Apple

Temple Run 2 updated with playable Santa character and other holiday goodies

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated January 26, 2016

Imangi Studio's popular endless runner, Temple Run 2, used to be my favorite time-killer for months following its January 2013 release. The free game saw a cool twenty million iOS downloads in the first four days of availability, growing to a whopping fifty million downloads in under four weeks.

I've since stopped playing the game and only occasionally fire it up to challenge myself with beating my best scores.

If you've been yearning for a substantial Temple Run 2 content update as much as I have, today is the day as a new version of the game surfaced on the App Store featuring a playable Santa character, various holiday-themed artifacts, new collectible masks, a cool new water slide feature that lets you swim through raging rapids and lots more.

The full breakdown is right after the break...

Rdio expands into 20 new countries

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated October 12, 2018

Rdio, the popular music-streaming services, announced today that it has expanded its service into twenty new countries globally. After today's expansion, the service is available in 51 countries across six continents.

The company conveniently timed its announcement just as Spotify is scheduled to hold a press conference later today, likely to announce plans to make mobile access to its music service free.

With today's expansion, Rdio is now the second largest music subscription service in the world in terms of countries serviced. By comparison, rival Spotify is currently available in 32 global markets and Apple's iTunes Radio is a U.S.-only affair, though new countries will be added some time in 2014.

However, Rdio still pales in comparison to Deezer, which is available in a whopping 182 countries around the world. The full list of new Rdio countries is right past the fold...

Valve gives its Steam iOS app iOS 7 makeover, offline chat and more

Christian Zibreg ∙ December 11, 2013

Valve has refreshed its Steam Mobile client for the iPhone and iPad with a new user interface design which fits the overall iOS 7 aesthetics much better compared to the previous version.

Additionally, this version of Steam Mobile has added a few new features and enhancements such as the offline chat mode, improved push notifications and icon badging, a brand new streamlined interface for responding to friend invites and a couple other tidbits.

The application allows Steam fans to stay in touch with the Steam community wherever they go. In addition to the Steam chat, the app relays the latest gaming news from the Steam network as well as notable game sales and includes the ability to browse community groups and user profiles...

Apple awarded new patent for head-mounted display system

Cody Lee ∙ Updated April 14, 2018

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...

Google Drive for iOS finally gains file-sorting and find and replace features

Christian Zibreg ∙ December 10, 2013

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...

Yahoo buys video startup QuikIO

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated January 25, 2018

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...

Qualcomm launches Gimbal, its own $5 iBeacons

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated January 24, 2016

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...

Google Play Books gains OCR-based search

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated January 26, 2016

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...

Flint adds in-app invoicing, Passbook coupons, card scanning and more

Christian Zibreg ∙ December 10, 2013

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...

Apple poaches top radio exec to lead iTunes Radio ad sales

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated January 26, 2016

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...

iPhone 5s now available within 24 hours from online Apple Store

Christian Zibreg ∙ December 10, 2013

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...

VLC 2.1.2 is out with experimental decoding of HEVC and WebM/VP9

Christian Zibreg ∙ December 10, 2013

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...