.com At Bat went live in the App Store for free this morning with some great features and better pricing options.

Instead of having to pay $30 for the separate iPhone and iPad apps like last year, MLB is offering a free, universal download with a season-long in-app subscription for $14.99, and there’s more options available.

The GSMA has announced the winners of the 17th Annual Global Mobile Awards which took place yesterday at Mobile World Congress. The top mobile products and services were showcased and there was even some entertainment with comedian/songwriter Tim Minchine as the host. Categories ranged from Best Consumer Mobile Service to Best Mobile Innovation for Publishing and while we love hearing about innovative products, it’s really the hardware categories that had us talking.

There is certainly no shortage of Photography apps in the iOS store that promise to do magical things to your snapshots. Users can turn their photos into vintage looking pictures via Instagram, transform faces into comic book art with Halftone, or do weird things with Percolator, but this latest app is a bit different from all the rest. Pxl is a new app available for iPhone and iPad that transforms pictures into cool pieces of abstract art.

Ever find yourself alone in your positive review of an app? Maybe you think the price of a mobile game is too high while others think it’s a steal. User satisfaction in the mobile ecosystem is quite a roller coaster of information and emotion. That’s why uTest, a software testing company, decided to crawl hundreds of thousands of apps and user reviews to see just how happy or unhappy users of the top two mobile operating systems were with their app experience. uTest has laid out this information in a nifty little infograph showing user satisfaction across Android and iOS with side-by-comparisons of the two. Check it out and tell us what you think.

BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — In Russia, if you want to come up with a mascot for your company or a character for your app, there’s no focus groups or testing: it all comes from the top down.

That’s why when Russian app development and publishing company iFree wanted to release a new virtual assistant for Android and iOS to take on Siri, i-Free’s Kirill Petrov dictated the design of i-Free’s latest character. He would be an all white, gremlin-like humanoid with huge flashing teeth and glowing yellow eyes. He would hail from the planet Edelweiss (named after a beer), and he would come to Earth in the time-honored tradition of many alien invaders before him: namely to kidnap our women for his own lascivious pleasure.

Meet Spoony. He’s terrifying. He uses much of the same core technology as Siri, the distant relation he’d eventually like to kill, or at least surplant. Presumably after making out with her first.

BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — Snapily is an app that lets you snap 3-D photographs with your iPad or iPhone, and then view them with 3-D specs. You can even order 3-D lenticular postcards from the app and have them sent to your home. It would be amazing: if it worked.

BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — If you thought that Adobe’s new Photoshop Touch was just a cut down, iPad-sized version of the desktop app, think again. I just watched a hands-on demo here at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and this deceptively simple little app is pretty amazing.

BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — What if you could swipe your credit card and then — moments later — have the transaction details appear on your phone. Better still, what if all of your payments could be organized in a beautiful app, an app which could actually make managing your money fun. This service now exists for your iPhone, and it’s called Boku.

BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — Scalado, most recently seen removing people from photos like a cold-war-era dictatorship, today showed me some of its other fancy photo-processing apps. Scattered across Android, Windows Phone and Symbian, but mostly Android, there is an embarrassment of cleverness in fast photo processing.