Episode 006: We talk about some of the best photo and weather apps from 2013, Sebastien installs new RAM in his iMac, Jeff and Cody debate heavily over Touch ID accuracy issues. The crew discusses iOS 7′s sparse design details, frequent crashing issues, and Apple’s new App Store milestone.
If you’ve been having trouble finding a podcast client that fits you, you may want to check out Castro. Castro is a beautiful new podcast app for your iPhone that backs up its good looks with powerful features.
I should tell you up front that the app is for iOS 7 users only. You could tell it was designed specifically for the OS, as it’s rife with transparent backgrounds, flat UI elements, and a smart, gesture-based interface… Read More
Good news for folks looking to grab an iPhone on the cheap before Christmas. T-Mobile is reviving its Black Friday special for a limited time, taking away the down payments for select iPhone models making them completely free up front.
The promotion starts December 11—that’s today—and includes 16GB models of the iPhone 5s and 5c, along with other devices. This means that, if you qualify, you wouldn’t have to pay for either phone until you got your first monthly bill… Read More
Over the past couple of years, Apple has been filing and collecting patents on inventions involving wearable computing devices. And one of its particular areas of interest is in head-mounted display systems, which it first patented in 2006.
Today, the US Patent and Trademark Office published another patent from Apple that it has just been granted that covers a head-mounted display system. It looks like an Oculus Rift and is designed to enhance gaming, movies and more… Read More
Twitter has updated its official iOS client today, bringing the app to version 6.0. The update is a fairly significant one, bringing about a new look and feel for the app, as well as photo-sharing for direct messages, improved search and more.
The new look pushes the UI of the Twitter app further into iOS 7 territory. There’s more white spacing—the menu bar at the bottom is now all white— and texts and graphics seem flatter. And Twitter has added various other enhancements…
My favorite calendar app for iOS—Fantastical 2—has been updated with a few new features that you should know about. First up is support for the latest version of TextExpander. As we told you about in an earlier post, TextExpander was forced to change its approach to sharing snippets. As a result, any app that features TextExpander support must be updated to retain snippet functionality.
The second feature to be found in Fantastical 2′s latest update is support for Waze. If you have the GPS and navigation app installed on your iPhone, you can now upon location links using Waze instead of Apple Maps or Google Maps. These, and other changes make the cut in Flexibits’ latest update to Fantastical. Check past the break for the full change log. Read More
Last month, Facebook released version 3.0 of its popular Messenger app. The update was significant because it featured an all-new UI design for the app, bringing its aesthetics more in line with those introduced by Apple in iOS 7.
Today, the client received another update, bringing it to version 3.1. This time Facebook added a few new convenience features that will allow you to access a person’s Timeline or call them (toll-free) by simply tapping on their picture… Read More
Gene Munster—yes the iTV guy—is out with a new report today looking at the state of Siri’s ability to accurately answer and respond to queries. The Piper Jaffray analyst regularly assesses the accuracy of Apple’s digital assistant.
In his latest look, Munster found that Siri has continued to improve with the release of iOS 7, particularly in its ability to properly interpret questions being asked and its overall performance when accessed in noisier situations…
The search monster Google today updated its free Drive for iPhone and iPad app with the much-needed ability to sort your cloud files according to several built-in criteria. The highly requested feature finally makes it easy to access your files by last edited, last modified, title and last opened by you. Additionally, you can also find and replace in documents.
I switched from the native Microsoft Office apps to Google Docs years ago and never looked back. Google’s suite of cloud productivity apps has won me over with its ability to access, edit and share my stuff on any network-enabled computer, right in a web browser, without having to install anything… Read More
In the past year or so, Yahoo’s been bolstering up its video and rich content expertise by acquiring smaller startups left and right. The company kicked off the acquisition spree by buying the mobile news startup Summly for $30 million and the #2 blogging platform Tumblr for north of $1 billion. Soon after, Yahoo paid $50 million for the cool iPhone video app, Qwiki.
In the ensuing months, Yahoo snapped up the DreamWorks-funded video-sharing app Ptch and announced that the New York Times technology columnist David Pogue and American television journalist Katie Couric are joining its A-team of premium content producers.
Today, it was reported that Yahoo in another acqui-hire move bought the cross-platform video startup called QuikIO… Read More
Good news Family Guy fans. The San Francisco-based game studio TinyCo has just announced that it has teamed up with Fox Digital Entertainment to build an official mobile game for the popular TV show, which first debuted back in 1999.
