macOS includes a super-handy Automator feature to automate the tasks you do on your Mac. Even though Automator takes advantage of ready-made actions for easy creation of complex workflows without programming, most people are unaware of its existence or what it can do.
An update to Uber for iPhone, dated January 22, has nixed integration with Siri and Apple Maps.
The Apple Watch is a great companion device for exercise, tracking your activity, and with watchOS 4, provides access to Apple Music. For people that prefer listening to podcasts while they work out, the Apple Watch is less ideal due to the lack of podcast app, either Apple's own Podcast app or third-party apps. A new Apple Watch app called MiniCast is looking to fill that gap and bring podcasts to your wrist.
MiniCast, available for free in the App Store (with $3.99 In-App Purchase), is a simple iPhone extension and Apple Watch app that allows uses to send podcasts from Apple's Podcasts app, Overcast, Castro, or PocketCast to their watch.
Apple has offered an Apple Music API for some time now and Facebook leveraged it to integrate the service with Music Stories, a song-sharing feature available within its mainland iOS app. Soon, Apple Music will integrate with the Messenger platform, too (currently used by more than 1.2 billion people every month). At the F8 conference today, the social networking behemoth announced that Spotify integration will be available on Messenger at launch and Apple Music real soon.
Starting with iOS 10, Apple is allowing a new type of applications in the App Store: apps that can detect and block spam phone calls from telemarketers, debt collectors, scammers, and automated systems. These apps act as an extension of the Phone application, and in theory, they can help you filter out those calls from people you don't want to talk to.
In this post, we will have a look at how these applications work and how to use them.
Having launched at the annual F8 conference for developers, Facebook's Save button is now available for public consumption in the form of a new Save to Facebook extension for the Google Chrome browser. As a bonus, an official new Share to Facebook extension with more capabilities is now also available for free in the Chrome Web Store.
Taking dead aim at Pocket, the new Save to Facebook extension makes it simple for Chrome users to tuck articles away on Facebook to read later on. According to the social networking firm, more than 300 million people use the Save feature every month.
A new OS X extension from Hasbrang Productions, the prominent jailbreak community development team, makes it easy to open and switch a new Terminal window to the current working directory, right from the Finder's contextual menu.
Available at no charge on the Mac App Store, the aptly named TermHere installs itself as a Finder file extension, readily accessible from the right-click menu. It works as advertised and is pretty convenient, more so if you use Terminal frequently.
Google's Hangouts application wants to become a unified communications solution for all your messaging needs despite not seeing new features in months. Now we know why: Google's been busy working on a major new version.
Now available on the App Store, the new Hangouts 9.0 brings a pair of new features, including one that'll automatically suspend video sharing during VoIP calls when an iPhone enters iOS 9’s Low Power Mode.
Yesterday, Apple released iOS 9.2 beta 1 to developers. As we explained, the update ushered in a couple of new features to iOS 9's Safari View Controller.
In iOS 9.2 beta 1, Safari View Controller gets a bit more powerful. It now has the ability to request a desktop site directly from the view controller, disable content blockers, and it can interface with Action Extensions, such as the 1Password extension.
In the video that follows, I showcase both new features, and compare them with an older version of iOS 9.
Sonico pushed out an update for its iTranslate app today, bringing the iOS client to version 8.4. The software, which is regarded as one of the best translation apps in the App Store, now comes with a keyboard extension and proper Apple Watch Glance.
The keyboard extension is particularly significant, since it can be used in most iOS 8-compatible apps. So now, instead of having to open the iTranslate app to make a translation, you can do it on the fly in WhatsApp, Mail or your favorite Twitter client.
Last fall, iOS 8 brought us App Extensions.
App Extensions have given developers the means to extend Apple's mobile operating system by infusing their app's functionality into the Notification Center's Today view, Share sheet options and actions, keyboards, cloud storage services and Photos.
App Extensions have been universally acclaimed and a lot ink has been spilled in writing about custom keyboards in iOS 8. As an iPhone photography fan, I was way more excited about App Extensions within the context of  Photos for iOS.
There was just one problem: OS X Yosemite doesn't support App Extensions in Photos for Mac. Thankfully, newly announced OS X 10.11 El Capitan saw to that, meaning now developers of photo-editing apps can provide their own filters and editing tools in Photos for Mac.
One of the most under-the-radar new features to hit OS X Yosemite was the addition of extensions. Action extensions are particularly nice, because they allow apps to interface with other apps directly.
Some app developers, such as Pixelmator ($29.99 on the Mac App Store), have brought third-party extensions to the Mac, which demonstrates how beneficial extensions can be. Watch our video that showcases Pixelmator's Repair Tool extension to see what I mean.