An Apple patent application describes a way of identifying people in digital images using face-recognition technology and then making it easy to send copies of the image to everyone in it.
The concept is highly reminiscent of Facebook’s Moments app, which identifies people and places in images and then allows users to easily share with friends, without having to post the pictures to Facebook.
No-one wanted to love last year’s RollerCoaster Tycoon 4 Mobile more than I did. And no-one was therefore more crushed when the “game” turned out to be the soulless, cash-demanding corpse of a once-great franchise-turned-freemium nightmare.
If you join me in that opinion, you can rest easy since RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 just hit the App Store — bringing iOS gamers the straight-up port of the PC classic they deserve, complete with touch controls and not an in-app purchase in sight.
Apple Metal, introduced at last year’s WWDC, gives developers low-level access to the GPU to maximize the graphics and performance potential of their games. Now Android gamers are going to get a taste of that, too.
No, Apple isn’t bringing Metal to Android — but Google is adopting an alternative called Vulkan.
Disappearing photo and video sharing app, Snapchat, has just updated to include a couple of great new features, including a data-reducing Travel Mode, an emoji button called Sticker Picker, and a way to see who’s viewing your posts, called Stories, in the app itself.
The brand-new beta of iOS 9 brings an entirely new set of wallpapers, some welcome improvements to Apple Music and more new treasures. These are some of the most exciting changes yet to Apple’s upcoming mobile operating system (the previous beta brought back Home Sharing and delivered lots of tiny design tweaks).
Let’s run through all the changes in iOS 9 beta 5, which was made available to developers today.
The latest update to HBO Now on Android and iOS gives subscribers the ability to stream their favorite shows to their TV via a Chromecast. The new feature comes less than a month after HBO Now made its debut on Android following Apple’s exclusive three-month deal.
A brain-training iOS game can reportedly help improve the memory of patients with schizophrenia, thereby letting them lead more independent lives.
Anyone who enjoyed last year’s smash hit Flappy Bird should take a minute to check out the excellently (if ironically) titled new iOS puzzler, Red Game Without a Great Name.
Putting you in control of a mechanical bird maneuvering its way through 60 levels of steampunk-inspired obstacles, the game takes a page from the Flappy Bird playbook, but tacks on the challenging addition of swipe-based teleportation for a genuinely original proposition.
Trust me, it’s a lot of fun!
Those of us old-school instant messaging warriors remember the day when Yahoo! Messenger was the king of the IM clients. The purple search giant is hoping that day may well be at hand again.
Every mobile platform now ships with its very own virtual assistant, and while they all offer a similar set of basic features, Google Now and Siri are way ahead of their rivals. Google Now knows what you want and when you want it, but Siri has sass and personality, and is about to get a whole lot better with the help of Proactive.
If you were to pit the two against each other in a virtual ring, which one would come out wearing the belt? Join us as we find out in this week’s Friday Night Fight between Cult of Android and Cult of Mac!
Looking for an innovative, immersive app experience to entertain your buddies with this weekend? Then you may be interested in 360-degree animated film app Spotlight Stories, which just landed on iOS after a couple of years as an Android exclusive.
Using a combination of 2D and 3D animations, the app lets you move your body and mobile device to check out what’s happening in different parts of the video — essentially letting a story unfold around you. If you’re remotely interested in seeing the potential of the iPhone and iPad as a way of telling stories in a totally new way, you won’t regret it.
When it comes to the App Store and the Mac App Store, the two software dispensing platforms are not treated equally.
Not only do top 10 Mac App Store apps make a whole lot less than the chart toppers on iOS, but developers are noticing that Apple’s not even giving Mac app developers some of the same critical tools their counterparts enjoy on the App Store.
“What you don’t know won’t hurt you” is a common phrase that unfortunately does not apply to the apps on your phone. It turns out that thousands of apps on Android and iOS secretly have ads in them that you can’t see, and they very well might be what’s causing a number of problems that plague smartphones today.
In what will surely be met with a sigh of relief from developers, Apple has stopped people running beta versions of iOS from writing reviews of apps in the App Store.
Many of these reviews tend to be negative because developers have yet to optimize their apps to run the latest prerelease software version. As a result, apps run on a beta version of iOS are far more likely to crash, or feature bugs.
Square continues to add to its lineup of small business tools, especially for owners and managers who want an overall better grip on their businesses. It’s introducing a new Dashboard app that does just that: it lets owners track sales in real-time right from an iPhone. Still, the only requirement is a free Square account.
Apple and IBM have been collaborating on creating an excellent suite of apps for the iPhone and iPad over the past year, but starting today, IBM’s MobileFirst apps are adding support for Apple Watch.
The Apple and IBM partnership revealed today that it’s created 10 more apps that cover everything from managing employee shifts to helping government inspectors get all the data necessary while out in the field.
Take a tour of the new apps below:
If you can’t bring yourself to pay for a virtual reality headset made of cardboard, then now’s your chance to bag one for free, courtesy of a popular porn portal. BaDoink advertises the many safe-for-work things you can do with the device, knowing full well you’ll try some NSFW things, too.
Fallout Shelter, the terrific vault-building game from Bethesda, raked in a whopping $5.1 million during its first two weeks availability.
The payday is even more staggering when you take into account that the game is totally free to download and play, only offers one virtual add-on, and isn’t even available on Android yet.
Android’s massive lead in market share is translating into a staggering number of app downloads, with Google Play serving 85 percent more apps than the App Store during the second quarter of 2015. But despite that, iOS is holding onto a significant lead where it matters most — in revenue.
If you’re afraid of ever being in a dangerous situation without any witnesses or good samaritans nearby, you might want to consider downloading this new app appropriately named Witness. Calling itself the ‘panic button for the smartphone age,’ one tap broadcasts live video and your current location to a list of preset emergency contacts, who can then decide if it’s appropriate to take action.
Of course, if they do nothing, they could potentially have front-row seats to a very morbid and disturbing show.
If you’re looking for a best-in-class photo retouching and editing app, you can’t go wrong with Pixelmator, available both for Mac and iOS.
The mobile version is utterly fantastic, letting you engage in the same sort of high-end photo editing, painting, and graphic design that you find in the desktop version for a fraction of the price.
The new update, which came out on Tuesday, ramps up the photo Repair tool to something that’s five times as fast, and even more precise. There’s also a new Dynamic Touch system, which lets you use the tip of your finger for thin strokes and the pad of your finger for thicker lines.
You won’t see this kind of subtlety and power in any other photo app, especially for $4.99.
Apple Pay today makes its debut in the United Kingdom, nine months after it launched in the U.S., and it has been greeted by plenty of support from local banks. Those with a supported device can register their credit and debit cards now through the Passbook app on iOS.
It’s a little late to the party, but three betas in Apple released the News app it announced at WWDC 2015. Soon to be on every iPhone and iPad running iOS 9, News lets users customize the topics that are most important to them, then browse and read distraction-free news articles.
If you’re not running iOS 9 beta 3 or in a supported country like the U.S., fear not, we have the full tour.
According to Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, his team is on top of the recent removal of Home Sharing from the iOS 8.4 update.
Cue tweeted that we can expect the feature, which lets you share music across Home Sharing-enabled Apple devices on the same network, will return in iOS 9.
Apple Music isn’t available on Android yet — though it is coming — but that doesn’t mean you have to miss out on Beats 1 radio. Thanks to a new web app, you can tune into the 24/7 worldwide broadcast on Android and other unsupported devices right away.