Microsoft today issued a pair of updates to Skype's messaging, VoIP and video calling apps in the App Store.
While the apps continue to be separate downloads on iOS rather than a universal binary (come on, Microsoft!), Skype for iPhone has gained useful 3D Touch actions available both from the Home screen and within the app itself.
In addition, both editions of Skype have picked up improved conversation and contact management, as well as ghostly Halloween video message filters and emoticons.
Scanbot, a comprehensive mobile scanner app for documents and QR codes, has been refreshed in the App Store today with several new features and refinements, including more accurate edge detection and a new color filter for text documents which produces scans that often look better than the original.
Scanbot is fully compliant with iOS 9, supports 3D Touch shortcuts on the Home screen and actions within the app and can recognize a wide variety of bar codes, including UPC-A, UPC-E, Code 39, Code 39 mod 43, Code 93, Code 128, EAN-8, EAN-13, ITF14, PDF417, Aztec and DataMatrix.
Yesterday, Facebook issued an update to its main iOS client to help extend your iPhone's battery life by preventing it from playing audio silently in the background.
File the move under the 'too little, too late' drawer: if history is anything to go by, waiting for Facebook engineers to deliver a fully battery-friendly iOS app might be a fool's errand.
The biggest contributor to Facebook's infamous battery drain has got to be the app's continuous monitoring of your location, which continues after leaving the app. In this tutorial, we'll teach you how to prevent this by disabling a feature called Location History, thereby helping reclaim some of the juice lost to the battery-hogging app.
Apple has seemingly begun experimenting with landscape screenshots and video in the App Store. A handful of App Store apps now offer landscape screenshots, video posters in landscape or both.
Twitter users and SplitMetrics have also noticed the change recently, which impacts the iPhone and is also showing on iTunes. Before the change, landscape App Store screenshots would show in portrait mode, requiring users to turn their head.
Facebook-owned Instagram is taking on Live Photos, one of Apple's headline iPhone 6s features, with a brand new 1-second video loop app called Boomerang. Available free of charge in the App Store, Boomerang aims to turn everyday moments into “something fun and unexpected.”
The app couldn't be simpler. You just point your iPhone's front or rear camera and press a button to take a burst of ten photos.
Boomerang then stitches the individual images together into a one-second sped-up video that plays forward and backward in a looping manner, similar in appearance and function to Apple's Live Photos feature.
Fleksy Keyboard, one of the most popular software keyboards in the App Store, has received a major update this morning. The update to the freemium app strives to solve the problem of users constantly demanding that developers add an ever-growing collection of new UI themes to the app, so they've added a new custom theme photo builder feature to Fleksy Keyboard 7.0.
The ability to personalize the keyboard has been one of the top requests from users, Fleksy says, and has prompted the company to come up with a system for users to build exactly the keyboard that suits their liking, and even share their creations with friends and other Fleksy users.
Although not apparently obvious, Apple's Reminders app on iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, Mac and iCloud.com lets you share to-dos and checklists with friends and family.
Sharing a reminder list with, say, your girlfriend (or wife) is particularly convenient as you’ll both be able to add, delete and check off items as completed, and all changes will instantly appearing on everyone's devices thanks to seamless iCloud syncing.
This isn't just great for grocery lists, shared to-dos and interactive lists among family members, but for business, too. For example, you could share a to-do list with team members to keep everyone apprised of what needs to be done on any particular day.
In this post, we're going to show how easy it is to create a list in Reminders and invite others to participate across iOS, macOS, and the web.
Apple's latest iOS 9 mobile operating system is now powering a total of 61 percent of active iPhone, iPod touch and iPad devices in the wild, according to Apple's official numbers published on its portal for developers.
By comparison iOS 9 was found on 57 percent of devices just two short weeks ago. The latest data point was calculated by monitoring App Store access on October 19, 2015.
Publisher Activision today announced immediate availability of a new iPhone iPod touch and iPad game, called Guitar Hero Live. It includes two free of charge trial songs, with hundreds more available when you purchase a controller bundle.
The game is available in the United States starting today and will be launching in Europe this coming Friday, October 23, with an Apple TV version releasing later this year.
An optional $99 bundle is available from major retailers around the country with an AA batteries-powered Bluetooth Low Energy guitar controller along with guitar strap and included redeem code. A two-guitar bundle is $149.99.
In addition to bringing Yellow Pages-powered business listings to Apple Maps customers in Canada, the Cupertino firm has apparently refreshed a Maps backend in the United States, adding transit directions for Boston and multiple Amtrak routes in the Northeastern United States.
The longest Amtrak route available runs from Chicago to New York. As first noted by MacRumors, other supported routes with transit directions include the Northeast Regional, Acela Express, Keystone, Lake Shore Limited, Pennsylvanian and Maple Leaf.
Apple and Yellow Pages have partnered to bring Apple Maps customers in Canada rich business data like address, phone numbers, URLs, category, hours of operations, photos, ratings, reviews and more.
“We are pleased to bring our YP.ca local business listings data to Apple Maps,” said Matthieu Houle, Vice-President, Digital Media of Yellow Pages, in a media release Monday. Apple's Maps acknowledgements page now lists Yellow Pages as a data provider in Canada.
Waze, the popular social-mapping location data startup, today pushed a major update to its GPS, maps and social traffic application in the App Store.
Featuring a refreshed design and cleaner maps with emphasis on safer driving, the new Waze 4.0 for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad also brings reduced battery consumption allowing the app to run longer in the background, and much more.