Apple

Nike+ Move gains better Leaderboards and more accurate Where You Moved screen

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated May 16, 2018

I frequently use Nike's fitness app, Move for iPhone, which made its App Store debut in early-November. Apple highlighted Nike+ Move during the September double-iPhone event as a use case scenario on how health and fitness apps can benefit by taking advantage of the new M7 motion coprocessor found inside the iPhone 5s. Not only does Nike+ Move tracks your movement even when it's inactive - with little to no impact on your battery life - it really gets you moving on a daily basis.

Beautiful and light iOS design, nicely animated interface, easy to grasp features and inviting concept together made me fall in love with the software from day one. A fresh update which just surfaced on the App Store is now introducing a more comprehensive Leaderboards and a more accurate Where You Moved screen...

Apple experimenting with custom landing page for Angry Birds Go! in the App Store

Cody Lee ∙ Updated April 14, 2018

Last month, Apple began testing the app trailer waters by hosting a video clip on the App Store for the new game Clumsy Ninja. The embedded clip had no voiceover or custom App Store branding, and it's the only one we've seen like this in the Store to date.

Now, it looks like Apple is running another experiment involving app and media discovery. We noticed this afternoon that it has given the new game Angry Birds Go! a custom landing page in the App Store with links to its related soundtrack and other apps...

Spotify announces free mobile streaming, Led Zeppelin deal, 20 new countries

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated May 16, 2018

Having just wrapped up its news conference in Manhattan, the popular Swedish startup Spotify announced that its namesake five-year-old music-streaming service is now providing a limited amount of music free on tablets and smartphones (with a few caveats), just as The Wall Street Journal predicted.

Previously, only desktop and web streaming was free as mobile devices required a paid Spotify Premium tier.

Also, Spotify is now available in an additional twenty new markets and has landed an exclusive content distribution agreement with Led Zeppelin, an English rock band formed in London in 1968. The band has stubbornly refused to license its music for streaming and was holding out until 2007 to join iTunes so this is kinda big deal.

The Led Zeppelin deal arrives hot on the heels of an exclusive deal with Metallica, which Spotify signed a year ago. The full reveal is right after the jump...

Apple TV picks up ABC, Bloomberg, Crackle and KOR TV channels

Christian Zibreg ∙ December 11, 2013

After adding Yahoo Screen and PBS channels last month, Major League Soccer and Disney Junior channels in September as well as Vevo, Weather Channel, Disney, Smithsonian and a bunch of other content sources earlier this year, Apple's again expanded on the device's content sources.

The $99 media-streaming box is now even more useful with four additional channels from ABC, financial organization Bloomberg, Sony's streaming movie and TV show service Crackle and Korea-based on-demand video service KOR TV, all now accessible from the Apple TV's Home menu...

Temple Run 2 updated with playable Santa character and other holiday goodies

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated January 26, 2016

Imangi Studio's popular endless runner, Temple Run 2, used to be my favorite time-killer for months following its January 2013 release. The free game saw a cool twenty million iOS downloads in the first four days of availability, growing to a whopping fifty million downloads in under four weeks.

I've since stopped playing the game and only occasionally fire it up to challenge myself with beating my best scores.

If you've been yearning for a substantial Temple Run 2 content update as much as I have, today is the day as a new version of the game surfaced on the App Store featuring a playable Santa character, various holiday-themed artifacts, new collectible masks, a cool new water slide feature that lets you swim through raging rapids and lots more.

The full breakdown is right after the break...

Rdio expands into 20 new countries

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated October 12, 2018

Rdio, the popular music-streaming services, announced today that it has expanded its service into twenty new countries globally. After today's expansion, the service is available in 51 countries across six continents.

The company conveniently timed its announcement just as Spotify is scheduled to hold a press conference later today, likely to announce plans to make mobile access to its music service free.

With today's expansion, Rdio is now the second largest music subscription service in the world in terms of countries serviced. By comparison, rival Spotify is currently available in 32 global markets and Apple's iTunes Radio is a U.S.-only affair, though new countries will be added some time in 2014.

