Google Earth just got what turns out to be rather a big update. On paper it seems like nothing more than a few interface tweaks and the ability to open KML and KMZ files linked from Safari, but one new bullet point — “Touring support: load tours from the Earth Gallery or from mountain layer” — turns the map app into something entirely different.
We’re only two days away from experiencing the new gravity defying, interstellar slingshotting Angry Birds Space game and Rovio wants to make sure we don’t forget. Today they released the official game trailer and while we’ve already been exposed to in-game footage, the trailer gives us a bird’s eye view of the latest avian egg abduction. So grab your freeze-dried astronaut food, pack yourself a month’s supply of adult diapers and start counting down to this year’s out of this world blockbuster.
Yesterday, we showed you how to fix apps that get stuck “waiting” as you downloaded everything to your newly-restored iPad. That’s fine and all, but what if you really, really need to check your RSS reader of choice to read the latest Cult of Mac stories? With this incredibly simple tip, you can just tell the iPad to download that app right away.
It’s been an expensive month for many the Apple fan. The new iPad isn’t cheap, and after spending between $500 and $830 on a new top-of-the-line tablet, it might be hard to scrape enough money together to actually furnish your iPad with apps, music or movies.
Don’t worry, we got you covered. Here’s how to save 20% off all App Store or iTunes purchases.
The Humble Bundle is back again, this time bringing five games never-before-seen on Android. If you’re wondering what Humble Bundle is, it’s a pay-what-you-want bundle of multi-platform, DRM-free, and independently developed games. Not only do customers get to pick their own price, but they also get to allocate their payment by deciding how much goes to the developers, how much goes to charity, and how much goes to Humble Bundle (which pays for the bandwidth and development of the promotion). They usually offer a slew of games for the price of “whatever” and then throw in a bonus game for those willing to pay more than the average customer (which isn’t that expensive).
Activision Product Director Noah Heller talked with T3 a bit about their Call of Duty Elite app and its natural progression from smartphone to tablet.
“We’re working on the tablet app right now, I can’t tell you much about it but what I can tell you is that it will be a truly native, customised application for the tablet, it’s not just a simple port.”
Bringing COD Elite to the tablet has many advantages to the smartphone counterpart as it allows Activision to take advantage of the additional screen space. What additional features will be added to the tablet app remain a mystery but there’s been talks about possibly adding live Heat Maps among other things.
There is, you may be aware, a new iPad launching today, along with its fancy new camera. That’s great and all, but what if you a) don’t want one b) live outside the first wave of launch countries or c) just don’t care?
Then why not make a little improvement to the camera already in your iPhone or iPod Touch, with a little app called CameraSharp which, today at least, is free? CameraSharp is an app with a single purpose: to make taking photos easier.
After unboxing your new iPad and getting it setup, the first thing you should do is open up the App Store and download some essential apps. We’ve compiled a list of 12 of the App Store’s greatest offerings, which we think should be installed on every iPad. These are apps you certainly won’t want to miss.
The new iPad’s Retina Display is perfect for reading, so some of the most highly-sought after app updates are going to be the ones that make the best iPad e-reading apps compatible with the doubled resolution. And, in fact, many such apps, like Kindle, Evernote and Readability have already updated.
Unfortunately, when you get your new iPad today, you’ll have to slog through Marco Arment’s best-selling e-reading app Instapaper in fuzzy old SD. But don’t despair, Retina Display support is coming soon.
If you’ve just upgraded from an iPad 2 to an iPad 3 a new iPad, no doubt you’ll be wanting to put the new device’s super powers – Retina screen, LTE wireless data, improved camera, and A5X processor – to the test.
Here’s a short list of apps that’ll help you do that.
Paypal has finally made it into the mobile payment market after being beat to the punch by the likes of Square and Intuit. PayPal may be late to the party but they have a more recognizable name in the world of payment systems and that may just be enough to push them to the front of the line. Besides their name, they’re also offering merchants a 2.7% flat rate on transactions versus the 2.75% offered by Square. PayPal didn’t stop there either, launching a full on geometrical attack by choosing a triangle as the shape of choice for their card reader dongle.
Experts at the Intrepidus Mobile Security Group came across some interesting parsers definitions within Google Wallet’s source code that could hint at a possible iOS release. How Google actually plans on getting Google Wallet to work on a non-NFC/SE iOS device is another story, but for now, let’s take a look at the iOS definitions found by Intrepidus.
By all accounts, text-heavy apps really shine on the new iPad’s Retina Display, so I’m glad to see that Amazon have already updated my favorite iOS e-reading app to work at native 2048×1536 resolution.
And that’s not all. Amazon has also taken the opportunity to redesign the Kindle library view so that it’s organized in two separate tabs, “Cloud” and “Device,” which should make it easier to tell which e-books you have stored locally and which ones need to be slurped down from Amazon’s databanks.
You can download Kindle 3.0 on the App Store right now for free.
