Apple’s Top 25 Favorite iOS Apps Of The Year 2015

1) Periscope

Apple’s favorite app of the year.
The idea of broadcasting live video from your phone isn’t a new one, but all the early entries flopped pretty hard. Twitter has seemingly figured out the formula with Periscope, though; just about any time news of a major event goes down, someone will have a Periscope stream up from the scene.

2) Enlight

A surprisingly advanced all-in-one photo editing tool. It’s not a Photoshop replacement, but it does a whole lot more than filters.

3) Robinhood

Robinhood lets people buy stock without paying anything for each trade. So how do they make money? Currently, by accruing interest on the money sitting in user’s account.

4) Workflow

Workflow lets you build one-tap actions for things you do often (like calling your mom, ubering to work, or uploading your last photo to Dropbox) and put them in your iPhone’s widget drawer.

5) Instagram

You read TechCrunch. You know what Instagram is.

6) HBO Now

HBO’s standalone app for streaming the stuff once reserved for your cable box, AKA known as “The reason you keep in touch with your good-friend-from-grade-school’s mom because she’s letting you log in with her account”

7) Hopper

Heading out on a trip soon? Punch the details into Hopper, and it’ll keep an eye out for price drops and try to figure out the best time to buy.

8) Darkroom

Another photo editing app, but with a clever twist: you can build your own Instagram-esque filters.

9) Lark

An AI nutritionist. You talk to Lark like it’s a buddy, and it responds and advises you like a human trainer might. It’ll also use your phone’s sensors to scrap activity/workout data

10) The Everything Machine

Got a kid who likes to tinker and build?
The Everything Machine is a visual design tool that lets them build virtual gadgets with all sorts of components — light bulbs, switches, displays, and more.

11) Pacemaker

Surprise house party? Pacemaker lets you DJ from your iPad. Plug in your Spotify credentials, and you’ll be able to scratch, add effects, and slide between multiple tracks.

12) Tandem

Practice languages by chatting with native speakers. You say what language you want to practice and what you’re interested in, and Tandem connects you. You can text, video chat, or do a voice call.

13) Jet

A shopping app with a curious twist: as you add more stuff to your cart, Jet searches across retailers to find the cheapest combination of those items and passes the savings on to you.

14) Timeline

Timeline says they “put news in context”. For each story, there’s a timeline that you can scrub through to display related stories past.

15) Vee for Video

Think iMovie, but with more video effects and filters.

16) Fit Men Cook

Simple, budget-conscious recipes that can often be made in bulk for a week’s worth of meals.

17) Spark

A super-slick, customizable email app. You can read our full review here. My favorite feature: intelligent searches in plain english, so you can search for things like “emails with attachments from last month”

18) RefMe

A college student’s best friend. When you need to cite a book for a paper, just scan the barcode. Pick your citation style, and it’ll generate your citation page for you.

19) Wildcard

The news from each day broken down into 2-3 sentence chunks.

20) Paper

A super pretty organizer for stuff you’d want handy — notes, to do lists, doodles, and photos. It’s like a gorgeous little virtual pinboard.

21) Giphy Cam

As the name implies: its a photo tool for quickly making GIFs. Hit record, add a filter if you want, boom: gif.

22) PRY

Part game, part book, part movie. An interactive story that strays from the normal way we read.

23) Reuters TV

Slick, personalized video news. Only got 10 minutes to catch up on what’s going on? Punch in how much time you have, then just swipe through the stories you don’t care about.

24) ZOVA

Short, easy-to-follow workouts designed mostly for women.

25) BlueApron

One of my favorite things of the year, as well.

BlueApron takes all the fun parts of cooking and gets rid of the crappy parts. Hate shopping? BlueApron delivers pre-portioned fresh ingredients to your door. Hate digging through recipes? BlueApron picks them for you, though they give you some options.

They break down the meals in super easy to follow ways, and the meals are pretty damned tasty. It can be hit-or-miss at sometimes, but I’ve liked more meals than I disliked. Plus, it gets me to cook/try things I’d otherwise normally not consider.

Top 10 iOS 8 Privacy Settings That You Should Be Aware Of

In a world where privacy and security of personal data is taking a hit amidst government snooping and photo leaks, every company that deals with private information has to set up a wide range of controls in place. Apple is no exception to this.
There’s much more to privacy than meets the eye. Hidden inside Settings → Privacy is a plethora of switches and controls that you should use to protect your data from being tracked. While we can be sure of the fact that Apple would not let loose ends hang in its code that makes your information easily accessible, it’s best to review all these privacy settings yourself and tighten the security yourself.

