It's the weekend again, and once you get tired of playing Super Mario Run, you're going to be looking for other new apps and games to try. Never fear, iDB is here to help. In this week's Apps of the Week roundup, we have an awesome new black and white photo editor, a book-reading tracker, an app for buying things on-the-fly, and of course two new games for you to check out.
Aping Snapchat seems to have paid off in a major way for photo-sharing service Instagram as it announced passing a whopping 600 million users earlier today. The last hundred million Instagrammers joined the service in the past six months, said the Facebook-owned company.
Instagram infamously ripped off Snapchat Stories with its own Stories feature, which debuted in early-August.
Popular cloud-storage service Dropbox has refreshed its iPhone and iPad application on the App Store with three new features: bulk-renaming of photos, offline folders and recent save locations. In addition, the company announced a major infrastructure push enabling faster sync speeds thanks to several new proxy servers established across the globe, including accelerators in California, Texas, Virginia, New York, Washington, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong.
Instagram today announced a new feature in the mobile app for iOS and Android: Saved Posts. As the feature's name suggests, this lets you save posts you’d like to revisit later (don't worry, only you can see what you saved). Simply tap a new bookmark icon underneath a post in your feed to save it to a new, private tab on your profile, labeled Saved. This feature requires Instagram 10.2 for iOS, a free download from the App Store.
Taptaptap's Camera+, one of my favorite camera/image-editing apps, has received a major update on the App Store today. Bumping version number to 9.0, the new Camera+ enables both RAW shooting and editing on compatible iOS 10 devices. Moreover, the app brings out extensive support for the iPhone 7 Plus's dual-lens camera and wide color photography while implementing rich haptics on the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus.
Camera+ is available for $2.99 from the App Store.
Twitter today announced that users of its mobile app can now broadcast Periscope-powered live video. Why go live on Twitter? Because live video broadcasts “bring moments and events to life in a way that no other medium can,” said the popular microblogging service. This newly added feature requires an update to Twitter's mobile app, which is rolling out to everyone on the App Store today.
Snapchat today updated its iPhone and iPad app on the App Store with a trio of new features. You can now engage in groups chats with multiple users at once, create your own stickers from within the app and even identify a song that's currently playing around you thanks to Shazam integration.
There's also a new Paintbrush tool in Snapchat 9.45 for iOS that will turn your snaps into artistic-looking images.
This week's edition of our Apps of the Week roundup features some great selections, including a financial assistant, an email filtering client, and an app for watching news videos on-the-go. And as always, we've selected two great new games for you to check out this weekend.
Softorino, a purely European crew packed with talented developers, recently released WALTR 2 as a successor to the original app that's captured more than 500,000 downloads worldwide in just under 20 months since its debut.
A well-deserved success, if you ask me, because WALTR made it super easy to convert audio and video files encoded in “foreign” formats, such as DivX/MKV movies with subtitles and FLAC audio files, without requiring a jailbreak.
I raved about WALTR in my review, underscoring how its drag-and-drop simplicity allows just about anyone to bypass the mess that is iTunes. And boy, does it fly: in my tests, WALTR transcoded a 2.64-gigabyte MKV file on my 1.3 GHz Intel Core i5 mid-2013 MacBook Air into an iOS-friendly format and sent it over USB to my iPhone 6 in under two minutes.
Building on this remarkable engine, WALTR 2 is now available with new features like support for more than two-dozen legacy iPod models and other devices starting from iOS 5. It uses automatic metadata recognition that works perfectly, gives you the ability to transfer media to your device wirelessly, supports PDF and ePUB file formats and much, much more.
Based on the continuous growth of Wallet for ticketing services and Apple Pay, Apple’s bid to render cards and printouts a memory of the past has come a long way. Wallet makes handling and storing any type of ticket considerably simpler, which is why it is easy to get irritated today when presented with no other delivery option but an old-school paper pass. Thankfully Apple and other retailers are increasingly swinging towards the digital platform, but there are still countless cases where you just cannot add a ticket or voucher to your Wallet - even though it would make life so much easier.
Pass2U Wallet, a free app for iOS, taps into that need and conveniently bridges the gap. Just like Wallet itself it offers to scan hard copy barcodes in order to convert them to Wallet passes, however contrary to Apple’s Wallet it will practically work with any piece of paper imaginable. As such, Pass2U Wallet complements and enriches the stock Wallet app nicely, making sure you will be able to add anything you like to your iPhone’s Wallet. Find out more about the app in our review below.
According to Phil Schiller, Apple's Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, the App Store last month enjoyed the highest monthly sales ever since its inception in the summer of 2008. “November 2016 was a record breaker for the App Store—the highest monthly sales ever in its history,” reads the tweet.
Although Schiller didn't provide any hard numbers, in just two weeks during last year's holiday season the App Store raked in a massive $1.1 billion revenue from sales of iOS apps and In-App Purchases.
Single Sign-On, a feature that allows supported video apps to use your saved cable credentials, is launching some time next week alongside iOS 10.2 for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch and tvOS 10.1 for the fourth-generation Apple TV. Ahead of these software updates, an additional four providers have pledged to support Single Sign-On at launch.