The European Commission today gave its approval to Apple’s $3 billion takeover of Beats Electronics and Beats Music. The regulator concluded that the two companies are not close competitors, and that the headphones they sell are “markedly different in function and design.”
You know how it is — you want to share that lovely photo of your new puppy, but you really don’t want the person you hand your iPhone to swiping to those over-the-top party photos from your last lost weekend.
Overswipe, a new app from developer Haley & Hughes, aims to solve that very problem in a super intuitive way. All you do is open the app, tap on the photos you want to share, and then hand over the iPhone. Your intended viewer will only see the photos you chose, and won’t be able to swipe into anything super embarrassing.
Coinciding with the forthcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot produced by Michael Bay, Apple has announced its latest free App of the Week as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Rooftop Run.
It’s an endless runner combat game, in which the heroes in a half-shell fight against the sinister Foot Clan and evil associates. If you’re a Turtles fan, you’ll find plenty of familiar faces here — including the obvious (Leonardo, Donatello, Michelangelo, and Raphael) and less obvious faves (Kraang, Baxter Stockman, Casey Jones).
If you’ve been wary of joining the digital comics revolution because of digital rights management (DRM) concerns, Comixology, a comics portal and mobile app, is creating a solution.
Announced Thursday at the company’s San Diego Comic-Con panel, the new DRM-free backup service will let you keep a local copy of your purchased digital comics from the likes of Image Comics, Dynamite Entertainment, Zenescope Entertainment, MonkeyBrain Comics, Thrillbent, and Top Shelf Productions. You’ll be able to save a local copy in PDF or CBZ (a comic-book archiving format) right on your iPad.
“For those out there who have not joined the comic reading community because of DRM – you have no excuse now,” said ComiXology’s John D. Roberts in a statement. “We’re excited about the launch of DRM-free backups today and look forward to announcing more innovative features as we move ahead with our mission of making everyone on the face of the planet a comic book fan!”
The Angry Birds are, ahem, transforming yet again in this new trailer from Rovio and Hasbro, released to coincide with San Diego Comic Con this week.
You’ve got the red bird cosplaying as a voice-less Optimus Prime, running his way through an island-style world, smashing through crates, and then finally facing a giant, laughing pig-bot Deceptihog. It doesn’t get much better than this. Check out the video below.
Merek Davis is not a coder. The developer never even made an app before 2013. Yet on his first iOS at-bat, he hit an App Store grand slam with Mextures, his photo-editing app that quickly became one of the top photo apps of the year.
Mextures is like Photoshop for your iPhone, only easier to use. The app’s editing tools and formulas let you tweak and re-tweak pics, adding light leaks, textures and color gradients that can turn even your crappiest pics into something majestic.
It’s a bona fide hit, with some of the most-followed names on Instagram using Davis’ creation. But it almost never happened.
When surfing the web or using one of your favorite applications, chances are your iPhone is burning through mobile data. Unless you have unlimited data on your wireless plan, this can quickly become a costly habit. Luckily, it’s easy to control your data on iOS no matter who your carrier is.
In today’s video, we show you how to manage data on your device so you can avoid a hefty bill.
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Just in time for Comic-Con International, iOS game Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff is rolling out an appropriately themed update, adding a whole new storyline and cameos from a bevy of geek-chic celebrities.
The new plot line concerns (surprise, surprise!) a comic convention that comes to Quahog. Chaos naturally ensues, and Stewie somehow gets transformed into the evil octopus monster seen in the above picture. To fight him, Quahog enlists the help of an all-star celeb cast including Patrick Stewart, Bryan Cranston, Stan Lee, Ron Perlman, George Takei, Felicia Day and Nathan Fillion.
With their help, the Griffins and supporting characters are turned into real superheroes, who can use their new-found powers to save the day and restore order to the town.
The console-quality, Zelda-inspired game Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas was one of the best original games in ages when it hit iOS late last year.
Based on the amazing feedback that game deservedly scooped up, developers FDG Entertainment and Cornfox & Bros. have just dropped a brand new victory lap trailer hyping what looks to be an epic “Game of the Year Edition” update the team is currently working on.
Earlier this week, forensic data scientist Jonathan Zdziarski made a bold claim: iOS may be vulnerable to government snooping by design. According to Zdziarski, iOS had multiple backdoors installed that made any device running the OS “almost always at risk of spilling all data,” which in turn made for some “tasty attack points for .gov and criminals.”
Apple, of course, denied having ever worked with the government to install any backdoors. But that didn’t change the fact that these unsecured services do exist, and worse, have gone entirely undocumented. But thankfully, Apple has rectified at least that last problem, penning a new support document that explains what each of Zdziarski’s snoopsome services actually does.
iPhones and iPads are remarkably simple to use. And yet they are also incredibly powerful — and incredibly complicated — devices. Sometimes getting them to do exactly what you want isn’t as straightforward as you might like.
In today’s video, we show you five basic iOS tips that will make using your mobile Apple devices much easier. Edit documents, keep snoops at bay and more by using these easy and effective tips that every iOS owner should know.
