Apple’s iMessage service is pretty terrific, but it has one big limitation, and that is that it’s only available on Macs and iOS devices. At least officially. But there is an unofficial app that brings iMessage to your Android-powered smartphone. It works just as advertised, but we strongly advise you not to use it.
Upset with how expensive Adobe Cretive Cloud is? Us too! That’s why we at Cult of Mac Deals brought you a solution. With Flux 4 you can easily build professional-looking website creation for only $49.99 (a savings of 64%). The interface is more design-oriented than “code-oriented”, which allows for a much easier learning curve than other apps in this space.
With the release of Adobe Creative Cloud, having Dreamweaver for $50/month is just too expensive! Flux 4 is the perfect replacement for design focused web design – agile, simple, and powerful. Plus, no coding is required! This deal ends tonight at midnight, so grab it while you can!
The new Google Translate is ready for the iPhone and iPad, and it’s a fantastic update. While other apps are better at giving you context and points of grammar, Google’s app is hard to beat for fast translations of single words or phrases.
And now it adds a third way to input words: handwriting.
Good news, Google Wallet users — you can now access your account on your iOS device with an official Google Wallet app. You can use it to make payments to friends, track your loyalty cards, and access nearby offers. One feature you won’t find, however, is tap-to-pay, which relies on NFC connectivity.
Do you use Google’s excellent Chrome browser for the iPhone or iPad? If so, you might want to update it and check it out: Google has just introduced a new feature to Chrome that can reduce mobile data usage by over 50%. But it’s invite-only, for now.
Mobile start-up Bump just announced that it has been acquired by Google in a blog post on Monday.
The company was founded in 2008, making a name for itself on the hot technology of bumping phones together to share contact data. The app has been downloaded over 100 million times, and continues to get updates. The same team released a fairly popular photo-sharing app called Flock last year, as well.
The acquisition was reported on AllThingsD as netting the company somewhere between $30 and $60 million.
If you never downloaded the free Snapseed app for OS X before Google axed it, then you have a second chance – as long as you;re using Google’s Chrome browser anyway. Google+ added a browser-based version of Snapseed to its flailing social network.
Apple just announced the much-anticipated iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c at an event in Cupertino, and both devices will go on sale next Friday, September 20. The iPhone 5s hopes to compete with the latest high-end devices from the likes of Samsung, Nokia, and HTC, while the iPhone 5c aims to be a decent midrange offering that’ll get you into Apple’s ecosystem without breaking the bank.
So how do these devices stack up against their rivals? We’ve compared the iPhone 5s with the Galaxy S4, the HTC One, the Nokia Lumia 1020, and other popular devices to help you establish which one provides you with the most bang for your buck. We’ve also thrown in the iPhone 5c for good measure so that you can decide whether its price tag is as good as it seems.
When Apple introduced Photo Stream to iCloud back in 2011, the Cupertino company made it incredibly quick and easy for its users to share their favorite photos with their friends and family without syncing them to their computer first. But Photo Stream has a downside, and that is that it’s only available on iOS.
Fortunately, there are plenty of awesome alternatives with cross-platform support, and one of those is Kicksend. Not only does Kicksend let you share photos with friends — regardless of the smartphone platform they choose — but it also lets you print and send real photos to those who don’t have a smartphone at all.
Google’s mobile apps share a common and easily distinguishable design language, for the most part. The iOS app for Google Drive has been in desperate need of a redesign, and a revamped version has been released today in the App Store.
Google Drive now includes the card-like interface seen in other apps, which Google calls “thumbnail view.” You can quickly toggle between viewing thumbnails of files and the traditional list view. There are a number of other additions, including simpler file sharing and the ability to edit in landscape mode.
Unlike Apple, Google likes to make its hardware compatible with all of your other gadgets — regardless of which platform they’re running. So you may have purchased a $35 Chromecast dongle to work with your iOS devices. If so, you’ll be interested in Google’s new Chromecast app, which lets you set up and manage your dongle from your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
Google clearly has high hopes for Google Glass, and it’s confident that in the future, we’ll all be wearing one. In fact, you may be able to pick one up in your local Best Buy when you pop in for that new Justin Bieber CD. Rumor has it Google is renting 6,000 square feet of floor space inside every Best Buy store next year just to sell its new wearable tech.