#1. Geo-tagging Photos

Geo-tagging of photos helps you sort them into albums based on where you clicked the photos. It has been useful but the problem with geo-tagging is that the location data gets added to the EXIF of the photo. When you share the photo, that data is visible to all. If you’d rather not have location data given away along with the photo, you will have to turn the feature off. To do this:

Go to Settings → Privacy → Location Services



Tap on Camera
Select “Never”



This will prevent location data from being recorded when you click photos.

#2. Share My Location

In iOS 8, Apple also introduced a new feature as a part of Family Sharing. This allows a family member to know your exact location which is helpful when you want to meet up, when parents need to track their kids etc. But if you wish to disable this, you can do this.
Go to Settings → Privacy → Location Services
Tap on Share My Location → and switch it off.

#3. Apps using Location

A lot many apps might need to know your location to work in the intended way. For instance, if you are looking for directions on Maps (any maps app), you will have to allow that app to access your current location. Apple shows a prompt the first time any app asks for your location. To check which apps have access to this data, here’s what you can do:
Go to Settings → Privacy → Location Services
Scroll down and you’ll find a list of apps that might need to track location data
Tapping on each gives you three options: Always, Never, While Using

Selecting Always will allow that app to track your location even when the app is in the background (not open). Selecting Never prohibits the app from tracking your location any time.

#4. iAds, Location-based

A lot of changes are being introduced to iAds to make ads better (but that’s kind of an oxymoron). iAds, the ad platform for iOS, can track some information so that the ads shown are more relevant. The silver-lining is that all information is anonymized, meaning your data goes to the trackers but they don’t know who you are and can never track your device. Still, you can turn this feature off so that iAds can’t track your location.
Open Settings → Privacy → Location Services
Scroll down and tap on System Services

Turn off the switch for Location-based iAds

#5. Contacts, Photos, Camera etc.

Under Settings → Privacy, you will also see a list of stock apps (like Camera, Photos, Contacts, Microphone) etc. Tapping each shows you a list of apps that have requested to access the data within the app. For instance, Facebook might have requested access to your Contacts. You can turn on/off the access from here. Usually, if turning off the access is not going to affect the way you use the app, it’s best to turn it off.
Go to Settings → Privacy and tap on each app (Camera, Photos etc.) to configure the access.

#6. More Advertising Privacy

Besides the location-based iAds, you can further limit ad-tracking. We’ve covered on this previously. To prevent any kind of data from being sent to advertisers from your iPhone/iPad:
Open Settings → Privacy → Advertising
Switch on Limit Ad Tracking

#7. Diagnostics & Usage

Apple, with your permission, collects anonymous usage data. This information is used to find out the performance of apps and iOS on the device. It helps Apple fix possible problem areas, bugs, issues and appcrashes. Like iAds, Apple doesn’t know who the information is coming from because it is anonymized. However, you have the choice to prevent diagnostics and usage data from being sent to Apple. To do this:
Open Settings → Privacy
Tap on Diagnostics & Usage
Tap on Don’t Send

#8. Website Tracking in Safari

Websites can track some information too. When you visit a website, it can try to track your locatio. Of course this is to make the experience better and more relevant but if you want to prevent it, there’s a way.
Go to Settings → Safari

Switch on Do Not Track under Privacy & Security

#9. Website Tracking in Chrome

Similar to Safari, other browsers – the most popular being Chrome – also let you enable/disable websites from tracking some data off your iPhone. In Chrome, you have to get to the settings from the browser (instead of going through Settings). Here’s a link to turning off website tracking off in Chrome.

#10. Using DuckDuckGo instead of Google

DuckDuckGo is now available as a default search engine besides Google, Bing etc. DuckDuckGo is different from Google in the fact that the website does not track any information of you when you search on it. (Unlike Google and any other search engine for that matter). To set DuckDuckGo as the default search engine:
Go to Settings → Safari
Tap on Search Engine
Select DuckDuckGo

10 Most Creative Statues Around the World

A statue is a sculpture representing one or more figure, generally full-length, as opposed to a bust, and at least close to life-size, or may be larger. You can see statues in many different forms and sizes. Also the materials used to make them can vary. Every city and metropol has sculptures on streets. Most of them are boring though. Just usual ones of famous people from history. But some of them really make you look twice. In this 10 list, , i have collected some of the most unique andamazing sculptures from streets around the world. If you have similar sculpture in your town, feel free to share with us by using comments section. We may come with part II with your example.

Check out 10 Most Creative Statues Around the World.

