Apps

Beats Music app updated with new Offline mode, in-app subscriptions and more

Cody Lee ∙ Updated March 20, 2018

Beats Music updated its iPhone client late last night, bringing the app to version 1.0.7. The update brings about a number of improvements, including better Facebook and Twitter account management, a new Find Your Friends feature for locating and following your Facebook friends, and more.

Perhaps the biggest change, though, is that the app now supports in-app subscriptions. This means that users now have the ability to bill their monthly subscription fee directly to their iTunes account. There's also a new Offline listening mode and thousands of new tracks available for The Sentence...

Union lets you stack, blend, and superimpose images together for great effects

Lory Gil ∙ April 18, 2014

Pixite, the creator of Tangent, LoryStripes, and Fragment, two of which made it to our top-ten best photography apps of 2013 list, has been working hard for the past year to bring some pretty interesting photo effects apps to iOS.

Union is the latest release from the app maker. It is an image blending program that lets you mask, edit, and merge multiple images into one. Plus, you can import photos from Tangent and Fragment with the original image and shapes on separate layers to create interesting effects…

Space Shooting: how long can you survive in this game?

Lory Gil ∙ April 18, 2014

A few months ago, we took a quick look at the adorable arcade shooter game Hopeless: The Dark Cave. The cute glowing Blobs won my heart when they shook with fear as the incoming onslaught of monsters would terrorize the gun-toting puffs.

Hopeless: Space Shooting is the sequel to the first adventure starring the marshmallow-like Blobs. This time, they’ve found themselves fighting aliens in outer space. Don’t worry, though. They are still huddled together in a dark cave, hopeless as ever…

Find out what it would be like to clone yourself with Instantion

Lory Gil ∙ Updated January 26, 2018

There is an episode of Futurama in the sixth season called “Benderama” where Bender makes half-sized copies of himself to do his work. While the inevitable world-destruction antics ensue, it does make one wonder what it would be like to have a few clones hanging around to help out with the chores.

Instantion is a platform game that emphasizes puzzle-solving action. Players create clones that stand on buttons, activate bridge functions, and fall to their death so we don’t have to…

Facebook updates Paper with photo comments, birthdays, events, group updates and more

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated January 26, 2018

Following yesterday's release of Facebook 9.0 for the iPhone and iPad with direct comment replies and other improvements, the social networking giant today issued the first major update to its Paper for iPhone application, which was released on February 3.

Paper version 1.1, now available free in the App Store, includes a bunch of useful features that were missing in the initial release.

You can now add photos to comments, get notified about upcoming birthdays and events, follow posts from your favorite groups, choose among the nine new article covers from outlets like Fox News, Bloomberg News, Mashable, FT, kottke, Popular Science, The Hollywood Reporter, Vanity Fair and Hacker News and more...

VLC for iOS introduces folders, new file types, subtitle improvements and more

Christian Zibreg ∙ April 18, 2014

Back in January, VideoLan's cross-platform media player, VLC, rolled out a major iOS 7-centric redesign of its iPhone and iPad client. It's also fixed numerous bugs while adding the ability to stream media from Google Drive and Dropbox.

Apps like VLC are needed to enjoy "foreign" audio and video file types on iOS devices, stuff like mkv, avi, wma, divx and more.

Following a few maintenance releases, the team today released a new version that refines the user interface and extends the app's functionality.

The new VLC 2.3 for iOS is now available free in the App Store, bringing support for folders for your media files. In addition, there are two new options in settings dealing with subtitles and gestures, the app can now play password protected HTTP streams, it's got new translations, supports additional audio and video file formats and more...

Facebook app updated with direct comment replies and more

Cody Lee ∙ April 17, 2014

Facebook rolled out an update for its iOS client this evening, bringing the app to version 9.0. The update brings about a handful of new features, including the ability to reply directly to comments.

The ability to reply directly to comments has been a wish list item for users for quite some time. Don't get too excited though, it'll only be available on select Pages that have enabled the feature...

Shatter Alley is a music-driven brick breaking game

Lory Gil ∙ Updated January 26, 2018

Back in 1976, The Woz created a brick breaking game based loosely on the concept of Pong. Breakout would go on to spawn an immeasurable number of similar games, as well as the popular Super Breakout sequel.

Shatter Alley is a brick breaking game that takes the original concept and incorporates a music playlist so you can boogie down to the beat while you blast away descending blocks…

Skitch for iOS updated with streamlined sharing, paragraph text annotations and more

Christian Zibreg ∙ April 17, 2014

Evernote-owned Skitch is one of those apps that efficiently solve real-life problems. In Skitch's case, it's about augmenting your images with catchy annotations while managing to be really fun to use in the process.

It has a robust, easy to grasp selection of markup capabilities that let one quickly share one's annotated images across social networks and export them in a variety of common formats.

I know Sebastien is definitely making the most out of Skitch in his daily communication with the staff and I’ve been using it regularly to annotate and highlight certain items of the screenshots we use in our ongoing how-to series.

Aside from that, Skitch is indispensable if all you want is quickly create viral images, tweet out a funny picture to get your point across and so forth, you get the idea. A new version is now available in the App Store, offering faster sharing, a new paragraph text feature in the annotation tools, general fixes and stability improvements and more. Go ahead, learn all there is about the new Skitch version 3.1.1 right after the break...

Dropbox acquires cloud-based photo management service Loom

Cody Lee ∙ Updated January 27, 2016

Following the debut of its new Carousel photo and video management app last week, Dropbox announced today that it has acquired Loom, a cloud-based service for storing your photos. The move should surprise no one, as both companies have very similar goals, but it will affect end users.

Starting today, Loom is no longer accepting new users, and the service will officially shut down on May 16. Current users have until then to act if they wish to save any of their photos/videos by either exporting them to Dropbox, with no interruption in service, or downloading them via a zip file...

GoogolPlex will ‘unleash the power of Siri’ with Nest, Philips Hue, Spotify commands

Jake Smith ∙ Updated April 16, 2018

Siri within iOS 7 can be limited sometimes, thanks to Apple's "walled garden", but a new tool called GoogolPlex wants to change that by opening the voice assistant to new commands.

Self described as the "App Store for Siri", GoogolPlex opens Siri to work with Spotify, Philips Hue, the Nest Thermostat and more, just by an iOS user changing a few proxy settings...

Facebook launches its own Find My Friends feature

Christian Zibreg ∙ April 17, 2014

Social networking giant Facebook is bound to stir controversy all over again as it's just introduced a new friend-tracking feature. Similar to Apple's free Find My Friends iOS app, Facebook's Nearby Friends basically notifies you when your friends are nearby.

It's a rather radical idea, one Facebook said Thursday was designed to encourage people to "meet up and spend time together" in real life. Go figure. Learn more about Facebook's Find My Friends right below the fold...