Commuters in New York now have a new way to pay for their ride. As announced by New York governor Andrew Cuomo, the MTA eTix app now supports Apple Pay. This means that commuters can now easily and securely purchase tickets for New York City’s Long Island Railroad and Metro-North Railroad trains.
Google today has released a nice update to Google Maps for iOS users. The update, which bumps the app to version 4.23.0 includes enhancements to reviews and location descriptions, as well as iOS 10 optimizations and widget support.
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While some have questioned the need for strong encryption to protect simple chats between friends, the continuing revelations of mass surveillance by governments does make the issue a matter of principle for some. Just yesterday it was revealed that Yahoo likely allowed the government to scan all of its users’ emails. And, as I’ve argued before, we all have perfectly innocent things to hide.
Facebook began testing Secret Conversations – Facebook Messenger chats protected by end-to-end encryption – back in July, promising a wider rollout later in the year. The company has now told Wired that the rollout is complete, and that the feature is now available to all Facebook users …
Yahoo today launched a new app for iPhone and iPad (and Android) called Yahoo Newsroom.
Adobe Photoshop Elements 15 lets you adjust facial expressions
Adobe is releasing Photoshop Elements 15 and Premiere Elements 15 today, and this year’s release includes of plenty of powerful new tools that make advanced photo and video editing more approachable.
StubHub is out with what it says is the “first ticketing app for Apple TV” on the tvOS App Store. StubHub for the fourth-gen Apple TV offers a visually rich experience with both categories and show times. Their goal is to help people go from browsing for entertainment in the living room to finding something to experience out in the world. There’s even a handy feature that shows you seat perspectives for available tickets on the big screen.
Facebook has long been a convenient place to sell unwanted items, but the audience for your sales has so far been limited to your friends and followers. With the addition of a Marketplace feature on mobile, Facebook allows you to expand your audience to everyone in your local community.
Facebook is where people connect, and in recent years more people have been using Facebook to connect in another way: buying and selling with each other. This activity started in Facebook Groups and has grown substantially. More than 450 million people visit buy and sell groups each month — from families in a local neighborhood to collectors around the world.
To help people make more of these connections, today we’re introducing Marketplace, a convenient destination to discover, buy and sell items with people in your community.
Interestingly, Facebook isn’t getting involved in the transactions themselves …
In the first high-profile iMessage App Store rejection we’ve seen, the developer of the Phoneys sticker pack says Apple has reached out with bad news: the company will pull the app in a week if it is not significantly changed. Phoneys (currently) features stickers that look like iMessage bubbles, effectively allowing users to replace messages from their friends with some funny alternative text.
The app hit #1 Top Paid in the iMessage App Store. Despite getting approved initially, Apple says that the store does not accept “prank apps” and the current form of the stickers violate Apple trademarks …
As the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus continue to make their way to more and more people, developers are gradually rolling out app updates with new features specific to Apple’s latest devices. Today, a pair of popular apps have been updated: Alto’s Adventure and Adobe Lightroom.
The CW today updated its iOS app with a pair of new features that Apple users will greatly appreciate. With the update, which bumps the app to version 2.13.1365, iOS and Apple TV users can now watch their favorite content on their TV…
Skype today announced a major update for its iOS app that brings with it a host of new features and optimizations for iOS 10 users. The update brings contact information improvements, CallKit support, and Siri integration. With today’s update, the app is now at version 6.25 on iOS.
Eight years since the App Store’s initial release, we’ve seen quite the influx of Twitter apps on the market. Over time, the situation settled down and the best competitors stood on top. I’ve come to find my one or two main Twitter clients, but that still hasn’t stopped me from looking for any new contenders. While there are the few Twitter apps that everyone knows, it’s refreshing to see a new take on the familiar experience.
Enter Leaf, a new Twitter client available in the App Store today that takes a few creative approaches to the experiences we have come to know and love.
