The iPad Pro and its second generation have made Apple’s tablets more powerful than they have ever been in the history of iOS. With the release of iOS 11, the iPad is more capable than ever to serve as a primary computing device for many people.
College students are some of the best suited primary iPad Pro users, and the following are some of the best apps to help those students flourish in college with Apple’s most powerful tablet.
There’s no two ways about it: unsolicited texts are an issue. Be it outright spam, carrier notifications or simply unpalatable contacts, more often than not your phone fails to protect you from some rather unsavoury messages.
Interestingly, text message security is an unusual topic rarely broached, either because it remains forced to live a sad existence in the shadow of the seemingly more profitable email bubble, or because it’s decidedly trickier to contrive a service that genuinely satisfies text message users.
For all intents and purposes, SMS Shield has pulled off that feat. Once downloaded and set up (subscription fees range from $5.99 yearly to $0.99 monthly corresponding with a 1-year, 1/2-year and 1-month package), you can’t help but feel that your iPhone’s Messages app just battened down the hatches.
Today we feature an enjoyably challenging game that attempts to help you improve your rhythm by helping you learn and perform Steve Reich’s composition Clapping Music.Â
There are a wide range of weather app options for users to choose from, and today we are featuring one excellent weather app that deserves to be in consideration for your precious Home screen real estate.
The potential of voice recording from your wrist is huge, as it certainly has been for years on iPhone and iPad. For that reason, Apple itself has equipped their iPhones with a stock memo app years ago, and here at iDB we have showcased the most compelling alternatives for iOS back in 2016. Alas, the Apple gods haven’t graced us with a similar stock app for Apple Watch yet and that’s in spite of the fact that for the longest time quality third party apps to fill the gap were few and far between.
Living in a time where mindless entertainment is only one touch (or app) away can make it incredibly hard to focus on the simplest tasks and really get your head down for uninterrupted, productive work. If you can relate to the struggle, Forest, an app best described as a good-natured trojan horse inside the world of apps, could be a service to tickle your fancy.
Not all tasks are created equal. No doubt you either have taken the trash out or you have not, but there is a vast number of daily challenges that are conquered in increments, tasks that can be taken on for an hour, then sidelined at their half way point and ultimately capped off in the afternoon. Users of Apple’s Reminders app might know the struggle to approximate a progression-based task to the binary reminder framework we are provided: ever tried to make the Reminders app nudge you every day until you have hit the treadmill five times per week, or let's say read ten chapters of your book? For all intends and purposes, it’s cumbersome.
Taskful sets out to remedy the pain of that. It also lets the user select only certain days of the week to remind you of due tasks (e.g. weekdays) and will smartly display the items relevant to you on a specific day and, more crucially, blank out tasks set for a future date. Needless to say this can be priceless for people quickly throwing their hands up when faced with a dauntingly long list of tasks. To bolster the sentiment, the app also automatically breaks up longer tasks into daily chunks.
How intelligent is this thing really?Naturally, for a smart task manager to really hit its stride, it takes equally smart data input. Such being the case, you’re going to want to learn the nitty-gritty of Taskful before judging the application’s utility. So let’s briefly talk about the mechanics of it:
On the face of it, Taskful and Apple’s Reminders app share some structural traits. That is, both offer category based sorting of items, in which each category (Urgent, Finance, Work) is represented by a color of your choosing. That’s about where the similarities come to an end however, because on Taskful, filing away a task properly is swiftly accomplished by swiping left and right to change the background color of your note during creation. At the same time, the app will analyze your task as you scribble it down and immediately glean information such as dates and numbers.
Based on its reading, smart bubbles right below the draft will interpret your input and suggest measuring sticks for your task. You can tap and confirm or manually alter them. To exemplify, use a number like '4' in your task, now mark the little ‘Amount: 4’ bubble magically popping up beneath the text and as a result, the reminder needs to be tapped four times to be considered finished by Taskful. Until then, a big and rewarding progress bar will grow in 25% increments every time you come one stop closer to your goal.
Along the same lines, Taskful is also capable of acting as a quirky step tracker. On launch, the app asks permission to read and write HealthKit data, meaning the app can track your step count and remind you to get off the couch if you haven't ticked the ‘walk 600 steps’ reminder at night.
It goes without saying that these are just two hands-on examples of how to put Taskful to good use, not so much selected at random but rather intentionally to demonstrate the app's versatility. What's more is that it comes with a good deal of UI customizations such as a built-in dark mode. In other words, both in scope and depth Taskful decidedly one-ups Apple’s Reminders. And above all else, it feels good to look at one unifying 'All Tasks' tab, something Reminders’ stacked business cards look sort of makes impossible.
Competing in the world of task managers and to-do lists is a tough gig on the App Store, yet it appears as though Taskful has found the sweet spot to prevail. It is also earning the right accolades along the way, with Apple just recently featuring the app in the ‘Apps We Love’ category in various countries including the US, Australia and New Zealand.
Taskful is available on iPhone and iPad, the latter of which just added split screen support to round the package off nicely. If you want to give the app a whirl, it is currently priced at a reasonable $1.99.
