Spotify is finally making its Family Plan more family-friendly by giving parents greater control over the music their kids can listen to.
It will soon be possible to block out explicit tracks with a password-protected setting that only parents have access to. Spotify is also adding a “Family Mix” playlist.
Instagram is finally giving us the ability to mute accounts that we don’t want to see in our feeds.
The feature lets you weed out annoying friends without actually unfollowing them. You will still be able to view their profile if you choose to, and you can unmute them anytime you want.
Snap, Inc., the company behind Snapchat, just paid a staggering $7.7 million to acquire a “geofilters” patent and prevent it being snapped up by Facebook.
It is believed to be “by far the highest amount paid” for a single patent in Israel — the previous record was less than half that — and it goes to local firm Mobli.
McDonald’s Australia has begun taking job applications through Snapchat in an effort to attract young people to its workforce.
The “Snaplication” process, believed to be a first for both McDonald’s and Snapchat, requires applicants to submit a 10-second video of themselves while using a new filter that applies a McDonald’s hat and uniform.
I recall at WWDC 2011 when Steve Jobs introduced iCloud he talked about how up until that point, managing and syncing content across devices was driving everybody nuts. You’d take one photo on one device and would have to plug it in and sync it to another device, which would then offer up some of its own photos and meanwhile none of them are even on the third device yet. It truly was an insane world. But in 2016, the new Circle with Disney aims to solve a surprisingly similar problem.
Managing content across devices has gotten much easier, yet managing the people who use those devices has not. Circle is a brand-new product from Disney that wants to unify your family’s entire online experience. It allows you to set time limits for individual family members, block websites based on your child’s age, and even pause Internet access entirely when it’s time to log off.
CloudMagic, the best third-party email client for mobile, just got even better thanks to a major new update that’s available right now on Android and iOS. In addition to adding quick filters for things like unread and starred messages, the release brings customizable alert tones, account nicknames, access to spam folders, and lots more.
The team behind Evomail, a popular third-party mail client for iOS, today released Evomail+, a new version of its app designed for iOS 7. In addition to a beautiful new design, the new release adds a whole host of new features, including customizable gestures, filtering tools, and Dropbox and Box.net integration.
Oh, and like it’s predecessor, it’s completely free.
Path has updated its iOS app today to introduce the ability to hide the Friend Progress Bar from your feed. The release also brings the ability to edit your email address and password within the settings drawer, and new stickers and filters.
I don’t know about you, but I spend a lot of time deleting spam messages from my inbox — despite using a junk mail filter. But the issue is about to get a whole lot worse, with Google gearing up to deliver adverts to our Gmail inboxes. The messages will appear under the new Promotions tab that was recently introduced in a Gmail update, and Google is testing them on a small number of users now.
TweetDeck for Mac just got a pretty nice update via the Mac App Store that introduces a new user interface and a number of new features. Users will find it’s now easier to navigate their way around the app thanks to a new sidebar, while the built-in translation makes it easier to communicate with foreign friends.
The Google+ apps for Android and iOS have today been updated with a number of new features and improvements. Both apps get user interface tweaks and the ability to re-share posts to communities, while iOS users will also see a number of Snapseed filters that will allow them to enhance their photos before they post them.
One of the better Yuletide traditions is the venerable holiday Advent Calendar, in which each day of December leading up to Christmas is marked off on a special calendar by opening its corresponding door to find a small gift, toy or chocolate squirreled away inside.
This year, we here at Cult of Mac decided we wanted to give our readers their very own Apple-themed advent calendar, filled with the year’s best apps, gadgets, stories and other curios. So each day in December, we’re going to lovingly peel back the door on the Cult of Mac 2012 Advent Calendar to reveal another delicious morsel, something really special that came out this year that we think every one of you should enjoy.
It’s Day 12! That means KitCam, one of the best camera apps for the iPhone.
Launchpad tries to bring an iOS-style app interace to OS X. Whether you like it or not, it’s here to stay. Introduced in OS X Lion, Launchpad arranges the apps you have installed on your Mac in a grid array, much like the apps are arranged on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. Of course, your Mac has a much bigger screen than these iOS devices (hopefully), so there’s even more of a need to filter out the apps you don’t want so that you can find the apps you do want to find.
In iOS, as you get more and more apps installed on your device, you’re gonna end up swiping to the right of the home screen at some point and typing the name of an app into the Search field there. Prior to Mountain Lion, there was no way to do this in OS X. Now, however, there is, and I sincerely hope they bring this concept back to enrich iOS itself.
I can imagine that the reaction you get from mentioning the word “jailbreak” within the Apple camp in Cupertino is almost identical to that you get when mentioning the word “bomb” on an airplane. In fact, Apple hates the word so much that it considers it an expletive, and it’s now filtering it from the iTunes Store.
