Most dating apps look for things you and potential mates both like. Hater is a new dating app that takes the opposite approach, basing your raw matches on lists of things you both hate, from important topics like politics to simple annoyances like social etiquette and fashion. Like Tinder, you'll still get to anonymously swipe left or right on potential matches, but unlike Tinder, you'll have a built-in list of things to bitch about together if/when you finally meet face-to-face.
It doesn't matter what your politics are — keeping yourself better informed and making your opinions known to your representatives makes for a stronger democracy. Countable makes it as easy as browsing your social feeds. It offers short, non-partisan summaries of news and upcoming legislations, providing unbiased arguments both for and against each bill, and also lets you send video message to your reps, or post opinions/votes on upcoming issues. It's old-school advocacy for a busy modern world.
Sir David Attenborough has spent decades of his life putting animals and other natural phenomena to film. Attenborough Story of Life is a new app that lets you peruse his work on a subject-by-subject basis. Included in the app are segments from such esteemed shows as Planet Earth, Blue Planet, and Life, covering everything from the tiniest insects to the largest creatures on Earth. A perfect warmup before Planet Earth II comes to the States.
This isn't your normal filter app. The hint's right there in the icon. Instead, Darkr tries to recreate the process of using a real-life darkroom to develop your photos. For starters, your camera roll appears as a bin of negatives. Select one, and it gives you a digital test strip to find the correct look, then takes you into an editor where you can crop, rotate, dodge, burn, blur, and tone the image. It has several built-in camera modes, including one that mimics a large-format camera, and as you might expect with a past-obsessed app, it only produces results in black and white.
Traveling during the holiday season is hard enough without having to guess how long the line through security will take, where you can pick up a last-minute gift, or whether or not you can find some Wi-Fi. FlightSpeak keeps you informed of all that and more. It has detailed information for over 300 airports worldwide, including up-to-date security wait times, store and restaurant locations — perfect for finding a pre-flight drink to calm your nerves — Wi-Fi information, and power outlets for charging your gadgets.
Your phone's browser most likely has a "private" mode built in, but a lot of times it doesn't do enough to completely protect your privacy. That's where Firefox Focus comes in. Backed by Mozilla, it automatically blocks a wide range of tracking tools, keeping you from being followed by advertisers and potentially unsavory suspects. It makes it extremely easy to erase your history, passwords, and cookies, and since many of the trackers it blocks are advertising-related, it might just speed up your browsing experience while cutting your data usage.
If you're over the age of, say, 20, odds are you have some old analog photo prints laying around. Instead of buying a scanner to digitize them, use the highly capable camera in your phone and the PhotoScan app from Google. It uses specialized algorithms to detect edges, correct perspective, rotate as needed, and stitch multiple exposures together to get rid of glare. It also integrates seamlessly with Google Photos, and as with nearly all software from Mountain View, it's completely free.
Staying true to their clean lines and minimalist design, Fellow takes their already exceptional kettle off of the stovetop and gives it a life of its own with Stagg EKG. Adding an electrical element makes way for variable temperature control, allowing you to choose your perfect temp ranging from 135F to 212F, while the hold option keeps your water hot for up to 30 minutes. A bluetooth upgrade lets you control and follow the process from your phone, as well as connects to your grinder and scale to help you master your brew for the perfect cup every time.
Presented by Fellow.
Like it or not, iMessage stickers are here to stay. Instead of bombarding your friends with animated characters that make their messages illegible, annoy them by fixing up their poorly-written texts with Grammar Snob. This smart sticker pack gives you a host of handwritten, red-inked annotations to let your friends and family know when they've made a typo or missed a common spelling, instantly sending them back to grade school in the most 21st century way possible.
Some people are hardcore planners, scheduling every trip down to the minute. The rest of us enjoy a bit of spontaneity, which often means finding a place to stay on short notice. One:Night is perfect for such outings. Built by The Standard, this new app gives you a choice of carefully-curated hotels offering single night stays in New York and LA beginning at 3:00 pm, with a selection that changes daily and rates that are guaranteed to be the lowest available. And since a place to sleep is only part of the equation, it also offers up suggested timelines that will help you enjoy both your accommodations and the surrounding neighborhood to the fullest.
