Noted Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who has a respectable track record when reporting on Apple, released a note estimating Apple Watch pre-orders to be in excess of 2.3 million units, with a breakdown of Apple Watch Sport, Apple Watch, and Apple Watch Edition each taking 85%, 15%, and less than 1% respectively.
Yahoo-owned Tumblr today released a major update to its free iPhone and iPad client in the App Store. Tumblr 4.0 for iOS sports a number of new features, enhancements and nice-to-haves that make blogging from the palm of your hand a frictionless and more enjoyable experience than before.
For starters, you can now create new blogs (previously available through the web interface only), as well as delete entire blogs from inside the app. Video embedding has been made as easy as pasting a URL from YouTube or Vimeo or another such site.
VOX Music Player for Mac by Coppertino Inc. has gone iPhone. Available at no cost in the App Store, the application lets you enjoy high-quality music encoded in the lossless FLAC format on your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad.
Of course, you can play the usual assortment of lossy audio files, too, including MP3, AAC and just about any type of audio file format you could think of. For example, the app is capable of rendering music formats like APE, WMA and CUE which are not supported by iTunes natively.
Your music can also be cached for playing offline.
A brand new app by Path creators (you do remember Path, don't you?), called Kong, is now available at no cost in the App Store. Billed as a piece of software designed to play with your selfies, Kong unleashes your imagination by letting you create GIFs of yourself in an instant.
You can make the bite-sized animated GIFs more interesting by adding text, applying filters to your selfie and more.
Your animated meme can then be shared with a private circle of friends or with the web at large through Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other services. Kong is actually quite cool and addictive, let me explain why.
For the third year in a row, Apple CEO Tim Cook is participating in a charity auction organized by the fundraising service CharityBuzz. You can now bid on the opportunity to have lunch with Cook on the Apple campus in Cupertino, California, and to be his guest at an Apple keynote event. In fact, the highest bidder will win not one but two VIP passes to an Apple keynote.
Glide for iPhone has been updated on the App Store today with Apple Watch support, becoming the first app to bring one-way real-time video messaging to the wrist-worn gizmo. The app lets you see a preview of video messages up to five minutes long on your wrist and respond straight from your Apple Watch.
Other features include getting quick updates to the Watch when friends send you videos, texts or photos without needing to take out your iPhone, accessing all chats and missed events and more.
Apple's Watch features a handy “multitasking” shortcut that Apple did not detail publicly. According to a Reddit user who provided an animated GIF of the feature in action, double-tapping the device's Digital Crown switches you between your two most recently opened apps.
Although it's unclear yet if the Watch has true multitasking capability found on the iPhone and iPad, this shortcut is a great time-saver that makes it easy not only to jump between actions if you are multitasking, but also to go back to the Watch face if you’ve just been in one app.
Samsung's has devoted a team comprised of two-hundred skilled engineers to build mobile displays exclusively for Apple. The move indicates that the two technology giants are strengthening business ties, patent disputes notwithstanding, Bloomberg reported Wednesday.
The team formed April 1 and also helps with sales, people with direct knowledge of the matter said. In addition to the improved business relationship, analysts think the exclusivity of the business arrangement might indicate that Samsung Display could win more screen orders from Apple in the near future.
In a bid to potentially boost its mobile imaging prowess, Apple has purchased an Israeli camera technology company called LinX Imaging for a reported $20 million, according to a Dow Jones report cited in a tweet by CNBC and later confirmed by Apple.
LinX, which builds miniature multi-aperture cameras designed for mobile devices, could help improve imaging features of future iPhones.
And because its technology is also used in tablets and so-called ultrabooks (ultra-thin notebooks akin to Apple's MacBook Air), there's a reasonable likelihood that we may see significantly improved cameras come to Apple's Mac computers and iPad tablet lineup.
Various versions of Apple's iOS 8 mobile operating system are now running on 79 percent of devices in active use, as measured by the App Store on April 13, 2015. The freshest stats were churned out Tuesday from the App Store Distribution webpage publicly available on Apple's portal for developers.
iOS 7 is now found on nineteen percent of devices, with earlier iOS versions running on two percent of iPhones, iPads and iPod touches in the wild.
FiftyThree's iPad drawing app, Paper, has been refreshed Tuesday with a pair of new features (among other enhancements) — Backup and Activity Center.
The former lets you back up private copies of your journals in the cloud so you don't lose your Paper data in case your iPad is stolen or damaged (and you didn't have enough space on iCloud for full device backup via iOS).
The Activity Center is a new place in Paper's Mix service that collates all your social activity in one place. For those wondering, Mix is an online repository of Paper content posted by creative users from around the world.
Popular iOS app Workflow announced on Tuesday support for the Apple Watch, to bring automation to activities on your wrist.
"Workflows automate things you do every day by connecting your favorite apps and services together. Now workflows can help you do less with your phone, and more from your wrist," Workflow wrote on its new Apple Watch website.