It's the weekend, and you know what that means: it's time for another round of iDB's Apps of the Week post. Every week we put together a list of apps and games we think are worth checking out, and this time around we've got some great selections. This week's picks include a navigation app for walking, an annotation app, and more!
Like on any given Thursday, Apple today refreshed the App Store to reflect new software arrivals and promotions.
In addition to highlighting apps whose proceeds will go to the World Wildlife Fund until April 24 through the new 'Apps for Earth' section, Apple's editors have slashed Pixelbite's award-winning sci-fi action adventure, Space Marshals, as the App Store's new Free App of the Week.
This universal iPhone, iPod touch and iPad game normally retails for $4.99, so do yourself a favor and save a few bucks by grabbing this great freebie right now.
A new Watch button was rolled out yesterday to Vine's iPhone application in the App Store, allowing you to enjoy videos in channels and on profile pages without having to manually scroll through individual posts. It's basically a whole new way to watch Vine as you can now kick back and view the entire story of any channel or watch an account from start to finish.
The failing Internet pioneer Yahoo today announced a major update for its mobile email application.
Bumped to version 4.3, Yahoo Mail for iOS introduces new third-party integrations allowing you to add cloud files directly from your Google Drive or Dropbox to your messages as attachments, or add animated GIFs to your emails from Tumblr, which is another Yahoo-owned property.
The compose interface makes it easy to choose among Tumblr's most popular GIFs of the moment, search for that perfect GIF or browse GIF categories including Love, LOL, Cute, Cheers, Fail, Happy and more. GIFs are added to your emails as attachments.
Snapchat today announced a very cool object-tracking feature that works with live video, in real time.
Now available in Snapchat for Android and coming soon to the company's iPhone application, users can optionally attach a sticker to an object or a person in the frame and Snapchat's algorithm will handle the rest and do all the heavy lifting for you, Engadget reports.
You could add colorful scribbles to your photos and videos before but these were static. By pairing stickers with specific parts of your recording, the Snapchat algorithm can make them move, rotate and change their size to follow the object it's attached to as it moves around the frame.
Yesterday, Google announced a cool new feature to mark the tenth anniversary of its online calendar service: Google Calendar will now scan your calendar intelligently to find the time on your schedule to work on your personal goals.
According to Google, the updated Google Calendar app lets you add a personal goal to your calendar.
These can be things like “run three times a week” or “hit the gym every day except weekend”. After parsing your natural language input, it'll schedule time automatically for you and help you actually stick to it.
Facebook was supposed to announce the addition of customer service chat bots and Live Chat APIs soon, but it seems that the latest app update already includes the plumbing work necessary to support chat bots. As first noted by Engadget, the app now shows a Bots and Businesses section and already third-party chat bots appear in search.
Trigraphy by Nixes, a beautiful app for turning your photographs into low-poly artwork, was refreshed in the App Store earlier this week with a few new tricks. Bumped to version 2.1.2, the software gained two new effects alongside an effects bundle and other perks.
For starters, it's now possible to open images in Trigraphy from other apps because the app has gained its own Document Provider extension.
The built-in gallery now supports albums and users can change how images are saved and how 4K assets are handled, which should fix problems related to 4K download.
Airmail, the popular Mac email client, has made the leap to the iPhone back in February.
As of today, this powerful email application is available with a native interface on iPads, with full support for iOS 9's Split View multitasking mode, wireless keyboards with fully customizable shortcuts, Touch ID, the ability to draw sketches within the app and much more.
“Never before has e-mail been so powerful and productive across your Apple devices,” developers told me via email. “Use the extended screen real estate to compose and communicate like never before.”
The refreshed iPhone and iPad app is available now in the App Store at no charge for existing users.
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) on Tuesday announced a kids-friendly version of its iPlayer video-streaming app, called iPlayer Kids. Available in the UK App Store at no charge, the ad and In-App Purchases free software offers kids a safe environment to watch all of BBC Children’s world-class content in one place.
These include over 10,000 episodes being made available this year alone, including both new and old CBeebies and CBBC favorites such as “Wolfblood”, “Blue Peter”, “The Dumping Ground”, “Topsy & Tim” and “Go Jetters”.
Google on Monday pushed a small refresh to its native Search app for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad in the App Store. Bumped to version 14.0, the software features an optimized layout of the Now cards to make better use of the iPad's screen real estate.
“Updated structure for Now cards on iPad, designed to keep your content organized and better surface the info you need most,” reads a line from Google's release notes accompanying the 65.4-megabyte download.
Learn how to use Screen Time parental restrictions on your or your child’s iPhone and iPad to prevent accidental app deletions or block downloading new apps.