Year: 2016

Anilaunch brings interactive animations to your Home screen app icons

The Home screen is one one with few animations or any real liveliness. This has been one of the greatest complaints of iOS since its inception. Nevertheless, the jailbreak community has always, and continues to this day, to attempt to improve the liveliness of the Home screen in iOS.

With a new jailbreak tweak called Anilaunch, you can have your Home screen's application icons animate in various ways from doing various things. In this review, we'll touch on what the tweak is capable of.

How we built the iDB app – part 2: from design to code

This is a guest post by Giulio Michelon, proud designer and CEO of Belka, the Italian studio that designed and developed the iDB app. We've asked Giulio to come here and share his experience developing the app, from the initial concept to the final product. Part 1 was published last week, and part 3 will be published next week.

In the previous part, we talked about the lo-fi design, which mostly iterates on the basic ideas and concepts. In this part I will talk about the high-fidelity design and the actual implementation of the product.

Telegram for iOS gains personal storage, group previews and trending/archived stickers

Telegram, a secure instant messaging service that supports rich media attachments and optional end-to-end encryption, today refreshed its mobile app on the App Store with a few new features. Telegram for iOS, now bumped to version 3.11, offers some interesting new sticker packs and lets you archive those you no longer use.

You can now preview groups before joining them and store your messages and media in the new storage chat.

Telegram is available free on the App Store and Mac App Store.

Dropbox Paper enters public beta, iPhone and iPad app now available

As of today, Dropbox Paper, a collaborative document editor akin to Google Docs and Apple's iWork for iCloud suite (only better!) is in public beta after spending about a year in private beta, the cloud storage startup announced.

In addition, the mobile Paper app for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch launched today, too, so you can immediately download it at no charge from the App Store.

In July, App Store hit highest-ever monthly billings and money paid to developers

According to Apple CEO Tim Cook himself, the App Store has set a new record in July with highest-ever monthly billings and money paid to developers. Developers have now earned over $50 billion from sales of their apps since the App Store's debut in the summer of 2008—and that's after the company's standard thirty percent cut on all App Store proceeds.

The CEO took to Twitter to congratulate developers on their “success and such inspired creativity”.

Apple Music for Android exits beta, gains equalizer settings and performance improvements

Apple Music for Android has dropped the beta flag, reveals the app's official description on Google's Play store. Today, Apple Music for Android was updated to version 1.0 as the app is no longer in beta, signaling Apple's confidence that it enables experiences its iOS counterpart has provided since launch. The app made its surprising debut in November of 2015 as Apple's first-ever Android software because the company wanted to make it easy for music lovers to allow people to enjoy music “no matter where you were and what products you were using”.

Snapseed update adds Text filter, image resizing when exporting and sharing & more

Since buying Snapseed from Nik Software in September 2012, Google has been somewhat neglecting this once popular mobile image editor, issuing maintenance updates that were light on new features. Today, the search firm announced that Snapseed, at long last, is getting some interesting new capabilities via an update on iOS and Android. The Text filter is now available and you can configure the app to resize photos when sharing/exporting.

UI adjustments and bug fixes are included in Snapseed 2.8 as well.

Apple issues new diversity report: 54% of its US new hires are now minorities

Apple on Wednesday issued an updated diversity report, showing progress in its efforts to beef up the hiring of women and minorities. The iPhone-maker is one of many Silicon Valley firms that has been criticized for having a mostly white, male workforce—particularly at the executive level.

According to the latest numbers, 56% of its US employees are white and 69% of its global staffers are male, but there has been a boost in new-hires. Apple says 54% of the US new hires added within the last year are minorities, meaning their new hires are more diverse than current workers.

Snapchat rolls out city-specific stickers that mock local trends and highlight landmarks

Snapchat for iPhone, an ephemeral image messaging app, yesterday announced a new feature called Geostickers. Basically special stickers available in some of the biggest cities around the world, they can be applied to images and moved around before sending them. You can also stick these city-specific stickers on your Snaps.

Geostickers are available now in Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, Washington DC, Honolulu, London, Sydney, São Paulo, Paris and Riyadh.

Astropad graphics tablet app for iPhone and iPad is now a lot faster and uses less battery

Astropad is a very cool app from former Apple engineers designed to let you draw into Mac apps by connecting your iPad or iPhone to the computer via USB or Wi-Fi. You can then draw into most Mac apps directly on your iOS device's screen, using your finger as a replacement for a professional graphics tablet. In fact, it's too good that people are replacing their Wacom tablets with Astropad and an iPad.

I've been using Astropad quite extensively and it works like magic, really.

There's very little discernible lag, courtesy of the proprietary Liquid engine providing nearly three times more fluid responsiveness than Apple’s AirPlay. That's why I'm happy to report that in its most recent version 2.0 update, Astropad is now even faster and more fluid than before and a lot less taxing on the battery.