Osmo is a game system for iPad that uses the tablet’s camera to interact with real-world objects like puzzle pieces or drawings (buy the starter kit for $69). There are several Osmo apps, spanning drawing, literacy, physics puzzles and more. Each one offers a mini ‘augmented reality’ experience where the iPad apps bring the real-world accessories to life.
The basic Osmo system contains a dock/stand for the iPad to sit on and a reflective mirror that attaches to the FaceTime camera. This adjusts the optics so that the camera is essentially recording the table area in front of the iPad, so that the Osmo apps can ‘see’ the objects placed there. Read on for a walkthrough of how well this all works …
Similar to Chrome, an update to the Google app for iOS today adds a new incognito mode that prevents search or browsing history from being saved. Other features include native playback of YouTube videos, improved iOS 10 compatibility, and performance improvements that reduce crash rates by 50%.
iOS 10 lets third-party developers use the standard call look and feel from the Phone app in their own apps with something known as CallKit, and Facebook’s latest update to Messenger is already taking advantage of it. Messenger for iOS has let you make calls over the Internet to your friends for a while, and now incoming calls to Messenger will behave just like standard phone calls. This improved behavior even extends to CarPlay.
macOS Sierra now supports video picture-in-picture just like the iPad for Safari and iTunes. You can pop out a video from the web into a floating overlay that stays on top of other windows and snaps to corners or anywhere on your display when you hold Option.
It’s a really nice feature when it’s available, but a lot of websites do not yet expose a PIP button. Luckily, Developer Arno Appenzeller has released a free Safari extension that enables PIP for Safari, Netflix and more video services. Here’s how to use it:
Apple’s Live Photos were introduced with the iPhone 6s last year and have slowly made their way to third-party apps and services. One area that has lagged in support for Live Photos, however, is the web. This is primarily due to the fact that Apple doesn’t offer a first-hand solution for adding Live Photos to websites. Tumblr, however, has taken a roundabout approach to supporting the feature and is rolling it out today.
Yesterday Twitter introduced the ability to send extended tweets that include images and videos without counting against the character limit. This change was introduced months ago, but third-party Twitter clients didn’t have a heads up on how to support the new feature until it launched.
For the last 24 hours of so, Tweetbot and other third-party apps have included URLs to full tweets on the web for extended tweets, and now Tapbots has quickly shipped an update to the Mac that supports the longer tweet format (and iOS support likely isn’t far behind).
Opera’s browser for Mac is finally out of beta, its headline feature being built-in unlimited VPN. The company first added it to the developer version back in April.
Even if you love Apple’s built-in Calendar apps on iOS 10 and watchOS 3, Fantastical for iOS and watchOS is the best way to view a streamlined list view of both your upcoming appointments and scheduled reminders. I use both apps but Fantastical is my primary calendar (and you can sort of remove stock apps now).
Over the weekend, Fantastical for iOS was refreshed with a much-needed iOS 10 update that supports the new iOS 10 widget styles. Before iOS 10, widgets could be any size which made Fantastical’s month calendar widget very useful, but it didn’t fit iOS 10 without an update.
Less than a week after the public release of iOS 10, popular iOS Twitter client Tweetbot has been updated with a handful of optimizations for Apple’s latest operating system. The update brings the app to version 4.5 and brings new iOS 10 features, as well as a handful of other changes.
Announced over the weekend, the latest version of Pokémon Go with the new Buddy feature is rolling out now. Version 1.7.0 for iOS includes many bug fixes and support for the Pokémon Go Plus accessory, but also disables the game on jailbroken devices.
Apple’s updated iWork apps with real-time collaboration features are hitting the iOS App Store now. Apple first demoed these earlier this month at its iPhone 7 event. Updates to Pages, Keynote, and Numbers for the Mac are coming later this month. Apple has also published its Playgrounds app for learning to code in Swift on iOS. Apple TV Remote and iTunes U for iOS also have new versions today.
Earlier this year, Twitter announced that it was planning to move away from the strict 140-character limit for tweets. While the overall idea would remain the same, things like media attachments and @ usernames would no longer count towards the limit. Now, The Verge reports that Twitter is set to rollout the change next week.