10 – People Of The River By Chong Fah Cheong – Singapore

People Of The River

09 – Mustangs By Robert Glen, Las Colinas – Texas

Mustangs

08 – Salmon – Portland, Oregon

Salmon

07 – Shoes on the Danube by Can Togay & Gyula Pauer – Budapest

Shoes on the Danube

06 – The Knotted Gun by Carl Fredrik Reutersward – New York

Knotted Gun

05 – Freedom by Zenos Frudakis – Pennsylvania

Freedom

04 – Juodasis vaiduoklis by S. Plotnikovas and S. Jurkus – Lithuania

Juodasis Vaiduoklis

03 – Les Voyageurs by Bruno Catalano – Marseilles

Les Voyageurs

02 – Giant Spider by Louise Bourgeois – London

Giant Spider

01 – The Unknown Official – Reykjavik

The Unknown Official

Top 10 Most Ridiculous Reasons To Sue Someone

The primary role of the justice system is to protect the citizens’ rights and determine which party is responsible for the crime brought to court. However, as you are about to find out, some people abuse the privilege of having an arbiter settle their disputes. And, at the same time, it’s not only citizens who decide to sue corporations for millions of dollars based on a ridiculous guilt premise. Far from it, as major companies, stars and even police authorities have attempted to turn their obvious mistakes into profits in court. Let’s examine the top ten lawsuits that fringe on absurdity.

1. The Nebraska senator who took God to court

In all fairness, Ernie Chambers’ lawsuit against the almighty was designed as an awareness raising campaign against the local legislation that does not allow people to file “frivolous” lawsuits. The elected state senator considered God directly responsible for acts like earthquakes, floods, hurricanes and other cataclysms. That is why the lawsuit was filed in a “cease and desist” manner and the stake was a restriction order against God. However, the judge dismissed the case because the defendant had no recorded address at that time. In all fairness, the reason to terminate the legal proceedings fits the lawsuit perfectly.

2. The California police department versus the Taser manufacturer

How should a police officer react when the arrested suspect in the back seat of the vehicle attempts to free himself from the handcuffs and kick down the car window? A Taser of course, this gadget is the easiest solution. But what if the Taser presents uncanny similarities to the handgun? Can one really call shooting the suspect rather than tasing him an honest mistake? Apparently you can and that was the court’s decision when police officer Marcie Noriega shot and killed suspect Evadero Torres point blank with what she believed to be the Taser gun. Not only that, but the Taser manufacturer was sued by the police and held responsible for the accidental death of the suspect.

3. The failed suicide victim who sued the subway train authorities

Back in 1977, Milo Stephens Jr. attempted to take his own life by throwing himself in front of a subway train. Fortunately (or not), the suicide failed, but Stephens was severely injured in the process. With the aid of an enterprising lawyer, he sued the NYC Transit Authority, claiming that the cause of his injuries was the negligence of the conductor who did not decelerate the train accordingly before pulling into the station. And now the funny part: Milo Stephens Jr. actually managed to win the lawsuit and was awarded $650,000, but he attempted the same stunt five years later, with no “personal damage” that time.

4. “Regular guy” versus Anheuser Bush

Don’t believe everything you see in commercials. This is the rule that “regular guy” Richard Overton should have heeded before suing Anheuser Bush for false advertisement and the promotion of false social concepts. There is no denying the fact that some of the cheesy Bud Light commercials depict beer as a mandatory social catalyst or the magical liquor that transforms regular guys into hot chick magnets, but Overton took things a bit too far. When he stated that the company’s promotional campaigns caused him high levels of physical/emotional distress as well as financial problems because he was not able to emulate the scenarios in real life. On a side note, to this day it is not known exactly which Bud Light ad Overton attempted to recreate.

5. The woman who sued a horror themed attraction park

Being attacked by a maniac with a chainsaw on the property of an attraction park is, of course, grounds for a lawsuit. However, what the woman who took Universal Studios to court on this premise failed to mention is that “Leatherface” – a character from the Saw movie franchise – was an employee of the park and the “assault” happened as a part of the Haunted House ride. While no blood was shed in the attack, it suffices to say that her undergarments were rendered unusable.

6. The injured pedestrian versus Google maps

The revolutionary navigation devices are meant to replace traditional maps, not common sense. In this case, Lauren Rosenberg had to learn it the hard way. Following the directions given by Google Maps, she made her way on foot to Utah State Road 224, a highly circulated highway that also goes by the name of Deer Valley Drive only to notice that there was no pedestrian sidewalk. Long story short, she continued her walk towards Park City and got run over by a car and sued Google for it, demanding $100,000 reparations. In all fairness, the aforementioned route is clearly marked as heavily circulated highway and the fact that she did not notice alternative pedestrian roads, so the case was dismissed.

