APPS, -30 best iPhone and iPad apps

Anne Frank in April 1941: the app offers a new take on her diary. Photograph: AP

Welcome to this week's roundup of new and notable iOS apps, covering apps and games for iPhone and iPad. It follows the publication earlier in the day of the weekly best Android apps roundup.

As ever, the pricing relates to the initial download, so often when you see (Free) there may be in-app purchases or subscriptions involved once you start using the app. Read on for this week's picks:

Anne Frank (£6.99)

Penguin and Beyond the Story's new Anne Frank iPad app

Published by Penguin Books and developer Beyond the Story, this is a new iPad take on Anne Frank's famous diary, including the original text, audio extracts read by Helena Bonham Carter, notes, documents and maps; timelines of Anne's life, and lots more video, audio and archive material.
iPad

Endless Alphabet (Free)

Endless Alphabet is a wonderfully playful phonics app for children, starring a parade of monsters introducing a word for each letter of the alphabet. Children get to drag letters into place, hear their sounds and definitions for each word, and watch comical animations to illustrate the meanings.
iPhone / iPad

Wave Trip (£1.49)

Musical game Wave Trip is getting lots of buzz online, and thoroughly deserves it. The game sees you guiding a "geometric astronaut" through colourful worlds, all of which can be "remixed and edited" like a piece of music. You can create your own levels and share them with other players too. A beautiful, inventive piece of work.
iPhone / iPad

Vine (Free)

Released by Twitter subsidiary Vine Labs, this social app is already causing a stir – not least with Facebook, which blocked it from letting people connect to their Facebook friends. Silicon Valley rivalries aside, it's an intriguing app: you shoot six-second videos which then play on a loop within Vine itself, and within your tweets.
iPhone

H&M (Free)

A brand new app rather than an update to H&M's previous iPhone app, the big deal here is that you can buy clothes from within the app, rather than simply browse the retailer's collections. The app also promises vouchers and offers, and news and videos on new fashion trends. It's one of the slicker shopping apps I've seen on iPhone.
iPhone

Might & Magic Clash of Heroes (£2.99)

One of the famous old names in RPG gaming gets spruced up for iOS, as you take five heroes on a quest to save their world. The game offers a 20-hour campaign to work through, as well as live and asynchronous multiplayer games online. The puzzle-battle system is where the fun lies, as you tweak tactics to crush opponents.
iPhone / iPad

Moves (Free)

Fitness gadgets like Fitbit and Nike's FuelBand are all the rage in early 2013, with their companion apps. Moves is an app that does away with the gadget part of that equation. It aims to track your daily walking, cycling and running for you, then display it all in a timeline and on a map.
iPhone

Cat Doorman's Little Red Wagon (£1.99)

There's a big opportunity for children's apps that blend stories and songs, with Night & Day Studios the latest developer to explore it. This is based on an album of children's music called Cat Doorman's Songbook, taking one of its songs – folk tune Little Red Wagon – and accompanying it with beautiful hand-painted illustrations and a scrolling score.
iPad

Rescue Rush (Free)

There's some innovative work being done to incorporate location into mobile gaming, with publisher Red Robot Labs one of those involved. Its new game is a bit like Pac-Man, except with a giant cat rescuing animals and avoiding scientists. The twist is that it's played on a stylised map of the real streets around your current location.
iPhone / iPad

Cubase iC Pro (£11.99)

A premium price for a professional music app: this is a remote-control app for the Cubase audio software, focused on musicians using it to record their songs, creating up to four dedicated cue mixes to adjust their mix from the iOS device.
iPhone / iPad

NFL Quarterback 13 (£1.49)

In good time for the Super Bowl comes developer Full Fat's follow-up to last y ear's American football game, which sees you lobbing long bombs to your receivers while battling against the wind and opposing linebackers alike. Whizzy 3D visuals meet casual gameplay – it's very good fun.
iPhone / iPad

Instructables (Free)

Now owned by graphics firm Autodesk, the Instructables website remains an excellent resource for recipes and do-it-yourself projects. Now there's an app for that, which not only enables you to browse the projects from the site – more than 100k in all – but also to create your own, with photos.
iPhone

Pebble Smartwatch (Free)

This is the companion app for the Pebble smart-watch, which has just started shipping to the people who crowdfunded its $10.3m Kickstarter campaign. The watch connects to this app using Bluetooth, enabling it to show incoming calls, emails and messages on the watch.
iPhone

Stow - the modern packing list (£1.49)

Genuinely an app I've been looking for for some time now, Stow is a packing list for trips, with an easy template-based way to create and tick off whatever you're packing for a holiday or business trip. Lists can also be shared by email, or between Stow apps on different handsets.
iPhone

