Apps

The developer behind the iOS app We Read Too says that, for her, coding has really lived up to Steve Jobs’s vision of “being at the intersection of technology and liberal arts.”

Kaya Thomas was interviewed by Apple about her app highlighting children’s books by Black authors or featuring Black characters …

Today, a team of designers and developers unveiled an incredible new Mac app dubbed “Freezeframe” that lets you save different workspaces for later. The app essentially takes a snapshot in time of your windows and tabs and lets you return to them through a handy menu bar icon. It’s like Mission Control on steroids.

Last year, I reviewed El Trackpad, which is an app that lets you control the mouse cursor on your Mac from an iPhone or iPad. However, the app requires the device to be connected to the Mac via USB, which is not ideal for some situations. Developer Hugo Lispector, who created El Trackpad, today released Controlly — a new app that uses PlayStation and Xbox controllers as remotes for Mac.

Mark Cuban is planning to enter the podcasting industry as soon as this year. According to a new report from the Verge, Cuban is planning to launch a new podcast app that allows hosts to “talk to fans live and monetize their conversations.”

If you’ve ever needed to record a podcast with other people, you probably know Call Recorder for Skype — which, as the name suggests, is a popular Mac app that lets users record conferences on Skype. Unfortunately, the app is being discontinued and will no longer be updated, mainly affecting users with M1 Macs.

Following a major interface overhaul in December last year, Apple today updated the Shazam app for iPhone and iPad with home screen widgets for iOS 14. The new widgets let users have quick access to the latest songs identified by the app.

Over the last week, the Reddit forum WallStreetBets has helped push stocks like GME (GameStop), AMC, and BB (BlackBerry) to new highs. New data from Appfigures today indicates how this viral retail investing trend has sent apps like Reddit and Robinhood to the top of Apple’s App Store charts.

Focos is a popular photo editor for iOS that brings advanced tools to edit images with depth field taken using Portrait Mode on iPhone. The app was updated this week with some interesting new features, including support for the Apple ProRAW image — which is available for iPhone 12 Pro users.

Two weeks ago, a report from Fast Company highlighted that Google had suspiciously not updated the vast majority of its iOS apps since December 7, a day before Apple required developers to provide a privacy report for every app available on the App Store. Following that report, Google quickly fired back and said it would start updating its iOS apps with the privacy labels as soon as that same week, the week of January 4.

Two weeks later, Google still hasn’t updated the vast majority of its iOS applications with these privacy labels, including its popular apps such as Gmail and YouTube. Even if Google has no mal-intent, this scattershot approach is leaving users puzzled and concerned.

App Annie’s annual State of Mobile report reveals that Americans now spend more time using apps than watching live TV.

The report also shows that consumer spending on apps grew by 20% last year, in large part driven by the pandemic boosting demand for home-based entertainment …

Microsoft has silently updated its Office apps to iOS today with some interesting features for iPad users. While Microsoft Word now supports mouse and trackpad interaction, the Excel app finally works with multi-window mode.

The Parler app is non-functional, and parler.com has gone offline, as Amazon Web Services discontinued service to the company. Both the website and the app relied on AWS for content distribution.

The social network was set up after Twitter started clamping down on disinformation and hate speech. However, both Apple and Google dropped the apps after it was revealed that Parler was used to help plan the attempted coup at the Capitol, and was being used to plan a second armed attack in DC ahead of the inauguration …

After giving Parler 24 hours to introduce new content moderation policies, Apple announced today that Parler has officially been kicked off the App Store. This means the app has been removed from the App Store for new downloads.

If you like to take some time to create your own music playlists, you know how hard it can be to keep them organized and, most importantly, give them a great name and cover artwork. With the Denim app, which was recently released on the App Store, you can easily create custom cover artwork for your playlists.