Apps

If you're unable to make the trek to Washington, DC but still want to witness President Obama's second-term swearing in, for the first time ever we can say, "there's an app for that." Obama's second inauguration, the 57th in US history, will be the first to have an official smartphone app of its own. The Presidential Inaugural Committee launched the app today for both iPhone and Android, offering features for those visiting our nation's capital for the big day as well as anyone watching from afar. If...

An iPhone without apps would be like a zebra without its stripes — plain and boring. As we all know by now, the ability to download and run third-party apps is the x-factor for mobile devices, particularly smartphones. SEE ALSO: 5 Best iPad Apps of 2012 Getting great new apps, many of which are free, makes your phone feel new and exciting. Scroll through the gallery above to view our picks for the top six iPhone apps of 2012.

In our state of continued information overload, and because of the growing number of services which we have to check in order to keep up with the information that matters to us, things get missed by even the most active social media users. A new startup called Slim wants to change that, and is today launching an iOS application which allows you to discover and be alerted to the most important life…

It can be tough to keep up with all the new apps released every week. But you're in luck -- Mashable takes care of that for you, creating a roundup each weekend of our favorite new and updated apps. This week, a new drawing app attempted to take on Draw Something, and a video app was dramatically updated for iPad. A exceptionally popular iOS app finally made its way to Android, and an Android-only app saw a huge update.

Swell creates playlists of audio news and information from places like BBC, NPR, ABC, and Ted Talks based on your personal tastes.

Apple released iOS 7 on Wednesday, and debuted a huge visual overhaul along with it. Heavily textured backgrounds and dark colors are out, while soft gradients, thin sans-serif fonts and bright, bold hues are in. After looking at apps designed for iOS 6, Apple's latest operating system immediately seems out of place. Fortunately, many developers spent the better part of the summer preparing their apps to look at home on iOS 7.

While I still like to read a newspaper when time permits, the Web has become my primary method of keeping up with the latest headlines, investigative reports, analyses and long-form features....

Newly launched iOS application TheNeeds is the latest attempt at offering users a better, more personalized news-reading experience with a service that focuses not only on your interests, but also how those interests evolve over time. The app, something of a competitor to the magazine-like Flipboard, or a community site like Reddit, helps to surface the best articles, blog posts, videos, social…

There are things you can see and things you can’t see when you gaze up into the sky. With a little help from an app or two, you can identify all of them.

One of the main things we try to do at TechCrunch is highlight new gadgets, apps, and other products that you might want to check out. We’re hardly the only site with that aim, but the success of Product Hunt (which recently won our Crunchie Award for Best New Startup) suggests that there’s an appetite for services that are all product discovery, all the time.Startup Tube Centrex…

Are you the kind of person who says, “I read BuzzFeed for the news”? Do you secretly wish you didn’t have to wade through all those listsicles and quizzes to get to the serious reporting? Well, BuzzFeed’s releasing an app just for you.The company is launching a mobile app called BuzzFeed News, and at first glance, it’s pretty much what you’d expect. Unlike…

An innovative new app launched today by business news site Quartz turns new stories into an interactive streaming text conversation. Also of interest: the new iPhone app was launched for Apple Watch before being released to Android phones at all.

This week’s selection of must-have iOS apps features a brand new social news experience called News.me. Created by Bit.ly, with backing from The New York Times, this app shows you not just what your friends are sharing, but also what they’re reading. Sony’s new Crackle application offers a library of over 100 great movies and TV shows, such as The Da Vinci Code, Ghostbusters, Seinfield and Spider-Man – all of which are completely free to watch. RockMelt also makes this week’s must-haves – a web browser ...

The Daily, a News Corp.-owned daily news publication that launched exclusively on the iPad 15 months ago, is continuing to expand to new platforms wit…

When Zite‘s smart iPad newspaper launched in March, we were all down in Austin waiting in line for the iPad 2. It was the perfect storm of Twitter adoption, news curation and…

RSS isn't for everyone, but a handful of new apps are making feeds easier to discover and more intuitive to read than ever. FLUD Mobile for the iPhone is one of them—it's free and it looks great. FLUD Mobile, iPhone, Free. A cleanly designed feed reader that serves up bits of news not as a list of text headlines but rather as a grid of attractive, picture-bearing squares. Navigating with horizontal and vertical swipes is a piece of cake, and new feeds can be added from a list of featured sites or...

The Daily App Deals post is a round-up of the best app discounts of the day, as well as some notable mentions for ones that are on sale. Starting a Business with Venture Capital (iTunes) Previously $9.99, now Free. Starting a Business with Venture Capital for iOS is an app that showcases over 40 videos that instruct entrepreneurs how to pursue funding for their company (without giving up a large portion of their company in the process). Covering the protection of an idea, to planning and pitching, to...

Readability has updated its iOS app to bring a new grid view to the Top Reads and Longform Picks curated reading lists on the iPad. Version 1.2.3 of the app also promises “even more sync speed improvements” which should make Readability even snappier than it was before.

You’ll laugh! You’ll cry! You’ll commit untold violence! This week’s roundup of iOS apps offers users the full range of human emotions....

Today sees the release of the latest edition of The Next Web Magazine, and this month we’re looking at games and gamification....

Less than a month after it had acquired Summly, an iOS news app that uses a combination of natural language processing and algorithms, Yahoo has updated its main mobile app for iPhone and iPod touch with the UK startup's new summarization technology. In a blog post, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer outlines her company's continued dedication to mobile, introducing the new version of the Yahoo iOS app, which now features an endless stream of stories, new social and personalization features, and an overhauled...

Watchup, the startup aiming to create the tablet version of the daily news broadcast, has released version 2.0 of its iPad app, adding features for both casual and power users. The Watchup app pulls news videos from a range of sources, such as the Associated Press, PBS NewsHour, and the Wall Street Journal, and it stitches them together into a continuous playlist. Initially, users had to…

This is a guest post by Martin LeBlanc, the founder of IconFinder, a search engine for icons. You can follow him on twitter here...

Keeping up with the news used to be pretty simple. You picked up your favorite tabloid or broadsheet newspaper on the way to work, or tuned into a scheduled news bulletin at some point on the radio or TV....