Google announced a new version of its YouTube app for iPhone and iPad is hitting the App Store today. YouTube 2.0 includes a bunch of new features, including the ability to watch a video while searching for the next great thing to watch.
The app sports better Chromecast integration as well, complete with a new preview screen that lets you queue up videos to push to your TV. There’s also a “play all” feature that allows users to watch every single video in a playlist without having to queue anything up.
The free update is available now in the App Store and Google Play.
Here’s a video of the new features:
Google has updated its Google Maps apps for Android and iOS to add real-time incident reports from the Waze community. This means that when Waze users — or “Wazers” as they like to be called — report accidents, construction, road closures, and other delays, the alerts will be displayed inside Google Maps as well as Waze.
The good people at Motorola will probably clock me in the head with a Droid Maxx battery for saying this, but shouldn’t Google open-source Moto X technology?
The most vocal and active iPhone and Android fans scoff at the notion that Moto X is the new iPhone. But it’s true.
The iPhone used to represent the most elegant, innovative and fun-to-use smartphone for everybody. That status has now been taken by Motorola’s new “Google phone,” the Moto X.
Google updated its flagship social network app for Google+ on iOS today, bringing it up to par with the recently released Android Google+ app update. The new features includes integration with Google Drive, the loss of Google Messenger in favor of Google Hangouts, and some new stuff for Apps for Business users.
We first heard that Samsung may be planning to announce its new “Galaxy Gear” smartwatch at its September 4 Galaxy Note III event earlier this month, but the rumor just got even stronger after it was confirmed by Bloomberg’s reliable sources.
They claim that the South Korean electronics giant will unveil a “wristwatch-like smartphone” powered by Android that will go head-to-head with the new Sony SmartWatch 2, and a potentially competing product from Apple, one of Samsung’s biggest rivals.
Almost half of the top 50 apps on iPad are unavailable or have not been optimized for competing devices that run Google’s Android operating system. That’s according to a new report from Canalys, which believes Google should be doing more to encourage top developers to build high-quality tablet apps for its platform.
Apple TV manages to grab most of the spotlight for streaming set-top boxes, but when it comes time to actually view content, Americans are using Roku far more frequently than Apple’s little hobby.
A new study from Parks Associates found that while the Apple TV is used by 24% of U.S. consumers with a streaming video device, Roku has managed to best that with a 37% usage rate among households with such devices.
After Google announced Hangouts at Google I/O back in June, we suspected that Google+ Messenger’s days were numbered — and we were right. In a new Google+ update rolling out now on Android, Google is killing Google+ Messenger for good, while the iOS version will get the chop at a later date.
Steve Cheney is a pretty smart guy, with a serious background in technology and mobile marketing, both as a former TechCrunch author and the current head of business development for iOS and Android chat app, GroupMe.
Cheney’s written a fairly strong analysis of the current Apple/Android war for supremacy and, as he sees it, there’s a clear advantage for Apple in the actual mobile device arena. Cheney calls it “bang per watt,” and he attributes Apple’s dominance here to the vise-like grip the Cupertino company has on the vertical integration of hardware and software.
I may not be a designer, but I know what I like. And even with my lack of craftsmanship in design, I do have a sense of realizing when a color is just a bit, well… a little off. But what I don’t know how to do (at least with ease) is how to fix that “offness” when I really need to.
So I don’t fix it at all.
Only when people who have more design sense than I do tell me that the color that I thought was “a little off” is actually very off do I feel bad about my decision to just let it be. That’s when this app—currently on sale through Cult of Mac Deals—probably could have come in handy.
ColorSchemer Studio 2 is touted as “the professional color-matching application for your Mac” and Cult of Mac Deals has it for only $29 for a limited time.
Today Google refreshed its promoted search results for local business in Google Maps on both Android and iOS. When you search for a business, Google will now show ads for merchants that have paid in a bottom banner. Like Google search on the web, it will be obvious that the listing is a promotion.
Android’s share of the worldwide smartphone market increased yet again during the second quarter of 2013, while the iPhone suffered a slight dip, according to the latest figures from IDC. But Research Manager Ramon Llamas is confident that Apple’s smartphone will recapture more users later this year when the Cupertino company launches the iPhone 5S.