Twitter’s #music app for iPhone is supposed to become one of the best ways to discover new and popular music. To help users fine tune their discovery needs, Twitter updated #music today to include a new Genres feature for its charts.
The new Genres feature expands the number of areas users can select to search for music. You can now browse for music in country, hip-hop, pop, R&B and more. Twitter’s also included new categories for Superstars, Popular, Emerging, Unearth and Hunted charts.
Remember how well that AOL acquisition of Time Warner worked out? Photo: AOL
AOL launched a new iPad app today that gives users access to the company’s wide-variety of content for news, mail, weather and video. The magazine style app is similar to Flipboard in that you can choose from a wide variety of topics to customize your own news stream, except there’s a ton of junk in-between because hey, it’s AOL.
The app is iPad only right now and can be downloaded from the App Store for free.
The Cult of Mac team used Glassboard to help coordinate our reporting efforts at this year’s CES back in January. It was quick, simple, tied us all together and made the show a little less crazy.
This time around, maybe we’ll dump Glassboard for Anchor, released today. It’s an app with the same basic idea — hanging out and communicating with all your teammates through your iPhone — but with a heavy slant toward fun. And if anything is a great antidote for crazy, it’s fun.
There are two things people care viscerally about in the San Francisco Bay Area: food and tech.
There’s always someone with an iPhone Instagramming dinner or squinting over health scorecards for those taco trucks on Yelp. (See also: “Foodies The Musical,” a local hit.)
But a lot of these apps don’t deliver what food lovers really hunger for, says the organizer of a new app contest. The 8-Hour Food App Challenge wants local residents to sit at their kitchen tables and concoct new apps about all things culinary on Saturday, June 29.
“The kind of food content that makes you salivate isn’t the kind you find in apps designed by engineers,” says Pietro Ferraris, founder of Map2app and sponsor of the Challenge, told Cult of Mac. “Most apps made by engineers about food are pretty boring, so we hope to change that.”
Apple’s new “Designed by Apple” commercials, which boast about the impact of its Mac and iOS devices, are being considered a flop in comparison with previous ad campaigns from the Cupertino company. Fans have criticized the way in which Apple has bragged about itself and the lack of joy in each video.
The official Skype apps for iOS have been updated today to add free and unlimited video messaging, which previously required a $4.99 per month Skype Premium subscription. The updates also bring a number of other improvements to things like photo sharing and call stability.
Apple will pay music labels more than Pandora for its new iTunes Radio service, according to terms reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. In addition to a set fee, the Cupertino company will also cough up a cut of its net advertising revenue every time a song is played.
The developer behind Reeder, one of the best Google Reader clients for iOS, has confirmed that the app’s development will continue after Google Reader is closed on July 1. The app will soon receive an update which will bring support for a number of Google Reader alternatives, and if that wasn’t enough, it’ll be free on the iPhone starting today.
Took me about five minutes to make this. Video courtesy OfficialBestOf
This is Flowboard‘s second significant update since the app’s April launch, and like the first, brings meaty upgrades. In this case, the big news is that the app now gives you the ability to embed YouTube clips and PDFs in your digital publication, and thankfully adds a way to undo you last action.
AT&T might finally get its comeuppance for throttling data. Photo: Apple.
There’s a new hacked carrier update available for iPhones running on AT&T, which delivers HD Voice, support for Release 7 HSDPA speeds on the iPhone 4S, and a number of other improvements. As always, you don’t even need a jailbroken iPhone to install it.
The new Google Hangouts app for iOS has received its first update since making its App Store debut back in May. The release adds a number of new features, including the ability to invite friends via SMS and click and share links, plus bug fixes and improvements.
Triggertrap has released a new dongle which lets you fire real camera flashes using your iPhone. This brings you into the realm of high-speed photography — the kind where people shoot bullets through balloons of water and capture the image.
Mailbox, the popular third-party Gmail client for iOS, has received yet more new features in its latest update. iPhone users can now take advantage of the new landscape mode for a wider look at their mail, and there’s now support for Gmail’s “send as” aliases.
Poppy is a box containing lenses and mirrors that turns you iPhone into a 3-D viewer – or a 3-D camera. If you ever used one of the old 3-D Viewmasters, this is exactly the same. Except it uses an iPhone instead of a card circle of tiny film slides. And you can film with it as well as view. And it does video.
