Heres our look back on 2016 on the Apps that really caught our eye. The ones we tried out and instantly fell in love with. Check out the list below and give them a go.
Viki
There are plenty of Wikipedia apps knocking around the App Store, but Viki does something a bit different. Although you can use the app to search Wikipedia in the normal way, it starts out displaying a Nearby tab, providing articles about interesting things in your vicinity.
Visually, this looks superb from locations on a map to large clickable thumbnails at the foot of the screen. It’s also a practical way to find out more about somewhere without resorting to review-oriented web services.
Castro
The system works a lot like email: new podcasts show up in your inbox, you fling those you’re interested in to the top or bottom of a queue, and dump the rest in a searchable archive. For those podcasts where you must listen to every episode, they can be queued by default.
This is smart, saving you time and effort, and the archive works brilliantly, too, providing speedy access to older episodes.
ImgPlay
A playground for GIFs, ImgPlay aims to bring life to whatever you capture with your iPhone – or to fine-tune the motion within those things that already move.
You start off by loading pretty much anything from your Camera Roll: photos, videos, Burst mode images, Live Photos, or GIFs. With stills, you can select a number of them to stitch together, essentially making ImgPlay a kind of low-end stop-motion tool.
But it’s with Live Photos and Burst shots that ImgPlay really becomes interesting. You can take the video or sequence of images your iPhone shoots, trim the result (including removing individual frames), add a filter and text, and then export the lot as a GIF or video.
Burstio
Launch the app and you see your burst photos as little film strips, each detailing the number of images within. Select a burst and you can trim the series, adjust playback speed, and alter playback direction.
Your edit can then be exported to video or GIF. The process is elegant and simple, and brings new life to images you’d otherwise never use.
Ferrite Recording Studio
As a free app, Ferrite Recording Studio is mightily impressive – a kind of beefed-up Voice Memos, which lets you bookmark bits of recordings to refer to later, and then edit and combine multiple recordings in a multi-track editor view.
But when you pay for Ferrite, it becomes a fully-fledged podcast creation studio on your iPhone.
First and foremost, in-app purchases remove track and project length limits. This affords much greater scope for complex projects, which can have loads of overlaying tracks and potentially be hours in length.
Prisma
We’ve seen quite a few apps that try to turn your photos into art, but none hit the spot quite like Prisma. The app is almost disarmingly simple to use: shoot or select a photo, crop your image, and choose an art style
TECHstance 