Apple on Thursday updated its App of the Week promotion with the game King Rabbit. This means that for the next 7 days, you'll be able to download the popular action-puzzler for both iPhone and iPad for free—a modest savings of $1.
For those unfamiliar with the title, King Rabbit is a puzzle-action crossover. Players are tasked with helping King Rabbit rescue his bunny citizens from devious enemies using keys, potions, bombs and other items they find along the way.
Last time we checked, iOS adoption rates stood at 84 percent of iPhone, iPod touch and iPad devices that were detected as running iOS 9. Moreover, eleven percent of hardware was on iOS 8 and the remaining five percent of devices used iOS 7 or older editions of Apple's mobile operating system.
These stats were valid as of a little more than two weeks ago. The new numbers Apple just posted to its App Store dashboard for developers, however, paint a not-so-rosy picture for iOS 9 adoption.
According to App Store device logs, the latest set of figures has not changed the slightest bit, or has not changed enough to move the needle versus two weeks ago.
Apple's oft-criticized review process for app submissions, which normally takes about a week or more, now takes as little as two days, according to developers who reported seeing dramatically faster App Store review times on submissions.
AppReviewTimes.com, a website that tracks average App Store review times using crowdsourced data, has confirmed that Apple's review process now takes an average of two days to approve an app, based on 332 reviews in the last 14 days.
Periscope, a Twitter-owned app that lets anyone start a live video broadcast from their iPhone, today received a pretty substantial update on the App Store. Bumped to version 1.4, Periscope for iPhone now lets you search videos and broadcast live to the service from a compatible DJI drone.
In addition, the team shared a preview of their full beyond 24 hours approach that will be available in the coming weeks.
If you rely on the excellent cross-platform Sunrise Calendar to keep up with your schedule, Microsoft has some bad news for you: your favorite calendar app is breaking up with you as the Windows maker announced plans to shut down Sunrise on August 31. For those wondering, Microsoft bought this popular calendar app in February of 2015.
Fortunately, Sunrise alternatives are plentiful.
Google's native Translate application for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad received a major update yesterday in the App Store, bringing version number to 5.0 and introducing some rather interesting advances. For starters, Google Translate now works without an Internet connection, allowing you to translate words, phrases and sentences in 52 of the 103 supported languages when there is no cellular or Wi-Fi connection available.
The instant camera translation feature, called Word Lens, now works with Chinese: it reads both to and from English, both Simplified and Traditional Chinese. This feature is ideal for traveling: you just point your camera at, say, a restaurant sign in a foreign language and witness the appropriate translation appear like magic in live video feed.
As promised, Google this morning launched its first software keyboard for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, called Gboard. Available free on the App Store, it integrates the power of Google Search, supports gesture-based typing, lets you send GIFs, emoticons and more. “No more app switching; just search and send, right from your keyboard,” said Google.
Yesterday, iDownloadBlog detailed a cool new one-handed zoom gesture during video capture which Snapchat's latest update has implemented.
This incredibly convenient shortcut permits you to zoom in and out as you're shooting video with Snapchat's camera, in real time. As one of our commenters pointed out, Google Maps has long had a similar shortcut on its native iOS app.
With it, iPhone, iPod touch and iPad users can zoom in and pan around in one-handed mode, without needing to use a two-fingered pinch-zoom gesture. Here's how one-handed zoom mode works on Google Maps for iOS.
There's a new app in the App Store called System and Security Info that shows detailed information about your device and running apps from a security standpoint. It can do a lot of things, including monitor memory and disk usage, show running processes, and it even detects malware and other anomalies.
A few other things about the app also caught our eye. One, it's capable of telling if your iPhone and iPad have been jailbroken, and two, it appears that former jailbreak contributor Stefan Esser (also known as i0n1c) is involved in the project. In fact, it was Esser who penned the announcement blog post.
We don't hang out on Snapchat on a regular basis, but I myself use the app from time to time to check out new features. Earlier today, my boss Sébastien shared an amazing collection of handy Snapchat tips and trick, created by fifteen-year-old Victoria Samson.
Some of the tricks she demonstrates are quite brilliant, but her video how-tos don't cover Snapchat's latest feature addition—the ability to zoom while recording a video in one-handed mode using a simple gesture. That's precisely what this quick tutorial will discuss: using Snapchat's handy one-handed zoom mode during video capture.
About a month ago, Facer, a smartwatch customization platform, landed on the Apple Watch via a free of charge App Store app. Unlike most other apps for customizing watch faces, Facer puts your style and individuality on full display with thousands of custom watch faces and the ability to design your own with an online creator tool.
The app can pull watch face images from a variety of sources, including your Instagram feed, and it even has neat flash card style faces for learning things like languages, constellations, Solar System's planet names, the elements of the periodic table and so forth.
Microsoft issued an update to OneDrive, its free of charge mobile cloud-storage client, adding some new features.
In addition to a fresh coat of paint and a revamped app icon, OneDrive for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad was bumped in the App Store yesterday to version 7.1 with support for Peek and Pop in-app gestures for previewing content with 3D Touch on the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus.
In the refreshed app, you can now peek at any folder or file by pressing it lightly, or pop right into it by pressing a little deeper.