In this week's edition of our Apps of the Week post, we've hand-picked 5 titles for you to check out this weekend. The selections include a video streaming app with a unique twist, a different kind of Twitter client, a full-featured annotation app, and two new games that you won't want to miss!
Tony Fadell is stepping down as CEO of Nest, he announced in a blog post on Friday. The former Apple engineer and founder of the smart thermostat/device company, which was purchased by Google in 2014 for $3 billion, says he's moving into an "advisor" role to Alphabet and CEO Larry Page.
Despite recent reports of turmoil within the company, Fadell insists that the move is amicable and the transition has been in progress since late last year. He says he's leaving the company to new CEO Marwan Fawaz, who was previously CTO of cable company Charter, with a two-year roadmap in place.
Just ahead of WWDC 2016, which kicks of with a keynote presentation on Monday, June 13, at 10am, Apple issues a timely refresh to its official WWDC app for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.
The refreshed app has an all-new dark interface and now runs on the fourth-generation Apple TV so you can watch WWDC action from the comfort of your couch.
In mid-March 2016, Facebook-owned Instagram said it would soon tweak its algorithm to surface posts you care about at the top of your feed. Since then, the company has been testing the improved algorithm with a very small subset of its 400 million monthly active users. Starting today, this feature is available to all Instagram users without needing to update the mobile app, the company reported.
In yet another sign of its commitment to advancing health-related services across its platforms, Apple has quietly poached Dr. Rajiv Kumar, a pediatric endocrinologist from Stanford Children's Health, Fast Company has learned. Kumar specializes in treating kids with diabetes.
Additionally, he also is the creator of a HealthKit-enabled diabetes monitoring system for young patients at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford University. Lucile CEO Christopher Dawes has confirmed to the publication that Kumar left for Apple.
Yahoo on Friday launched its Sports app for the fourth-generation Apple TV, bringing its highly popular sports property to the big screen, for free. A bonus for those who’ve cut the cord, Yahoo Sports for Apple TV brings a highly personalized experience to viewers, including news, highlights and live games.
The Unicode Consortium has settled on a batch of new emoji characters that will become part of the Unicode 9.0 standard, to be released formally on June 21. The final emoji candidates for inclusion in Unicode 9.0 include such emoji as a man in tuxedo, lying face, clown face, drooling face, nauseated face, rolling on the floor laughing, selfie, face palm, pregnant woman, first place medal, shopping trolley, deer, shark, owl, potato, croissant, pancakes, bacon, judo uniform and more.
Micro-blogging startup Twitter has added basic support for 360-degree video after both YouTube and Facebook did the same months ago, said The Verge. However, videos shot with 360-degree cameras won't yet play inline inside Twitter's mobile app or website. Rather, users are taken to a separate website where they can click and drag to look around the videos.
Facebook is killing off Notify for iPhone, its mobile notifications app for news, sports, weather and more, a company spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch.
The app debuted on the App Store about six months ago, in November 2015. Notify was conceived as a real-time news app designed around push notifications “from sources you love, right on your lock screen, all in one place.”
The original Badland game is still one of my favorite atmospheric puzzlers on any platform. Although it's two years old now, there's nothing quite like it on the App Store. That's because its creator, Helsinki, Finland-based Frogmind Games, has made a smart move of building a level editor into the game.
As a result, you get more levels to play than you could bargain for. But, with 2000+ levels created each week, small wonder people are having a hard time finding ones worthy their time. Frogmen has thought of that: in its latest “Eternal Day” update, the game brings out a curated selection of the best 40 levels out of 70,000+.
The jailbreak community is one place where we can almost always count on developers to create new ways to interact with music throughout the system-wide iOS experience. New tweaks are released all the time that let you control your music without even being in the Music app itself, and each tries to be better than the last.
A relatively new tweak release, Proton, is available in Cydia and offers some unique functionality of its own. We'll show you what it's all about inside this review.
Apple released a software update for iTunes on Thursday that has been made available via the Mac App Store. The update comes with some minor improvements to the software.
Bringing the software up to version 12.4.1, this update is mostly a bug fix release and is recommended for everyone who uses iTunes.