Apple’s 50 Billionth Download: Say the Same Thing.

Apple wrapped up its latest iOS App Store promotion on Wednesday when the 50 billionth app was downloaded, and Thursday morning the company announced the app thathit the major milestone was the free word guessing game Say the Same Thing. According to the company, iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users are downloading apps at more than 800 per second, or over 2 billion a month.

Apple's 50 billionth download: Say the Same ThingApple’s 50 billionth download: Say the Same Thing

The 50 billionth download was made by Brandon Ashmore of Mentor, Ohio. Mr. Ashmore was given a US$10,000 App Store gift card for making the 50 billionth download. Making that 50 billion number sound even more significant, Apple said re-downloads and app updates weren’t included in thier count.

Apple launched the App Store in 2008 with only 500 apps available, and that number has climbed to over 850,000, and over 350,000 of those are iPad-native. The App Store is available in 115 countries.

“The App Store completely transformed how people use their mobile devices and created a thriving app ecosystem that has paid out over nine billion dollars to developers,” said Apple senior vice president of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue. “We’re absolutely floored to cross this milestone in less than five years.”

Lemon Wallet: Create Passbook cards for your entire wallet and much more.

Lemon Wallet for iPhone review: Create Passbook cards for your entire wallet and much more

Lemon Wallet for iPhone is basically a virtual wallet similar to Passbook but picks up where it lacks. For instance, you can easily create Passbook cards with Lemon Wallet for any credit card, identification card, or rewards card regardless of whether or not that actual merchant supports Passbook. Lemon Wallet also has add-on paid features that allow you to track transactions and report a lost or stolen wallet for easy card replacement options.

Upon launching Lemon Wallet, you’ll be asked to sign up for a Lemon account. The process is quick and easy and relatively painless. You can pop into the settings portion of Lemon Wallet to fill out the rest of your information whenever you’d like but to create an account, you’re really only required to enter your email address and verify it. Simple enough.

To add cards, simply tap the camera icon and select the type of card you’d like to add. The camera app will populate and then ask you to snap a photo of the front and back of your card (or receipt). From there you’ll be asked to enter some information including the name as it is on the card, expiration, and to confirm the card number.

Lemon Wallet will automatically pull in numbers on credit cards but ask you to verify the image scan worked. For things such as driver’s licenses, while you can store them and create digital copies for Passbook import, you’ll need to manually enter them in since the format varies from state to state and country to country. You can also take photos of receipts and store them within Lemon Wallet as well which makes for an easy way to track business expenses on the go. Just snap a picture and enter the date and amount.

To add any card already in your Lemon Wallet to Passbook, just tap into the card and then tap on the menu option button in the upper right hand corner. This is where you’ll have the option to add Lemon Wallet to your Passbook app.

The interesting part of Lemon Wallet is actually its add-on service, Lemon Wallet PLUS. For either $4.99/month or $39.99/year you’ll get premium services that include active account monitoring, enhanced security with an additional passcode lock, card expiration alerts, and lost wallet services. If you ever lose your physical wallet, Lemon Wallet says you can cancel and replace your cards with basically a button tap. I haven’t personally utilized this service as my wallet isn’t lost, but I’d be interested to hear if anyone has, and how the experience was.

As far as viewing transactions with a premium plan, Lemon Wallet PLUS has the ability to tie in with BillGuard, one of our favorite Passbook compatible services in order to monitor transactions and alert you of any fraudulent activity that may be happening on any of the accounts you have linked.

If you aren’t sure about picking up Lemon Wallet PLUS right off the bat, you can try it for free for 15 days.

The good

  • Better interface and design than most third party wallet apps available
  • Turn any card you own into a digital Passbook card
  • Lost Wallet service makes it less of a hassle to replace stolen and lost credit cards and ID cards
  • No credit card needed to try premium services before you decide to buy

The bad

  • You’ll have to have the premium version to add a secure access code to the app, which is a downer considering the app contains highly sensitive information. This should be an option for everyone, not only premium users

The bottom line

While Passbook does a good job of storing cards for merchants that have supported the service, it’s still lacking. Lemon Wallet can somewhat bridge that gap and allow you to finally track all your cards and information in one place. Whether you use Lemon Wallet exclusively or use it as a middleman to Passbook, it does what it says it does, and it does it well.

Source : iMore.

Keep Track Of Every Little Thing With EveryThink, Now Updated.

Drag, hover, drop your way to GTD.

Drag, hover, drop your way to GTD.

EveryThink, an amazing get-it-all-done-and-in-one-place app, has just updated to version 1.3.1, bringing a host of improvements to an already pretty great app.

The new update adds Dropbox to the already existing Google Drive support, meeting invitations from within the app itself, Siri Reminder integration, and Facebook support, which brings contact photos and Facebook calendar events in automatically.

New usability features have also been added, including a guided introduction to the many features of the EveryThink app, as well as landscape orientation, so you can hold your iPhone the way you want to and still use the spatial organization central to the app’s interface.

EveryThink lets you add calendar events and various documents and data associated with them, like adding presentations, spreadsheets, PDFs, and even voice notes all attached on the specific calendar entry. You use the app with what the developers call a “Drag-hover-Drop” move, which lets you connect all these important things together with the gestural system. A short video from the team explains more:

“I was frustrated by the fragmented support for managing personal information in the mobile environment,” said CEO Yair Grinbergin a statement. “Current digital devices organize information separately by type – rather than by content and use. This approach creates a counter-productive paradigm. EveryThink strives to organize information the way people actually think and work.”

The new interface and integration improvements were created with help from user feedback and EveryThink’s strategic plan to become the best mobile personal information management app out there.

You can grab the updated EveryThink app in the App Store now for $4.99, a cool half off the regular price.

Source: Cult of Mac.

