Apple began adding several new app categories to its Apple TV App Store on Thursday. As noted by Afterpad, the new categories are being rolled out to Apple TV 4 owners at a staggered pace, so they may not be available to everyone just yet.
The new categories include Catalogs and Utilities, and should help ease what has been a pain point for early ATV 4 adopters. Since the device launched last fall, App Store browsing and discovery has been a prominent complaint among users.
Today’s websites are big, even more so taking into account that scripts from ad networks continue to gobble up data long after actual website content has been retrieved.
One valid approach to reading news involves adding articles you want to read later to Safari’s Reading List, but that will download each saved webpage to every device that has Safari enabled in Settings → iCloud.
A nicely done iPhone app called Kommute from developer Red Brick Labs might be a far better solution for those people who are eager to download their favorite websites in order to read them on the go, or when they’re not on Wi-Fi.
With Kommute, you just add any URL and the app intelligently fetches home page content along with deep links, for you to browse later. From my brief hands-on time with Kommute, I liked the app and the fact that it works as advertised.
Apple on Thursday updated its App of the Week promotion with Laser Dog's 'HoPiKo.' This means that for the next 7-days, you'll be able to pick up the popular 8-bit platformer for free, for both your iPhone and iPad—a savings of $2.
HoPiKo is described by its developers as an "intense speed run platformer where you get to save gaming." Players must jump from platform to platform, exploiting shortcuts and ripping through hundreds of gorgeous, hand-crafted levels.
Telltale Games, a maker of episodic games, today launched The Walking Dead: Michonne on the App Store, Android, Mac and Windows PCs and the Xbox One, Xbox 360, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 3 consoles. A new mini-series, The Walking Dead: Michonne is aimed at both fans who are already familiar with the iconic character Michonne and those who have no prior knowledge of Robert Kirkman's comics, the TV show or Telltale's titles for that matter.
“This story is a separate, standalone experience, which makes it a great place to jump into the franchise with an awesome character,” notes Telltale.
Spark, a powerful email client from Ukrainian developer Readdle, has received a much-needed refresh in the App Store today, finally bringing out a native user interface on the iPad, so now you can experience Spark's email magic on all your devices, including the 12.9-inch iPad Pro.
Spark 1.6 also includes other refinements and improvements, such as an even better wrist app with fully native watchOS 2 support, landscape mode across all iOS devices, nine new languages, the ability to keep your email accounts and settings synced across all devices via iCloud and more.
The update is being rolled this morning so don't panic if you don't see it yet in your local App Store as these things take time to propagate.
Apple on Wednesday announced that it has posted videos of several Apple TV Tech Talk sessions to its developer portal. Both paying and non-paying members of Apple's developer program can access the instructional clips for free through the website.
The videos are taken from the 11 Tech Talks Apple has hosted around the world over the past few months. They contain in-depth technical information on building and designing for tvOS, refined coding techniques, and other valuable development help.
The Photos app on your iPhone, iPod touch, iPad and Mac lets you use the Auto Enhance and Remove Red-Eye tools with Live Photos in a non-destructive manner, which is nice.
But use filters, or perform a crop or trim on your Live Photo and it'll get turned into a still image because Apple's Photos solution isn't advanced enough (yet) to support these editing operations in conjunction with Live Photos.
This can be quite cumbersome for two reasons. A) You must manually restore your Live Photo by tapping Edit → Revert; and B) these stills only include the motionless part of your Live Photos.
With Live Crop, a nifty little app by developer MobiLab, not only can you trim and crop out parts of your Live Photo without destroying its live component, but also crop, zoom, trim and resize Live Photos, your videos as well as animated GIFs.
Netflix on Wednesday pushed out an update for its iOS client, bringing the app to version 8.0. The release is significant in that it features a number of improvements, including a better Kids experience on iPad and new Post-Play experience on iPhone.
Version 8.0 also features native support for Apple's just released iPad Pro, meaning the layout has been optimized for the tablet's 12.9-inch screen to show more content per screen, as well as support for 3D Touch actions like Peek and Pop within the app.
Facebook on Wednesday announced a move that has been long in the making: the company is extending the functionality of its ubiquitous Like button with six different reactions that help describe users' mood and express how something they see in the News Feed makes them feel.
Available to all users globally across all mobile and desktop platforms, the six new reactions—Like, Love, Haha, Wow, Sad or Angry—can be applied by holding down the Like button on mobile or hovering over the Like button on desktop.
Without fail, anytime I settle down to work on a programming project, a large chunk of my time is devoted to searching Google and StackOverflow for the best ways to tackle a given coding issue. Even if I haven't run into a problem per se, looking for the most efficient approach to a function or finding a snippet of code that carries out a specific purpose are just a couple reasons why I'm continuously researching whatever language with which I'm working. That's why Quiver is such a huge help to me.
Viber, the popular instant messaging application, has received an update in the App Store. Bumped to version 5.8, the app now works side-by-side with other apps in iOS 9's new Split View and Slide Over multitasking on the iPad Pro.
On the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, your most recent chats are now available right from the app's 3D Touch shortcut menu on the Home screen.
This edition of Viber also packs in some other improvements related to 'read' and 'liked' icons in group chats and an all-new media browser for chats.
Google on Tuesday issued a small update to its YouTube client in the App Store, adding support for the iPad Pro's 12.9-inch 2,732-by-2,048 pixel resolution screen, bringing the app's version number to 11.0.6.
Unfortunately, advanced iPad-only features provided by iOS 9 are not yet supported in YouTube for iOS, namely the new Slide Over and Split View multitasking modes.
This edition of YouTube also fixed a bug that caused the keyboard to freeze while commenting and another one which caused the app to crash after adding a Google or YouTube account on iOS 7.