In mid-March 2016, Facebook-owned Instagram said it would soon tweak its algorithm to surface posts you care about at the top of your feed. Since then, the company has been testing the improved algorithm with a very small subset of its 400 million monthly active users. Starting today, this feature is available to all Instagram users without needing to update the mobile app, the company reported.
In yet another sign of its commitment to advancing health-related services across its platforms, Apple has quietly poached Dr. Rajiv Kumar, a pediatric endocrinologist from Stanford Children's Health, Fast Company has learned. Kumar specializes in treating kids with diabetes.
Additionally, he also is the creator of a HealthKit-enabled diabetes monitoring system for young patients at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford University. Lucile CEO Christopher Dawes has confirmed to the publication that Kumar left for Apple.
Yahoo on Friday launched its Sports app for the fourth-generation Apple TV, bringing its highly popular sports property to the big screen, for free. A bonus for those who’ve cut the cord, Yahoo Sports for Apple TV brings a highly personalized experience to viewers, including news, highlights and live games.
The Unicode Consortium has settled on a batch of new emoji characters that will become part of the Unicode 9.0 standard, to be released formally on June 21. The final emoji candidates for inclusion in Unicode 9.0 include such emoji as a man in tuxedo, lying face, clown face, drooling face, nauseated face, rolling on the floor laughing, selfie, face palm, pregnant woman, first place medal, shopping trolley, deer, shark, owl, potato, croissant, pancakes, bacon, judo uniform and more.
Micro-blogging startup Twitter has added basic support for 360-degree video after both YouTube and Facebook did the same months ago, said The Verge. However, videos shot with 360-degree cameras won't yet play inline inside Twitter's mobile app or website. Rather, users are taken to a separate website where they can click and drag to look around the videos.
Facebook is killing off Notify for iPhone, its mobile notifications app for news, sports, weather and more, a company spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch.
The app debuted on the App Store about six months ago, in November 2015. Notify was conceived as a real-time news app designed around push notifications “from sources you love, right on your lock screen, all in one place.”
The original Badland game is still one of my favorite atmospheric puzzlers on any platform. Although it's two years old now, there's nothing quite like it on the App Store. That's because its creator, Helsinki, Finland-based Frogmind Games, has made a smart move of building a level editor into the game.
As a result, you get more levels to play than you could bargain for. But, with 2000+ levels created each week, small wonder people are having a hard time finding ones worthy their time. Frogmen has thought of that: in its latest “Eternal Day” update, the game brings out a curated selection of the best 40 levels out of 70,000+.
Apple released a software update for iTunes on Thursday that has been made available via the Mac App Store. The update comes with some minor improvements to the software.
Bringing the software up to version 12.4.1, this update is mostly a bug fix release and is recommended for everyone who uses iTunes.
Revered software engineer Sinisa Durekovic has joined Apple in an unspecified role in October, Bloomberg reported on Thursday, citing sources.
Durekovic was charged with managing the development of advanced satellite navigation systems used by luxury carmakers such as BMW AG, Daimler AG’s Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen AG’s Audi, suggesting another possible mapping push for the Cupertino giant.
Apple on Thursday updated its App of the Week promotion with the game Sago Mini Road Trip. This means that for the next 7 days, you’ll be able to download the popular children's title on both iPhone and iPad for free, a solid savings of $3.
In Sago, kids play as Jinja the cat as they set out on a road trip. There are more than 10 vehicles and 6 destinations to choose from, and no rules or time pressures to worry about. So kids can relax, hit the road and explore at their own pace.
If you needed another proof that Apple is not very good at online services, here's one: the App Store, the Mac App Store and various other online services are currently down, according to a notice on Apple's System Status webpage.
Other iCloud services were affected at the time of this writing and have been inaccessible to an unknown portion of Apple's user base, including the Apple TV, iTunes in the Cloud and Volume Purchase Program.
UPDATE: The outage is more widespread than originally thought, with iCloud Drive, iCloud Backup, Mail Drop, iWork for iCloud, Photos, iCloud Web Apps and iCloud Storage Upgrades all having been affected as well.
Without naming a specific source, iMore's Rene Ritchie has reportedly heard that Apple is not planning to refresh the aging 27-inch Thunderbolt Display at WWDC this month after all. “I asked around, and it's not happening at the keynote or any time in the immediate future,” he wrote.