Facebook yesterday announced that its Messenger service has hit a major milestone: the software is now being used by more than one billion people every month to message their friends and family. Messenger saw a major surge in popularity after it was decoupled from the main Facebook mobile client, and especially since becoming a software platform in its own right with chat bots, apps, money payments, expanded emojis and other features.
Facebook Messenger is a free download from the App Store.
A new emoji-predicting keyboard from Microsoft-owned SwiftKey, called Swiftmoji, launched on the App Store.
Available at no charge on the App Store, it boosts your emoji game by predicting a wall of suggested emojis based on crowdsourced data, the user's own preferences and the actual text written in any of the user's keyboards.
This ability to get perfect emoji predictions based on what you’ve just typed is similar to Apple's much-improved QuickType keyboard on iOS 10.
If you write books, manuals or lengthy manuscripts for a living, chances are you rely on Scrivener for Mac for your work. If so, you'll be delighted to learn that the app's creator, British developer Literature & Latte Ltd., has released Scrivener for iOS following a long period of thorough beta testing. The iPhone, iPad and iPod touch app costs $19.99 and provides the full range of features writers need to create, edit and update their work on the go with full-screen mode on the iPad and other perks.
The unthinkable has happened: Twitter has decided to open its account verification system to the masses. That's right, everyone can now apply to have their account verified for bragging rights in the form of that blue checkmark next to their Twitter account name, which used to be the privilege of the rich and famous. But there's a catch: Twitter says that it will approve accounts that are “of public interest” so you'll need to tell them why they should verify your account.
The popular Photoshop alternative, Pixelmator, on Tuesday refreshed its iPhone, iPad and iPod touch application on the App Store, bringing out two desktop-class tools—Magnetic Selection and Quick Selection—along with numerous selection improvements and a bunch of fixes for the Apple Pencil, the iPhone version of the app and more. The Smart Selection and Magnetic Selection tools first appeared in Pixelmator for Mac in May 2016.
Last Thursday's deadly terrorist attack in France's Nice left eighty-four people dead when an attacker ploughed a lorry into people celebrating the national Bastille Day on the Promenade des Anglais. In the aftermath of the attack, Nintendo is postponing the planned release of Pokémon Go in the country out of respect for the French people “in this time of national mourning,” a Pokémon Company spokesperson told IGN France.
This past weekend, the social networking giant Facebook announced that a beta version of its brand new software development kit (SDK) for Apple's Swift programming language is available for download. The new SDK integrates Facebook buttons into iOS, watchOS, macOS and tvOS apps written in Swift, and integrates such features like Facebook Login, Analytics for Apps, Graph API and Share to Facebook sheets. The Facebook SDK source code is available via GitHub on an open-source basis.
British pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) announced Monday that it has started a new rheumatoid arthritis study which uses Apple's ResearchKit platform that lets medical researchers gather robust and meaningful data from iPhone users. The drug maker will be using ResearchKit in its new GSK PARADE iPhone app.
Following its major revamp of the Mac app, the powerful email client Airmail 3 has now received its first point update on the Mac App Store, bringing out a few missing features. In Airmail 3.0.1 for macOS, a free update for existing users of the app, you can take advantage of a brand new Unified VIP feature which brings together emails from the app's built-in VIP contacts received across all your accounts. BusyCal 3 users will appreciate the ability to connect their calendars from within Airmail 3 and everyone will love many other features available in this release.
Pokémon Go's burgeoning community has been painstakingly creating and maintaining a detailed Google map of PokéStops and gym locations found in specific spots around the world. Actually, whole websites have sprung up dedicated to the Internet phenomenon that seems to be taking the word by storm. Now Yelp developers have decided to jump in on the action with a new PokéStop filter in their mobile app.
Pokémon Go fever is still in full swing, but for those of you looking to try out different apps and games this weekend, iDB has you covered. In this edition of our Apps of the Week roundup, we have a beautiful new productivity app, a video social network for DIY'ers, a cool new photo editing app, and of course some great new games for you to check out.
Reports surfaced yesterday on Reddit that some users of Readdle's excellent free mobile email client, Spark for iPhone, got locked out of their Apple ID account. Some of the affected people were able to re-gain access by performing a password reset on their Apple ID. It would appear that an error on Spark's servers has caused this behavior though Readdle assured customers that there was no breach or data leak.