WhatsApp is no longer just an instant messaging service. In a new update now rolling out to users on iOS, the company is introducing new voice calling capabilities that allow you to phone family and friends anywhere and at no extra cost.
The update also brings an iOS 8 share extension and other new features and improvements.
Apple just announced WWDC 2015 today, when the company will presumably unveil iOS 9. Yet with iOS 9 on horizon, a significant number of iPhone and iPad users still haven’t bothered upgrading to iOS 8, with just 79% of all iOS users running it.
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The easy-to-use Mac software is designed to help you recover deleted photos, videos, messages, contacts, call history, notes, etc., either directly from your phone or by extracting and restoring files from iTunes or iCloud. All you need to do is plug your mobile device into your Mac and click “Start Scan.”
Sometimes you just need to emphasize something. One of the best ways to do so when you’re texting is to make the words you really need to get across in all capitals. Or maybe you just want to shout at someone, and an ALL CAPS sentence will certainly get that across for you.
Before now, I’ve always just deleted the word I was trying to emphasize and re-typed it after double-tapping the Shift key in iOS (for Caps Lock). Now, however, it looks like you can change the case of the word after you’ve typed it without deleting anything.
Here’s how.
The new messaging capabilities built into OS X Yosemite make your Mac even more useful for day-to-day communication. With this new set of features (part of Continuity), you can send SMS text messages and make phone calls from your Mac. Than can be super-helpful if you’re forgetful and leave your iPhone in another room.
It doesn’t take too long to set it all up; in fact, we’re going to show you how to set up Continuity in less than two and a half minutes! Check it all out in our video below.
When it comes to almost everything Apple does (except for iPhone sales, of course) you could characterize the company’s approach as “Slow but steady wins the race.” That’s certainly what’s happened with iOS 8 adoption, which started out sluggishly, but has slowly continued to climb upwards in the months since.
According to Apple’s latest developer stats, a solid 77 percent of eligible iOS users are now upgraded to the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system: a not inconsiderable 5 percent rise from early February, when the company last shared its adoption figures.
Accusations that iOS 8 is slower than Apple’s previous mobile operating systems have circulated since the software debuted in 2014. Although it works great most of the time on my iPhone 6 Plus, you don’t have to look far to find people complaining that the latest version of iOS slows down to a sluggish crawl.
From hard resets to turning on the “reduce motion” option under Accessibility, numerous solutions can be employed to keep iOS 8 running at a good clip. One explanation for iOS 8 feeling slower than its predecessors, however, is that (much like iOS 7) its system animations take too long to complete, thereby making the interface feel slower than it should.
So peeved is Omni developer William Van Hecke that he recently compared the animation speeds in a YouTube video. Chalk it up to unnecessary nitpicking if you want, but when you see iOS 3 reacting considerably quicker than iOS 8, it definitely makes you think Apple could make improvements.
Check out the video below:
This week: Apple might be eyeing 2020 for their first car, but you can catch our most wanted features and price expectations right now. Plus: Cupertino pay massive bonuses to poach top talent; the insane acceleration of Tesla’s new electric car; the new and notable from iOS 8.3 beta; Toyota says “no thanks” to CarPlay; and finally, your listener questions, answered!
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Full show notes ahead!
It’s been about six months since iOS 8 came out, and the official Dropbox app has been lacking one major thing: the ability to save files to Dropbox from any app’s share menu.
Today the long-awaited feature is finally available.
Bad news, jailbreakers. Apple has stopped signing iOS 8.1.2, the last jailbreakable version of the iOS 8 operating system. That means that unless you already have iOS 8.1.2 installed, you won’t be able to jailbreak using existing methods until another exploit comes down the pipeline.
iOS 8.2 hasn’t even been released to the public yet, but Apple is already moving on to the next version. The first beta build of iOS 8.3 was seeded to developers this morning while iOS 8.2 beta 5 is still being tested.
The software update was made available today in the iOS Dev Center. Along with iOS 8.3, Apple has also released a beta build of Xcode 6.3 that includes Swift 1.2. The release notes don’t mention any new features, but we’ll tell you about all the goodies we find as soon as it’s installed on our iPhones.
In the meantime, here are the direct download links:
Twitter announced its fourth quarter earnings today, and while the social network beat its revenue estimates, it failed to meet Wall Street’s expectations for monthly active users.
The company only added an extra 4 million users in the quarter, bringing the total number of monthly active users to only 288 million. That figure was much lower than analysts’ predictions of 292 million, but according to CEO Dick Costello, Twitter’s slower-than-expected growth was mostly because of a bug in iOS 8.
Almost three quarters of iOS users have upgraded to the newest version of Apple’s mobile operating system, according to the latest stats shared by the company.