Deko (Free)

Many iPhone owners I know use photos as their wallpapers, but Deko aims to provide an alternative: stylish wallpaper images that you create yourself by swiping its patterns around the screen. A neat and creative idea.
iPhone / iPad

Swipp (Free)

Swipp is interesting: a way to share your opinions with other people, and see what they've been saying about a place or topic too. Its developers have a grand ambition – "building the largest collection of open knowledge on every topic in the world" – although as ever the concern here for users is the risk that if it takes off, someone bigger will buy it for the data and/or development team then shut it down (as happened with an app called Stamped in 2012).
iPhone

Kids Discover Antarctica (£1.99)

Actually just one of several educational iPad apps released by Kids Discover in the last week, but this one has penguins so got the nod for inclusion here. You can't argue with penguins. It's a slickly-designed guide to Antarctica for children, offering 3D models, video, audio and photographs, quizzes and snappy text. Other apps available cover galazies, cells, space, extreme weather and Washington D.C.
iPad

Men's Fitness Cover Model Body Plan (£1.49)

If using an app like Moves (see above) helps you shed some pounds, how about packing on some muscles? This new app from Dennis Publishing's Men's Fitness magazine offers a four-week plan to "make your six-pack stand out". As opposed to your great big beer-filled gut stand out, as may be the case.
iPhone / iPad

Serendip (Free)

Serendip's subtitle is "Free Music Radio", and that's exactly what you're getting: a stream of music it thinks you'll like, based on your tastes and social connections. Every user has a profile on the app so you can see who's similar, and the music itself comes from YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud and Bandcamp (hence why the app is free, presumably).
iPhone

Mushroom Wars (£1.99)

Originally a hit on Sony's PSN service for PlayStation 3, Mushroom Wars has now been ported to iPad. It's a cutesy real-time strategy game with 27 maps for your mushroom characters to battle their enemies on, while upgrading weapons and beefing up their army.
iPad

Cracking Sands (£2.99)

Switching genres, Polarbit's new game is a racing game promising "a band of merry lunatics driving small vehicles fitted with big guns". So it's about shooting as well as driving, with customisable characters and vehicles, and a choice of single-player or online multiplayer modes.
iPhone / iPad

Montblanc Timepieces (Free)

"Part biography, part chronography and all beautiful," is how Montblanc describes its new iPad app, which captures the fact that it's no mere digital catalogue. The app focuses on 40 of the company's watches, with photos, 3D models and a "True View" feature to see how they'd look on your wrist.
iPad

Learn Maths with Beluga (Free)

Beluga Learning has been receiving high praise from education experts even before the launch of this, its first app. Aimed at children, it sees them exploring virtual islands completing a range of mathematical challenges, accumulating multipliers for their scores as they go.
iPad

The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins (£2.49)

Another week, another book-app based on a Dr. Seuss tale from publisher Oceanhouse Media, which is working its way through the catalogue with aplomb. This tells the story of a boy desperately trying to take his hat off to the king, only to find other hats appearing in its place. Marvellous rhyming prose, voice narration and word-highlighting make this fun for young readers.
iPhone / iPad

Finds (Free)

This looks interesting: an app for showing off the items you find while shopping, tipping other people off about them. And, of course, digging into the tips uploaded by other users, complete with photos and links to buy those products online. It'll only work if enough people use it, of course.
iPhone

Spraffl (Free)

Location-based messaging? The jury's out on quite how many people want to do it, but Spraffl hopes enough will to make its app useful. The idea: you post anonymous messages that people nearby can see: "Break some local news, comment at an event, make an honest review, pay someone a compliment, tell your neighbours to pipe down or share a joke with your colleagues," encourages its App Store listing. Again, it'll only be as good as the amount of people using it.
iPhone

Pantheon the Legends (Free)

Card-battler games are proving pretty popular in the West, having exploded some time ago in Japan. Pantheon the Legends is the latest to go live on iOS, getting you to collect a deck of cards based on classical gods and heroes, then fight against other players over the network.
iPhone

Vuemix Video Browser (Free)

Here's a new take on video search, with an iPad app that enables you to search for a topic and see nine video thumbnails on-screen at once when deciding what to watch. The videos are sorted into categories, although unfortunately it's not yet available in the UK.
iPad

Weezic Augmented Sheet Music (Free)

Something for musicians here: a digital sheet-music app for iPad that turns pages automatically, but also accompanies you with a virtual orchestra. It includes 14 free scores, with more to come (presumably using in-app purchases) in the future. It's based on the existing Weezic.com site.
iPad

Yoga Studio (£1.49)

It's been out on iPhone for a while, but Yoga Studio has now been upsized for iPad. It offers 30 yoga classes with high-definition video showing you what to do, but also lets you create your own classes or browse a library of 280 yoga poses.
iPad

That's this week's roundup, but what apps have you been enjoying on iOS this week? Post your recommendations, or your views on the apps above, in the comments section.

