The Week in iOS Apps: App-icurious

This week’s roundup of iPhone and iPad apps includes a fresh update for a much-loved cooking app. Also featured: new apps for those who love photos, scheduling, studying, and their dogs.

This free iPhone app is like the Hotels.com or Airbnb of the dog world, letting users find a safe and trusted pet sitter when the occasion requires—and often at half the price of local kennels. The latest version of the app is updated for iOS 7; users can pinch and zoom on photos of host properties, save those photos to their phone, and share them via social media. Hosts, meanwhile, can now upload multiple photos at once, giving pet owners visual proof that Fido is doing well.

The free Epicurious app for iPhone and iPad has been revamped for iOS 7, with new fonts and bigger pictures to make cooking easier. There are more than 30,000 recipes to choose from; favorites can be stored to a “recipe box” and users now have a shopping list to guide their grocery store trips. The iPad version of the app also includes a “cook mode” that features voice commands to guide users through a recipe.

Version 2.0 of this $1 student planning app for iPhone and iPad offers a bunch of new features—students can list their goals, track progress across multiple semesters, and even call their teacher directly from the app. The iPad version of the app also lets users view the information in landscape mode.

A recent trend in iOS apps aims to help users read more quickly. The $3 Outread is the latest entry into the Evelyn Wood school: users access their read-it-later app—Pocket, Instapaper, or Readbility—set the reading speed, then try to keep up with the highlighting marker as it speeds across the lines of text. Articles can even be read offline.

This free iPhone photo editor offers a few more features than its free peers—more filters and tools than in basic picture apps—and in-app purchases make it more versatile yet. New shape and crop tools have been added to the app in recent weeks; the latest update also fixes crashes present in earlier versions.

Need a free, iOS-based version of PowerPoint for your iPad? The latest updates to Presentics presentation app add font styling—bold, italic, underline, and the rest—as well as improved display of images, a redesigned user interface that includes a new presentation view, and a new start button.

The update to the $1 Reddit app for iPhone is photo-oriented: users can turn their phone to landscape mode to see picture-heavy subreddit threads transform into galleries. Favorite photos can also be saved directly to the phone. Plus, you can still perform the major Reddit functions of upvoting, downvoting, and link-sharing.

This new newsreading app functions a lot like Zite, streaming stories from thousands of new sources and displaying them based on preferences gleaned from a user’s social networks. (Users sign in using their Facebook or Twitter accounts.) Add or subtract news streams then share favorite stories via social networks.

Feedly (pictured) is sporting a new iPad design … Polamatic has been redesigned … and Twitteriffic now includes the live-streaming of Twitter feeds.