Link to App Store: Taskful ($1.99)
Since watchOS 4 is not poised to deliver all answers to some of our lofty demands, it is time to get serious about alternative solutions to replicating a Notes-esque experience on your wrist. And as though the people behind SnipNotes had known of Apple’s continuing blind spot all along, in late 2015 the app originally designed for iOS went out on a limb and added an Apple Watch extension to its core competencies. Since then, the note taking app has gone from strength to strength and, even if only philosophical at this point, provides a standard of note sharing between iPhone and Watch that Apple themselves could hardly topple.
Let’s get the major pitfall out there first: just like Apple’s (still fictitious) Notes app on watchOS would only correspond with the original Notes app on iPhone, SnipNotes too only works and syncs inside its very own cosmos.
Accordingly, if you want to create, share or store notes (including locations, images, links) on your wrist, you are going to have to embrace SnipNotes as your default gateway for note taking. If you weren’t expecting anything else great, nothing to see here. If you thought of SnipNotes as a third-party app to read and feed into your proprietary Apple Notes, unfortunately that is still off limits.
That’s about as far as (subjective) caveats go, and with that it is time to turn our focus to the glorious meat of the app.
Take notes, Apple!SnipNotes earns its first brownie point right on launch. When activated, the app is going to ask for Touch ID authentication before breaking the seal to your data. This is not only a much appreciated safety net for when your nosy friend handles your iPhone, but generally gives most users peace of mind and a sense of privacy protection that Apple Notes is slowly getting whiff of as well.
The second brownie point is scored by an intuitive file system inside, consisting of multiple categories (such as Travel notes, Snapshots, etc.) which can all be edited, deleted or supplemented with the addition of new rubrics.
Brownie point number three - yes we’re keeping score - is conferred due to the fact that SnipNotes allows you to individually determine which categories sync their contents with your Apple Watch. It all starts with the ‘Inbox’, the overarching folder on both your devices, which functions as the initial collecting tank for new notes. From there, you can assign any file or note to a category, filter them or favorite notes to permanently pin them atop of your lists.
As for Apple Watch devotees, here's your lowdown: Notes can be created by way of voice input and Scribble. Neither might ever truly rival bigger screen note taking, however the ability to swiftly capture fleeting thoughts might be priceless to some. So talk to your wrist or jot down a few letters and before you know it, the note will be seamlessly relayed to your iPhone.
Conversely, SnipNotes on iPhone can be a great agent to storing pictures or screenshots on Apple Watch, since the app's category structure enables a folder like organization of your images. This little detail can't be stressed enough, because frankly, to this day, Photos on Apple Watch is egregiously half baked. That’s four out of five brownie points.
Suffice it to say that there is a whole lot more to discover, especially for advanced users, such as clipboard-to-note shortcuts and smart widgets. SnipNotes has clearly not spared any expenses to ultimately please every type of user, which is admirable in its intent but can sometimes produce an air of clutter to the untrained eye.
If you’re curious or in need of a notes app for your wrist, iPhone or iPad, grab SnipNotes for $0.99 on the App Store today.
More often than not, the term Augmented Reality still has that elusive, techy ring to it, particularly when brought up in conjunction with Apple’s purported eyewear project. Curiously, many of us have it down as tomorrow’s technology rather than today’s, when the truth is that AR apps have populated the App Store for years.
While some of these apps are admittedly not much more than shoddy tech demos, separating the wheat from the chaff actually produces some really cool apps conceived to boost your business, creativity or simply keep you entertained in novel ways. With the preamble out of the way, here are the best Augmented Reality apps for iPhone available today.
Sending your friends voice recordings on messenger platforms such as iMessage, WhatsApp or Threema is surely not everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s hard to overlook its rising popularity in certain circles. Be it for faster communications or text weariness amongst younger people, voice messages are rife in chats today and that is despite the one clear downside they have: unlike texts, they are not very discreet, which makes them basically unobtainable in a host of potential situations.
Understanding the (circumstantial) issues with voice messages, Apple were the first to offer voicemail transcriptions in iOS 10 and now Textify joins the cause to bring a similar service to an even wider audience. The speech recognition app provides spoken word-to-text transcriptions for all your favorite messenger platforms including iMessage, WhatsApp, Threema, and Line. And suffice it to say that it wouldn’t be on iDB if it was not surprisingly powerful at that. Here’s how it works.
Time famously flies, which is why calendars have been invented to make sense of that unstoppable ride called life we're all on together. It is also the reason why it has been ages since we last shook the App Store tree and scrutinized all the best calendar apps for iPad falling off it for their quality.
So here we are again, same place but different time, sizing up what today’s App Store has to offer in terms of third-party apps to satisfy your organization and scheduling needs on iPad. Join us on a roundup of some of the best iPad calendar apps for iPad.
If you sampled a bunch of people and asked them about their favorite downtime activities, chances are there would be a fairly even split in numbers between respondents choosing a good book over other forms of entertainment and those drawn to the audiovisual media instead. Folks of the latter segment know best for themselves where to get their daily dose of videos from, but places such as Netflix, Youtube or Hulu are generally speaking a solid bet. Internet empowered services aside, there is credible chatter that in the shadows of society, some renegades continue to resort to a traditional TV set for their spate of mindless diversion.
Whether you find yourself all too often hunting for new videos to watch during lunch break or you identify with the dwindling TV crowd, a brand new app called neverthink could be for you. That’s because it marries the old-fashion convenience of always-on programming with the excitement of the sometimes mercurial internet. Neverthink wants you to never again think about what videos to dig up next and their way of going about it is unique enough to potentially strike a chord with you.