Looking for new apps or games to play around with this weekend? As usual, iDB has you covered. In this week's App of the Week roundup, we have some great titles that are perfect for killing a lazy Saturday or Sunday afternoon. There's a unique, visual music-making app, two great-looking productivity apps, and two new games.
Apple on Friday issued an advisory on its portal for developers about an important upcoming requirement for watchOS apps. According to a one-sentence post, “starting June 1, 2016, all new watchOS apps submitted to the App Store must be native apps built with the watchOS 2 SDK or later.”
Apple is scheduled to hold its annual pilgrimage for developers, WWDC, from June 13 through June 17, 2016, or two weeks after the requirement to develop strictly native apps kicks in.
A small but important update has appeared for Snapchat's free of charge mobile application in the App Store. Bumped to version 9.29, the app's expanded the utility of its popular Face Swap feature which now works with images from your Camera roll.
Face Swap is apparently a new craze. With this feature available in Snapchat in the form of a Lens, users can easily face swap with their friends. And with today's update, they can swap their face with someone else's photo stored in their Camera roll.
Apple on Thursday pushed out an update for its Apple Store iOS client, bringing the app to version 3.7. The update brings about new 3D Touch features on compatible devices, and makes the app available in new countries.
As for 3D Touch support, iPhone 6s users have long been able to utilize Quick Actions on the app icon, but now the Apple Store app supports Peek and Pop. So force-pressing on a link within the app now opens up previews.
A year after it rolled out the ability to place and receive VoIP audio calls on Messenger, Facebook is now introducing a new VoIP calling feature with support for up to fifty people on a single group call. Group calling currently supports standard VoIP audio calls, but Facebook did tell TechCrunch that “group video calling is definitely a use case that a lot of our people might be interested in at some point”.
Since launching in 2009, there have been over nine billion check-ins on Foursquare across the globe. Celebrating its seventh anniversary, the startup pushed an update to its mobile application on the App Store which includes a handy new history features.
Similar to location history on Google, the updated Foursquare app makes it simple for users to browse any place they've been and checked into via a new History tab.
In addition, Foursquare now has its own Photos extension which makes it super easy to share a photo as a tip, right within the context of the Photos app.
Calendars 5, one of the best iOS calendar applications out there with a built-in event and task manager and native Google Calendar sync, has been slashed to zero bucks as Apple's new Free App of the Week. The $6.99 universal productivity app is now available at no charge on the App Store until next Thursday. This marks the first time Calendars 5 has gone free in years following Readdle's two-day promotion back in May 2014.
Since learning that Apple's software development kit now includes a new MapKit framework for tvOS, I've been eagerly awaiting to see what Apple TV developers are going to do with it. I salivated at the prospect of Apple Maps on a big screen telly because it sounded too good to be true.
Even better, Apple's SDK supports advanced features like map annotations, adding overlays and performing reverse-geocoding lookups to determine placemark information for map coordinates, among other features.
With TV Maps by Arno Appenzeller—to my knowledge, this is one of the first of MapsKit-enabled apps for the new Apple TV—you can browse Apple Maps from the comfort of your couch. At long last, planning trips on the big screen has become a reality for those of us who're invested into the Apple ecosystem. The experience of using maps on a television is much cooler than you could imagine: this is the first tvOS app that has made me wish that the Apple TV supported hand gestures so that I could explore maps Minority Report-style.
Two weeks after rival WhatsApp announced that chats on its platform are protected from eavesdropping with end-to-end encryption, the popular messaging app Viber on Tuesday released a privacy-enhanced edition of its iPhone and iPad app.
Bumped to version 6.0, messages you send and receive through Viber are now protected with end-to-end encryption, as indicated by the new padlock icon, and you can also hide away specific chats.
Pinterest today announced a completely overhauled iPhone and iPad application—“our fastest, cleanest app yet”—that lets you focus on more Pins than ever before. The app, used by more than a hundred million people around the world, is a lot faster than the previous version it replaced, with your Home feed now loading up to three times faster.
The refreshed application is now rolling in the App Store so check back later if the new version isn't immediately available where you live. The Android edition of Pinterest and its web-based counterpart are next on Pinterest's list to tackle, though they wouldn't commit to a firm release dates for these.
Knowing that Apple has been restrictive in the past on what is and what isn't allowed to pass in the App Store for a Notification Center widget, it can be fun when little gems find their way into the top charts section and you stumble upon them.
While looking through them, I discovered a free endless runner game called Steve - The Jumping Dinosaur, but unlike other endless runners you've played before, this game is played inside of a Notification Center widget rather than from the app itself.
Version 1.1 of the iDB app was just approved and is now available in the App Store, including the usual round of stability improvements and bug fixes, as well as a couple notable additions. More specifically, we have added a new bookmarking feature as well as support for the San Francisco font, something many of you were pretty vocal about.