Vavuud is a simple, plastic wind meter for your smartphone that takes advantage of magnetic power in order to give you an accurate wind reading. It plugs into your phone’s jack and relays the information to you via a simple app. Here’s how it works:

As its arms spin in the breeze, the magnetometer in your phone detects the field created by the two magnets embedded in the Vaavud’s rotor. The app then converts the rotations of these magnets into wind speed using modified sound processing algorithms.

Read more

Digital textbook platform Boundless has released an iPhone app that gives students access to free digital textbooks as well as premium digital textbooks for a subscription fee. Prior to releasing the app, students could only access the service through Boundless’ online platform.

The mobile app brings the online experience to the iPhone by giving students access to online versions of their textbooks. The app lets students align their assigned textbook “chapter by chapter, section by section, so that you don’t need to buy your book. Our experts use the best of the internet to bring affordable textbook alternatives to you.”

The digital textbooks allow readers to search inside of them and feature concept summaries. Students can pay $20 for premium access which includes interactive study materials such as flashcards and chapter outlines and quizzes to help students test their knowledge. (Via Engadget).

Vanity Fair has introduced a new iPhone app that gives readers access to all of its print magazine content. The Condé Nast title’s in-house team used Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite to create the app, which has been designed specifically for the iPhone 5. While the magazine’s app was available on the iPhone in the past, only the iPad edition included full access to the magazine’s content.

The iPhone app’s table of contents categorizes stories based on reading time be it, “Short,” “Medium,” “Long” reads, and “Everything Else.” Short reads take less than five minutes. Medium reads take 5-10 minutes, and “Long” reads take 10 minutes or more of reading time.

The app also includes lots of rich media content such as videos, photo slide shows, interactive infographics, and archival articles. Users can share content directly from the app to their social networks or via email.

You can check out the app and download free sample content. If you like what you see, you can purchase issues ala carte for $4.99 each or buy a subscription for $19.99 a year. Existing print and iPad subscribers get full access to the new iPhone app.

It’s literally raining cats and dogs over at Weather Kitty and Weather Puppy, and Grumpy Cat Approves. She gives the app a paw of endorsement.

This Weather Kitty app upgrades your weather notifications to the point of cute overload. The basic kitty app is free, but if you want Grumpy weather, you can upgrade with an in-app purchase. I know there’s a million weather apps floating around out there but for the furry friend fanatics, it doesn’t get better than this. If you get tired of the kittens and puppies, you can upload your own with the app upgrade. My only remaining wish? Kitty gifs. Read more

Earlier this year, I wrote about the best free apps for transcribing recorded interviews, speeches, videos or other audio content.

If you don’t want to do the work yourself, there is another option. For $1 a minute, you can transcribe pre-recorded text using the Rev Voice Recorder app. At a conference last week, I tested out the platform with a ten-minute speech.

I recorded 10 minutes of a speech on the app’s “normal” setting from my seat in a hotel ballroom. I recorded the speech and uploaded it to the Rev translators straight from my phone at 2:30 in the afternoon. They emailed me back a clear and accurate transcript at 9:00 pm the same night.

Read more

LinkedIn wants to make applying for a job as simple as possible and now you can do it from your phone. The company has updated its app adding a new search feature that lets you search for potential jobs and then apply without a resume directly from your account.

You can search based on job title, keyword or company. LinkedIn will also recommend jobs for you based on your skills and employment history. Once you find your desired job listing, you can use the app to app for the job directly from LinkedIn. You don’t need a resume, you can simply use your LinkedIn profile to represent your work experience and to show off your skill set.

The business social network is also pushing an upgrade called a “Job Seeker Premium Account” that will give you paid placement at the top of a recruiter’s inbox. It costs $29.95 a month for a monthly membership, or if you commit to a year’s membership it is $24.95.

Yahoo has shuttered Astrid, the popular to-do list app, which it acquired on July 5th. To help Astrid users, we have put together a list of alternative to-do apps. We’ve included links to the apps and a brief description of what the apps do below.

1. Any.do: “Millions use Any.do every day to remember all the tasks they want to-do and make sure they get them done. Key benefits: Seamless cloud sync, Speech recognition, Alerts, Any.do Moment, Snooze tasks, Google Task Sync, Notes, Sub tasks, Amazing Widgets, Repeating / Recurring Tasks, Missed call, Auto complete, In app actions, Gesture support & much more!”

2. Wunderlist: “Wunderlist is the easiest way to manage and share your daily to-do lists. Whether you’re running your own business, planning an overseas adventure or sharing a shopping list with a loved one, Wunderlist is here to help you get things done.” Read more

Albumatic first launched earlier this year to promising reviews, but has since gone through some major changes to address flaws in the app. The new app is a redesign of the entire sharing and collaborative experience with the new iOS7* platform in mind.

Albumatic’s founder, Adam Ludwin, has to this say about their decision to remake the app:

You realize that creating value and something that people want to use is just an infinitely hard task. I’d have to say, being an entrepreneur is a very humbling experience, and being a VC is about constantly having people feed your ego.

Read more

Heard is a funtime-shifting app that lets you record audio in the immediate past. It uses the same princicple as TiVO and other time shift TV recording technology.

With HEARD installed on your iPhone, you have a powerful time-shifting app that lets you customize how far back you want to go so you can grab that otherwise missed audio. The HEARD app runs silently (and seamlessly) in the background and ‒ with a simple tap ‒ the instructions / driving directions / jokes / stories / first words / laughter you would have previously missed are now saved and stored on your iPhone.

Read more

Going on a biking trip is a great way to spend a vacation, but it can be a pain to lug your bike along with you —  if you don’t pack it right, it runs the risk of getting damaged after you check it in on the plane.

Enter Spinlister, a new tool that helps connect bike riders with bike renters, so if you are flying half way around the world you don’t have to bring your bike with you. You can use the app to search for a bike rental at your destination. The app is also great if you’d like to make a little bit of extra money by renting out your own bikes to other cyclists. It’s like Airbnb for bikes.  Read more