Weathertron is Yet Another iPhone Weather App. In fact, it’s Yet Another iPhone Weather App Built On Dark Sky’s Back End. But as we shall see it’s totally worth a look: it looks great, it’s universal and — best of all — it’s called Weathertron.
Sony’s RX100 is a pretty great compact camera. And the new RX100 II should be even better. The update/sequel, announced today, adds a bunch of modern-day gizmos to the $750 compact camera.
Limbo is an atmospheric platform puzzle game which has sold over three million copies across several gaming platforms, including PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Steam, and the Mac App Store.
Developer Playdead announced recently that Limbo will now also be available on the iOS platform for iPad 2 and up, as well as the latest generation iPod touch and iPhone 4S and 5.
There’s a lot of similarity between the Ecoxgear Ecorox Bluetooth speaker/speakerphone and the Navy SEALs. They’re both rugged, packed with stamina and waterproof. Oh yeah, and they both come from aqua-crazy San Diego.
We have high hopes for PopCap’s long anticipated sequel to Plants vs Zombies, but it looks like gamers will have to wait a little while longer before the game hits the App Store.
PopCap announced today that Plants vs Zombies 2 has been delayed and will miss its targeted launch date of July 18th. The launch date will be pushed back to some date “later this summer” according to the game’s Twitter feed.
Plants vs. Zombies 2, originally slated for a July 18th release, will now be released later in the summer. Stay tuned for more details.
Google published a big update for it’s Google Earth app for iOS today. The new version includes an improved UI with a left hand panel that makes it easier to enable different layers of information.
Along with the refreshed UI, the Google Earth update adds Google Maps Street View to the service so you can explore the world in 3D flyover or at street level. Improved directions and search were also added to the list of new features.
Despite new technologies for mobile payments, customers trust familiar companies like Apple.
Square has quickly risen to popularity thanks to its clever credit card payment system for iPhone and iPad that has been adopted by small businesses across the country. To compliment its payment system, Square launched the Square Register last month, and today it just introduced its new eCommerce portal called Square Market.
Square Market is an online marketplace for businesses to list and sell their goods across the U.S. (think Etsy or eBay). Anyone can open a store for free with items photos and a profile of your business. You can even post items directly to Twitter to generate interest in your business.
Here’s what Square’s Director of Discovery, Ajit Varma, had to say about the launch:
Let’s be honest–sometimes it gets a little tricky to see the stuff on those tiny little iPhone screens, especially as we all get a little (ahem) older. While the accessibility feature to set large text has been around for a while, there’s a new feature in iOS 7 beta that holds promise, and isn’t actually in the accessibility section.
Dynamic Type will let any application that supports the feature adjust the font size in the app to better match what works best for you.
Here’s how to access and change the settings for Dynamic Type in iOS 7 beta.
This is a neat touch: the camera quick launch drawer in iOS 7 actually has its own gravity bounce effect, so that you can effectively bounce it against the bottom of the screen like a rubber ball. You can even do it so hard that it will bounce all the way to the top of the screen and the camera app will open. Very cool.
In a landmark victory for same-sex marriage, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the bill passed in 1996 that ruled same-sex marriages are unconstitutional. After voting 5-4 in the decision, the Supreme court justices threw out part of the law that denies federal benefits same-sex couples.
To celebrate the decision, Apple released the following statement to All Things D regarding the Supreme Court ruling:
“Apple strongly supports marriage equality and we consider it a civil rights issue. We applaud the Supreme Court for its decisions today.”
In a statement earlier this year, Apple had the following to say about DOMA:
“DOMA hurts legally married same-sex couples and prevents companies from treating all employees as equals. Apple strongly supports marriage equality and we hope the Supreme Court will declare the law unconstitutional.”
The Supreme Court also handed same-sex marriage advocates another victory by clearing the way for gay and lesbian couples in California to marry, by voting 5-4 to dismiss a Prop. 8 appeal over same-sex marriage on jurisdictional grounds.
JetBlue is the latest airline to ditch its flight manuals for iPads. The budget airline received approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to give its pilots custom-equipped iPads to replace heavy paper manuals and serve real-time information to the cockpit during the flight.
Over 60 pilots have been involved during the trial phases of JetBlue’s iPad program, but JetBlue will give all 2,500 pilots a fourth-gen 16GB Wifi-only iPad. The company has been approved to use PC-based laptops in the cockpit for 10 years now, but the company says the iPad will offer new capabilities as JetBlue implements Ka-Band satellite Wifi.
