Apps

Get your adventure caps on -- it's exploring time. This week's app collection for kids is all about taking the road less traveled.

The market for children’s and educational apps continues to grow — evidenced by Apple last week announcing 1 billion downloads of educational apps from iTunes U — and that growth is leading to both consolidation and new business models. In one of the latest developments, TabTale, a publisher of children’s and family apps, has bought Kids Games Club, maker of apps like “Paint Sparkles” (a…

iPhones. iPads. Android. Windows Phone. We've updated all of our essential apps lists to include a few forgotten favorites, some long awaited arrivals and, as always, even more amazing apps. Check them out!...

China is now the world’s largest smartphone marketplace, with Flurry estimating that there will be 246 million smart devices in China by the end of this month. It’s a potentially lucrative market for app developers, but almost impossible to crack without the necessary language or cultural understanding to reach Chinese users. Educational app makers, however, have SmarTots to help.

In the age of social media, we can track disease outbreaks like never before. Now, a new game from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention takes the armchair epidemiology to a whole new level. The CDC created "Solve the Outbreak," a new iPad app, to increase awareness of public health outbreaks. If you were a fervent fan of movies like Contagion or 28 Days Later, you can put those hours of Internet research to work.

The iPhone comes with a bunch of apps you never use. Some of them are poorly implemented. Others are lacking important features. Fortunately, there's a whole world of developers offering some very viable third-party alternatives. Unfortunately you can't delete the apps your iPhone comes with, but here are some alternatives that will free you from their boring grips....

Just how much does your brain functionality affect what you hear? Your gut reaction to that question might be “not a lot,” but the staff at the Exploratorium, a hands-on science museum in San Francisco, asks you to reconsider that position with its new Sound Uncovered app for iPad. According to the Exploratorium, you ultimately owe your sense of hearing “not so much to your two ears as to what’s between them.”...