Apple just sent an email blast to its registered developers to inform them that it's implementing two suggestions from the developer community starting September 7, 2016, the same day the iPhone 7 event is scheduled to take place. The first concerns “abandoned” apps that no longer function as advertised and the other deals with funny tricks some developers resort to in an effort to game the system.
Facebook today announced a new live-streaming feature on the mobile Messenger app, dubbed “Instant Video”. Similar to the live-streaming feature built into the mobile Facebook app, Instant Video allows you to start streaming live video with a friend on Messenger by tapping a new button found in chat windows. The video streams in a small window so that you can continue chatting while streaming.
Following first hands-on demonstrations of Siri's app integration that select developers gave to The Wall Street Journal's Nathan Olivarez-Giles last week, Apple on Thursday published an article of its own to share more details regarding Siri integrations for payments, messaging apps and more.
As a quick backgrounder, Siri on iOS 10 will work with your apps thanks to Apple's new SiriKit framework which was designed to help developers integrate Siri functionality into their own apps.
Available today as a beta release for Plex Pass subscribers, a new DVR feature allows Plex users to record both free over-the-air shows and cable broadcasts using their own digital antenna and HDHomeRun devices from Silicon Dust. As a bonus, it also supports non-DRM CableCARD channels on the HDHomeRun PRIME network attached digital tuner. This is a great feature addition that will put more television into your Plex-powered media center.
Plex is available for the iPhone, iPad, iPod touch and Apple TV, as well as for the Mac, Windows, Linux and a host of other media-streamers and other devices and platforms.
Google has brought full RAW support to Snapseed, allowing people who are serious about their iPhone photography to edit images saved in the professional RAW file format on their iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. As its name suggests, RAW stores original image data as captured by the camera's sensor, without any post-processing. Snapseed 2.9 for iOS also includes user interface improvements, bug fixes, a new face-editing tools and other improvements.
Instagram today announced that users of its free of charge iPhone app can now use the familiar pinch-zoom gesture to zoom in on photos—and videos—found in their feed and elsewhere in the app. I've long craved for this feature: in fact, I've been using iOS's system-wide Zoom feature to get a closer look at photos in the Instagram app that interest me. Just yesterday, Instagram pushed another update which brings out a new low-light button for its built-in camera.
Snapchat's Geofilters, special overlays that communicate the “where and when” of a Snap, can be quite useful—you can apply one to a Snap before sending it to a friend, or add it to your Story.
Today, Snapchat released a brand new web tool that lets you make custom On-Demand Geofilters using your own graphics or pre-made templates costing as little as $5 for a party in a small geographic area, no image editing software required.
You can customize your own Geofilters with the color palate and the text of your choosing. Once published, guests see your Geofilter when they post Snaps during your event. In this brief step-by-step tutorial, we're going to guide you through the process of creating your own Geofilter using Snapchat's new browser-based web tool.
A brand new version of Snapchat is now available in the App Store on your iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. It's a point update but don't let that fool you as it makes a handful of things a bit easier. For starters, you can now finally preview a person's public Stories without adding them as a friend. Before today, you had to add a contact as your friend to view their Stories so just this nice improvement alone could go a long way toward helping us discover new accounts and content on Snapchat a bit more easily than before.
Today, Instagram's Explore tab will start showing some users a bar of Stories from accounts they could follow, TechCrunch reported yesterday, saying these algorithmically personalized suggestions will roll out to everyone soon. Stories recommendations are based on who you follow and the topics you care about, making it easy to add someone new to your Home feed’s Stories section.
We'll keep things short and sweet this week. The latest edition of our Apps of the Week roundup includes a fun new photo editor from Jimmy Fallon, an app that auto-summarizes long web articles, a minimal music-maker, and of course two new games for you to check out.
As you may have heard, WhatsApp is starting to share some of users' account data with Facebook (things like your registered phone number and the last time you used the service) to improve targeted advertising and friend suggestions on Facebook and better fight spam on WhatsApp. Thankfully, you can easily opt out, right when the prompt goes up, or within 30 days of accepting the new terms, here's how.
Facebook-owned WhatsApp today updated its Terms and Privacy Policy for the first time in four years to reflect that the messaging service will start sharing select account data with Facebook in order to improve targeted advertising. Wait, does that mean that you're going to be inundated with ads on WhatsApp? In a word, no—at least for the time being. As per the amended terms of service, “We still do not allow third-party banner ads on WhatsApp.”