It's the weekend, and you know what that means: it's time for another round of iDB's Apps of the Week post. Every week we put together a list of apps and games we think are worth checking out, and this time around we've got some great selections. This week's picks include a navigation app for walking, an annotation app, and more!
Apple has a "secret team" exploring various changes to the App Store, reports Bloomberg. Citing people familiar with the company's plans, the outlet says among the ideas being pursued is paid search results, where developers pay to have their apps more prominently displayed.
Such a move would drastically impact search results, as a developer with a word puzzle game in the App Store could essentially pay to have their game listed among the top search results—similar to Google.com. It would also give Apple a new way to make money from the App Store.
Instagram announced on Thursday that it's going to be rolling out a new look for Explore featuring video channels. The Facebook-owned social network says that it hopes the move will make it easier for users to discover video content they'll enjoy.
Starting today, iOS and Android users will begin seeing a personalized channel in the Explore tab of the Instagram app called "Videos you Might Like." The channel will feature videos collected from across the world in a seamless viewing experience.
Like on any given Thursday, Apple today refreshed the App Store to reflect new software arrivals and promotions.
In addition to highlighting apps whose proceeds will go to the World Wildlife Fund until April 24 through the new 'Apps for Earth' section, Apple's editors have slashed Pixelbite's award-winning sci-fi action adventure, Space Marshals, as the App Store's new Free App of the Week.
This universal iPhone, iPod touch and iPad game normally retails for $4.99, so do yourself a favor and save a few bucks by grabbing this great freebie right now.
Apple has partnered with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) on a brand new App Store initiative that will have the world's leading organization in wildlife conservation and endangered species receive 100 percent of the proceeds from select App Store purchases until April 24, just in time for Earth Day.
Descriptions of participating apps were updated this morning to reflect that “Apple and WWF are working together to protect life on our planet”.
A new Watch button was rolled out yesterday to Vine's iPhone application in the App Store, allowing you to enjoy videos in channels and on profile pages without having to manually scroll through individual posts. It's basically a whole new way to watch Vine as you can now kick back and view the entire story of any channel or watch an account from start to finish.
The failing Internet pioneer Yahoo today announced a major update for its mobile email application.
Bumped to version 4.3, Yahoo Mail for iOS introduces new third-party integrations allowing you to add cloud files directly from your Google Drive or Dropbox to your messages as attachments, or add animated GIFs to your emails from Tumblr, which is another Yahoo-owned property.
The compose interface makes it easy to choose among Tumblr's most popular GIFs of the moment, search for that perfect GIF or browse GIF categories including Love, LOL, Cute, Cheers, Fail, Happy and more. GIFs are added to your emails as attachments.
Snapchat today announced a very cool object-tracking feature that works with live video, in real time.
Now available in Snapchat for Android and coming soon to the company's iPhone application, users can optionally attach a sticker to an object or a person in the frame and Snapchat's algorithm will handle the rest and do all the heavy lifting for you, Engadget reports.
You could add colorful scribbles to your photos and videos before but these were static. By pairing stickers with specific parts of your recording, the Snapchat algorithm can make them move, rotate and change their size to follow the object it's attached to as it moves around the frame.
After enabling complete end-to-end encryption for chats and adding support for sending and receiving PDFs and basic text styling, WhatsApp for iPhone in its most recent update brings the ability to attach Microsoft Office documents to your instant exchanges with friends on the service.
Although not mentioned in the official release notes accompanying the 59.1-megabyte app, the change was spotted this morning by the Italian blog iSpazio. This is a useful new feature for users that removes the need to convert Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents to the PDF format before attaching them to their WhatsApp conversations.
Yesterday, Google announced a cool new feature to mark the tenth anniversary of its online calendar service: Google Calendar will now scan your calendar intelligently to find the time on your schedule to work on your personal goals.
According to Google, the updated Google Calendar app lets you add a personal goal to your calendar.
These can be things like “run three times a week” or “hit the gym every day except weekend”. After parsing your natural language input, it'll schedule time automatically for you and help you actually stick to it.
Facebook was supposed to announce the addition of customer service chat bots and Live Chat APIs soon, but it seems that the latest app update already includes the plumbing work necessary to support chat bots. As first noted by Engadget, the app now shows a Bots and Businesses section and already third-party chat bots appear in search.
Trigraphy by Nixes, a beautiful app for turning your photographs into low-poly artwork, was refreshed in the App Store earlier this week with a few new tricks. Bumped to version 2.1.2, the software gained two new effects alongside an effects bundle and other perks.
For starters, it's now possible to open images in Trigraphy from other apps because the app has gained its own Document Provider extension.
The built-in gallery now supports albums and users can change how images are saved and how 4K assets are handled, which should fix problems related to 4K download.