Universal agrees to deal with Apple for iRadio.

Apple-Radio

iRadio is getting closer to reality, so audiophiles, get ready.

People familiar with negations claim that Apple has reached a deal with Universal Music Group, which is the largest record company in the world. Sources claim that the deal is much better than the one record labels currently have with Pandora, and the same deal is on the table for other label companies (other companies may not be as willing, though). Apple is reportedly planning on paying the same, or even more, than Pandora currently does to gain access to music for iRadio.

The new service will reportedly be available on mobile devices, and include features not available on Pandora such as the ability to rewind songs, and have a button available to easily purchase music.

Are you excited about iRadio? Will you use the service? Would you prefer to use an Apple service over the similar existing streaming services such as Pandora or even Spotify? Leave us a comment and let us know!

Source: TodaysiPhone.

Amazon Cloud Drive Photos app for iPhone lands on the App Store.

amazoncloud

Amazon’s been hard at work over the past year releasing cloud-based apps and services in a desperate effort to keep up with the modern trends in technology and media consumption. The latest addition to the ever-expanding portfolio of apps and services is Cloud Drive Photos, which does exactly what the name suggests it does.

The app essentially allows users to upload, manage, access and view cloud photos on their iPhones. As per the App Store description:

- Store and secure thousands of photos in your Amazon Cloud Drive 
– Protect your memories – photos from your iPhone or iPod touch are automatically saved to Cloud Drive whenever the app is running 
– Have access to your entire photo collection in the Amazon Cloud, even those that aren’t in your Camera Roll 
– View your photo albums in stunning layouts from your iPhone or iPod touch 
– Share your Cloud Drive photos on Facebook, Twitter, and through e-mail

Whether we need this as well as the countless other similar apps is yet to be seen. But, for those of you who regularly make use of Amazon’s cloud service, this app should be a no-brainer. As you’d expect, Amazon Cloud Drive Photos is a free download and is compatible with any iPhone or iPod touch running iOS 6.0 or later.

Source: TodaysiPhone.

Five apps that’ll help you follow the 2013 NFL Draft.

It’s a big day for football fans who are gearing up for the 2013 NFL draft. The first round picks start tonight, Thursday, April 25, at 8:00 pm ET, followed by the second and third round on Friday and Saturday, respectively. Use one or all of these iOS apps below to bone up on the draft picks as well as follow the NFL draft live for the next few days.

Draftpedia  iPhone; Free

Draftpedia offers comprehensive draft information for the NFL and NBA that extends back to 1970 for the NFL and 1969 for the NBA. It’s a wealth of sports draft information right at your fingertips.

2013 Draft HQ – Pro Football  iOS Universal; US$2.99

2013 Draft HQ – Pro Football is your one-stop shop for information about the draft. Follow news on the top players and read their stats from when they were in college. There’s also mock drafts and forums so you can participate in the draft instead of just read about it.

CBS Sports App  iPhone; Free

The CBS Sports app will offer streaming coverage of CBSSports.com’s Draft Show Live on the iPhone. The CBS app will also feature mock drafts, player profiles and a live draft picker with round-by-round picks.

NFL Mobile  iOS Universal; Free

The NFL Mobile app will provide live video coverage of the NFL draft as well as other draft features like draft alerts and draft trackers, which allow you to follow your favorite prospects and teams. *Some features may require a subscription and may be limited to Verizon or Verizon Wireless customers.

NFL 2013  iOS Universal; Free

The NFL 2013 app also offers live coverage of the draft and includes Draft Xtra, a second-screen experience that you can monitor while you watch the draft on TV or over the internet at NFL.com/LIVE. There’s also news, analysis and mock drafts. *Some features may require a COX, Cablevision or FiOS NFL Network subscription.

Source: TUAW.

Pixter, A Fast, Accurate And Good-Looking OCR App For iPhone.

Pixscan

A few months back, I spent far too many hours trying to find an app which would scan a page of text and turn into actual, editable text. I found none. Or rather, I found nothing good. There are plenty of OCR (optical character recognition) apps in the store, but they were either inaccurate, or ugly, or (most often) both.

And while Evernote is excellent at letting you search on scanned pages and even your handwritten notes, you don’t get to touch the text itself.

I gave up, and now – as usually happens with my “urgent” research projects, I’ve forgotten why I needed it on the first place. Which is a shame, as Pixter Scanner has been launched,and it is quite excellent – with one huge annoyance, for me at least.

Pixter is an iPhone app that runs just fine pixel-doubled on an iPad. To use it, just snap a picture of a page of text, crop it and you’re done. There’s an on-screen guide box to help you line things up, and once you’re done the OCR is almost instant.

Like most OCR pas, the text is plain and free of all formatting, which means titles run into body text in one big blog. This, while it looks messy, is preferable to badly-guessed formatting which you’l just have to correct anyway.

Accuracy is astonishing. I scanned a page from The Catalan Cookbook, an English-language book which mixes in lots of Catalan terms, as you’d expect. Pixter managed not only the English text, but didn’t try to second-guess the Catalan text either: Instead of thinking it had just read a badly-scanned English word, it just rendered the Catalan perfectly.

The app keeps the original scan, so if there are any problems with the OCRed text you can just tap the screen and see the original.

“More than” 32 languages are supported (how many is that? 33? More?) and you can also translate the text after scanning – great for foreign restaurant menus. And speaking of languages, we no come to my big problem with the app. The icon for the English language is a U.S flag, not the Union Jack. I’m not one of those Brits who bristles at the changes wrought on English by the colonies – I swim through both versions every day – but isn’t the British flag the accepted standard here? After all, Spanish gets the flag of Spain, not of any South American country.

Anyhow. It’s a small thing. The app itself is excellent, and I recommend it.

Download Pixter – $0,99

Source: Cult of Mac.