However, Rdio still pales in comparison to Deezer, which is available in a whopping 182 countries around the world. The full list of new Rdio countries is right past the fold...

Valve gives its Steam iOS app iOS 7 makeover, offline chat and more

Christian Zibreg ∙ December 11, 2013

Valve has refreshed its Steam Mobile client for the iPhone and iPad with a new user interface design which fits the overall iOS 7 aesthetics much better compared to the previous version.

Additionally, this version of Steam Mobile has added a few new features and enhancements such as the offline chat mode, improved push notifications and icon badging, a brand new streamlined interface for responding to friend invites and a couple other tidbits.

The application allows Steam fans to stay in touch with the Steam community wherever they go. In addition to the Steam chat, the app relays the latest gaming news from the Steam network as well as notable game sales and includes the ability to browse community groups and user profiles...

Apple awarded new patent for head-mounted display system

Cody Lee ∙ Updated April 14, 2018

Over the past couple of years, Apple has been filing and collecting patents on inventions involving wearable computing devices. And one of its particular areas of interest is in head-mounted display systems, which it first patented in 2006.

Today, the US Patent and Trademark Office published another patent from Apple that it has just been granted that covers a head-mounted display system. It looks like an Oculus Rift and is designed to enhance gaming, movies and more...

Google Drive for iOS finally gains file-sorting and find and replace features

Christian Zibreg ∙ December 10, 2013

The search monster Google today updated its free Drive for iPhone and iPad app with the much-needed ability to sort your cloud files according to several built-in criteria. The highly requested feature finally makes it easy to access your files by last edited, last modified, title and last opened by you. Additionally, you can also find and replace in documents.

I switched from the native Microsoft Office apps to Google Docs years ago and never looked back. Google's suite of cloud productivity apps has won me over with its ability to access, edit and share my stuff on any network-enabled computer, right in a web browser, without having to install anything...

Yahoo buys video startup QuikIO

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated January 25, 2018

In the past year or so, Yahoo's been bolstering up its video and rich content expertise by acquiring smaller startups left and right. The company kicked off the acquisition spree by buying the mobile news startup Summly for $30 million and the #2 blogging platform Tumblr for north of $1 billion. Soon after, Yahoo paid $50 million for the cool iPhone video app, Qwiki.

In the ensuing months, Yahoo snapped up the DreamWorks-funded video-sharing app Ptch and announced that the New York Times technology columnist David Pogue and American television journalist Katie Couric are joining its A-team of premium content producers.

Today, it was reported that Yahoo in another acqui-hire move bought the cross-platform video startup called QuikIO...

Qualcomm launches Gimbal, its own $5 iBeacons

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated January 24, 2016

iBeacons, an Apple indoor positioning system based on Low Energy Bluetooth 4.0 (BLE) wireless technology packed inside tiny transmitters, seems to be picking up steam as of recently. Although Apple never conceived iBeacons technology to be platform-dependent, current installations are limited to sending push notifications right to the Lock screen of nearby iPhone, iPod touch or iPad devices.

These alerts use a combination of physical location, activity, time and personal interests and typically include various marketing messages, such as store discounts, freebies and so forth.

Surprisingly enough, Apple's supplier Qualcomm has now entered the game with the Gimbal, its own iBeacons-compatible platform which promises to bring location sensing to a micro-location level at an affordable price...

Google Play Books gains OCR-based search

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated January 26, 2016

The Google Play Books app has received a nice update this morning which lets you search through the contents of scanned pages.

If you've used the Google Books service before, you know that the Internet giant supports a variety of book formats, including those with free-flowing text, scanned pages or even a combination of both.

Unlike the regular text which can be copied and pasted, scanned pages are regular images. Therefore, to make searching of scanned pages possible some sort of an optical character recognition (OCR) feature needs to run either on the device itself or on the server.

That's exactly what this Google Play Books update does for you...