All the best iPhone apps in one place - what more could you ask for?
Apple’s App Store boasts one of the most extensive collections of apps this side of the sun. Inside you can pretty much find anything – and we mean anything. But what are the best and, more importantly, which are worth having on your iPhone?
In a bid to locate, download and test the best apps for iPhone in 2013 we’ve been tinkering with applications all year to bring you a list of the best apps in the run up to Christmas. We’ll be adding 10 new applications to this list every week as December 25 approaches.
To keep things tidy we’ve decided not to include the big apps that every man and his dog knows about –– Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google Mail and the like. Instead, we’re focusing on useful applications that might have slipped under your radar.
So, without further ado, here's our pick of the best.
Normal: Battery Analytics (£0.69)
Battery drain is a huge pain for every iPhone user, but the rate at which your battery drains can vary from user to user even if they are using the exact same model of iPhone. That’s because there are plenty of apps which are big battery hogs. That’s where Normal comes in. The app identifies the worst battery hogs on your device and advises you what you can do to get them to stop draining the battery so much. Best of all it shows you a chart for each app that easily explains how much battery life you’ll gain if you delete the app entirely. I had one app that was sucking a whopping 4.5 hours of my battery life. Thanks to this app I found out what it was and now my iPhone lasts much longer on a single charge.
Photo Sphere Camera (free)
Google’s spherical photo app for Android finally comes to iOS. Photo Sphere Camera lets you take 360º photos with your iPhone 4S or above. In that way it’s not too much different than other spherical photo apps for iOS, but Google has done a great job with the user interface. This app looks like it belongs on the iPhone. You can also upload your 360º photos and publish them on Google Maps as soon as you're done shooting.
Sickweather (free)
Sickweather is billed as the first doppler radar for sickness. The app uses social media reports to plot the location of outbreaks of Flu, Norovirus, Pink Eye, Whooping Cough, and 19 other illnesses. If you’re in the US the reports are displayed on a 5 Day radar map so you can see color-coded locals of outbreaks. People in other countries can still use the app to report outbreaks and lookup recent illness reports. Sickweather is the perfect app for both parents with young children and hypochondriacs.
Uncanny X-Men: Days of Future Past (£1.99)
This X-Men game is one of the funnest I’ve played on the iPhone (it works on the iPad too). If you’re a comic fan you’ll know the storyline already: it’s the future and mutant are being hunted to extinction by the Sentinel robots. Matter of fact the latest X-Men movie was based on this storyline, but this game is based firmly in the comic world, which is obvious from both the artwork and characters used. You can play as Wolverine, Storm, Kitty Pryde, Colossus, Cyclops, Polaris or Scarlet Witch as you side-scroll through worlds including a post-apocalyptic New York City, Washington D.C., Savage Lands, Asteroid M and more. The gameplay harks back to classic arcade games, but best of all is this game, refreshingly, has no in-app purchases or adverts. Pay once, play forever.
Notifyr (free)
In OS X 10.10 Yosemite coming this fall Apple has introduced a new feature called Continuity which allows iPhone users to send and receive plain old text messages and phone calls on their Mac. However, Apple’s features leave out support for third-party apps like What’sApp. That’s where Notifyr comes in. Notifyr sends push messages from apps like WhatsApp and Instagram directly to the Notification Center in OS X 10.9. The app pairs your iPhone with your Mac viaBluetooth and once paired the first time, connects automatically each time your devices are in range. Keep in mind you’ll need an iPhone 4S or higher and a relatively recent (last three years) Mac.
Google Analytics (free)
After years of cries for this app from webmasters, Google finally answered their prayers last week. This app is the company’s official mobile version of its Analytics tools that until now have been web-only. The app allows users to monitor all their web and app data from their iPhone including viewing real-time metrics, and delving into audience, acquisition, and behavior metrics. There are actually a lot of third-party Google Analytics apps that OFFER
more features, but we suspect Google is only just getting started with this app.
more features, but we suspect Google is only just getting started with this app.Lingua.ly (free)
Lingua.ly is another app that aims to teach you a foreign language--only this app takes a unique approach to how it teaches you. The app shows you foreign news articles in their native language which you must read. If you don't know what a specific word means, tap on it to see its meaning. Words you tap on are also then saved and made into flashcards and games that are then used to help you commit the unknown words to memory. I love the current news article take as it keeps you abreast of current affairs and works your mind differently than most language learning apps that just ask you to translate generic phrases do. Lingua.ly currently can teach you French, English, Spanish, Russian, Arabic and Hebrew.
MapHook (free)
Have you ever been walking around somewhere and seen something cool? That something “cool” could be a beautiful piece of street art or a new cafe or even a shirt in a store window. The premise behind MapHook is we all see many cool things each day but there isn’t a good way to make note of what, where, when, and how we felt about what we saw. That’s where this app comes in. It’s a location-based journal that allows us to take on-location notes, photos, and video of the stuff we see and journal about it within the app. The app also allows us to share these entries with others and browse a collection of public entries, which the makers hope will prod people to explore their cities more and become aware of interesting places they didn’t know existed.
Pocket Drive + (£2.99)
Pocket Drive is the iOS file manager Apple forgot. Put this app on your iPhone and it turns it into a wireless hard drive. Launch the app and your iPhone appears in your Mac’s Finder or Windows Explorer as an external drive, then simply drag and drop your files between your PC and iPhone. There’s no syncing or any kind of connection setup to go through. The app just works. The paid version allows you to use all the free space on your iPhone (or iPad) to store files. But there’s also a free version with in-app purchases that gives you 512MB of space for free and allows you to buy more space as you need it. Pocket Drive is the best file manager for iOS I’ve ever used–and that’s saying something, because I’ve used them all. Download it today.
Pedometer++ (free)
Pedometer++ was one of the first apps to take advantage of the iPhone 5s’ M7 motion coprocessor--and it’s still one of the best. I love the app so much because it does one thing only and does it well: it tracks the number of steps you take in a day and displays your results on a beautiful bar chart. The app will also show you if you’re on track to hitting your step goal each day, which you can configure in the app’s settings. So often fitness apps try to be everything to everyone, but Pedometer++ wisely knows that sometimes people just want a simple fitness tracking solution.
YouCam Snap (free with IAP)
Are you one of those people that sit in a lot of meetings or presentations and use your smartphone’s camera to snap pics of important slides from keynotes? If so, you’ll love the YouCam Snap app. The app automatically de-skews any picture you snap with it. For example, if you’re sitting in the corner of a room and take a picture of a slide, in the photo one end of the slide will appear bigger than the other (or skewed) due to the camera’s location. YouCam Snap allows you to crop out just the slide from the photo and then automatically de-skews it and saves it as a PDF. What you end up with is the perfect image of the slide as if you had saved the original file right to your iPhone.
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