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Aperture Exporter is a free tool for those fleeing Aperture after Apple shut it down. It’s a beta, but that’s cool because you can still use Aperture for now while you wait for the final version. Aperture Exporter will mirror your collections as folders, save the original files with XMP metadata sidecar files, and even retain your ratings, comments and other metadata. What you won’t get is your image edits, but that’s because Lightroom and Aperture are so different. Free
Is iOS spying on you for Apple?
According to forensic scientist Jonathan Zdziarski, quite possibly: Several undocumented services run regularly in the background on over 600 million iOS devices, which could be sending data to Apple.
A good mobile puzzle game is always welcome, and if you’re looking for something to augment your TwoDots and Threes games, developer Ricardo Fonseca is hoping he has something for you.
Called Dropu, his new iOS game is — as Fonseca describes it — what would happen “if Tetris and Sudoku had a baby.” As with Tetris, blocks fall from the sky and it’s your job as player to make sequences of them in order to clear lines.
Apple today announced the eighth annual iTunes Festival in London with a whole bunch of massive acts already confirmed. Those lucky enough to bag tickets will see the likes of Pharrell Williams, Maroon 5, Kylie, Sam Smith, and Blondie.
In what has been a great year for iOS gaming, Monument Valley stands head and shoulders above most of its competition. Part M.C. Escher and part Fez, the game lets you journey through a surrealist world full of optical illusions and hidden paths — all the while avoiding and outsmarting the sinister Crow people.
It’s great, compelling fun — and apparently we’re far from the only people to think that, since developers Ustwo announced late last week that their game has now been downloaded in excess of 1 million times.
Google Search for iOS has got a new Easter that allows Android-hatin’ fanboys – or anyone else who just likes destroying things – to tear apart the GOOG’s childish logo, one letter at a time.
To find the Google Search easter egg just open the app to the main search screen and you’ll be able to drag, flick and drop letters from the Google logo anywhere on the screen. Titling right and left makes the letters float or fall based on your tilt, and if you want to restore order, each letter can be put back in its proper place.
If your app still has the Nelson Mandela logo you’ll have to wait for an update, but in the meantime, checkout the easter egg in action in the quick video below:
While Android has a significantly larger user base, iOS has always been the more profitable platform for app developers. That’s expected to change over the next three years, however. One analyst believes that by 2018, Google Play will bring in more revenue than the App Store for the first time ever.
The European Commission has issued some words to Google and Apple about both companies’ steps to ensure children don’t rack up huge amounts of money on in-app purchases without their parents’ permission.
In a statement released by the Commission on Friday, Google is praised for a series of changes that will be put in effect by the end of September — while Apple finds itself on the receiving end of some harsh criticism.
Fans of strategy simulation games can rejoice at the news that the popular Anno series — which first arrived on PC back in 1998 and has continued as a successful franchise to the present day — has landed on iPad.
Called Anno: Build an Empire, the games starts with you colonizing an uninhabited island, which you harvest for resources, before building your way up to a fully-fledged, bonafide civilization — featuring various colonized islands under your control.
There are some incredibly clever examples of people painting masterpieces using their iPad, but a new 3-D painting app called Psykopaint is promising to provide the most authentic painting experience yet.
Psykopaint gives you an astonishing variety of materials and options to work with: ranging from different textures and opacities of paint types, to a selection of papers and canvases, each with their own absorption rates, textures, and amount of grain. You can paint freestyle, or choose to work within an accepted artistic style like Impressionism and Impasto — courtesy of custom brushes that imitate the brushstrokes of artists like Monet, Van Gogh, and Gauguin.
In short, it’s the closest thing you’ll get to feeling like a real artist.
The iPhone comes preloaded with many stock applications, but not all are as powerful as you wish they’d be. Luckily there are tons of developers pushing new apps into the App Store, and many of their creations upstage the stock iOS applications.
In today’s video we take a look at five iOS apps that can easily replace baked-in Apple apps and enhance your iPhone experience. Look at weather in more detail, refresh your music player and more with these powerful apps.
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Facebook’s ‘make a bunch of apps and see which ones stick’ strategy for mobile has unleashed a new app for the iPhone this morning, and it’s supposed to make interacting with famous people on Mark Zuckerburg’s social network easier than ever, but you’re probably not cool enough to use it.
So long as we live in a world where WhatsApp can be bought for $19 billion and even an ultra-simple novelty app like Yo manages to scrape together $1 million in venture funding, people are going to go right on creating messaging apps.
One of the latest is La-La Messenger, which promises users the possibility of conducting entire conversations out of song snippets. A greeting, for instance, might be “Hello” by Lionel Richie, while “the world is a dark place if this is the future of communication” could be Sean Paul’s “Gimme the Light.”
Apple has been waging a fierce war against Flash ever since the iPhone debuted without the power to run Adobe’s battery hungry, multimedia software. Finally, seven years into the battle, Google is adding another blow by flagging Flash content in mobile search results with a warning that sites might not work properly.