Apps

The award-winning ‘Sky Guide’ is free right now within the Apple Store app

Those of you who enjoy app deals will be interested to know that Sky Guide is available for free right now. Apple is currently offering promo codes for the award-winning star-gazer, which typically costs $1.99, within its Apple Store app.

For those who aren't familiar with it, Sky Guide is a star and constellation guide that automatically aligns itself when you hold your device up to the sky. There may be many apps like it, but none of them are more beautiful or easy to use.

Pac-Man receives big update, goes on sale for 35th anniversary

It may be hard to believe, but Pac-Man is celebrating its 35th birthday this weekend. The popular pellet-gobbling arcade game made its debut 35 years ago on May 22, 1980 (it launched first in Japan, and then Midway brought it to the US in October).

Unsurprisingly, Bandai Namco is going above and beyond to honor the anniversary. It's hosting a party in Chicago with the creator of Pac-Man Professor Toru Iwatani tonight, and it's pushed out an update and discount for the iOS port of the game.

25 amazing apps and games are currently on sale for $0.99

Apple this week launched a new promotion in the App Store called 'Amazing Apps & Games for $0.99.' The curated section highlights 12 great apps and 13 popular games, which normally run between $2 and $6, that are currently on sale for less than a buck.

Among the offerings are the endless snowboarder Alto's Revenge, and premium creative apps like Procreate Pocket and Enlight. Many of these have already been mentioned in our App Recap, but we thought the deals were worth compiling into a single post.

Take a sneak peek at Spotify’s new experience with Running, activity-based playlists and more

An iDownloadBlog reader has sent in a number of gorgeous screenshots of Spotify's major iPhone revamp. The software was just released to Spotify's beta testers a few hours ago ahead of its impending public release.

You may have heard Spotify stepped on Apple's toes with the announcement of new media types like news, video and podcasts, along with a flurry of feature additions like activity-based playlists, a cool Running feature and more.

With that in mind, we urge you to take a look at the screenshots included below and see for yourself how the new Spotify experience on mobile looks like.

Physics-based puzzler ‘Magnetized’ goes free as Apple’s App of the Week

Apple has just named “Magnetized” its App of the Week for this week. This means that from now through next Thursday, you’ll be able to download the abstract physics puzzler for both iPhone and iPad for free—an awesome savings of $2.99.

In Magnetized, you are tasked with navigating a moving ball through a series of neon mazes using magnetic control points. It sounds simple at first, but the mazes get increasingly difficult, forcing you to try and master momentum and direction.

App Store highlights apps for Global Accessibility Awareness Day

In honor of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, Apple has begun highlighting apps with specialized accessibility features. The curated section features apps such as Instapaper, which offers text-to-speech, and Workflow, which can automate complex tasks, and is featured on the front page of the App Store.

Apple has long been praised for the accessibility features in iOS. Grammy Award-winning artist, who has been blind for most of his life, famously took time out of a concert to thank Steve Jobs and company for their work, saying "there’s nothing on the iPhone or the iPad that you can do, that I can’t do."

Asphalt 8 picks up new cars, exclusive decals, Tenerife track, widget support and more

Asphalt 8: Airborne, Gameloft's free-to-play arcade racing title for the iPhone and iPad, today received a major content update in the App Store. The game has gained a number of new cars, tracks and loads of other improvements, amongst them support for the Apple Watch and a widget for the iOS Notification Center.

Asphalt 8 was first to support Metal, Apple's new graphics framework in iOS 8 that makes graphics intensive games run smoother with more effects. Now Gameloft provides the latest Asphalt update as a 64-bit application that should run even faster on iPhones and iPads powered by Apple's A7 chip or newer.

Sunrise Calendar and Wunderlist integrate, letting you create and manage Wunderlist tasks in Sunrise

6Wunderkinder GmbH, the German developer behind the popular task/to-do app Wunderlist, and the team behind the cross-platform calendar application Sunrise Calendar, on Thursday announced feature-rich integration between the two apps.

The move allows fans of both services to create Wunderlist tasks directly in Sunrise, write a Wunderlist task as done and change its due date in Sunrise and more.

Flow by Outlook, Microsoft’s hybrid IM/email iPhone app, inadvertently leaked

Microsoft has inadvertently leaked an upcoming hybrid email and messaging app via a download webpage marked "Microsoft Confidential", ZDNet reported Wednesday.

Called 'Flow by Outlook,' the lightweight email app should release for the iPhone. It's being billed as a “great way to have rapid email conversations on your phone with the people who are important to you,” as per leaked changelog.

Free video calling in Facebook Messenger rolling out to all users worldwide

Facebook confirmed today that free video calling in its mobile Messenger application has begun rolling out to all users worldwide. The feature launched in select markets on April 27, 2015.

“Quick update on video calling in Messenger: we're happy to share we've now rolled out the capability globally, with the exception of a few countries we're still working on improving quality for,” David Marcus, Messaging at Facebook, wrote in a post on Facebook this morning.

SwiftKey keyboard launches theme store

SwiftKey, the popular gesture keyboard for iPhones, iPads ands iPods with iOS 8 or later, today launched a brand new theme store featuring a dozen themes for customizing the look and feel of its keyboard.

After debuting on Android in 2014, the built-in theme store is now available to iOS users with twelve newly designed themes, priced from 99 cents to $1.99.