It may not be official, but with the start of September, summer is pretty much out the door. No one likes to see those sunny days fall by the wayside, so we’re sure there was a bit of gloom hanging over the workweek. Fortunately, we’ve got a whole slew of iOS apps for you to take your mind off your troubles. Just push ‘em way deep down inside—it’s the healthy thing to do.



ku xlarge20 iPhone Apps of the Week: CARROT Alarm, Ping, and More S Ping : Instead of swiping and sliding emails into categories to be read later or archived, Pings takes a wholly different approach. Here, email conversations are separated by the individual contact, much in the same way your text messages are organized. If you get emails from someone not in your contacts—usually a business or newsletter—they end up on an entirely different page thats jus ta swipe away and all grouped together. You can currently use Ping with Gmail, AOL, Yahoo!, and iCloud accounts. Plus, if both people in the conversation use Ping, the thread gets some iMessage-like boosts such as quicker response times and an indication of when the other person is typing. Ping will be available in the App Store starting September 18, and you can sign up to reserve your spot now over at Ping’s website. [TBD]



ku xlarge21 iPhone Apps of the Week: CARROT Alarm, Ping, and More S Push Launcher : Push Launcher’s a super simple app that does one little thing but does it well; it gives you a means of putting all your most used app in one, easy to access place—your notification center. The app features a (supposedly) intuitive interface that lets you add, delete, and edit apps from your pulldown menu. You can even schedule an app to open up on its own using push notifications. So if you know you like to read the New York Times on your phone at a certain time of morning, you can set a push notification to make opening up the app as easy as possible. [Free this week]



ku xlarge22 iPhone Apps of the Week: CARROT Alarm, Ping, and More S CARROT Alarm : CARROT is a “sentient” alarm clock. She plays aggressively chipper music to wake you up, makes you perform tasks with your phone so you actually have to focus, and keeps track of points. You can’t win a more pleasant wakeup experience, but you can use them to unlock better alarm tones and routines. Eventually you can even use points to get CARROT to recite bedtime stories to you. Which sounds pretty dreadful. But points! CARROT Alarm Clock syncs with CARROT To-Do, and to multiple iDevices. [$2]



ku xlarge23 iPhone Apps of the Week: CARROT Alarm, Ping, and More S


Path : This week, Path introduced a premium, pay-for service. Path 3.2 for Android and iOS now allows users unlimited access to the network’s stickers, camera filters and all manner of other things for a monthly or annual fee. Subscriptions for iOS sell for $5 for three months and $15 for a year. It’ll help Path generate revenue, and in return offer users more features—stickers! photo filters!—and a more customizable experience, according to Path. Though we’re yet to find out exactly what that means. But it raises the question: are you prepared to start paying for a social network? [Free, $5/3 months, $15/year]