Like many other popular apps, Flipboard, the beloved social news magazine for the iPhone and iPad, has received a nice update today bringing out support for iOS 8's Share sheet extension which allows you to more conveniently collect what you love into Flipboard magazines across Apple's ecosystem.
Now available free of charge in the App Store, the new Flipboard 2.3.8 also includes support for the bigger screens on the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.
Thursday morning, the online retail giant Amazon has released the new Kindle 4.5 for the iPhone and iPad in the App Store, bringing out a Today widget and compatibility fixes for Apple's latest iOS 8 software update, in addition to the ability to copy passages of text from e-books, look up translations and more.
The 40.4-megabyte download is universal so any iPhone, iPod touch or iPad is supported natively as long as it's compatible with iOS 7.0 or later.
Apple on Thursday released an update to its desktop Safari browser for Macs running OS X Mavericks which contains improvements to compatibility and security while introducing a pair of new options for strengthening your privacy when searching.
The first such feature turns on SSL encryption for all Yahoo searches conducted from Safari's search field. As a result, no one can eavesdrop on what you're searching for online.
The other adds DuckGoGo, a search engine that does not track you (Google won't like this) as a built-in option in the search field. Note that Safari in iOS 8 and OS X 10.10 Yosemite already includes DuckGoGo as an option.
Safari 7.1 has arrived on the heels of yesterday's OS X Mavericks 10.9.5 update which contains Safari 7.0.6 and improves the stability, compatibility and security of your Mac.
Following up on yesterday's public release of the free iOS 8 software update for Apple's iPhone, iPad and iPod touch mobile devices, French games maker Gameloft on Thursday unleashed a pair of updates for its two highly-successful titles: Modern Combat 5: Blackout, a first-person shooter, and Asphalt 8: Airborne, a crazy racing game driven by a powerful physics engine which has you performing dynamic, high-speed aerial stunts.
Both games are now powered by iOS 8's new Metal framework which provides low-level access to the GPU inside the Apple-designed A7 chip (the iPhone 5s, iPad Air and iPad mini with Retina display) and its A8 counterpart (the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus). When played on these devices, both of these games benefit from close-to-the-metal access to graphics cores, without the overhead of the OpenGL graphics run-time.
It's Thursday and Apple's editors have slashed another app to zero bucks in the App Store's weekly Free App of the Week promotion.
Free until next Thursday and replacing last week's Free App of the Week, the addictive puzzler Bicolor, movie tie-in Real Steel by Reliance Big Entertainment has now gone free for a week, until next Thursday.
Representing a $0.99 saving, Real Steel for the iPhone and iPad is based on the 2011 Dreamworks movie starring Hugh Jackman which takes place in a secret world in the not-so-distant future where boxing has gone high-tech.
Instead of human boxers, players control sophisticated boxing robots weighing over 2,000 pounds and reaching up to eight feet tall. Featuring lush graphics, fast-paced action and addictive mechanics, Real Steel is a nice time-killer. And with all-new Tournament and Survival modes, it should keep you busy.
Apple has been working with the popular Irish rock band U2 on a secret project that should result in birth of a brand new music format designed to tempt music lovers again into buying both whole albums and individual tracks, according to TIME Thursday.
As a longtime partner of Apple, the Irish band helped the Cupertino firm push the iPod music player into the mainstream by producing a special edition U2 iPod in 2008.
Apple is also one of the biggest proponents of U2 lead singer Bono's Product(RED) initiative to fight AIDS. And earlier this month, U2 played at Apple's iPhone 6 event and is currently giving away its latest album, “Songs of Innocence”, for free on iTunes.
Apple this evening launched a new privacy site in an effort to increase transparency on how it protects user data, and to educate users on how they can better protect themselves. Additionally, Tim Cook has posted an open letter to Apple Customers detailing the various sections of the new site, as well as Apple's stance on user privacy.
The move follows recent bad publicity for Apple, in which its laxed iCloud security measures were blamed for the hacking of high profile celebrity accounts, which resulted in a slew of nude photos being leaked. The company maintains that its servers were never breached, but Tim Cook promised to double down on security anyway.
Following its release of iOS 8 this morning, Apple has begun updating its mobile apps to support the firmware. It looks like Numbers and iMovie were first on the list, with both apps showing up in the App Store's Updates tab today touting iOS 8 compatibility.
The change log for Numbers is fairly brief, mentioning only support for iOS 8, iCloud Drive compatibility, and stability improvements and bug fixes. iMovie's update, however, is a bit more extensive, bringing about new features like slow motion and video filters.
Update: it looks like Apple has also pushed out iOS 8 updates for Pages and Keynote as well.
Update 2: iMovie was experiencing issue so Apple apparently pulled it from the App Store. It should be fixed and come back quickly.
Update 3: as expected, Apple resolved the issue quickly and iMovie is once again available in the App Store.
Admittedly, the myriad of new and useful capabilities that Apple's just-released iOS 8 brings to your iPhone, iPod touch and iPad are going to prove hugely popular with mainstream users, to say the least. With iOS 8, Apple is appeasing harsh critics who'd frequently point out that Android is capable of things iOS cannot do, and then some more.
iOS 8 opens up Apple's mobile operating system to third-party development to a much greater extent than ever before. And stemming from relaxed policies, iOS 8 boosts on-the-go productivity with deeper inter-app sharing while implementing some of the features our Android friends have grown accustomed to, but in a typical hassle-free Apple fashion, things like third-party keyboards, custom actions, photo editing extensions within the context of Photos and Camera apps and way more.
And though evolutionary rather than revolutionary, we have no doubt in our minds that iOS 8 is going to significantly improve the functionality of Apple's mobile platform, and perhaps even give some folks less reasons to jailbreak.
To celebrate today's release of the free iOS 8 software update, we proudly present you this detailed overview of more than two dozen iOS 8 features we think you're going to fall in love with at first sight.
Rounding out its day of software releases, Apple this evening has pushed out OS X Mavericks 10.9.5 for Mac users. Developers have been testing the beta over the last few months, and it includes a new version of Safari and various improvements.
Among those improvements is better reliability of VPN connections that use USB smart cards for authentication, which should please enterprise users, and easier access of files located on an SMB server. It's definitely more of a maintenance release.
iOS 8 released today and with it came not only plenty new features, but also the usual assortment of teething issues which — as is the norm in the software industry — happen to plague other vendors' software, too.
For example, a last-minute bug discovered in the HealthKit framework has prompted Apple to pull all HealthKit apps from the App Store this morning until the issue is fixed via a software update due by the end of this month.
Aside from this inconvenience, iOS 8 has also been found to slow down older devices such as the three-year-old iPhone 4s.
I'm sure readers will discover their favorite issues with iOS 8 just by scanning their RSS feed and keeping a close eye on conversations on Twitter, Facebook and other social media channels.
But here's the thing: it's all part of the Apple folklore. Early adopters certainly don't mind being part of it, even if it means coping with unforeseen issues, unexpected crashes, broken apps and other problems.
The question is, are you an iOS 8 holdout or an early adopter?.
Game industry veterans Midoki and Rovio, the renowned Angry Birds maker hailing from Finland, have joined forces to publish a new game for Apple's platform under the Rovio Stars label.
An addictive combat strategy adventure, Plunder Pirates invites you to build an island in lush three-dimensional graphics and then recruit a pirate crew to set sail for uncharted waters.
The free-to-play download has optional In-App Purchases available, supports Game Center achievements and leaderboards and files as one of the first iOS titles supporting Apple's low-level framework for close-to-the-metal 3D graphics programming, aptly named Metal.