The annual Appy Awards are dedicated to acknowledging creativity and excellence in app design. READ MORE»
The annual Appy Awards are dedicated to acknowledging creativity and excellence in app design.
The Appys honor extraordinary Applications on all platforms: mobile, social and web-based. The Appy Awards are unbiased to App's format, platform or device; instead we focus on the best apps in a diverse range of categories, from Games and News, to Health and Fitness, Social Networking, Photography and many others.
The Appy Awards judging takes place in February 2013, and the Winners are announced at the Appy Awards "Get Appy" party in March 2013 at MediaPost’s OMMA Global Conference & Expo in San Francisco, CA.
Once you submit your entry, your app is automatically and instantly eligible to be featured as our “App of the Week”. As a “Featured App”, you can expect a special placement on our website, an “Appy Awards Featured App” badge for your website and promotional and marketing efforts, and a featured review article written by our team and published in the weekly “Appy Awards News” newsletter (subscribe to it below). <<CLOSE
The Appys honor extraordinary Applications on all platforms: mobile, social and web-based. The Appy Awards are unbiased to App's format, platform or device; instead we focus on the best apps in a diverse range of categories, from Games and News, to Health and Fitness, Social Networking, Photography and many others.
The Appy Awards judging takes place in February 2013, and the Winners are announced at the Appy Awards "Get Appy" party in March 2013 at MediaPost’s OMMA Global Conference & Expo in San Francisco, CA.
Once you submit your entry, your app is automatically and instantly eligible to be featured as our “App of the Week”. As a “Featured App”, you can expect a special placement on our website, an “Appy Awards Featured App” badge for your website and promotional and marketing efforts, and a featured review article written by our team and published in the weekly “Appy Awards News” newsletter (subscribe to it below). <<CLOSE
Anyone who’s shopped at the Apple Store knows how wonderfully convenient it is for the customers and staff that the sales people can process your credit card right there in the middle of the store with a device attached to their iPhones. No lines, no hassle. Select what you want and even the receipt is emailed to you. No paper. No mess. Imagine that same convenience extended beyond the boundaries of a brick and mortar store and unlimited by type of phone.
Pay Anywhere gives you that flexibility and more. The card reader is smaller than the Apple Store’s and sleeker than Square’s and available for iPad, iPhone, Android and Blackberry. Getting started is a cinch. The folks at Pay Anywhere will set up your merchant account for you for free. You just pay 2.69% per swipe, a notch lower than the going rate at Square. Now you’re ready to accept credit cards right at the tables in your restaurant, or out front right next to cars at your carwash, or in the middle of a vacant lot at the local flea market. Literally anywhere. App features include commitment-free pay-as-you-go pricing; GPS; compatibility with cash drawers and thermal printers; text- and photo-based inventory; detailed receipt emails; built-in reporting of sales trends with “Heat Maps”; and a free merchant portal for detailed account activity – all directly within the app itself. No need to log into a remote Web site to get important sales data. It’s a feature-rich sales app that truly takes credit card processing on-the-go to a whole new, well, place, literally any place.
The irony does not escape me. I’m sitting on my couch, petting my pomeranian and watching the Olympics while yelling at Bob Costas. Cradled between my dog and a bowl of homemade chicken salad sit various Apple products. I use the iPhone for tweeting my disgust for Bob, the MacBook for reading the occasional email and an iPad for downloading apps and playing games.
This seems like an average day for most Americans. But it’s ironic because I’m playing with the ‘My Life as a Refugee’ app from United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees – the UN Refugee Agency, all while snuggled under my plush blanket from Brookstone with air conditioner well below 68 degrees. It’s a rough life in the first world.
Coinciding with the UNHCR’s launch of the ‘1 is Too Many’ campaign, ‘My Life as a Refugee’ takes an innovative approach to bring awareness to the awful situations refugees endure. In order to understand the issues refugees contend with, three unique stories were designed based on actual experiences. For players to empathize with the life of a refugee, they have to become one. Players begin the game by selecting a character: Merita – pregnant and in the center of a civil war; Paulo – 15 years old and forced to become a child solider; and Amika – a young mother speaking out for women’s rights. By virtually living these roles, the player is faced with making the same decisions that these individuals encounter in war-torn, poverty-stricken countries. 