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APPS, Gaana.com releases mobile app: First impressions

If you're a music lover, there's no way you wouldn't have accessed popular online music site gaana.com. Well, the service offered by Times Internet Limited, has now stepped beyond the Web and landed on your mobile devices. That's right. The Gaana app is now available for iOS, Android, BlackBerry and J2ME devices for free.

So now you can access and listen to over a million songs on your device while on-the-go. Is the app better than its web counterpart? We gave the iOS version a spin and recorded our first impressions of the app.

Beginning with the interface, it's pretty simple and clean, no hassles whatsoever. If you haven't signed up earlier for the service through the web, now would be a good opportunity. You can also login via Facebook and get started right away. Though signing up isn't necessary to use the app, it lets you customise the app/ music to your tastes.

The home screen greets you with a series of popular albums on top and a list of various music charts in several regional languages like 'Mirchi Top 20, US Top 20', 'Kannada Top 15' and much more under the Playlists tab. The Songs tab enlists most popular songs from recent times. You can listen to songs in Hindi, English, Tamil, Telugu and in 21 other languages.

The bottom of the screen has a generic menu section with my zone, search, home, discover and settings options. You can stay organised by creating your own playlists and favouriting songs, artists and albums by accessing the 'my zone' section. 'Search' for over millions of songs instantly and 'discover' what you're friends are listening to along with browsing through new releases, artists, albums, genres etc.

While playing songs, the appropriate album art for each one loads automatically. You can instantly favourite it, add it to your playlist, share it with others or even turn it into your radio station with Radio mode and other options listed on the screen.

Another pretty slick feature in the my zone section is that you can swipe over a listing to reveal various options that you can use to add to a playlist, enqueue the song, view the artist or album and share it as well. You can always access the 'Info' tab on the player screen to view various details related to a particular song and do other stuff as well.

Social networking integration allows you to share your favourites with friends via Facebook, Twitter and e-mail. The app also offers smart recommendations to listen to similar songs, artists or albums. If you already have a Gaana account on the web, your content automatically sync when you log into mobile and vice versa.

That was the good stuff. What about disappointments? Well, initially we did run into trouble while launching the app and logging in. The app did crash a few times. Also, when listening to songs on a weak Wi-Fi connection can ruin the mood since they just get stuck in between while playing. Make sure you have a stable Wi-Fi connection to enjoy an uninterrupted music experience. Perhaps the app could buffer more aggressively over Wi-Fi to get over temporary dips in signal strength.

Another thing we noticed is that we couldn't stream music to our Airport Express via AirPlay from within the app, something the saavn.com app lets us do. However, this is easily fixed by switching the output target from system-wide iOS settings.

Another noticeable flaw is that the album covers either don't load fully or are very low res in some cases, which is disappointing to see. But considering this is the first mobile version for the app, we hope the company takes due notice of this flaw and brings fixes in future updates.

When compared to the Saavn app on iOS, the latter offers a similar music experience but with an even wider range of songs and genres. But unlike Gaana, the Saavn app has intrusions in the form of ads and even the music streaming was quite slow. As far as the interface is concerned, we didn't find the Saavn app as polished and smooth as Gaana.

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Tech : Me Against Rape' Android App Comes To Your Rescue

The candles at the peace march may be dying down along with the cries that flamed up at the time of the Delhi gang rape case, but deep down the fear of women's safety in the country has thankfully not been silenced. Since mobile phone is a common ally of almost every woman in the country, there have been people encouraging developers to come out with apps that can cater to the safety aspect ever since. Well, here comes another one to your rescue!

Named 'Me Against Rape', this safety mobile application has been developed by three engineers based out of Nashik in Maharashtra. The app is available for free download from the Google Play store for Android. It is for both smartphones and tablets.

Courtesy the app, users can raise an alarm by sending a text message along with the location details to a pre-allotted number. Not only that, the app keeps sending updated location to the number every ten minutes, making tracking easy.

It does not end here. The mobile can also start recording the incident, in case the victim wants to use it as an evidence in court. To avoid the risk of finding out the operations in the phone, it deactivates the calling and SMS functionality- however, it is optional. (Source: Efytimes.com)

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