
This week’s roundup of apps includes one offering that turns iPhone 6 users into an army of weather data collectors—who needs TV meteorologists when you can create your own weather forecasts?

An-gry Birds! More than meets the eye! An-gry Birds! Robots in disguise! Yup: The Angry Birds have apparently exhausted the possibilities of one sci-fi franchise and moved on to the next. This time it’s the Autobirds versus the Eggbots and, well, you get it. This week’s update rolls the game out to the entire planet, and features new weapons and other cool new features.

Speaking of beloved movie franchises turned into iOS games: Cars: Fast as Lightning is the official Disney-Pixar game based on the adventures of Lightning McQueen, Mater, and all their friends. Actor Owen Wilson, the voice of Lightning, even joins the fun for high-quality animated cutscenes. Mostly, though, there’s lots of racing.

This free photo album editor for iPhone is a lot like the Triage app for email: Both offerings let you dispose of unwanted content quickly by swiping up (to delete) or down (to keep); anybody with a reasonably good working thumb can pare down their photo library in just a few minutes.

This app for kids lets the play games that help them learn to code. Developers say: “ With CodeQuest they can create, innovate, and style their very first website in basic HTML and CSS. Within minutes they’ll be interacting with code as they have never done before.“ Have fun and learn a skill. That’s what iOS was made for, right?

We’ve long loved this family of note-taking apps for iOS, giving Drafts 3.0 a 4.5-mice rating. Version 4.0 has arrived with a number of new features, including support for any font installed on your device, an “arrange” feature that lets you drag and drop entire lines of text to a new location, version histories for your drafts, and improved Markdown support.

HDR tools can make still photography look a lot like a Led Zeppelin album cover; this $3 app lets you “record real-time tonemapped HDR video in HD resolution right from your iPhone 6” to create amazing video images. You can use tools to adjust contrast, saturation, noise reduction, and other details. Not recommended for pre-iPhone 6 phones.

If learning to code seems a bit utilitarian, kids can always learn to make their own TV using the new $3 TeleStory app. You can pick a scene to act out, write a script and choose a costume to be superimposed on your body, then shoot the video with dozens of characters, effects, and settings available to liven up the action.

This new app wants to turn iPhone 6 users into an army of weather data collectors: It uses the phone’s new barometer to take readings, then links you to a network of other WeatherSignal users and crowdsources your data, helping create weather forecasts. With the iPhone 6, you’re suddenly a mobile meteorologist.

News Republic has introduced a new news digest to let you survey the day’s headlines in three minutes… YouTube has been updated for compatibility with the iPhone 6 hear … and so has Skype.
Author: Joel Mathis

Joel Mathis is a regular contributor to Macworld and TechHive. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and young son.