Ever make one of those “flip the corners of the pages of your notebook” movies? With a sprinting stick-man, or a swimming stick-woman who gets eaten by a shark? Me too! And I used to play with LEGOs – all the time. Man, the kids today have it made! If you’re into movie-making, DC super heroes and LEGOs, get ready for the perfect storm of awesomeness…
LEGO Super Heroes Movie Maker is a free app (free! what a deal!) that gives you most of the tools you’ll need to make super-cute, super-cool, super-creative stop-motion movies on your iPhone. Check out 
Google’s Project Glass still seems light years away, and while there are many other augmented reality mobile apps out there, most fall short on the promise of a helpful heads-up display experience. Vito Technology’s Star Walk for iPad is a refreshing exception in this field. After playing with it for about a week, it is now my new favorite star-gazing app as well as the new go-to app when I want to show off what the iPad is capable of.
The Star Walk app is full of cool features, yet easy to navigate. It launches with a comprehensive ‘Sky Live’ screen which shows the sunrise and sunset times, phases of the Moon, and visibility and elevation angles of Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. You can change the current date to the previous or next day with the arrow buttons, and as you cycle through the days, you can see the Moon phases and the information for the other objects featured on the screen change as well. Once you close this view, the app takes you right to the beautiful live sky view synchronized to your location and time of day. 
The written word is one of the most important things the human race has accomplished, and of course, learning to decipher it. Literacy is so important to me, it is ironically difficult to find the words to describe the impact it has had on my life. I was fortunate to have parents that read to me from inception, and the joy of reading has stuck with me forever.
That’s the key, parents – start young and mold your children into the literati and not the ill-fated, unimaginative lower echelon of non-readers. With more than 67 million iPads sold to-date, it is more than likely you’ll teach your children to read using a screen instead of a paperback. Books such as Your Fantastic Elastic Brain, released in hardcover two years ago and now debuting on the little screen, are made for the next generation of tech-savvy, diaper-swaddled geniuses. 
I live in New York City, therefore I don’t own a car. But once upon a time I zipped up and down the east coast, and I’ve met my fair share of lovely state troopers. I don’t think they were pulling me over to chat about my bumper stickers. There was one incident in particular that I got very testy with a brutish man in khaki– I should have kept my mouth shut. This was before the iPhone was even invented, but it would have been great to have some evidence that I wasn’t going that fast.
According to TicketDefender, more than 100,000 drivers per day receive speeding tickets. Some experts estimate that 10-20% of all radar-backed speeding tickets are issued in error; and in the case of radar that is operated from a moving police vehicle the number of inaccurate tickets may be as high as 30%. Let’s do the math: for every 100,000 drivers getting a speeding ticket, up to 30,000 people could receive a ticket in error. If you’re one of those statistics with a lead foot, there’s an app for that. 
Full disclosure: I don’t use Instagram and I’m not Pinterested. I say that because first impressions from friends about Via.me were that the site looks vaguely like Pinterest and the functionality of the app seems very Instagrammy. Because of this I went to check them out and there are indeed a lot of similarities between the Instagram and Via.me apps. Instagram though doesn’t have a Web site of its own. And while Via.me’s Web site does look similar to Pinterest, they are very different sites. It’s more of an elegant combination of Pinterest and Instagram.
Like Instagram, the Via.me app uses the built-in camera on your iPhone to record photos or video (you can also record sounds) and post them to your Via.me, Facebook and Twitter accounts. Like Instagram, it comes with a suite of fun filters you can apply to your photos, instantly transforming them into apparent works of art. Having studied photography in college and even spent a little pro time behind the lens, it piqued my interest, and as soon as I left work I began a photographic odyssey home to Jersey City. 
Look, I’m old school. I listen to hits from the 70s and 80s. I still like to read actual physical books, where you get the pleasure of turning pages, using bookmarks, and placing them on a shelf when you’re finished. Most of all, I like to send and receive handwritten cards and letters. The personal touch means even more today, because, let’s face it, it’s so much easier to text “how r u?” (and add a smiley face).
ThankYouPro will meet you halfway in your quest for the personal touch. Somewhat similar to the fairly basic Cards app by Apple, this app is also free, and lets you create high quality thank you notes, totally customizable on the front and inside. It costs $2.99 (or less) to have your card mailed anywhere in the world (in a professional envelope, first class, within 24 business hours). Very cool, very affordable and very easy. My favorite detail is adding your signature, which you create with your finger on the app’s blank signature screen. Just choose your ink color and sign away, a personal touch which the Cards app doesn’t offer. Love that! You can choose from among 20 or so template designs, or make the card truly unique with your own photos, or any image at all.