Everything Apps
InstaGamer is a great companion to Instagram that lets you play the traditional matching game with photos from Instagram
InstaGamer is a fun iPhone and iPad game that's just like the classic matching game, only the things being matched are instagram photos. You can play with photos from the popular feed, specific tags, your own feed or photos, or photos you've liked.
A recent survey by a marketing firm called App-Promo shows that 59% of developers don't manage to make enough money from app sales to break even on costs, and 80% don't generate enough revenue to support a standalone business. 68% earned $5000 or less from their top app, while 12% earned $50,000 or more. Those top earners have around $30,000 set aside for a marketing budget. 64.5% of the apps created by those surveyed were paid, while 39.5% relied on advertising and 32.9% were freemium or lite versions of full apps.
Squiggles! for iPad is an adorable children's game that instructs the child user to draw squiggles on pictures so that they can come to life. For example, after drawing squiggles behind a few cars and tapping "GO", the squiggles will act as springs that push the cars across the screen -- with sound effects and all.
The popular music streaming service Spotify has updated their app with proper iPad support. Now you can enjoying millions of songs and discover and share music on your iPad's larger screen. The iPad version isn't simply a big version it's iPhone counterpart either -- it's optimized to take advantage of the larger screen and looks amazing.
Apple is currently rejecting apps that use the Dropbox SDK to provide integration with the popular cloud storage solution. The reason for the rejections is apparently that, under a specific but not inevitable set of circumstances, someone using an app with Dropbox integration could end up on Dropbox's web site and find a way to pay Dropbox for additional storage. That would violate Apple's prohibition against using external websites to circumvent Apple's 30% cut of subscriptions.
While iTunes is the undisputed king of digital music, it doesn't offer streaming or subscription services, leaving the field wide open for a wide variety of contenders, including Pandora, Slacker, and Spotify. That's important because not everyone wants to buy their music. Some iPhone users want more variety and a better way to discover new music, or simply re-discover old favorites. That's because music is personal. It has to suit both our general tastes and our mood at the moment. A good streaming music app needs to reflect this. It needs to have music available that we like, when we like, and the better it does that job, the better it is.
Pandora, Slacker, and Spotify each have their own unique take on streaming music, but which one does it best?
Instagram may not have a native app available on the iPad, but Iris App is here to fill that void. You may not be able to upload photos to the popular photo sharing service, but Iris App does allow you to browse your feed, featured photos, "like" and comment photos, and more.
The widely popular twitter client for iPhone and iPad, Tweetbot, has been updated to version 2.3 and brings with it some great new features, including a new tweet detail view with both inline conversations and replies, the ability to stop retweets from individual users, new gestures, and more.
A Lithuanian developer, LemonLabs, has recently published an interesting infographic detailing a few simple ways in which designers can prepare their assets for developers in a useful and sensible way. The advice ranges from simple standard resolutions for icons, to highlighting particular Apple style guidelines, and how to package your final bundle of assets. A lot of it seems like common sense, but I'm sure there are at least a few iOS developers out there who would like to make sure their designers have at least glanced over something like this.
A new jailbreak tweak called Quasar has just been released that will let you have multiple app windows open and live all at the same time. If you yearn for the opportunity to have your iPad running like a desktop, Quasar could be just what you've been looking for.
