Expert Blogs

Documents 5 (free) allows users to read, listen, view, download, and annotate almost any content they desire on their iPad. the app is more than just a tool that will help you stay organized; it combines a document viewer with a file manager and a media player. The app is super-fast and looks good with clean graphics. There are plenty of options to use and everything is easy to locate on the app. 

I’ve sold most of my art books. I don’t know if this was the intent of Open Door’s Alan Oppenheimer or not, but it was the result of him providing me with Art Authority ($9.99). My iPad is no coffee table book, but that’s a good thing. As Apple touts the pencil thinness of the iPad Air, coffee table books start to look more and more arcane. What coffee table books have over the iPad is the size of their canvas. But when one actually visit museums, art books seem a bit of a travesty of pure form. Books not only fail to represent scale well, they don’t reproduce paintings or drawings with anything like fidelity to the originals; and they offer no way to experience media or paint thickness or pen impression. And when it comes to sculpture they are, of course, overwhelmingly flat (not to dismiss pop-up books).

As new iOS apps flood the App Store every day — recently topping 1,000,000 — we know it’s tough to tell which ones are worth their salt. But thanks to our Weekly Scoop, you can have the best for free! Here you’ll find a weekly roundup of the coolest apps free or at a discount for a limited-time only. Each week features the best and brightest from websites like Free App Report, AppsGoneFree, appsfire, and more.

Hurry! Get 'em while they’re hot!

Even though Google overtook Apple by number of created applications in 2013, iOS remains the most profitable platform for app developers and marketers. There are a number of helpful tools that developers can use to create sketches and prototypes of iOS applications if they don’t want or don’t have the opportunity to hire in-house designers.

On Tuesday Disney released a new app, Disney Movies Anywhere (free), that lets you stream or download your movies from Disney, Pixar, and Marvell, as well as browse and purchase additional movies. Plus, just for creating an account, the app offers a free movie, Pixar's The Incredibles (regularly $19.95). The app also offers free exclusive Disney content, including original programming and never-before-seen videos. The idea behind the app is that it lets you keep your movies from these studios all in one place as well as buy new movies. This includes viewing movies that you purchased from the iTunes Store. You can watch your movies via streaming or download them and watch offline. Each purchase carries with it Disney Movie Rewards points.

Camera phone videos, particularly of outside activities, are often rolling and jerky enough to make one practically lose their lunch when viewing them, which is why a camera tripod is a great tool. You can't lug one everywhere however, and it's usually impractical for your iPhone. Apple has added software image stabilization into the iPhone, but there are limits to its effectiveness. You can save yourself and your loved ones some replay discomfort by adding a more robust video stabilizer app to your iPhone library. There are online tools available on sites like YouTube, but for a finer level of control, you might try Emulsio (free), which was just updated on February 24.

Safe driving saves lives. Everyday we hear about accidents caused by drunk driving, careless driving, and texting. Luckily there are apps that can help you become a better driver and help you out in case of an accident or emergency. 

Here are four great apps to help you stay safe on the road:

As people across the world slept on Wednesday night, Microsoft subtly shifted the branding associated with SkyDrive, the company's Dropbox, Box, and Google Drive competitor. The now rebranded OneDrive, offers a basic storage capability across devices. The initial allocation is an interesting 7GB. To get you started, mobile users who choose to backup their photos to OneDrive will be rewarded with an additional 3GB, bringing the storage capacity for new users to 10GB. Like Dropbox before it, OneDrive now encourages its adherents to send out referrals. Each referral that takes up the offer returns 500MB in incremental storage, maxing at 5GB of extra free storage.

Let me start by saying, not all freemium games are bad. There are some notable titles that don't intentionally extort dollars from gamers. Freemium games rely on what has been referred to as the "friction point," the point in which a game has limited your progress and you either have to wait for your energy to recharge, pay more money to continue, or proceed to grind away at a lower, less challenging level while scraping credits together to gain a more competitive edge. The challenge for many freemium game developers is walking that line between frustrating the gamer enough that they are willing to throw down real-world money to advance and not frustrating the gamer so much that they put the game down and don't come back. Distimo released an interesting report in March 2013 showing just how profitable it is for developers to walk this line.