In February 2016, IBM promised to bring Apple's new programming language Swift to the cloud. Today, the firm has made good on that promise with the introduction of Bluemix Runtime which allows developers to write server-side code for iPhone, Mac and Windows PC apps in Swift.
“Swift is now ready for the enterprise,” Mike Gilfix, IBM’s Vice President of MobileFirst and Smarter Process, said in an interview with Mike Gilfix of Computerworld.
Apple has released a small update for compatible iPhones, iPod touches, and iPads on Friday dubbed iOS 10.0.2 that fixes a handful of small bugs introduced with the initial release of iOS 10.
Facebook just pushed a major update to its Messenger software in the App Store. On iPhones with iOS 10, the app now takes advantage of Apple's new CallKit framework to make audio (VoIP) calls from Messenger look and behave like normal cellular calls with full support for Lock screen and Phone integration.
Bumped to version 89.0, the app now shows incoming VoIP calls from Messenger contacts right on your Lock screen complete with fullscreen contact images, standard controls like the Mute, Keypad, Speaker, Add Call and Video buttons and more.
Snapchat recently rolled out a minor refresh to its iPhone application in the App Store, bumping version number to 9.39.3.0 and bringing out a new Sticker Search feature. As the feature's name suggests, this lets you find precisely the sticker you want simply by typing its description. A previous Snapchat update introduced a few tweaks, including support for caption styling with the new bold, underline and italic options.
At the annual I/O developer conference in April 2016, Google previewed two new mobile apps: a one-to-one video calling app called Duo, which released in mid-August, and a messaging software called Allo, which surfaced on the App Store this morning as a free download.
It sports features commonly found in messaging apps and includes a built-in Assistant, Google's conversational artificial intelligence helper, an Incognito mode and more.
While Google originally promised Allo would only store messages transiently and in non-identifiable form, the firm's had a change of heart as Allo logs all chats by default.
Apple's Messages app provides an optional iOS-only mode which cuts down your cellular data consumption to a bare minimum when sending image attachments. I don't know about you, but I worry about sharing high-resolution images when cellular data is on. In my experience, most normals are oblivious to the fact that sending a single shot-on-iPhone photograph through iMessage burns through one to five megabytes of data, sometimes even more.
In low quality mode, Messages uses only 100KB per image attachment. Another way to think about it: you can send 30 to 50 images for the same amount of data required to share a full-resolution attachment in Messages. In this brief tutorial, we'll teach you how to tell Messages to send lower quality images in order to optimize your cellular data consumption and prevent unwanted overage fees.
With Instagram drafts, you can save any half-finished photo edits and work on them later, which is handy for those times you get too busy to post right away. And if you run an Instagram account for your business, letting your social media manager save a post as a draft makes it easy for you to review it in advance of publishing.
In May of this year, Twitter promised it would be stopping counting media and other non-text content against its 140-character limit. Today, the company announced that embedded photos, videos, GIFs, polls and quoted tweets no longer count toward your 140 characters.
Twitter originally promised to also stop counting user mentions like @iDownloadBlog, but didn't specify today when it'll drop @usernames from the character count.
With iOS 10, Safari didn't receive a major facelift like some other Apple apps did. That's not saying Safari didn't have a few tricks up its sleeve that make browsing the web a more pleasing experience for everyone. One of the little things about iOS 10 that I'm sure many folks appreciated was the ability for Safari to play videos inline on the iPhone and iPod touch, too.
This feature has been present on iPads for years.
Thankfully, you can watch most web videos inline on your iPhone and iPod touch, even while multitasking in Safari. Telling Safari to play a video inside the webpage isn't as obvious as it could have been, so here's a little tutorial to get you up to speed.
At each iPhone introduction, Apple would usually invite one or more game developers on stage to demonstrate titles which show off the power of its latest chips. This month's iPhone 7 introduction was no exception. To showcase what's possible with the new A10 Fusion chip, Apple invited This Game Studio co-founder Heather Price on stage to show off a mobile game called Oz: Broken Kingdom, which just launched in the App Store as a freemium download.
A new take on Oz, Broken Kingdom sports crisp and detailed Metal-driven graphics that take full advantage of the A10 Fusion chip, although it supports older devices as well.
To say that YouTube, one of my favorite mobile apps from Google, has poor 3D touch support would be an understatement: it's been now a full year since the iPhone 6s introduced the world to 3D Touch and yet support for the technology is literally non-existent in YouTube for iOS.
Conveniently ahead of the iPhone 7's arrival, Google yesterday moved to assuage some of the concerns of users who have been craving for 3D Touch in the app, releasing a small update which enables some interesting shortcuts on the Home screen.
WhatsApp is one of the showcase apps for CallKit, Apple's new framework allowing VoIP calls to integrate with iOS 10's Phone app and behave like cellular calls. Today, WhatsApp has rolled out its anticipated update which enables integration with Phone and Siri on iOS 10 while bringing out half a dozen other features and improvements like forwarding multiple chats at once, a new iOS 10 widget that lets you go to a recent WhatsApp chat or see which chats have unread messages, and more.