Apple

Infuse 3.4 is live with folders, background audio, landscape lock on iPhone and more

Infuse 3, an elegant and versatile player for virtually any video file format you can think of created by jailbreak developer FireCore, has picked up a slew of new features and improvements in Monday's version 3.4 update.

Infuse 3.4 makes it easy to organize your videos using folders, delete ones you no longer need from the ticket view, continue playing audio in the background after leaving the app to quickly check your email, and more.

At long last, Instagram is increasing photo resolution to a sharper 1,080-by-1,080 pixels

I love Instagram but have always had a first-world problem with its paltry photo resolution. In today's age of ultra-crisp mobile screens, 640-by-640 pixel images just don't cut it anymore. Well, it took only a couple of years but Instagram just announced that it is rolling out support for bigger, crisper images on both iOS and Android.

“We're rolling out 1080x1080 uploads (and higher-quality viewing) for Instagram on iOS and Android,” Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger wrote in a tweet today.

The company's iPhone application wasn't updated today with support for uploading and viewing crisper photos so it's likely a silent update on Instagram's servers. The official company blog did not share details about the sharper photography experience at post time.

Microsoft’s new opinion-gathering app removes the friction around event planning

Microsoft has released a brand new iPhone and iPad application in the App Store. Called Tossup, it was designed to make event planning and opinion-gathering a cinch by basically collecting answers from your friends to any questions you pose to them.

You can present people with a quick Yes/No poll, ask them to find and pick a restaurant, to agree on when to meet, invite them to extend the opinion about any topic and more.

Skype for iPhone updated with location sharing

Skype for iPhone has picked up the ability to share a location with others in its latest update in the App Store.

The Microsoft-owned VoIP program was bumped to version 5.14 Monday to make it trivial to share your current geographical location, or your favorite place, with friends and family using the paperclip icon in the chat window. Moreover, this edition of Skype introduces unspecified improvements.

The new version of Skype arrived hot on the heels of a recent update which brought out handy web link previews in the chat window and replying with dictation on Apple Watch.

iPhone 6s is 0.2mm thicker than iPhone 6, leaked industrial design diagram indicates

Apple's next-generation iPhone 6s should measure 7.1mm deep, a 0.2 millimeter increase versus the current-generation iPhone 6, which measures 6.9mm deep. If true, the 4.7-inch iPhone 6s will have the exact same thickness as the 5.5-inch iPhone 6 Plus, according to a purported schematic leaked Monday to Engadget Japan by a reliable source in the Chinese supply chain.

KGI Securities' analyst Ming-Chi Kuo previously said that an imperceptible increase in thickness was necessary to accommodate Apple's implementation of force sensing on the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus's screen.

Pegatron goes on a hiring spree ahead of next-generation iPhone production

With a little more than two months before its assumed September release, contract manufacturer Pegatron is reportedly in the process of hiring as many as 40,000 workers as it makes preparations to kick off assembly work on Apple's iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s refresh, according to a DigiTimes report this weekend.

Protek, a Pegatron subsidiary in eastern China, reportedly began recruiting workers at the end of June and will continue to do so until October, one month after the expected launch of the new iPhones.

Protek is planning to hire 40,000 workers in total, said the Taiwanese trade publication.

First look at upcoming Minecraft: Story Mode

A brand new international reveal trailer posted during the July 4 weekend offers a tantalizing glimpse into Minecraft: Story Mode, an upcoming narrative-driven adventure game created by Minecraft developer Mojang in collaboration with Telltale Games, the makers of the Game of Thrones cinematic video game series.

Following its announcement back in December 2014, the official teaser trailer for Story Mode has now premiered at the Minecon show in London. The video depicts a game set in the world of Minecraft with its own original story that will be driven by player decision. The game will consist of five episodes, with the inaugural episode set for release in 2015.

How to master Apple Music liking system to influence ‘For You’ recommendations

Apple Music offers a section called For You which provides a personalized selection of music based on your listening habits. On the surface, it sounds great until a song you can't stand listening to anymore or an artist you really aren't a big fan of gets injected into the For You feed.

Wouldn't it be great if you could teach Apple's algorithm exactly what music you like and, more importantly, what you dislike? Thankfully there is, but it takes a bit of a learning curve to master the Apple Music recommendation system.

Here's what you need to know regarding fine-tuning For You recommendations and customizing your listening experience on Apple Music.

Apple’s ‘El Capitan’ European trademark filing confusingly includes tablets

Is Apple really readying an iPad that could run both iOS and OS X? The toaster-refrigerator dilemma has been occupying the collective mind of fans who have been keeping their fingers crossed for the convergence of the Mac and iPad ever since the original iPad debuted more than five years ago.

Apple's European trademark filing for ‘El Capitan’ is certainly intriguing, to say the least, as it mentions tablets as one of the devices targeted by the desktop operating system, as revealed yesterday by Patently Apple.

Analysis of ‘iPhone 6s’ logic board suggests improved NFC, 16GB base model and more

A leaked logic board has already offered a valuable insight into some of the many hardware enhancements in Apple's upcoming 'iPhone 6s' and 'iPhone 6s Plus' refreshes. Thus far, we have learned about Qualcomm's new baseband modem which doubles LTE download speeds, a slightly thicker enclosure to accommodate Force Touch sensors and possibly a higher-resolution Retina screen.

9to5Mac has teamed up with semiconductor experts at Chipworks in an effort to identify other chips and components based on images of an alleged iPhone 6s motherboard.

Here are their findings.

SoundCloud for iOS gains shuffling, related tracks, sharing improvements and more

SoundCloud, a Swedish online audio distribution platform based in Berlin, today issued a refresh to its gorgeous iPhone and iPad application, in time for the summer.

SoundCloud 3.10.0 for iOS now lets you play related tracks, shuffle liked tracks and audio files in your playlists, add or remove tracks directly from your playlists, plus share directly from the search screen and your list of liked tracks.

Tweetbot’s iOS app gains alerts for Quoted Tweets, support for longer Direct Messages and more

About ten days since Tweetbot for OS X brought these new features to the Mac, now Tweetbot for iPhone and iPod touch has picked up support for notifications related to Twitter’s new embedded quoting feature while laying groundwork for longer Direct Messages, a feature Twitter announced almost a month weeks ago but has yet to enable on its end.

Also, Tweetbot 3.6.2 for Mac now produces crisper video thanks to improved video upload quality.