This Week's Sponsor:

Listen Later

Listen to Articles as Podcasts


Posts tagged with "iOS 7"

My Finances Lets You View Your Income and Expenses at a Glance

If you just want to keep tabs on your expenditures and income without the overhead of managing a budget, My Finances is a lightweight iPhone app that gives you a glance at how you’re spending your money and what your net worth is at any given time. Put expenditures into categories, track how you’re spending over time, and make quick decisions on whether you’re spending too much. To begin tracking, My Finances lets you enter a starting value in the settings to create a baseline. The app doesn’t connect to your bank to automatically track spending, but it does you mindful since you have to enter each transaction yourself. Setting up basic categories for gas, groceries, public transportation, and eating out can go a long way towards becoming aware of where your money is really going. The app is free to download, but an in-app purchase for $3.99 unlocks all of the features.

Permalink

Audiophone Lets You Stream Music to Your iPhone Without Limitations

Provided you use Subsonic, Audiophone lets you take your personal music collection with you wherever you go. As an alternative to online storage solutions like Amazon’s Cloud Player, Google’s Play Music, or iTunes Match, Audiophone is about giving you direct access to your library from your personal computer. Want to listen to songs encoded in FLAC and WAV on your iPhone? Because it’s a music player that piggybacks off of Subsonic, the music can be transcoded and pre-buffered so that your streamed tunes can make the most out of your available bandwidth, no matter where you are. Like Genius in iTunes, Audiophone can also generate playlists based on your favorite songs on the fly. Plus, it includes support for AirPlay so you can stream music to a pair of speakers through an AirPort Express or your Apple TV. The app is $4.99 on the App Store, designed for listener who wants to end-to-end control over their music streaming experience.

Permalink

Zippy: A Task Manager With Insights

There’s lots of task managers on the iPhone, but how many break down just how good you are at getting things done? Zippy adds some recent features that have found their way into apps like Mailbox, such as a flyover grid of options for snoozing tasks until a later date, and maintains a list of completed tasks and whether you’ve completed them on time. Tags help keep your tasks organized so you can attribute things to home, work, and personal projects, and view tasks per tag. Perhaps the only improvement Zippy could make is the ability to add tags when creating tasks themselves. The insight’s tab is Zippy’s most original feature, and it breaks down things like when you complete tasks, how good you are at planning in advance, and what times of the day you’re most likely to mark things as done. Analyze your daily routine and replace your stack of sticky notes with Zippy, which is only a dollar until March 4th. Grab it from the App Store.

Permalink

Yahoo News Digest 1.1 Adds “What You’ve Read” and Other Improvements

I’m a fan of Yahoo News Digest simply for the fact that it breaks me out of the tech news bubble in short spurts. The latest point update adds atoms for Weather and Statistics, new sharing options such as the ability to tweet Cover Posters, and a new “What You’ve Read” overview has been added that shows you a grid of what digests you’ve browsed through. Shown above, there’s also a little “Did you know?” section that now precedes extra articles in the app. Yahoo News Digest is free to download from the App Store.

Permalink

Setting Up a Family Friendly Environment on iOS with Restrictions, Guided Access, and OpenDNS

When I handed down my iPad to a loved one, they were given a device that would give them unlimited access to the Internet. For the first time, they could access the news and weather, research articles, and Google just about anything without having to rely on me or someone else to help them. iOS devices like the iPad are lauded because they make doing things like this ridiculously easy for someone who isn’t computer savvy, and I’m comforted in knowing that the iPad isn’t likely going to suddenly stop working or become infected by a virus. At the same time, I want to make sure their experience is pleasant, and that they don’t accidentally enter a password in a phishing site or stumble upon something that might be offensive to them. We either have parents or grandparents who’re just learning about what devices like the iPad can offer them, and it’s our job to make sure they stay safe.

Parents don’t want their young child stumbling upon anything they shouldn’t, and we certainly don’t want curious kids making accidental in-app purchases, rummaging through our email, or deleting personal apps. Parents want to create safe and fun environments for their children, especially if the intention is to use an iOS device as an educational tool.

In a family setting, it’s about striking a balance. How do you make it comfortable for the grownups in the house who want to use their devices as is, while keeping your child safe online?

Read more


The Unexpected Costs of Background Fetch

David Smith talks about how one of iOS 7’s most important features can unexpectedly increase costs for developers, as data is more frequently requested in the background.

My first example of this was when I added Background Fetch to Check the Weather. A weather app’s primary function is displaying up-to-the-minute, constantly changing data so in my initial iOS 7 update I experimented with adding highly frequent background updates. The result was far more dramatic than I’d expected. […]

Permalink

Units is a Highly Customizable Unit Converter

Units avoids needless scrolling through its sizable library of measurements by letting you search and favorite pairs of units, which saves oft-used conversions in a personalized list. The app can make conversions for just about anything you can think of, like units of data, force, luminance, and time. Like similar converters, the design is split between two columns of units, which you simply line up to make a conversion. A basic calculator is built into the app so you can perform basic operations like adding and multiplying. The app is fully customizable, letting you change the font, font color, and background color, so you can mix and match styles to your liking. The app’s $2.99 on the App Store.

Units doesn’t convert currencies, so for that you may want to check out Banca instead.

Permalink

Wordsalad Generates Beautiful Word Clouds

If you want to present an idea or just create a cool word cloud, Wordsalad for iPhone and iPad takes a bunch of words and generates a beautiful image that you can export in full HD in PNG or PDF formats. The app is able to pick out the most important words and bring those forward, filtering out unimportant words like articles, prepositions, and pronouns. You can customize the result by changing fonts, colors, and word layouts. Great for posters, presentations, and brainstorming, Wordsalad is $2.99 in the App Store.

Permalink

Reporter for iPhone Privately Tracks Your Life Story

Ellis Hamburger for The Verge on Reporter, a new app that tracks your daily activities:

Reporter works by buzzing you several times per day with a brief quiz based on the questions Felton asks himself. They range from “Where are you?” to “What are you doing?” and “Who are you with?” Some questions can be answered by tapping Yes or No, while others are multiple choice questions, let you type in text, or offer a location picker that polls Foursquare for nearby places. You can also add your own questions (like “Are you happy?”) or program certain questions to occur only when you hit the app’s Awake or Sleep switch (like “How did you sleep?” and “What did you learn today?”). Each time you report, the app also pulls in various pieces of information like the current weather, how many steps you’ve taken today (using the iPhone 5s’ M7 motion coprocessor), and how noisy it is around you using your phone’s mic.

There’s lots of little interesting things that bubble up in Ellis’ review, such as Nicholas Felton’s ideas for printing your records into a book. The best thing about this app is that everything stays on your phone and you can export it in CSV or JSON. The downside is that you have consistently use the app to make it work. The app only costs a few bucks on the App Store, and the website looks great.

Permalink