Apps

Facebook Messenger passes 900 million users, unveils profile codes and other new features

Christian Zibreg ∙ April 7, 2016

Facebook today announced its Messenger mobile application is now being used by more than 900 million people globally every month, up from 800 million active monthly users announced in January.

Celebrating the milestone, the social network firm unveiled Snapchat-like scannable profile codes.

In addition, it announced some interesting new ways for people to find businesses and friends to start a conversation, including vanity profile URLs on Messenger. More than a billion messages are now being sent every month between people on Messenger and businesses, wrote David Marcus, Facebook's Vice President of Messaging.

Siri co-founder to demo Viv, ‘the global brain’ that provides an intelligent interface to everything

Christian Zibreg ∙ April 7, 2016

Dag Kittlaus, a brilliant artificial intelligence engineer who helped create an advanced personal digital assistant that Apple bought and marketed as Siri, is about to show his brand new artificial intelligence product to the world at TechCrunch's Disrupt NY 2016 conference later this week.

Kittalus, who co-founded Siri and was the CEO of the startup, has since moved on and co-founded another startup with Siri veterans Adam Cheyer and Chris Brigham, called Viv Labs, with the goal of radically simplifying the world by providing an intelligent interface to everything.

Reddit: The Official App hits the App Store

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated October 16, 2018

Nearly a year and a half following its acquisition of Alien Blue, the popular iOS client for Reddit, the popular social news service today released its long-awaited official client for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.

Reddit: The Official App, as it's called, is available at no charge in the App Store and if you download it during its launch weekend, they'll treat you to three free months of Reddit Gold membership.

Apple may soon permit users to hide unwanted stock apps on iOS, iTunes metadata suggests

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated December 25, 2017

Strings discovered in iTunes metadata suggest that the ability to remove Apple's stock iPhone and iPad apps such as Compass, Voice Memos, Find My Friends, Tips and Stocks is coming very soon.

For those wondering, iTunes metadata provides information about iPhone, iPod touch and iPad apps that can be found on the App Store, such as the date an app was released, its size, the store category it’s in and so forth.

As explained by AppAdvice, a pair of new keys—labeled “isFirstParty” and “isFirstPartyHideableApp”—started showing up in iTunes metadata a few weeks ago on every app in the App Store.

Facebook app gaining Live button, video broadcasts now more Periscope-like

Christian Zibreg ∙ April 6, 2016

The Messenger button in the mobile Facebook app for iOS and Android which sent users to the Messenger app has been replaced with a Live button as the popular social network aims to push live and pre-recorded videos in front of as many eyeballs as possible.

Announced in a blog post Wednesday, the company is also rolling out new features for Facebook Live that give users more ways to discover, share and interact with live video.

‘Edge’ brings a Galaxy S7-inspired feature to jailbroken devices

Anthony Bouchard ∙ Updated April 11, 2016

For those lurking the Changes tab in Cydia, you may have noticed an interesting new jailbreak tweak called Edge, which claims to bring a feature to iPhones that is typically found on a competing handset – the Samsung Galaxy S7.

Available in Cydia for $1.99, Edge lets you access a useful new menu from anywhere in iOS with a special slide gesture. The menu provides access to apps, tasks, contacts, and more, and in this review, we'll be showing you all about how the tweak works!

Reposting Vine videos to Instagram with VineGrab

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated February 12, 2018

I recently talked about sharing Instagram videos on Vine, a multi-step procedure that involves a third-party app to save an Instagram clip to the Camera roll before posting it manually to the Twitter-owned Vine service.

So far so good.

But what about the other way round? Of course that same process applies to posting vine clips on Instagram: save a vine to the device before manually sharing it on Instagram.

As it turns out, there's a bunch of third-party apps in the App Store which can take the pain out of resharing vines on Instagram. With VineGrab, a free iPhone app by Xiaoyu Xia, not only can you watch vines in a more elegant interface than Vine's own, you can also repost your favorite ones to Instagram.

New console firmware with support for playing PlayStation games on Mac is due tomorrow

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated October 21, 2016

As promised, Sony will release tomorrow a firmware update for its PlayStation 4 console which includes Remote Play functionality for playing PlayStation 4 games on a Mac or Windows PC, the company announced in a blog post this morning.

“With this update, we’re expanding PS4’s Remote Play capabilities to work with Windows PC and Mac,” said Sony. The Remote Play app, which launches tomorrow and will be available for download through the Sony website, lets you connect a DualShock 4 to your Mac via a USB cable as the controller for Remote Play.

Starting today, contents of your WhatsApp chats are now protected with full end-to-end encryption

Christian Zibreg ∙ April 5, 2016

WhatsApp today announced it is turning on end-to-end encryption to make it virtually impossible to eavesdrop on your communications.

Starting today, all text messages, photo and video attachments, documents, voice messages and VoIP calls are protected with full end-to-end encryption, developed in collaboration with Open Whisper Systems.

Similar to Apple's iMessage and some other instant messaging platforms such as Telegram, end-to-end encryption makes the contents of WhatsApp chats unreadable to third-parties. And with the encryption keys stored on a user's device, they cannot decrypt chats if served a valid government request.

Cable network Starz launches $9 per month streaming package for iPhone, iPad and Apple TV

Christian Zibreg ∙ April 5, 2016

Starz, a premium cable and satellite television network, today announced a brand new video service which permits owners of the iPhone, iPod touch, iPad and Apple TV to stream shows for a low monthly fee of just $8.99 per month.

A companion iOS app lets subscribers download full episodes to watch offline but does not offer live streaming. On the fourth-generation Apple TV, it supports universal search so you can ask Siri for shows to watch, including original ones like “Outlander”, “Power” and the upcoming “American Gods”.

Real Racing 3 gains three new cars, adds fresh new events and more

Christian Zibreg ∙ April 5, 2016

Electronics Arts and Firemonkeys today pushed a brand new content update to Real Racing 3, their popular racing game for the iPhone, iPod touch, iPad and Apple TV.

Bumped to version 4.2, the game has introduced three new powerful cars: the Hennessey Venom GT—the fastest accelerating production car in the world according to Guinness—along with the 2015 BMW 3.0 CSL Hommage R and 1975 BMW 3.0 CSL.

In addition, players can now take on the all-new Front Runner special event for their chance to win the aforesaid Hennessey Venom GT and participate in other events to bring home that classic 1975 BMW 3.0 CSL or the new 2015 BMW 3.0 CSL Hommage R.

Infuse 4.1 brings dark mode from iOS version to Apple TV, 24-bit HD audio, watched icons & more

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated February 4, 2018

Infuse, arguably the most versatile media player app for the iPhone, iPod touch, iPad and Apple TV by aTV Flash Black developer FireCore, has just unloaded a ton of goodies in its most recent update on the iOS and tvOS App Stores.

Available now, Infuse 4.1 brings an optional dark mode from the iOS edition of the app to its Apple TV counterpart, and it's a beauty! Next, you can finally delete videos from remote SMB and FTP/SFTP shares.

iOS users, I'm sure, will appreciate Infuse's background metadata fetching for Favorites whenever they open the app. And my favorite: Infuse now finally renders DIVX files without any hiccup.