WolframAlpha

Dude. College isn't exactly a walk in the park. Thankfully, these 25 apps will help make your experience a little easier.

Apps are the wave of the future, man. Soon every classroom will be filled with apps of all shapes and sizes, replacing your books, and maybe even your friends. But until then, you need apps on your computing device to succeed this school year. Whether you're reading, taking notes, annotating photosynthesis PDFs, or typing up a long paper on the juxtaposition of thing A and thing B, here are the best apps to get your schoolwork done. Of course, it's still up to you to actually do work, but with these...

Among other minor updates inside iOS 5.1, one feature that has until now gone unnoticed is better Yelp integration inside Siri. Now, when you ask Siri to find some pizza restaurants, you can tap the star rating next to each restaurant to see it inside the Yelp app for iPhone. If you haven't downloaded the Yelp app, it will appear on your screen inside the App Store — and this is what's most interesting here. Apple chose Yelp as its restaurant ratings partner, and could easily choose other kinds of...

A new in-app purchase for the $2.99 WolframAlpha iOS app takes using images as search queries to a new level. The $0.99 in-app purchase called "Extension" can analyze a photo's EXIF data, add filters, perform edge detection (seen below), perform color processing, and more. Once you purchase the extension for the app, you can either use images from your Camera Roll or take pictures from inside the app itself. It can even perform rudimentary text extraction (OCR) on images you upload. WolframAlpha's image...

Looking for a quick last-minute gift? Not feeling up to fighting the holiday traffic, crowds and checkout lines? Just too lazy busy to shop? Then you may want to consider giving the gift of an iOS app. You can gift any paid app from iTunes on your computer or from the app’s description page on your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. Just scroll down past the screenshot and look for the “gift this app” button. All you’ll need is the recipient’s email address to complete the transaction.

The end of the month is here, and that means it's time to do a little housekeeping on our list of the absolute best iPhone apps. Who will be inducted? Who will unceremoniously get the boot? WordLens: WordLens is a taste of the future. Point it at a sign in Spanish and it'll overlay an English translation on the fly while approximating the size and typeface of the original text. It's not perfect but it works well enough to blow your mind into a thousand little pieces. $10. Infinity Blade: Angry Birds may...

There's an ocean of apps out there. Whether you just got your iPhone and are feeling adrift or you're a salty old dog seeing what you might've missed, here are the absolutely essential apps. Twitter: Twitter thankfully didn't make too many changes when they gobbled up the already-great Tweetie 2 from Atebits—same clean interface, same Tweet swiping, and the same it-feels-so-good pull to refresh mechanism. Free. Facebook: The new, panel-based interface takes a little getting used to, but once you're...

In this week's mildly paranoid iPhone app roundup: Prices, slashed for the holidays! iPhones, recklessly tilted! Amazing classic games, handily ported! A decent camera app, sold for nothing! Cheap tickets, booked! Dictations, taken! Movies trivia, two ways! And much, much more... If you hate hate hate galleries, click here to view the apps as a single page. • Google Mobile: This update keeps the app from launching into Safari as much as it used to, and widens its voice capabilities. A minor but...

In this week's incidentally infringing app roundup: NASA enters the iPhone's orbit, Earthworm Jim is ALIVE, your handset learns two tricks it should've known already, rhythm gaming goes pro, and Loopt users crudely proposition one another. NASA: NASA's really stepped up their online presence in the last few years, giving armchair astronauts more media, stats and news than they could ever want. Nasa's iPhone app, matter-of-factly named "NASA app for iPhone," aggregates it all, including Twitter feeds,...