This week’s roundup of new and updated apps let you see the Earth from a whole new perspective, track your expenses, or simply kill a bunch of bad guys.
Marco Arment keeps creating. The man who brought you Instapaper and The Magazine has a new app out— Bugshot, a $1 offering for iPhone and iPad that lets users quickly and easily annotate screenshots from their iOS device. Just draw an orange arrow or box around the item that needs attention, then share it via Twitter or Facebook. It’s perfect for reporting bugs and errors in those other apps.
Want all the creepy conspiracy theorizing of The Da Vinci Code with all the blood and mayhem of most first-person shooter games? Deus Ex: The Fall, a $7 offering for iPhone and iPad, brings you just that. The newest update fine-tunes all sorts of features, making your enemies smarter, increasing your rewards for obtaining objectives, making weapons more accurate, and generally just kicking a little bit more butt.
This $7 app for iPad actually launched a few weeks back, but we just noticed it and it’s the kind of thing we love: A seemingly endless supply of photos of Earth—its clouds, its continents, its landmarks—as seen from space. Everything’s a little bit cooler when viewed from hundreds of miles above, isn’t it?
This is already one of the best soccer apps out there, letting users watch live and on-demand video of games from the best leagues in the world (though you do have to pay a subscription fee to do so). This week’s update makes improvements around the edges, letting users filter videos based on the types of competition they prefer, while including information from rugby and Australian Rules football leagues in the app’s database.
Previous versions of Instacast have always rated highly with Macworld reviewers; this week’s update includes a number of small improvements, including support for paged podcast feeds, MP3 chapter links and images, and podcasts in Italian, Japanese, Dutch, Arabic, Danish, Polish, and Brazilian Portuguese.
Having trouble tracking your expenses? Spendee lets you record transactions in real time so that you can see where your money’s going. Users can either opt for the app’s “smart” categories or create their own custom categories of expenses; they can also snap pictures of bills and receipts to better organize their files. Better yet it’s secure, offering PIN code protection so only you know what you’re doing with your money.
This $2 game for iPhone and iPad is a sequel to the popular Sprinkle game of a few years back. In this version, an interplanetary trash hauler accidentally scatters its cargo over the islands of Titan. Your job is to put out the resulting fires while conserving as much water as possible.
Uber, which lets you hail a ride from your iPhone, has been a hugely popular service in the cities where it’s been allowed to thrive without hassle from authorities. The latest update will prove popular too, letting users agree to split the fare on a single ride. The upside? You can’t get stuck with the bill anymore. The downside? You can’t stick your friend with the bill anymore.
Author: Joel Mathis
Joel Mathis is a regular contributor to Macworld and TechHive. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and young son.