Communicating in different languages shouldn't be a barrier. In a diverse world, being able to understand or make sense of different languages can be important. Thankfully, our smartphones have enough power, always-on internet access, and some powerful apps for helping bridge the language gap.
Whether it's translating a text message, website, street sign, or menu, we've found some of the best apps for translating text, speech, and the world around you into something you can understand.
What do you get when you mix the seemingly endless desire for weather apps with the adorable, quirky, and Minecraft-like style of design and animation? If you guessed Tinyclouds, the adorable weather app for iOS, you'd be spot on!
Dear iDB Diary,
Today I started journaling. Did you know writing in a journal is a great for your mind? It’s true. I read about it in an interesting article from the University of Rochester Medical Center. Jotting down a short log of important moments helps to improve memory and creates a time capsule of life’s milestones. Journaling is also great for thinking through a problem by allowing a different part of your brain to work through an issue.
I spent some time researching, and I found a few great apps that work well for keeping my journal on my iPhone or iPad.
— Ian, 4/24/18
The Stanley Cup playoffs are just getting underway, and that means hockey games almost every night of the week for the next several weeks. Keeping up with the latest matches, scores, and big plays can be tough.
Thankfully, keeping up with the playoffs doesn’t mean you need to commit several hours a day, in front of multiple TVs, watching every second of every game. Whether you’re looking for highlights or stats, brackets or scores, or even live streams of the games, the Stanley Cup Playoffs are right at your fingertips with these great iOS apps.
Back in 2014, we covered UniChar, a cool third-party keyboard that offered access to the wide world of Unicode characters and symbols. While the keyboard functionality of the app has remained mostly unchanged, a recent update leverages Apple's CoreML and Vision to introduce a new way to find for the perfect pictograph.
The Apple Watch is a great companion device for exercise, tracking your activity, and with watchOS 4, provides access to Apple Music. For people that prefer listening to podcasts while they work out, the Apple Watch is less ideal due to the lack of podcast app, either Apple's own Podcast app or third-party apps. A new Apple Watch app called MiniCast is looking to fill that gap and bring podcasts to your wrist.
MiniCast, available for free in the App Store (with $3.99 In-App Purchase), is a simple iPhone extension and Apple Watch app that allows uses to send podcasts from Apple's Podcasts app, Overcast, Castro, or PocketCast to their watch.
In this week’s episode of “Let’s Talk iOS,” Sebastien and Cody shared frustration over the lack of granular audio control on iOS and macOS. While iOS remains a point of frustration, a simple Mac utility called Sound Control gives users exactly what the name implies.
Sound Control enables application-specific volume sliders on the Mac. In addition to Menu Bar controls, Sound Control can also be configured with user-defined keyboard shortcuts to adjust the level of a foreground app, or mute any background app.
There is something almost addicting about the subtle haptic vibration that comes from the iPhone's Taptic Engine. It appeals to the same part of the brain as popping bubble wrap. Agile 2, from developer Ben McCarthy (of Obscura Camera), is a game of quickness for iPhone that uses the haptics of the iPhone to make it both mesmerizing, and addicting.