Light painting is nothing new, but until now it took a lot of planning to do it with your iPhone. Pablo makes it easy. Likely named after Picasso, who did a whole series of light paintings, this app lets you capture both still photos and brief HD videos using nothing but your phone, a light, and, perhaps, a tripod. Most notably, it uses patent-pending tech to let you see the painting as it comes together, and has a built-in community to let you share your works and find new inspiration in the snaps of others.
After years of anticipation, everyone's favorite plumber is finally coming to the iPhone. Just not how you'd expect. Super Mario Run mixes endless runner gameplay with elements of traditional platformers, and offers three different game modes: traditional, battle, where you challenge a friend's best score, and a third where you create your own "kingdom" using coins you gain in the other modes. Unlike past Mario adventures, it's playable one-handed, and judging by the screenshots — it doesn't launch until later this year — it might be the best-looking Mario ever made.
It's not the first guitar tuning app. It's just the first from a company that actually makes guitars. Fender Tune is designed to let everyone from the beginner to the touring musician get the most of their guitar. It uses the company's proven DSP technology to ensure tuning accuracy, and adaptive feedback to help you along. There's also a section of tone tips that can help you get your amp and guitar sounding their best, a section of tips for beginners, and a variety of pre-set tuning options, with the ability to save your own custom tunings and upload them to Fender Connect for access across all your devices.
A must-have tool for designers since its first set of fan decks hit the market. Now you can enjoy all the color management and organization of the traditional set in a digital environment with Pantone Studio. This new app gives you access to their complete library of over 10,000 colors, with the ability to use your own photos to create and customizes palettes and mood boards. The app is free for basic use, while professionals can sign up for full acces for $8/mo or $60/year.
Art inspires. It teaches. It enriches our lives. Now you can explore a vast collection of works without a trip to the museum with a download of Google Arts & Culture. Created using artworks, artifacts, and essays from over 1,000 museums and archives, this sleek app showcases a different work and its history every day, lets you zoom in to see the brushstrokes of your favorite artists, gives you VR tours of culturally important locations, and can even provide design inspiration by letting you filter by color.
We all have things we want to do, places we want to go, movies we want to watch, books we want to read. Keeping track of all those things can be a chore. Soon makes it easy. This slick app lets you keep tabs on all sorts of things you plan on doing, and brings in content like photos, posters, previews, and more automatically to remind you why you wanted to do it in the first place. Even better, it's social, so you can organize trips with your friends, or, if you're just bored and looking for something to do, see what they've got planned.
Smartphone keyboard keys are rectangles. Our fingertips are not. The Wrio Hexagonal Keyboard uses its unique shape and layout to better match our own physiology and increase our accuracy and speed. Its layout is based on QWERTY that, combined with the large hexagonal key shape and personalized auto correction, will boost your typing speed by up to 70%. It also incorporates gestures for even faster editing and switching, supports up to five languages at once, and has over 1,000 built-in emoji for those times when words simply aren't enough.
We've all done it — left the conversation we were in to switch apps and do a Google search. Gboard lets you do the same thing right from your keyboard. Addresses, flight info, maps, images, and more all appear right below where you're typing, ready to share with a single tap. It also handles typical replacement keyboard duties like glide typing and emojis with ease, and, yes, it has a dedicated GIF section, too. Surprisingly iPhone-only.
We've all made a quick trip to Giphy to select just the right GIF to drop in a thread. With Giphy Keys, you don't even need to leave the app you're in. This alternative keyboard puts the service's entire library at your fingertips, starting with currently trending GIFs, and continuing with the ability to filter by mood, memes, or movies, or just search directly. You can also use hashtag commands to have it select an animation for you — #echo transforms your words into a GIF, for example — and with millions to choose from, there's no doubt it'll find one that's right for the moment.
It's widely accepted at this point that sugar is bad for you — especially the processed sugar that gets added to foods in an effort to make them more addictive/taste better. Sugar Rush lets you know just how much sugar has been added to anything you're thinking of eating just by scanning the UPC code. It shows you how many teaspoons (or, scarily, tablespoons) have been added, as well as the ratio of naturally occurring sugars to unnecessary additives. And since it works from anywhere you can get Internet, you can make the smart, healthy decision before you throw the stuff in your cart.
Given the number of message screenshots we see a day, it's obvious there are a lot of people who don't mind their conversations being public. Talkshow lets others follow your conversations in real time. To use it, simply start a "show", give it a name, invite your co-hosts from Facebook, Twitter, or your contacts, and start talking. Each show gets its own easily-sharable URL, and editors will be on the lookout for the best shows, boosting them to the front page of the app. You can also follow other shows, like individual messages, and even send reactions. No screenshots necessary.