There are a number of half-baked third-party email clients for the iPhone, but until now, there hasn’t been a real replacement for the iPhone’s built-in Mail app. Sparrow for iPhone finally changes that. It’s crammed full of terrific features that make Apple’s solution look pretty amateur, and yet it’s still incredibly easy to use. In fact, I think it’s just as spectacular as Sparrow for the Mac.
Before our full review next week, here’s a great little how-to guide on using geotagging in Lightroom 4. Adobe’s photo-editing and cataloging app has caught up with iPhoto and Aperture in its latest version, and you can now view any photos with embedded GPS co-ordinates on an in-app map. This means any of your iPhone photos can be browsed by location, which is a surprisingly useful tool.
But what if you want to reverse tag your photos? Say your camera doesn’t have GPS, but you have a track log recorded on a GPS device or with an iPhone app. How do you put this data together in a useful way? Below, Adobe’s Terry White shows us how.
Oh Lord, after a dozen years, it’s finally come: Blizzard Entertainment has finally slapped a release date on their much-anticipated horror and fantasy themed hack-and-slash RPG, Diablo III. And that magic date?
After a brief moment in the iTunes in the iTunes App Store sun last week, Markdown text editor ByWord has officially arrived on your iPad and iPhone. It’s a companion to the excellent OS X version of ByWord, and is one of a growing number of apps to sync using iCloud.
Sometimes, we need to speed up the response of our mouse or our trackpad, like for a First Person Shooter game. Other times, we might need to slow it down, so we can work with more detailed graphics files in a drawing program. SmoothCursor, from the folks at leftbee apps, is a simple little utility that does just that.
We’re huge, unwavering fans of Tapbot’s Tweetbot Twitter client for iPhone and iPad. It just blows the official Twitter client out of the water in every respect. Ahead of the debut of the new iPad on Friday, though, and in accompaniment with their recent update to Camera+, Tapbot has pushed through the 2.1 update of Tweetbot for iPad (iPhone version coming soon), and not only does it support Retina Display resolution and Camera+ 3.0 image capturing and editing… it introduces streaming to the mix!
Instagram is one of the most wildly successful apps to ever hit the iOS App Store. The app’s co-founder, Kevin Systrom, recently revealed that Instagram now boasts 27 million active users on the iPhone alone during the South by Southwest conference (SXSW) in Austin, Texas.
We’ve all been clamoring for the popular social photography app to make its way to Android for many months, and it has been confirmed that Instagram for Android is coming “very soon.” The app is currently being tested in private beta.
The boldest claim Systrom made was that Instagram for Android is, in some ways, “better than our iPhone app.”
Are you an iOS/Android/Web Developer looking to work with a great group of individuals in a startup environment? Do you like Korean food and FIFA 2012? Then you might want to take a look at Boxee as they’re looking for developers in NYC to join their crew. To get potential candidates excited, Boxee is even offering up free Boxee Boxes to interviewees. That’s right, if you apply and end up getting an interview (whether in person or over Skype), Boxee will award you with a free Boxee Box. It’s like getting paid for trying to get paid!
Double Feature is a great new iPhone app which is going to revolutionize drunken, late-night movie conversations in pubs, bars and kitchens the world over. It has two functions: Movie Match and Name Search. But all you need to know is that when you find yourself saying “Who was that guy in [x] movie? I can’t remember his name… But hey, wasn’t he in [y] movie, too?” then Double Feature is the app you reach for.
The Apple TV isn’t positioned as a business or enterprise product, but its small size, easy setup, and AirPlay make it a very solid presentation tool – and the low cost doesn’t hurt, either.
While the Apple TV has the obvious advantage of being wireless and integrated with other Apple products, specific business advantages beyond its small form factor and the ubiquity of HDTVs and other HDMI-enabled display devices like projectors aren’t always immediately obvious (though those are pretty big advantages in their own right) – but at least one company is designing its business solutions around Apple’s so-called hobby device.
Business Intelligence developer MicroStrategy has taken the Apple TV/iOS combination to a new level by building its mobile apps around AirPlay and the Apple TV.
One of iPhoto for iOS’s most useful new sharing features is called Beaming. It lets you send your photos quickly and directly to anyone sharing your Wi-Fi network and also running iPhoto.
As good, long-time Mac users we remember the bad old days of networking, where getting two Macs to talk to each other was all but impossible, and hear-tearingly frustrating at best (even when they were joined to opposite ends of the same Ethernet cable). Clearly, something has changed. So just how does iPhoto Beaming work?
I favorite things a lot. I star things in Twitter and Google Reader, I like things in Instapaper, and I may or may not have once liked something on Facebook. All of this is for my work, as a way to bookmark stories and facts for later use. Every once in a while I try to work out how to collect them all into one universal inbox, but I never manage it. Now, thanks to the developer of the excellent Essay app for iPad, there’s an app for that. It’s called — appropriately enough — Favs.