As measured by visits to the App Store on February 2, Apple claims that 72 percent of active iOS devices are running iOS 8 — compared to 25 percent who are sticking with iOS 7, and a minuscule 3 percent using earlier iterations. It’s not quite at the 80 percent+ mark that iOS 7 was at this time last year, but next to Android’s pitiful numbers, it’s still got to be considered a runaway hit for Apple.
Read on to find out what’s driving the move.
This week: Apple has its best quarter ever, Apple Watch is coming in April and the best parts of the iOS 8.1.3 and Yosemite 10.10.2 updates. Plus, Disney considers a reboot of the beloved Indiana Jones movies, and then things really go off the rails in Facts of Life, a new game where we mix real facts with fake ones, then guess which is which!
Our thanks to Varidesk for supporting this episode. With models starting at just $275, Varidesk is a high-quality, inexpensive way to get started with a standing desk. And you should absolutely check them out, because moving to a standing desk will change your life.
Read on for full show notes.
Although it’s a Windows game, I’ve never met anyone without a sweet spot for Minesweeper, the addictive little puzzle game that Microsoft debuted in Windows 3.1. Sadly, though, it never came to the Mac.
But if you love a good game of Minesweeper, we’ve got some great news. You can now play it right within Notification Center. Better act on it soon, though: Apple has a tendency to pull interesting iOS 8 widgets like this one.
A weird bug in iOS 8’s Calendar app has been making people pull their hair out for months. When adding events using either a Google or Microsoft Exchange server, the time zone is randomly synced to Greenwich Mean Time.
Complaints started surfacing around iOS 8’s release last September, and the issue still persists.
Apple is already testing iOS 9, but in the meantime iOS 8 adoption continues to grow — although it’s starting to slow down.
According to Apple’s latest stats, 69 percent of active iOS devices are now using the latest version of the company’s mobile OS; up just 1 percent from January 5, when Apple last shared iOS 8 adoption stats. By comparison, 28 percent of users are still working on iOS 7, with a minuscule 3 percent using assorted earlier iterations.
If you’re a developer, listen up: it’s time to make sure your apps can support iOS 8 and Apple’s 64-bit ARM processors. Otherwise, you won’t be able to submit them to the App Store anymore.
It will be many months before developers see Apple’s first iOS 9 beta, but the Cupertino company has already begun testing the update internally ahead of this fall’s release. The software has starting appearing in analytics data for a number of sites in recent months, including our own.
We’re just one week into 2015, and already the App Store is setting new sales records. Apple today announced that during the first week of January alone, customers around the world spent almost half a billion dollars on apps and in-app purchases, with New Year’s Day 2015 the single biggest day in App Store sales history.
A lot has changed at Apple in the years since Steve Jobs died. While much of it is good (record-breaking iPhone sales, work on the new Apple campus, the stock-split leading to new share price highs), it’s unavoidable that one or two (or, indeed, 7) things would slip through the cracks, which Apple’s notoriously perfectionist late CEO would have hated.
The recent publishing of a patent for an iOS stylus — an accessory Jobs was vocal about opposing — got us thinking about other aspects of Apple, circa 2015, that likely would have rubbed the company’s late CEO the wrong way.
Here’s what we came up with.
We’re coming up to four months since the public release of iOS 8, and according to Apple’s own stats, 68 percent of users are now running the latest version of its mobile operating system. This is up five percent from one month ago — most likely buoyed by the massive number of iOS device activations which took place over the holidays.
iOS 7, meanwhile, fell 3 percentage points to 29 percent of the total active iOS user base, while earlier versions of the OS now hover around 4 percent. (Yes, we know those numbers add up to slightly more than 100 percent: it’s likely due to rounding-up the figures involved.)
2014 was an absolutely monumental year for Apple. Haters will hate, but one thing can’t be denied: This is a company that refuses to rest on its laurels.
Under Tim Cook’s leadership, Apple debuted a new product category with the Apple Watch, sold a record number of new iPhones, made the biggest acquisition in its history, and successfully sent its suffering stock price back into the stratosphere.
The company wasn’t without its missteps, but all in all, it’s hard to call 2014 anything short of a blow-away year for Apple.
Back in the skeuomorphic days of iOS 6, we were big fans of Auxo, an innovative iPhone app switcher that supercharged the iOS multitasking bar with live app previews, gestures, settings toggles, and more.
When iOS 7 was released, Auxo was updated to support Apple’s newer, flatter operating system, but it’s only now that Auxo creator Sentry_NC is getting around to update it to iOS 8.
It was a rocky start for iOS 8, but adoption figures continue to creep upwards. As per the latest figures released by Apple, 63% of active iOS users are now running the latest version of the company’s mobile OS, while 33% are using iOS 7, and 4% are running earlier versions of the operating system.
Apple measured usage via visits to the App Store on Monday this week.
The increase is likely related to the continued high sales of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus — which are predicted to sell a massive 71.5 million units over the holidays. Most recently, Apple released iOS 8.1.2 to the public, helping to solve the mystery of disappearing ringtones on iOS devices.