Tattoos are a profound form of personal expression. They're also very permanent. Ink Hunter is a new app that lets you try out different pieces without the need for imagination or multiple removal procedures. It has a large gallery of premade sketches to try out (you can also load your own artwork in) and uses a square smile drawn on your skin to place the tattoo, so you know exactly how it's going on your body before you head to your local shop to get inked for real.
Wikipedia is one of the most amazing things on the Internet. Viki makes it even better. This slick app wraps the world's collaborative encyclopedia in a delicious wrapper of well considered typefaces and intuitive interfaces. It also gives you quick access to articles about things nearby, lets you bookmark frequently read articles, and uses VLC integration to display the wide range of media formats used by the site. And thanks to slick, native code, it scales from the Watch to the iPad Pro gracefully.
The people who make our phones try to keep them secure — some more than others. Lookout just goes one step farther. It monitors your software, making sure things are up to date and ensuring that nothing nefarious is going on behind the scenes. It can backup your data, so you know your contacts and photos are safe. It can also let you know your phone's current location, sound an alarm to help you find it, send an alert if, say, the SIM card gets removed (suggesting it's been stolen), and, for those with an Apple Watch, can serve as a virtual leash, letting you know if your phone and wrist stray too far apart.
It sounds like a dream — no more having to thumb through your voicemail, deleting messages from people you don't want to talk to, or worse, dialing in and and listening to them one by one. With No More Voicemail, it's a reality. Using conditional call forwarding, it sends all your ignored and unanswered calls to an endless ringing loop, ensuring you never have to deal with another voicemail again. Should you decide you miss the inconvenience of phantom voices on your phone, it's just as easy to deactivate and put things back as they were.
Sharing songs using your smartphone is challenging at best, and can quickly squash a listening experience. Flo Music is an app for your smart phone that allows a host to download the app, invite friends and family to join your group, and all enjoy a shared music experience. Flo uses WiFi networks to connect everyone. Turning a WiFi network into a virtual jukebox. And Flo will even work without WiFi, acting as a hotspot so the music never stops. And with Flo Sync Mode, you can put away that headphone splitter and still share the same tunes as all connected devices play the same music at the same time. Up to 10 users can share one playlist, and everyone in the group can add songs. The host who initiated the group has the power to skip songs, pause, and approve who joins. It integrates with music apps like Spotify and SoundCloud and is the easiest, most collaborative way to enjoy your favorite songs together.
Presented by Flo Music.
Love it or hate it, there's no denying the screen on the Apple Watch isn't what you'd call "big". In fact, it's rather small. Tiny, even. A Tiny Game of Pong brings the classic '70s arcade hit to Apple's high-tech timepiece. You use the digital crown to move your paddle back and forth, get ten theme colors to match your strap, two game modes — arcade mode, unlocked from the start, and Classic playoff mode, available via in-app purchase — and Game Center integration. Far more fun than checking your activity progress for the third time this hour.
Qz.com does a great job of presenting the most important news of the day. The Quartz app might be even better. Instead of making you scroll through a list of headlines, it tells you what's going on in a conversational way, letting you interact with its well-informed robots like you would a buddy, and uses your responses to guide the action. For Apple Watch aficionados, it has a complication that shows you the current state of the market via emoji, and quizzes and haikus to enjoy when you're finished digesting current events.
New Year's resolutions, health goals, and normal fitness trackers not enough to get you up and active? Use shame as your motivation by downloading Cakewalk. This humorous app uses the sensors in your iPhone to track your movement, and sends you a message each morning telling you how much you moved — or how little — the day before. Built-in challenges and a friend-based leaderboard give you added incentives, an Apple Watch app lets you keep track of your progress on your wrist, and if all that isn't enough, you can set the app up to publicly shame you on social media. It's fitness tracking for the lazy.
Our phones are great communication tools, but the traditional phone call is terribly inefficient — both people have to be available, and productivity grinds to a halt while you're talking. Roger lets you keep in touch with friends and family on an on-demand basis. Built by the people behind Spotify, you simply enter the person's phone number, tap to talk, and then tap to listen when they reply. It's a modern-day walkie talkie, no unsightly antennas required.
