America First Credit Union said in a media release Thursday that cardholders can now use its America First Visa credit and debit cards with Apple Pay. In addition, as explained in a FAQ outlining the service, customers can also use their Visa Business credit and debit cards with Apple's mobile payment service.
Apple Pay is accepted at more than 220,000 retailers and does not require any special merchant equipment aside from a standard NFC-enabled terminal.
Things for the iPhone and iPad, the popular task management application by Cultured Code, is now available at no cost in the App Store until next Thursday, courtesy of Apple's ongoing Free App of the Week promotion.
You're looking at a cool combined savings of $30 on both the iPhone and iPad edition of Things which normally sell for $9.99 and $19.99, respectively.
Things for Mac has received a nice discount to celebrate the promotion and can be now downloaded for $34.99 in the Mac App Store, 30 percent off its full price of $49.99.
Download Things for iPhone and iPad at no cost until next Thursday, November 28.
With the iPhone 6 Plus, Apple took the unusual route of rendering apps at 3× scale into a backing store of 1,242-by-2,208 “logical” pixels which the GPU then scales down to the device's native full HD screen resolution of 1,920-by-1,080 pixels.
This is different from every other iOS device to date and required to simplify app development as developers must simply create two times crisper graphics assets for standard Retina screens and three times denser images to account for the new “Retina HD” screens of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.
On the downside, the system down samples everything by approximately 13 percent to the native resolution so some unwanted artifacts do appear which degrade image quality slightly in certain situations.
Corning, a company that supplies Apple and many other device vendors with its chemically strengthened glass, on Thursday announced the fourth-generation Gorilla Glass which it says has been designed to be up to two times tougher against drops on rough surfaces than “any competitive cover glass design now in the market.”
The announcement comes at an interesting time for Apple in light of its failed experiment with sapphire maker GT Advanced Technology which led to GT's unexpected bankruptcy and an unused $1 billion manufacturing facility in Mesa, Arizona.
Although the California firm planned on protecting the 4.7 and 5.5-inch screens on the latest iPhone 6 devices with ultra-thin sheets of sapphire, the plan was scrapped following GT's failed attempts to ramp up production and meet Apple's exacting standards in terms of volume and yields.
Apple has added 10 new companies to the list of data providers for its Maps app, according to Apple Maps Marketing. In a post, first spotted by 9to5Mac, the site says it was given the information by the Cupertino company itself in response to an inquiry.
The inquiry was in regards to submitting one of its clients with a few hundred locations to Apple Maps Connect. Apple replied, saying it's currently only accepting submissions from businesses with 1,000+ locations, but it could reach out to several firms.
In October, Fitbit announced that it had no plans of integrating its activity trackers or software with Apple's Health app. This means that if you have a Fitbit Flex or other device, the data it gathers will not be shared with Health, crippling its attempt to be your fitness data dashboard.
But a new app launched this week in the App Store that aims to change this. It's called Sync Solver, and it allows Fitbit wearers to track all of the important data collected by their wearables within the Health app, without ever having to use the standalone, dedicated Fitbit application.
Walmart on Wednesday announced that it is launching a number of its Black Friday sales a week early. In a press release, the company said that its 'Pre-Black Friday Event' will kick off at 8 a.m. on November 21, and give customers an early taste of its Black Friday prices.
A number of items are being discounted in the sale, including iPhones and iPads. Walmart will be offering 16GB iPhone 6 models for $179 (with two-year service agreement), along with a free $75 gift card, and 16GB Wi-Fi iPad Air 2 models for $489 with a $100 gift card.
In conceiving a feasible solution to running third-party apps in the extremely constrained power environment of the Apple Watch, Apple has come up with a rather peculiar yet familiar idea.
Initially, any third-party app processing will be offloaded to an iPhone in your pocket until the Cupertino firm begins accepting fully native Watch apps late next year.
Such an approach leaves only the app's storyboards and user interface resources running directly on the Watch, with everything else happening on an iPhone.
The only exception that proves the rule are Apple's stock apps which get executed on the Watch itself. In addition to acting as a viewport for third-party apps running on na iPhone, the Watch also manages Notifications and Glances and performs other lightweight housekeeping operations that don't tax the battery much.
To accomplish this feat, Apple is leveraging App Extensions in iOS 8 to run third-party Watch apps in a split mode.
Rubicon Project, a company that focuses on automating the buying and selling of advertising, has announced a partnership with Apple to help the Cupertino-based company move its iAd inventory. Apple hasn't officially commented on the matter, however speaking for the company Rubicon Project says "it had been selected by Apple to help power iAd’s adoption of automated advertising for Apple iAd’s 250,000+ mobile developers."
As Apple moves to repurpose the Mesa, Arizona plant it sought to run with the now bankrupt GT Advanced Technology, Reuters is reporting Wednesday that GT's creditors aren't all too happy about the agreement.
Even though the iPhone maker is committed to keeping the Arizona facility alive despite the failed sapphire manufacturing agreement with GT, creditors in a bankruptcy court filing noted that GT “may have gotten too little” in the proposed settlement with Apple.
As Apple continues to migrate Beats Music to iTunes servers ahead of a major service overhaul, The Financial Times newspaper is reporting that the iPhone maker is looking to bundle the subscription music service into its iOS mobile operating system “early next year”.
If true, Spotify will have plenty to worry about because Beats Music would become instantly available on hundreds of millions of iPhones and iPads without requiring a download.
Apple's App Store in the United States and elsewhere has changed the “Free” button to “Get”, as first noted by Sebastián Salazar on Twitter. The new “Get” button now appears in the App Store on the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices, as well as in the App Store section of iTunes for Windows and Mac.
As Salazar noted, the change may be in response to the avalanche of freemium software models that have been dominating mobile application stores for quite some time now.