Safari Technology Preview, a special version of Apple's desktop browser designed to give developers their first look at upcoming new features and future enhancements, today received the first official update since its release two weeks ago.
The new build packs in a host of fixes and improvements for Safari's layout and rendering engine, CSS, JavaScript, Web APIs, Accessibility, Web Inspector and other facets of the app.
Ahead of the upcoming April 24 premiere of the sixth season of HBO's popular “Game of Thrones” television show, Siri engineers seem to have updated her database to answer some of the most burning questions asked by fans, the most lingering one being “Is Jon Snow dead?”
Conveniently, Apple's made sure that the personal digital assistant is spoiler-free so you won't get anything out of her pertaining to whether or not the show’s most popular character has perished at the hands of the Night’s Watch.
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.
A longtime member of Apple’s closely-knit 19-person elite industrial design team has joined action camera maker GoPro, according to an exclusive report published Wednesday by the former Wall Street Journal reporter Jessica Lessin's The Information.
The article, hidden behind a paywall, states that Apple designer Danny Coster is now joining GoPro to head up a new hardware design group there as Vice President of Design.
On a somewhat related note, a murky rumor recently alleged that Apple was interested in acquiring GoPro. In a company-wide email today announcing the hire, GoPro said the executive would begin his role by month's end. Coster, who worked for Apple since the early 1990s, was apparently curious to explore the new opportunity at GoPro.
Amazon on Wednesday unveiled a brand new device, the $290 Kindle Oasis, its eighth-generation Kindle e-reader. Billed as its thinnest and lightest e-redear yet, the Oasis weighs in at just 4.6 ounces and measures a remarkable 3.4 millimeters at its thinnest point, which is less than half the thickness of Apple's iPhone 6s at its smallest point.
Its dual-battery charging system lets you read for months without plugging in if you're using the Oasis with the official charging case. Without the case, the device's built-in battery provides up to two weeks of reading based on 30 minutes usage per day.
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.
With each passing day, Chinese handset vendors are getting better at their game, producing phones with great technical specifications that often outperform flagship devices from the likes of Samsung, but cost half as much. Take, for example, Meizu, a Chinese consumer electronics company, which has built a new phone with some impressive hardware specifications.
Their new Pro 6 smartphone was just announced this morning: it has the world's first ten-core mobile processor, a 21-megapixel rear camera with a small ring two-tone flash consisting of 10 LEDs, a first for any smartphone, and a clone of Apple's 3D Touch.
Homefront: The Revolution, an upcoming shooter developed by Deep Silver Dambuster Studios and Deep Silver, a division of Austria's Koch Media, is based on an interesting alternative history scenario in which Steve Jobs was North Korean and started APeX Computers out of a garage in the 1970s.
Set in the year 2029 when the United States is occupied by North Korea, the game is full of alternative history stories relating to Apple and comes with a complete timeline of events that detail the creation of the APeX II personal computer, an iPhone-style device called aPhone and other events from 1953 onwards.
With Game Center, you can play your favorite games with friends who have an iPhone, iPod touch, iPad or Mac. Game Center is also where your global leaderboards, achievements, challenges, high scores and other data are stored for each Game Center-compatible game you play.
Some people also find this particular feature a major nuisance over being bugged with notifications and invites for the games they no longer have installed on their device.
Thankfully, you can easily remove any game that you no longer play from Game Center with a quick swipe.
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.
Netflix isn't wasting any time: they began rolling out support for high-dynamic range (HDR) streaming, with a spokesperson confirming that HDR programming will be delivered to compatible TVs anywhere Netflix is available.
“We are indeed live with HDR,” Yann Lafargue, Netflix's manager of corporate communications said to FlatpanelsHD.
The new streaming option works with compatible TVs, both in HDR10 and Dolby Vision, resulting in fewer compression artifacts and a greater dynamic range of luminosity than is possible with standard streaming technologies.