App Store Apps

Apple’s free app of the week: Super Arc Light

Apple on Thursday updated its App of the Week promotion with the game Super Arc Light.  This means that for the next 7 days you’ll be able to pick up the popular arcade shooter for free on both iPhone and iPad—a solid savings of $2.

For those who haven't played Super Arc Light, it's a minimalistic radial shooter, in which you must defend your base to the death against waves of challenging enemies. The developer describes it as Super Hexagon meets Geometry Wars.

Periscope introduces Replay Highlights, Live Autoplay and Tweet Embeds

Periscope, Twitter's live-broadcasting app, was updated in the App Store with a few new features, among them Replay Highlights, Live Autoplay and Tweet Embeds. Highlights automatically generates a short trailer for every Periscope broadcast of your home feed, making it easier to catch up on broadcasts you missed from the last day.

Periscope is a free download from the App Store.

BBC’s iPlayer Radio hits US App Store as new BBC+ app goes live in UK

The British Broadcasting Corporation's (BBC) iPlayer Radio mobile app, which used to be limited to customers in the United Kingdom, has expanded stateside today, TechCrunch just announced. Now customers in the United States can download iPlayer Radio from the US App Store and tune in to BBC's high-quality radio stations and content.

Earlier in the week, BBC announced launch of a brand new personalized content portal with a new BBC+ app on the UK App Store.

Facebook Messenger hits a major milestone—one billion monthly users

Facebook yesterday announced that its Messenger service has hit a major milestone: the software is now being used by more than one billion people every month to message their friends and family. Messenger saw a major surge in popularity after it was decoupled from the main Facebook mobile client, and especially since becoming a software platform in its own right with chat bots, apps, money payments, expanded emojis and other features.

Facebook Messenger is a free download from the App Store.

Meet Swiftmoji, SwiftKey’s new emoji-predicting keyboard

A new emoji-predicting keyboard from Microsoft-owned SwiftKey, called Swiftmoji, launched on the App Store.

Available at no charge on the App Store, it boosts your emoji game by predicting a wall of suggested emojis based on crowdsourced data, the user's own preferences and the actual text written in any of the user's keyboards.

This ability to get perfect emoji predictions based on what you’ve just typed is similar to Apple's much-improved QuickType keyboard on iOS 10.

Popular writing app Scrivener is now available on iPhone and iPad

If you write books, manuals or lengthy manuscripts for a living, chances are you rely on Scrivener for Mac for your work. If so, you'll be delighted to learn that the app's creator, British developer Literature & Latte Ltd., has released Scrivener for iOS following a long period of thorough beta testing. The iPhone, iPad and iPod touch app costs $19.99 and provides the full range of features writers need to create, edit and update their work on the go with full-screen mode on the iPad and other perks.

Thanks to Pokémon GO, Nintendo is now worth more than Sony

This morning, Nintendo shares finished trading another fourteen percent higher following the release of its crazy popular augmented-reality game, Pokémon GO, which launched on the App Store on July 6. Put simply, Nintendo shares have doubled in value since the launch of Pokémon GO, BBC said.

The report adds that thanks to the game, Nintendo's market capitalization has now surpassed that of another Japanese giant, Sony.

Pixelmator 2.3 for iOS brings out Magnetic Selection, Quick Selection & more

The popular Photoshop alternative, Pixelmator, on Tuesday refreshed its iPhone, iPad and iPod touch application on the App Store, bringing out two desktop-class tools—Magnetic Selection and Quick Selection—along with numerous selection improvements and a bunch of fixes for the Apple Pencil, the iPhone version of the app and more. The Smart Selection and Magnetic Selection tools first appeared in Pixelmator for Mac in May 2016.

Trouble finding good Pokémon with Pokémon GO? Try this

Pokémon GO took the mobile device community by storm, and already, it has launched in several countries.

The game, which allows you to capture Pokémon in what’s known as a virtual reality experience, gets players up and moving to find random spawns of Pokémon throughout their town or city.

But not everyone is having the best of luck finding the Pokémon they want, so in came a slew of apps to help out...

Catch ‘em all using Yelp’s built-in PokéStop filter

Pokémon Go's burgeoning community has been painstakingly creating and maintaining a detailed Google map of PokéStops and gym locations found in specific spots around the world. Actually, whole websites have sprung up dedicated to the Internet phenomenon that seems to be taking the word by storm. Now Yelp developers have decided to jump in on the action with a new PokéStop filter in their mobile app.

Notebook, Darby, Prisma and other apps to check out this weekend

Pokémon Go fever is still in full swing, but for those of you looking to try out different apps and games this weekend, iDB has you covered. In this edition of our Apps of the Week roundup, we have a beautiful new productivity app, a video social network for DIY'ers, a cool new photo editing app, and of course some great new games for you to check out.

Spark for iPhone is locking some people out of their Apple IDs, Readdle blames server issues

Reports surfaced yesterday on Reddit that some users of Readdle's excellent free mobile email client, Spark for iPhone, got locked out of their Apple ID account. Some of the affected people were able to re-gain access by performing a password reset on their Apple ID. It would appear that an error on Spark's servers has caused this behavior though Readdle assured customers that there was no breach or data leak.