Facebook has released an update to its Messenger software in the App Store, bumping the app to version 52.0 and bringing out 3D Touch shortcuts on the Home screen for owners of the iPhone 6s or iPhone 6s Plus.
Just press Messenger's icon lightly with 3D Touch and up pops a menu with the New Message option, along with handy shortcuts for starting a chat with your top three most-frequently messaged contacts.
Adobe today unleashed a major update to its Lightroom photography application for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad in the App Store.
Both Lightroom for iPhone and Lightroom for iPad apps now feature full support for the iPad Pro's high-resolution screen and iOS 9'2 Split View and Slide Over multitasking modes, in addition to an all-new built-in Adobe camera with shoot-through presets.
You also get split-tone adjustments, a Notification Center widget to launch the Adobe camera, full support for 3D Touch shortcuts on the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus and much more.
Gameloft's super-popular arcade racing title, Asphalt 8: Airborne, has received a major holiday-themed update in the App Store today, bringing out tons of new content. For the first time ever, the Lamborghini Egoista makes an appearance, not just in Asphalt but in any video game for that matter. You can unlock this amazing car, as well as the exclusive McLaren 570, Mercedes SLK 5 and more, in the new racing events starting December 18.
According to fresh new stats from Apple's App Store dashboard for developers, iOS 9 is now powering 71 percent of iPhone, iPod touch and iPad devices in active use, a one-percentage point gain versus the 70 percent milestone recorded two weeks ago.
iOS 8 continues declining as a result, dropping from 22 percent two weeks ago to 21 percent of iOS hardware as of yesterday, indicating that much of iOS 9's growth in the 14-day period came from users upgrading to iOS 8 and new iPhone buyers.
As you use apps on your iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, iOS dynamically manages system memory (don't confuse RAM with storage), allocating chunks of RAM to foreground and background tasks and suspending memory usage for apps that are not actively running in the background.
For the most part, iOS manages RAM efficiently to ensure that your frequently-used applications are ready for action as soon as you switch to them. But as so-called garbage collection is not available in iOS, a poorly written application might keep large portions of memory to itself and refuse to release it at iOS's request, resulting in slower performance.
You can get around this by rebooting your device, but there's a more elegant way to purge the memory taken up by apps without rebooting, as explained in this tutorial.
Just a few days after adding support for Microsoft Exchange accounts for work-related emails, Readdle's popular Spark email app for the iPhone received another major update in the App Store last evening.
Bumped to version 1.4, Spark now includes several new snoozing options and new ways to attach images and files. With customizable snooze times and related notifications, staying on top of your emails is now easier than before.
You also get a dedicated button for attaching images to an email message, the ability to chose image size to keep attachment size under control and switch between attaching actual files or sending links to files on your Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive.
The search monster Google on Friday issued an update to its mobile search application in the App Store, adding support for 3D Touch gestures on the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus and iOS 9's new multitasking modes on select iPads, while improving search results for places and local businesses.
With 3D Touch, hard-pressing on the Google app's icon on the Home screen brings up quick shortcuts for Search, Voice Search and Image Search features.
Poison Maps, a cool map app in the App Store based on the OpenStreetMap database, takes a novel approach to 3D Touch gestures versus most other 3D Touch-enabled apps, which makes it uniquely useful for navigating.
On non-iPhone 6s devices, the app takes advantage of the patent-pending Context Pan gesture letting you pan large distances by using a single touch of a finger instead of the usual two-fingered pinch-zoom gesture.
On devices without 3D Touch, however, context zooming and context panning is implemented using a long touch to control how far the map zooms out, rather then using the force of the press, as shown in a video demonstration further below.
Just in time for the holiday season, Google has issued a major update to its official video streaming application in the App Store, Google Play Movies & TV, with several much-needed features and a fresh new design. For starters, you can now stream movies and TV shows rented or purchased on the Play store over your carrier's cellular data network. Moreover, the app has gained the ability to stream video in high-definition.
And if you own a third-generation Apple TV or higher, you can stream your Google Play entertainment right to the big screen with official support for Apple's AirPlay wireless media streaming technology.
Yahoo-owned Tumblr today rolled out a major update to its iPhone, iPod touch and iPad application in the App Store, bringing out official support for Live Photos, introducing 3D Touch Home screen shortcuts and a few other enhancements. Tumblr 5.0 for iOS also makes its messaging feature available to everyone today, lets you send a post to any Tumblr and toss it with the tap of a button.
As promised back in September, Google Photos has now begun rolling out shared albums on the web and in its mobile apps for iOS and Android.
Arriving just in time for the holiday season, a shared album allows friends and family to add photos to it. Those who have joined a shared album will receive a notification about any changes and newly uploaded photos.
If it sounds similar to Apple's own iCloud Photo Sharing, that's because it is, with one crucial difference: shared albums on Google Photos aren’t designed for a social world—you can't like, comment on or caption them.
Product Hunt, a Y Combinator-backed website and mobile app for sharing and discovering new products, on Thursday received a major 3.0 update in the App Store, its biggest update since the app was introduced over a year ago.
Featuring a brand new design, Product Hunt now includes live chat and a built-in audio player for listening to podcasts. An expanded search feature lets you zero in on apps, websites, gadgets, games, podcasts and books—and you can now search Product Hunt within iOS's Spotlight feature.
But that's just tip of the iceberg as Product Hunt 3.0 packs in new profile pages, expanded Collections features, enhanced product pages and much more.