Apple on Thursday named Tapinator's "Combo Quest" its App of the Week for this week. This means that for the next 7 days, you'll be able to grab the popular role playing game for free for both your iPhone and iPad—a nice little savings of $1.
For those unfamiliar with the title, Combo Quest is an epic, time-tap role-playing adventure. You play a knight that must fend off vicious enemies and terrifying beasts on a heroic quest to retrieve the Combo Crown, taken by a mischievous dragon.
HBO on Thursday pushed out an update for its HBO Now streaming app, bringing the iOS client to version 1.3. The update is a significant one for folks running iOS 9, particularly those with a late-model iPad, as it adds compatibility with some of the new software's features.
The most important of those features is Picture in Picture, which allows [newer] iPad owners to watch videos in a small, standalone window while using other apps. Additionally, the update adds support for Spotlight Search, as well as various other bug fixes and improvements.
Electronics Arts' newest racing game on mobile, called Need for Speed: No Limits, is now available in the App Store as a freemium download. Created by developer Firemonkeys which brought you Real Racing 3, this new game challenges you to become a reckless yet respected driver.
A stable of sports cars available in No Limits include the Subaru BRZ, BMW M4, McLaren 650s, Porsche 911 and many more. Unlike previous Need for Speed Games, No Limits is big on customization.
Microsoft today updated OneDrive for the iPhone and iPad, its cloud-storage client app, with several new features such as a simpler way to share things with an all-new radial contextual menu and cool new ways to work with and annotate PDF files.
For starters, you can now draw smiley faces or whatever your like on PDF files, sign documents and more. And thanks to OneDrive's newly gained Outlook integration, you can share OneDrive files as email attachments through Outlook, if it's installed.
OneDrive's Document Picker extension on devices with iOS 8 or later permits you to open your cloud files in third-party apps like Keynote and Pages. Oh, and you can now see folders shared with you, alongside your own OneDrive folders, and sync them on your computer.
The App Store offers several high-quality apps that help you create strong passwords for various services, manage your passwords and synchronize them between devices with ease, AgileBits' freemium 1Password being perhaps the most popular one.
But there's now a brand new password manager on the block which takes a clever approach to securing all your online accounts with strong passwords but without having to actually remember them.
How about re-creating passwords from recipes?
Welcome to Naranja Studio's Password Chef, a novel $2.99 app for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad which takes advantage of unique recipes to basically turn any site name into an easy-to-recall password, canceling the need for additional software or devices.
Apple has named Nickelodeon's "Doodle Jump SpongeBob SquarePants" its App of the Week for this week. This means that from now through next Thursday, you could grab the special SpongeBob edition of the popular platformer for free—a solid savings of $2.
In the game, players are tasked with restoring order to Bikini Bottom after Plankton and his crew steal the Krabby Patty Secret Formula. You do this by helping Doodle Jump SpongeBob jump up and across the sea, blasting bubbles at anyone who gets in his way.
Following its Android debut nearly two and a half years ago, Google's note-taking mobile software, called Keep, is now available to download from the App Store.
Featuring Google's Material Design, the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad app offers a nicely rounded set of features commonly found in other note-taking apps but with less bloat and clutter. Needless to say, Keep benefits tremendously from seamless integration with other Google products and technologies.
Notes created in Keep can be accessed, edited and managed on iOS, Android and on the web, via a Keep web app. Google Keep is a free download so give it a try and let us know how you like it in comments.
Apple today refreshed its official XcodeGhost FAQ webpage, listing the top 25 iPhone and iPad apps on the App Store that contain the widely reported though mostly harmless XcodeGhost malware.
In addition to WeChat, one of the top messaging apps in the world, Rovio's Angry Birds 2 and China Unicom’s Customer Service app, most of the listed apps are distributed on the Chinese App Store only.
“If users have one of these apps, they should update the affected app which will fix the issue on the user’s device,” writes the company. “If the app is available on App Store, it has been updated, if it isn’t available it should be updated very soon.”
Apple has pulled many of the infected apps and said it's working closely with developers to get impacted apps back on the App Store.
Twitterrific 5, The Iconfactory's freemium Twitter client for iOS and OS X platforms, has received its iOS 9-focused update this morning.
The app is now fully optimized for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad devices running iOS 9 and supports new Slide Over and Split View multitasking modes on compatible iPads. If you own an iPad Air 2 or an iPad mini 4, you can now run Twitterrific and another app side-by-side in iOS 9's new Split View mode.
This is a great feature as you can now pin Twitterrific on the right and configure it to use Safari as your browser instead of in-app. In addition to iOS 9-specific support, this edition of Twitterrific includes other changes and improvements listed further below.
Spark, Readdle's excellent iPhone app for Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, iCloud and other email services, is now compatible with iOS 9 features, including 3D Touch on new iPhones.
Spark 1.2 for iPhone also includes the ability to select any email account or alias as default FROM: address for new emails. The app now lets you customize canned replies to your liking and includes a host of other improvements.
Pixelmator, the tremendously popular Photoshop replacement available for both iOS and OS X platforms, today gained an update which adds several new features on iPhone, iPod touch and iPad devices.
For starters, Pixelmator 2.1 for iOS is now fully compatible with iOS 9 (in fact, it's now an iOS 9-only app) and supports Slide Over and Split View iPad multitasking modes.
With Split View on compatible iPads, customers can use Pixelmator and any other app at the same time. More importantly, the app now opening and editing images in 8K resolution.
The XcodeGhost malware couldn't have arrived at worst time for Apple as the company prepares to launch its iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus tomorrow. The company has already removed the App Store apps infected by the malware, which has been found to inject its payload into apps compiled with compromised copies of Xcode that were distributed on non-Apple servers in China.
Wednesday, the Cupertino firm has confirmed plans to mitigate the threat by hosting local Xcode downloads within China. In addition, Apple has posted an XcodeGhost FAQ webpage on its Chinese website detailing the XcodeGhost malware and how customers might be affected by it.