Headed to Android and iOS in 2014, the title is said to feature an original story based on the show’s 212 episodes. Fox says that in the game, players will adventure throughout the city of Quahog, recruiting and confronting popular characters… Read More
iBeacons, an Apple indoor positioning system based on Low Energy Bluetooth 4.0 (BLE) wireless technology packed inside tiny transmitters, seems to be picking up steam as of recently. Although Apple never conceived iBeacons technology to be platform-dependent, current installations are limited to sending push notifications right to the Lock screen of nearby iPhone, iPod touch or iPad devices.
These alerts use a combination of physical location, activity, time and personal interests and typically include various marketing messages, such as store discounts, freebies and so forth.
Surprisingly enough, Apple’s supplier Qualcomm has now entered the game with the Gimbal, its own iBeacons-compatible platform which promises to bring location sensing to a micro-location level at an affordable price… Read More
The Google Play Books app has received a nice update this morning which lets you search through the contents of scanned pages.
If you’ve used the Google Books service before, you know that the Internet giant supports a variety of book formats, including those with free-flowing text, scanned pages or even a combination of both.
Unlike the regular text which can be copied and pasted, scanned pages are regular images. Therefore, to make searching of scanned pages possible some sort of an optical character recognition (OCR) feature needs to run either on the device itself or on the server.
That’s exactly what this Google Play Books update does for you… Read More
Flint is a nice little mobile payment service that lets anyone easily accept and process credit cards on the go.
The service provides an interesting alternative to the likes of PayPal (which revamped its iOS app and just launched a digital gift cards shop) and Square (which just redesigned its credit card dongle).
Flint is cross-platform and fees start at just 1.95 percent.
Today, the company has refreshed its free iPhone application with notable new capabilities, like the ability to scan and redeem coupons using your iPhone’s built-in iSight camera. Flint Mobile version 2.0 also lets you create invoices within the app and supports loyalty coupons in the form of Passbook passes… Read More
In another move meant to capitalize on the success of its free iTunes Radio streaming-music service, Apple’s hired a top radio exec as the company preps to offer iTunes Radio to advertisers in 2014 and take the service international, AdAge claims.
Former Cumulus Media Executive Vice President of Sales, Michael Pallad, has now joined Tim Cook & Co. and is now overseeing ad sales for iTunes Radio internationally, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke to AdAge. He will report into the iAd unit, which is led by Apple Vice President and former Yahoo exec Todd Teresi… Read More
Following reports last week indicating that Apple’s iPhone 5s has finally achieved 100 percent availability across Apple’s retail stores in the United States, the online Apple Store on Tuesday has updated its shipping times as well.
Web orders for the device are now shipping in 24 hours, another sign that Apple and its suppliers have fully caught up with demand, which is always good news with the Christmas shopping frenzy upon us.
All iPhone 5s models are now being advertised as available to ship within 24 hours, regardless of capacity, color or carrier… Read More
VLC, the free cross-platform desktop media player, has been through some turmoil as VideoLan, which manages the project, has undergone reorganization as the multinational development team now spans twenty nations.
The open source media player made its App Store debut back in October 2010 as one of the first iPhone apps that could render media file formats unsupported by iTunes and iOS. Unfortunately, the app got pulled in January 2011 over licensing issues.
The problems came down to the GNU General Public License (GLP) requirements as developer Rémi Denis-Courmont, lead contributor to the VLC project, filed a licensing claim based on the code he had contributed to the project.
Following a two-year hiatus, VLC made its way back into the App Store earlier this summer (you can download it for free). And today, VideoLan has pushed an update to VLC for Mac and Windows desktops, bringing a lot of fixes and a cool experimental decoding of media files in HEVC and WebM/VP9 file formats… Read More
The nation’s top wireless carrier, Verizon Wireless, last month admitted its strained network in major cities such as New York, San Francisco and Chicago was underperforming, with many users experiencing their 4G data throughput dropping to slower 3G speeds.
Verizon yesterday blamed the sub-par network quality on “capacity constraints” and argued these data throughput hiccups are now a thing of the past as the carrier has successfully fixed its network in New York City… Read More
If you find yourself attracted to visually stunning games, you are in luck. More and more unusual, atmospheric games are being added to the App Store on a regular basis.
Darklings is an atmospheric game that puts you in the world of Lum as he tries to save the light. Travel through forests and caves, battling Darklings and trying to bring light back to the world… Read More
This article isn’t about how important I think it is that consumers reduce their excessive use of plastic, paper, and glass. I’m not going to get on my soapbox and tell you that you should be composting your leftovers. I am talking about recycling, but not in the way you may think.
Starborn Anarkist is a dual stick shooter that features an intergalactic garbage collector who has finally flipped his lid. Players go on a laser-guided rampage, destroying every ship in sight. Then, use the debris from your destruction to upgrade your ship and show those waste-makers how to take out the trash (these puns are just getting out of hand)… Read More
