During a hearing Friday in Manhattan, a United States judge gave Apple final approval to pay $450 million to settle claims that it conspired with five publishers to raise e-book prices on the iBooks Store.
Reuters reports that Judge Cote approved what she called an “unusual” accord. The ruling came after Apple in July agreed to pay big bucks to settle price fixing allegations that the government and class action lawyers leveled against the Cupertino firm.
Apple updated its iCloud.com Photos app today, enabling the ability to upload photos. The feature, which developers have been testing on the iCloud beta site for the past two weeks, allows users to upload images to iCloud Photo Library.
Previously, those with iCloud Photo Library enabled in iOS 8 could view, download and delete their photos on iCloud.com, but there was no way to upload them. Now users can upload images—including those not taken with an iOS device.
I use FaceTime on a daily basis and have always hated it wouldn't let me save calls to my Mac in the form of a media file. Surely Apple could have implemented such a feature if they wanted, but they didn't and I think privacy is a big part of that.
If for whatever reason you need to record FaceTime calls to a Mac, Call Recorder by Ken and Glen Aspeslagh, twin brothers from Massachusetts, has you covered.
The app creates a QuickTime movie file containing an audio track for audio-only calls and a video track for FaceTime video calls. QuickTime is an industry-standard multimedia container, meaning you can play your saved video and audio chats pretty much anywhere, convert the files to other formats in software like iMovie or Adobe After Effects, upload them to YouTube and more.
Friday, Windows giant Microsoft published a new Apple-bashing ad on its YouTube channel.
The 30-second television commercial shows off the latest version of Cortana, Microsoft's Siri-like personal assistant, running on the Lumia 830 and interacting with a bunch of built-in applications.
Cortana amusingly brags to Siri about being able to perform functions Apple's personal assistant can't, like alert users to leave early for an appointment using traffic alerts, remind them of things based on who calls or texts and more.
The language certification industry commands some surprisingly insane fees so how about fair language certification for all?
Your prayers have been heard: the free learning platform Duolingo on Friday released an iOS app which allows anyone to certify their English proficiency right on their iPhone, iPod touch or iPad.
Not only can Duolingo Test Center certify your language skills right on an iOS device, but does so at a significant lower price, too.
And because there's no need to travel long distances to examination facilities available only in select major cities, you can get certified in the comfort of your home, in under half an hour.
Following Wednesday's release of a stable version of the 64-bit edition of Google Chrome for Mac, the Internet giant issued a new version of Chrome Beta for Mac, Windows and Linux that includes an all-new Bookmark Manager feature that previously leaked via screenshots (it was called Stars).
With Bookmark Manager, it will be a lot easier for Chrome fans to manage their saved bookmarks, delete unwanted ones, file them under folders and more.
And when creating a new bookmark, Chrome will let you select an image and add a note or snippet so you can find it more quickly later. “Google will also suggest a folder if it seems like it could be a fit,” the team said in a blog post.
As first reported by German blog Macerkopf.de [Google Translate], Apple has refreshed its iWork for iCloud suite of productivity web applications with several new features and improvements. Pages is now available in eight new languages: Deutsch, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, French, Hebrew, Arabic, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, with bidirectional support for Arabic and Hebrew.
Keynote and Numbers have gained support for the same languages with the exception of Arabic and Hebrew. All three web applications have gained easier file renaming and a couple other editing features.
With the all-important Black Friday shopping weekend just around the corner, Apple continues to improve supply of the new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. Shipping estimates for select models of the handsets have recently ameliorated for Apple's US online store and in other countries.
Both 64GB and 128GB iPhone 6 models, as well as the 16GB iPhone 6 Plus, are now showing ship dates 7 to 10 days out for all colors across all major US carriers. And the 16GB iPhone 6 is now shipping in 5 to 7 days, with Personal Pickup available at a number of Apple Stores.
On Wednesday, December 3, Billboard says it will premiere its biggest upgrade to its 200 chart in more than 23 years. The chart, which currently tracks the top 200 albums of the week by sales, will be the first to include on-demand streaming and digital track sales.
To do this, the chart will incorporate streaming service data measured by Nielsen Entertainment by way of a new algorithm. Billboard says it's the "most substantial methodology update since 1991," when Billboard began using point-of-sale data to measure album sales.
Following up on its August update which brought out uploading functionality in addition to some interesting private sharing options, Vimeo on Thursday issued a brand new version of its iPhone and iPad client.
Now at version 5.1.1, Vimeo's video pages have gained more informative layouts with the title, creator, play count and other information.
Active Vimeo users often complained about an avalanche of notifications from the site. Feeling their pain, the video sharing site has finally made it possible to cherry-pick notifications to receive in the Vimeo app.
Jump past the fold for other Vimeo 5.1.1 highlights.
Evernote, the popular note-taking and productivity platform, on Thursday issued a major refresh to its Mac app while adding a new Work Chat for sharing and collaborating to the iPhone and iPad client, among other items.
After a complete rewrite, Evernote 6.0 for Mac is now significantly faster, more reliable and consumes less energy than ever before.
As if that weren't enough, the new Mac app comes with half a dozen new features, including sleek new look optimized for OS X Yosemite, search improvements, the ability to resize images and tables, to mention just a few.
iOS and OS X editions of Evernote are available free of charge.
After previewing future platform enhancements and features during its Analyst’s Day event, the popular social service Twitter on Thursday began rolling out one of the mentioned new features: the ability to private share a tweet through Twitter's direct messaging function.
Think about sharing tweets privately with any of your followers in terms of discussing public content in private conversations, the micro-blogging platform suggested.
To do this from Twitter's main iPhone client, long-press the tweet in your timeline and choose the new “Share via Direct Message” option. The person you share a tweet with will get a push notification, said the company.
Moreover, the tweet will display directly in the conversation.