Apple on Friday seeded watchOS 4.2.2 beta 5, macOS 10.13.3 beta 6, and iOS 11.2.5 beta 7 to developers. Registered developers can install the new betas from Apple's Developer Center, or by using each platform's respective over-the-air updating mechanism.
Apple has refreshed web previews of iOS, watchOS, tvOS and macOS apps, changing the dated design of its App Store and Mac App Store web interfaces to match iOS 11's new App Store styling with larger images, bolder headings, a strong focus on reviews and other perks.
Instagram will soon let you jazz up up your story-telling on the platform by allowing you to overlay transparent-background GIF stickers onto their Stories via Giphy integration.
Earlier in the morning, aTV Flash Black developers FireCore released Infuse 5.6.7, their versatile media player app for iPhone, iPad and Apple TV, with new features like a true black mode for iPhone X, customizable home screen favorites and other improvements.
Instagram is currently trialing a new privacy-focused feature with a small percentage of its users that would alert them via a notification when someone took a screenshot of their Story.
Facebook-owned service WhatsApp is testing a new person-to-person payments feature with its employees in India, where the app enjoys a large base of 200 million users and is by far the most popular messaging service in the country.
Doubling down on the Stories format, Facebook is now testing a new feature with some folks that would allow users to upload Stories from a desktop web browser on their Mac or Windows PC in an effort to push the ephemeral sharing feature to as many people as possible.
PullToClear is a new free jailbreak tweak by iOS developer CreatureSurvive that lets you quickly and effortlessly every unread notification from either Notification Center or the Lock screen.
Once installed, you can pull down from either interface to reveal the hidden “Pull To Clear” action, as shown above. Pulling down further reveals the “Release To Clear” action.
Some people take their privacy more seriously than others, and a new iMessage extension dubbed MsgL0ck by iOS developer Simon Andersson takes that sentiment into consideration.
MsgL0ck lets the sender require authentication from the iMessage recipient before they can read the message. In Apple-speak, this means providing a fingerprint for Touch ID or a facial scan for Face ID (or a passcode if the recipient has neither).
In addition to testing the ability to cross-post your Instagram Stories to WhatsApp, the WhatsApp team is working on other potential enhancements such as a new spam-detection system designed to help warn users about suspected hoax messages.
Aside from quietly rolling out a new online status feature in Direct that will be great for stalkers, Instagram has reportedly been working on a text-only capability for Stories, called Type.
Facebook-owned Instagram is pilfering a feature from Messenger and WhatsApp that makes stalking people a lot easier. It's enabled by default, but can thankfully be turned off at will.