Animal Jam — Play Wild (free) — WildWorks’ cute social kids game now comes to the iPhone and iPod touch, following its iPad debut earlier this year. Developed in association with National Geographic, this game provides educational content in the form of videos, animal photography, and fascinating animal facts, while encouraging kids to interact in a safe environment, customize their animal avatars, explore the immersive game world, and play a variety of fun and challenging mini-games. The update also adds new “Jamaalidays” content for the holiday season, with new presents, an arctic wolf character, reindeer gear, a new gingerbread den for holiday parties, two new mini-games for kids to explore, and more.
Google Photos (free) — The Shared Albums feature that Google announced earlier this year has arrived for the iOS version, allowing users to more easily pool photos and videos across any smartphone, tablet, or computer. Users you share album links with will be able to add photos to the album and get notified when new moments are added. A “Free up space” feature has also been added that allows users to remove the full-size originals of photos that have already been safely backed up to Google’s cloud, letting you conserve space on your device. The update also adds Chromecast support, improvements to photo backup reliability and speed, and other performance improvements.
Pixelmator ($5) — This popular photo editing app for iOS gets updated for Apple’s newest devices, with iPad Pro and Apple Pencil support, and 3D Touch for the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus. Specially tailored brushes for the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil feature pressure, tilt, and acceleration sensitivity, allowing you to sketch and paint more naturally. Images of up to 100 megapixels are also supported on the iPad Pro. 3D Touch on the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus now allow you to not only access shortcuts in the app, but also use touch-sensitivity to paint on the screen. A list of other improvements and fixes are in here as well, with new artist-designed brushes, and performance and usability enhancements to various editing tools.
Scanbot 5 (free) — This powerful scanning app for iOS gets even better with the addition of Folders for pro users, letting you take the documents you’ve saved in Scanbot and organize them more effectively. Folders also synchronize with iCloud Drive — in both directions — so your filing system will be translated onto your Mac as well.
Pandora for Apple TV (free) — Although tvOS 9.1 added Siri support for Apple Music along with some other fixes, those who are not fans of Apple’s streaming and radio service will be happy to know that Pandora has now joined the big-screen club with a native Apple TV app. The Pandora app on the Apple TV gets a more Apple-like interface, while still allowing users to access all of the features of the service they’ve come to know and love. Users can manage existing stations, create new stations, browse through high-resolution album art, and skip, like, and dislike tracks. The new Pandora app for Apple TV is actually a universal update to the iOS app, so features should remain fairly consistent between the TV and iOS sides, and if you’ve already downloaded it for your iPhone, it will be waiting for you in the “Purchased” section on the Apple TV App Store.
