“My 5 most-used apps this year - Cult of Mac” plus 1 more

---

My 5 most-used apps this year - Cult of Mac Posted: 31 Dec 2019 01:01 PM PST For my job at Cult of Mac, I test a lot of apps. But of course, I also use a lot of apps, for work, for recreation, and for making music. I thought I'd make a short list of my most-used apps this year. Few, if any, of these apps are new this year, although some of them received major updates in 2019. But all of them are excellent, well-made apps, well worth checking out. So, let's get started. Launchbar Launchbar is so essential that a Mac without it feels broken. Launchbar, and other launcher apps like Alfred, let you use the keyboard to control and navigate your computer. Hit ⌘-Space, the default shortcut, and a small panel opens. Type into that panel, and the magic happens. It can be the name of an app, a song, a file or folder, a web-search term. You can run Applescripts, eject disks, change the volume, sleep the Mac, and on and on. Spotlight offers a small subset of these features, but Launchbar learns from you, and is about one million times more useful. Price: €29 Download: Launchbar from the Obdev (macOS) Beatmaker 3 I use a lot of music apps on the iPad, but the one I've loved the most this year is Beatmaker 3. If you're familiar with Ableton Live on Macs and PCs, then you'll understand the concept. You get the established timeline view, where each track gets a horizontal bar, and you can record and edit therein. But it also has a grid-like clip view that shares the same recordings, so you can quickly launch sections on the fly — ideal for compositions and live performances. But the reason I love BM3 is that it is so fast to use, and so powerful. Like Apple's own apps, it has a few odd conventions that make first-time use awkward — I tried it a few times before I understood it. But stick with it and the rewards are many. Sampling, or recording snippets from external instruments, is not only simple, but so easy, and so powerful, that the sampler alone could sell for hundreds of dollars on the desktop. It's also rock-solid (early problems gave it a reputation for crashes, but that's all in the past). Beatmaker 3 might not be my favorite place to finalize arrangements and sizes, but for getting a song started, and assembling all the elements, there's nothing like it — not even on the Mac. Price: $17.99 Download: BeatMaker 3 from the App Store (iOS) Ulysses Ulysses may be the best text-editing app on any platform. Photo: Ulysses Ulysses is the text-editing app that I use to write all my Cult of Mac articles. It uses the principles of Markdown syntax, but also lets you drag in images and add captions, add notes, and tags your articles/notes/story chapters. It is happy dealing with many thousands of documents, and everything is kept inside the app, so you never have to scour the Finder for a lost item. When you're done writing, the app lets you export your text to beautiful, custom-formatted PDFs, web pages, EPUBs, or to WordPress (how I use it). The idea is that the writing part is done in plain text, and the exporting part is a separate step. This means that you don't get locked into a single format early on, like you do with something like Word or Pages. Ulysses works on both iOS and macOS, and all your work syncs between the two. It's even good on the iPhone. Price: Free with subscription Download: Ulysses from the App Store (iOS) Fiery Feeds/Reeder If you read news, and RSS reader is essential. Photo: Reeder Using Twitter and Facebook for news is a fools' game. If you miss a Tweet in a feed, you've probably missed it forever. Most websites also make their articles available as a machine-readable list, called an RSS feed. If you add this link to an app like Fiery Feeds or Reeder, then you get all those new posts, all in one app. You can organize them into categories and folders, and you can read them as beautifully-formatted, text-and-images-only articles, without ads or Twitter buttons. Reeder is the better-looking of the two, but Fiery Feeds is more powerful and customizable. I can, for example, add an article directly to my Things to-do list with a single swipe. Price: Free with subscription Download: Fiery Feeds: RSS Reader from the App Store (iOS) Price: $4.99 Download: Reeder 4 from the App Store (iOS) Infuse Infuse — even better-looking than the movies it shows you. Photo: Firecore If you watch movies and TV shows on the iPad, then you should check out Infuse. It grabs album art, arranges series into playlists, tracks your progress through episodes, automatically grabs subtitles, and can play back video from external drives (yes, on iOS), as well as stream from popular online storage services. If you stream all your TV and movies from Hulu, Apple TV+, Netflix, and so on, then you don't need Infuse. But if you download your movies and shows, or keep them in the cloud, then you should totally check it out. Price: Free Download: Infuse 6 from the App Store (iOS)

Scammers are using Play Store apps to serve ads that nobody can escape - CyberScoop Posted: 19 Dec 2019 12:00 AM PST Written by Jeff Stone Dec 19, 2019 | CYBERSCOOP A sneaky network of more than 100 Android applications is allowing fraudsters to make money by pushing pervasive advertisements to users' devices, according to new cybersecurity findings. The device owners aren't the real victims, even though they're being exploited.  The constant stream of ads, some miniscule and others loud and inescapable, are leveraging victims' phones as conduits for scammers to rip off companies' marketing dollars. More than 100 applications with some 4.6 million downloads from the Google Play Store include malicious code that enables the bogus advertising network, according to research published Thursday by the bot detection firm White Ops. Android subscribers who downloaded these apps, some of which still existed on the Play Store at press time, believed they were installing programs that would predict their fortune, play games, take selfies or remove bugs. But the apps also abused their access to inundate the devices with advertisements that could be tracked but often couldn't be seen. Most of the apps first appeared in the Play Store in mid-September and, while duplicitous apps are all too common, these findings are the latest evidence ad fraud campaigners are investing in new ways to maintain access on affected devices. "The code has aggressive persistence mechanisms," said Inna Vasilyeva, a threat intelligence analyst at White Ops. "Once we started looking into one application, we could see that it was related to what a lot of other apps were doing." This malicious activity was made possible by two code libraries, which White Ops dubbed Soraka and Sogo. The apps also use AppsFlyer, a framework for mobile attribution and marketing analytics. It's a combination that enables the apps to remove a background notification service meant to prohibit fraud activity when a phone is powered down, and schedule ads to start appearing seconds after those anti-fraud measures are disabled. The paychecks available to ad fraud scammers are large enough to encourage the research and development of new malware and evasion techniques, which then can be repurposed to carry out more traditional forms of cybercrime. U.S. prosecutors accused one fraud ring of stealing roughly $30 million over a span of years, in part by commandeering a network of 1.7 million hacked computers. In this case, White Ops researchers cited Best Fortune Explorer, an app still lurking on the Play Store at press time, as one of the most nefarious. The game promises to predict user's future, such as when they will meet their true love and if they will be promoted at work. In fact, based on White Ops' code analysis, the app sends a nonstop stream of ads that many of the thousands of negative reviewers compared to a virus. A representative from Google's Play Store acknowledged questions about White Ops' findings to CyberScoop before press time. The app, which has 170,000 downloads, was published on Sept. 9 and shares many characteristics with the larger Soraka network, White Ops determined. Researchers from throughout the security community in recent months have tightened their focus on mobile apps that promise one thing only to do something very different. Google removed more than 100 adware-laced apps from the Play Store in response to findings from Trend Micro, while Wandera also has uncovered gaming apps capable of stealing users' credentials.

You are subscribed to email updates from "virus game app" - Google News. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now.	Email delivery powered by Google
Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States