The Internet giant Google on Friday refreshed its native Google Search application for the iPhone and iPad with enhancements to the built-in Google Now feature in the form of new cards for personalized TV recommendations and traffic information.
Furthermore, version 4.2 of Google Search for iOS now includes better Chromecast integration allowing owners of the $35 HDMI dongle to ask Google “what’s on Chromecast?” to open the Chromecast for iPhone app and start casting.
TeeVee 3, a TV show-tracking app that I reviewed in May by Tomas Perzl of the Czech Republic and Slovakia-based CrazyApps Team, now lets you tweet out upcoming episodes or mark the ones you've seen as watched, directly from the notification itself, and also see which shows are coming next in the Today view of the iOS Notification Center, thanks to its iOS 8-focused update released yesterday.
Other new features available in this excellent iPhone and iPad app include new sorting options (Alphabetically, Reverse, AirDate and Unwatched), the ability to delete a show by long-pressing it in the list and several bug fixes.
As a cherry on top, the team has decided to discount the $2.99 app to zero bucks, for a limited time, in an effort to bring in new customers. If you're going to grab the latest TeeVee 3.1 update, please keep in mind that the app now requires iOS 8.
You may have noticed over the past 24 hours that a new section has appeared in the App Store entitled "Apps & Games for iPhone 6." As you'd expect, the section is meant to highlight apps and games that have been updated for the larger displays on the two new iPhones.
There are likely thousands of apps that are compatible with the handsets, with many more to come. Apple rounded up about 65 of them, and we thought we'd share 10 of our favorites, so you know what apps we'll be downloading when we get our new iPhones tomorrow.
Alongside iOS 8, the App Store received a number of improvements, including video previews and support for app bundles. And with yesterday's release, several app bundles popped up in Apple's digital storefront, so we've decided to roundup a few worth checking out.
To give you an idea of how this works, among our list is the Runtastic Cardio Pack, which includes 5 iPhone apps made by runtastic that are meant to track various fitness activities. Individually, these apps would cost you $16, but the bundle is just $8—a 50% savings.
One of the cool new features available in iOS 8 is the ability to set third-party keyboard apps as the default on your iPhone and iPad. I was quick to jump on that bandwagon. Fleksy Keyboard – Happy Typing was my first third-party default because, frankly, I wanted my keyboard to look like a candy store. It is a gesture-based, colorful, super fast keyboard for iOS 8 with autocorrect and word suggestions. I’ve been playing with it for about a day now and I’ve got some hands-on experience to pass along to you.
Twitter, the popular micro-blogging service, is rolling out a brand new profile experience on Twitter for iPhone, in addition to another cool new feature — support for interactive notifications for incoming tweets on iOS 8 devices — the startup announced in a blog post Thursday.
While the new profiles will be available for everyone using iOS 7 or above, the ability to interact with alerts on the Lock and Home screen is not because this capability is part of the great new features available only in iOS 8.
SwiftKey has announced today that its new iOS 8 keyboard has already surpassed the 1 million downloads mark. The news comes just 24 hours after Apple released the software update, which activated support for third party iOS keyboards.
At the time of this writing, SwiftKey is the #1 app in the Top Free chart of the US App Store. Other third-party keyboard apps like Swype and Fleksy are also sitting at the top of their respective charts, as users rush to try out the new feature.
With the introduction of iOS 8 came vast amounts of new functionality, including the ability for users to add custom sharing and actions options to iOS's share sheet. This enables anything from in-line translation to saving notes to your favorite app from anywhere on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.
We've worked to bring together a compilation of iOS apps that have been updated by their developers to include support for these new features. As we happen upon them, we'll be adding more apps to the list below, so check back soon for those.
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.
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.
Demoed at WWDC back in June to show off the power of Apple's new low-level graphics framework, Metal, Epic Games' Zen Garden is now available to download on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad devices running iOS 8 and powered by the Apple-deigned A7 or A8 processor.
Built on the recently-unveiled Unreal Engine 4, the first game engine with built-in support for the Metal API, Zen Garden classes as a technological showcase.
The latest iPhone 6, for example, renders the demo in a whopping 1,440-by-1,080 resolution at a smooth thirty frames per second.