Apple has added a new category to its App Store, aimed just at children, the company's official App Store Twitter account announced on Saturday.
"Set children loose in wondrous worlds designed especially for them," the "Games for Kids" category description writes." From cute puzzlers to accessible tower-defense games, our selections are perfect for a wide range of skill levels and interests."
Rise & Shine is a new app, from the folks at Foley Productions, that has a creative way of getting you to wake up in the morning (or evening, depending on your schedule). We've seen apps where you have to shake the handset to make the alarm clock shut up, however Rise & Shine takes it a step further - you have to show it your pearly whites with a smile.
5by is an app on the iTunes App Store that will serve you with videos based on your mood. I've often done this through YouTube, where I'm in a really bad mood and will search for comedy videos to help brighten my spirits (I'm rarely mad, but it happens). 5by, also available on the web, will help expedite the process.
Microsoft's iOS client for its cloud-storage service, OneDrive, has received a significant update Friday bringing out a Document Provider extension of its own. The Document Provider extension is one of the major new extensibility features in iOS 8. With Document Providers, developers can write apps which expose their custom remote or local storage functionality to the operating system.
What this means for OneDrive fans is that they can now access their files in other apps. To see how this works and learn more about other changes in OneDrive 4.6, jump past the fold.
Twitter plans to unveil its new video feature in the next few weeks, reports Recode, and apparently some of the past details shared were wrong. Instead of a 10 minute video limit for the Twitter Video service like previously believed, it will be closer to 20 seconds and actually have a lot of similarities to the six-second, Twitter-owned Vine.
WhatsApp, the huge messaging app owned by Facebook, announced on Tuesday that it now has 700 million monthly active users, making it one of the most popular networks on the entire web. The app, which allows users to send texts without paying for messaging plans through carriers, has reached its new milestone of 700 million active people by adding 100 million users since August.
Google on Tuesday added new features to its Hangouts app for the iPhone and iPad, namely deeper integration with its Voice telephony service, a pretty smart way to share your location with others, the ability to tell your friends what you're up to via status messages and more.
Today's refresh follows last month's Android app update which introduced a similar set of enhancements. These newly introduced features are available on iOS right now so go ahead and download Hangouts free in the App Store and take the app for a spin.
Messaging app Viber was updated this morning with support for larger screens of iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. This update, which brings the Viber app to version 5.2.1, also comes with new emoticons and a few unspecified bug fixes along.
Viber has seen quite a few updates in the last months, with the addition of video calls, public chats, and maybe more notably, iOS 8 Share extension, Interactive Notifications and other improvements.
In an effort to drum up more engagement from users, Twitter plans a native video player as an extension of its Vine service, and as a rival to Google's YouTube. Instead of just tweeting a URL to a video elsewhere, Twitter wants users to actually upload videos to its site to keep engagement and sell you products through advertisements.
The Twitter Video website, with limited access, appeared for a short time on Friday evening, clueing us in on some of the features Twitter Video may feature when it launches in the first half of 2015. While Twitter provided a few small details about its video service on a conference call in November, this is the first time we've gotten some real details.
Twitter has expanded its "While you were away" recap feature to more users worldwide, in a greater attempt to boost user engagement within its Twitter for iOS app. The "While you were away" feature posts a recap of tweets you may have missed, and is the first time Twitter has brought non-chronological tweets to your timeline.
The feature doesn't appear to be in the hands of all users yet, but a Twitter search reveals it's rolling out - with mixed reactions from users. Twitter had previously announced the feature in November, but it's just now hitting the masses.
Apple's marketing team has pushed a new webpage worldwide titled "Start Something New" to highlight the iPad as a way of creating art through drawings and photographs.
Apple announced Tuesday evening that its iTunes Connect portal is now open again after shortly shutting down for the holidays, allowing developers to once again manage their apps with price changes, updates, and more.