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Netflix offline viewing coming before year-end?

It looks like Netflix offline viewing might finally be coming even though CEO Reed Hastings first said that the feature was “never going to happen”.

As Streaming Observers learned a few days ago, the company has changed its mind and will be reportedly adding offline mode to its mobile application before the end of this year.

Netflix's share prices shot up 20 percent this morning after the company reported better than expected third-quarter earnings.

Google announces YouTube Go app for watching and sharing videos without using any data

The annual “Google for India” event kicked off in New Delhi this morning, where the search company announced a new mobile app called YouTube Go.

Inspired by India for the next billion users, it's designed to help people in areas with poor connectivity watch and share YouTube videos without burning up mobile data.

YouTube Go provides controls not found in the regular app to let users see the file size of videos before they download them to the device for offline viewing. And to save data, the app presents clips as slideshows.

Offline viewing on Netflix to launch by year-end?

Video-streaming company Netflix seems to be secretly developing a feature that would permit subscribers to download specific television shows and movies for viewing without an Internet connection, industry insider and Penthera COO Dan Taitz told LightReading. Offline viewing on Netflix should launch before the end of this year. A Netflix spokesperson denied comment on the report.

Shazam brings back offline mode

Music and media identification service Shazam pushed a new update to its mobile application in the App Store which enables offline mode. The feature used to be present in Shazam from day one before it was temporarily removed in the overhauled app.

With it, you can still Shazam while offline and the app will name any songs you captured in offline mode when you're back online. Shazam is a free app. The paid $6.99 Shazam Encore app is available to those who want to get rid of ads and use advanced features.

App Stores and other iCloud services are currently down for some people

If you needed another proof that Apple is not very good at online services, here's one: the App Store, the Mac App Store and various other online services are currently down, according to a notice on Apple's System Status webpage.

Other iCloud services were affected at the time of this writing and have been inaccessible to an unknown portion of Apple's user base, including the Apple TV, iTunes in the Cloud and Volume Purchase Program.

UPDATE: The outage is more widespread than originally thought, with iCloud Drive, iCloud Backup, Mail Drop, iWork for iCloud, Photos, iCloud Web Apps and iCloud Storage Upgrades all having been affected as well.

How to download areas in Google Maps for offline use

Offline map of Statue of Liberty downloading inside Google Maps on iPhone

Google Maps has a wonderful feature built into it that lets you download maps from specific regions for offline use. This feature is perfect for when you need a map, and you know you won't have any cellular coverage or you don't want to waste your precious capped data on navigation tasks.

Right before a big road trip, you can follow this tutorial to download any region on Google Maps for your offline viewing pleasure on your iPhone or iPad!

Kommute for iPhone downloads websites for offline use and is better than Safari’s Reading List

Today’s websites are big, even more so taking into account that scripts from ad networks continue to gobble up data long after actual website content has been retrieved.

One valid approach to reading news involves adding articles you want to read later to Safari’s Reading List, but that will download each saved webpage to every device that has Safari enabled in Settings → iCloud.

A nicely done iPhone app called Kommute from developer Red Brick Labs might be a far better solution for those people who are eager to download their favorite websites in order to read them on the go, or when they’re not on Wi-Fi.

With Kommute, you just add any URL and the app intelligently fetches home page content along with deep links, for you to browse later. From my brief hands-on time with Kommute, I liked the app and the fact that it works as advertised.

Full offline maps with navigation and more coming soon to Google Maps for iOS

Although Google Maps for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad in its current incarnation supports saving a limited area as an offline map (just type 'OK Maps' into the search field), the full offline functionality used to be an Android exclusive, but that's about to change soon.

According to Google today, full offline maps in Google Maps are coming soon to the iOS edition of the software.