This week’s roundup of new and updated iOS apps features a novel way to put your kids to work. Plus, a game that really lets you use your head, and a tour of the National History Museum.
This cloud storage app for iOS has been completely redesigned with a new user interface; an improved preview for documents, photos, and videos; faster document rendering and photo loading; and improved sharing. Users who download the app in its first 30 days of availability get 50GB of free storage for life. (The service offers 10GB for free; 100GB is $10 a month.)
Need help motivating your kids to do household tasks? Chore-inator, a $3 iPad app, puts them to work. Parents take photos and assign tasks; kids can then take pictures of the completed tasks as proof they’ve done the work. Parents can also use the app to mark the chores complete or incomplete, and to monitor payment of allowances.
A further opportunity, if you need one, to re-create the Android experience on your iOS device. Google Play Movies & TV isn’t quite like having iTunes on your iPad—you can play back TV shows and movies, but thanks to Apple’s restrictions, you’ll have to buy or rent them on the Web.
Perhaps you’ve seen those annoying YouTube videos where the user forgot to turn their iPhone into landscape mode to properly capture images, leaving a tall thin image that appears as if you’re peeking through a door crack. Horizon, a $1 video app, lets you shoot your video holding the camera in any position and still deliver a video in landscape orientation. The secret? Your phone’s gyroscope.
This $5 app lets you tour the National History Museum, guided by the silky tones of Sir David Attenborough. It’s great for taking a virtual tour, but also has additional clips that you can unlock when actually visiting the museum.
This popular calendar app has been updated, expanding from iPhone-only to the iPad, too. The update also includes week and month views to help you track your schedule; additionally, it now updates in the background so that your latest events are available as soon as you open the app.
Ready to put a Kinect into your iPad? This free iOS game isn’t necessarily all that thrilling—you fly around and collect rewards along the way—except as a demonstration of Unmoove’s motion-capture technology: You control the flight using your head motions, captured by the front-facing camera on your device. ( See a video here.) As nifty as it is on its own, we’re more excited to see what comes of this tech in games down the road.
The $5 kids app lets your child interact with Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber as they go through a “a fun and interactive TV episode about building a strong foundation.” And for parents who hate playing the same video over and over for their kids, good news: Varied activities within the app make each time through a different experence.
Vine has focus improvements … Hotels.com has been redesigned … and Evomail has improved support for IMAP accounts.
