We're back with another edition of our Apps of the Week post. This is a weekly roundup of a handful of new and unique apps and games we think are worth checking out this weekend. Today's selections include new apps for highlighting and sharing interesting quotes from around the web, making music, and learning more about new topics, and of course we have two new games for you to try.
Earlier in the week, Apple updated iOS adoption numbers via its App Store dashboard for developers. According to the refreshed stats, the various iOS 9 editions now power 86 percent of iPhones, iPads and iPod touches, a two-point gain versus the 84 percent adoption rate that iOS 9 hit on April 20.
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, 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Last Thursday's deadly terrorist attack in France's Nice left eighty-four people dead when an attacker ploughed a lorry into people celebrating the national Bastille Day on the Promenade des Anglais. In the aftermath of the attack, Nintendo is postponing the planned release of Pokémon Go in the country out of respect for the French people “in this time of national mourning,” a Pokémon Company spokesperson told IGN France.
This past weekend, the social networking giant Facebook announced that a beta version of its brand new software development kit (SDK) for Apple's Swift programming language is available for download. The new SDK integrates Facebook buttons into iOS, watchOS, macOS and tvOS apps written in Swift, and integrates such features like Facebook Login, Analytics for Apps, Graph API and Share to Facebook sheets. The Facebook SDK source code is available via GitHub on an open-source basis.
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.