7. The story of the 67 million dollar pants

Roy Pearson, who was a judge in Washington D.C. made good use of his legal training and sued Custom Cleaners – a small, family owned dry cleaning company – for no less than 67 million dollars. He stated, quite eloquently for that matter, that the dry cleaners betrayed his trust and their policy of guaranteed customer satisfaction when they lost his favorite pair of pants. The trial ended when the owner of the dry cleaner presented in court holding the said pair of pants, in spite of the fact that Roy Pearson has never actually admitted those were his pants.

8. RIAA versus the dead “pirate’s” daughter

RIAA is taking music piracy quite seriously it seems. Otherwise, why would they bother sending a warning letter to a person who allegedly uploaded 700 illegal tracks on the internet 1 year after her death? In short, Gertrude Walton’s daughter is still disputing the charges of music piracy filed by RIAA, although she has already sent them the death certificate as well as testimonials that her mother didn’t knew how to operate a computer!

9. The man who took the Jackass idiom to a whole new level

When you legally change your name to Jack Ass, you should be prepared for the repercussions. Mr. Ass – who was an anti alcohol campaign promoter and utilized his name as part of the slogan – filed a lawsuit against Viacom’s popular show Jackass for defamation. Needless to say, the lawsuit was dismissed pretty quickly because, after all, why would you even change your name to Jack Ass?

10. Robert Lee Brock versus himself

The Brock versus Brock was a carefully orchestrated scheme in which Robert Lee Brock sued himself for “violating his civil rights” when, after ingesting a large amount of alcohol, he was apprehended by the police. Because he was sentenced to 23 years in the slammer, he had no income to pay himself the reparations. This means that – providing he won – the State of Virginia would owe him 5 million dollars. He didn’t, the case was immediately rejected as frivolous!

Top 10 Awkward Moments Caught with Google Street-View Technology

Google Maps Street View Technologies does a good job capturing the panoramic view of thousands of streets across the world. Most of the streets covered are those driven by car. Areas not accessible by car, like pedestrian areas, narrow streets and alleys are sometimes covered by Google Trikes or snowmobiles.
Since 2008, the technology has pretty much captured it all, including the following 10 things:

1. Public Urination:

There are plenty of pics of men urinating in public. In fact one man in France took Google to court in February of 2012 over a photo it published online through a street view application showing him urinating in his backyard. He believed that he was a laughing stock of his village as a result. His lawyer argued that everyone has a right to their own secrecy.

2. Marriage Proposal:

Some go to extremes to propose like one man who proposed in a TV commercial. Rand wanted to propose to his girlfriend Geraldine in a unique and romantic way. So he created his own website with knowledge of search engine optimization. His idea came to fruition in2006 and the order to buy some ad space during 2007 NFL. Then there was Michael Weiss-Malik, who planned ahead of time and stood at the side of the road with many others as Street View pictures were being updated. There are many other intentional and non-intentional cases.

3. Capsized Cruise Liner:

When a typhoon slams into a cruise liner, it usually capsizes. The cruise/hotel was docked in South Korea when it was hit by 135 mph winds of typhoon Maemi in 2003. All captured on Google earth.

4. Pants down low:

A guy was pictured sitting at the side of a road with his pants down. It was done in broad daylight on High Street, Langholm, U.K.

5. Dumped in a trunk:

A man was pictured in Mannheim, Germany, sitting naked in his trunk and on his driveway. Who ever thought that Hangover 3 was being filmed in Germany? Anyone? Why naked for all the neighbours to see?

6. Skeletal Guy in Scooter:

One guy in Toronto, Ontario, Canada decided to wear a skeleton costume to hide his fatness and obesity as he drove his scooter across the street. Google was there to film it all. Can you imagine, if Kramer from Seinfeld was driving along. Could this man be worse than the bra-less wonder from the sitcom who wore the bra as a top?

7. Ass Show:

A plumber in Netherlands was working on the side of street when his pants slid down to reveal his but crack. The Google Streetview technology was there to film it all. At least his face was not seen, but his partner may not be so lucky. Could the partner have known about the pictures in advance?

8. Itchy Pants:

A woman was walking down Cedar Town, U.K. when she felt an itch in her pants. She tried to adjust as the camera zoomed in.

9. UFOs:

Two mysterious, but identical UFOs were observed on Google Maps on September 28, 2012 almost 1000 miles apart. This raised many questions as to what they are and how there were photographed in the first place.

10. Plane:

Check this out http://goo.gl/maps/qBOq8. It looks as though the plane landed right on top of the buildings.