The Swype-style “glide typing” is also useful, even if this isn’t the only place you’ll find such a feature nowadays. There’s a Google search button built in and, this being 2016, gifs and emoji are brought to the fore as well. It’s accessible and fun.Īnother Google app: this time a keyboard replacement app for iOS.
Box Island is the latest: a series of programming puzzles based around slotting commands together in sequences to control the game’s boxy hero. There’s a lot of talk about encouraging children to learn to program, and a fair few apps aiming to help them do it. RunGo is a collection of jogging routes with voice navigation to make sure you don’t get lost, and tools to track your times and calorie-burning. It has rocketed up the App Store chart in its early days.Īnother app designed to help you find your way around a city, although in this case, you’re expected to be running not walking. You can use the app to broadcast live video while chatting to viewers. Lip-synching app Musical.ly has become something of a craze on smartphones, but this new spinoff is different: a direct rival for Periscope, YouNow and other live-streaming services. The app will help you find more than 900 plaques, and plan a route to take in the most interesting spots. This official app from English Heritage is a guide to the blue plaques scattered around London explaining where famous historical figures lived. You can also browse the “splashes” of other users from around the world. Splash is definitely worth trying if you’re itching to get creative with VR, turning your panoramic videos into 3D clips that can be viewed with the Google Cardboard headset. Virtual reality isn’t going to be just about experiencing 360-degree scenes: you may be making your own. That’s not something we can say for every podcast app in the App Store.Have you been using the Live Photos feature on iOS? Strangely, this app from Google is the first to make it useful, through the way it turns your few-second clips into gifs that can be shared on social networks and messaging apps. It’s been consistently updated since it launched last year, and you can expect support to last long into the future.
You might be able to get by with the free version of Overcast, but we wholeheartedly recommend paying $4.99 to unlock its full feature set. Paired with Apple’s Now Playing glance, it’s a pretty convenient setup. With it, you can quickly start playing a new show from your wrist, recommend an episode, and access settings for Smart Speed and Voice Boost. Overcast also features one of the best Apple Watch apps we’ve seen yet. The app is available on iPhone and iPad, and there’s also a barebones web player available for your laptop.
This can be frustrating at times, but also guarantees you won’t be bothered with unexpected pauses or buffering. The only real limitation of Overcast is that you can’t stream podcasts on the fly the entire episode must be downloaded before you hit the play button. And when it comes to discovering new shows, Overcast will pull in recommendations from Twitter, and it also groups new podcasts and established hits into helpful “starter kits” that you can subscribe to with a single tap. Power users can build playlists with custom smart filters, configure preferences on a show-by-show basis, or set a sleep timer if you’re listening to a podcast before dozing off at night. Whereas some other players can make it all too obvious that you’re manipulating speed, Overcast manages to play shows faster without sacrificing quality. If you’re the type who prefers listening to your shows sped up, Overcast’s audio engine delivers the most natural-sounding results we’ve heard. Podcasts aren’t always created equal when it comes to production values, so this can be a big help in sparing your ears. Another feature, Voice Boost, normalizes the volume on both ends of a conversation so no one is too loud or too quiet. It saves you precious minutes and eventually hours when you check Overcast’s settings menu to see exactly how much time you’ll definitely be surprised.
Smart Speed gets rid of silent moments and dead air wherever they exist in your podcasts, and this can significantly cut down the overall playing time. Even better, it has some really nice features which substantially improve that experience. It’s got a clean, straightforward, and tasteful design that’s easy to use and never gets in the way of what’s most important: the listening experience. If you’ve got an iPhone, the best podcast app is Overcast.