Famed designer Surenix and developer Kyle Howells have teamed up to create a new iOS task switcher/Control Center replacement called Alympus, which combines a full screen of toggles with a new music controller and a customizable grid layout for running apps.
The popular live streaming app Periscope today announced a much-welcomed update to its iOS app. The update, which bumps the app to version 1.1.3, includes a couple of new features and tweaks. For one, users now have the ability to mute notifications on a user-by-user basis. For instance, if you follow someone, you can now go to their Periscope account and turn off notifications for when they initiate a new broadcast.
We told you last month about a neat Apple Watch utility app called Power, and today it’s learning a handy new trick and becoming even more useful. Power, created in part by jailbreak developer Surenix, lets you check how much battery power your iPhone has remotely from your Apple Watch. As I mentioned before, this is a practical utility as it’s not uncommon to use the Apple Watch to stay on top of notifications while the iPhone charges in another room.
Starting with version 1.1, Power is adding support for notifications. This means you can charge your phone and know when it hits certain percentages in case you’re waiting for that level to take it off the charger and head out the door.
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Commerce company eBay announced today that it will soon retire several of its mobile apps including ones on iPhone and iPad. eBay’s primary iOS app will not be going anyway, however, and several of the discontinued apps will eventually see their features appear in the main eBay app.
In an effort to simply the shopping experience, eBay says it will be shutting down its Valet, Fashion, and Motors apps soon and later integrate their features into eBay’s primary app.
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After a pilot of its new “Sponsored Listening” advertisements last year, streaming music service Pandora Radio announced today that it’s rolling out the feature to all advertisers and listeners in its mobile apps. The feature rewards users with an hour of ad-free, uninterrupted listening as long as they first interact with an ad for at least 15 seconds.
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Apple has announced an expansion of its Apple Maps vehicle program, a fleet of vans equipped with advanced sensors collecting data for an improved Maps experience. Among the new locations, Apple will be bringing the vehicles to France and Sweden for the first time, while it also plans to survey a long list of new cities in the US and UK where it’s already started surveying.
We first reported on the project back in May, noting that Apple was gathering data to reduce its reliance on third-parties, including getting Google Street View-type images of storefronts and other 3D imagery.
For France, Apple lists the following areas already scheduled for surveying: Hauts-de-Seine, Paris (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th), Seine-Saint-Denis, Val-de-Marne.
For Sweden, the areas the company plans to visit include: Malmö in Skåne County, and Stockholm (Bromma, Enskede-Årsta-Vantör, Farsta, Hägersten-Liljeholmen, Hässelby-Vällingby, Kungsholmen, Norrmalm, Rinkeby-Kista, Skarpnäck, Skärholmen, Spånga-Tensta, Södermalm, Älvsjö, Östermalm).
Apple has also added a number of new areas in the UK and US that it plans to survey from August 17th to August 30th next month. The full list is on its website here along with other dates scheduled for data collection in various locations.
On the same night that VidCon kicks off in Los Angeles, Google has released a new version of YouTube for iOS. Earlier this week, the Android version of the app was updated with a fix for those annoying videos filmed vertically. Now, that update is making its way to iOS.
Twitter’s Periscope app may have taken a lot of the attention from Meerkat after the live video streaming competitor launched, but the first live streaming service to capture everyone’s attention this year isn’t giving up yet.
Meerkat announced an interesting partnership with GoPro today at VidCon, CNBC says. The partnership will allow GoPro users to live stream on the Meerkat service using action cameras. Previously streaming was limited to using either the front or rear smartphone camera so adding GoPro cameras as a source should result in some interesting streams for viewers.
The integration between GoPro and Meerkat is currently supported on GoPro3 cameras while a future update will add support for GoPro4 cameras. Meerkat and GoPro for iOS available for free on the App Store. Meerkat shared these instructions today for setting up the new feature:
[tweet https://twitter.com/AppMeerkat/status/624271796867592192 align=’center’]
Microsoft is rolling out an update to some its Office iOS apps today that includes a handful of new features for the Word, PowerPoint, and Excel iPhone and iPad apps.
Among the new features, all three apps get support for viewing protected documents and Outlook integration. For Outlook, users now have the ability to “send a document as an attachment in Outlook. Or directly edit a document attached to or linked from an Outlook email message.”
In addition, all three apps get support for bi-directional and script languages, including Thai, Hebrew, and Arabic.
The updated apps will also now let users invite others to edit a document and configure permissions for those collaborators.
The updated Microsoft Office apps (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) are available on the App Store now.
The iOS 8 update last year introduced the ability for third-party apps to extend their apps to share sheets in other apps just like Messages, Mail, Facebook, and other apps. Pinterest was ready on day one with an iOS app extension in the form of a Pin button that allowed you to “pin” content from Safari to your account.
Today its introducing an enhanced version of that Pin button just as functional as the web version with the ability to “edit descriptions of Pins, create new boards and choose from multiple images in a new grid format.” This should make it easier to save content for viewing later, tagging it with a proper description, and putting in somewhere where you can find it safely later when using the service.
You can download the latest version of Pinterest with the enhanced Pin button share extension for free from the App Store, and Pinterest has created a helpful image that shows how to enable any supported extension on iOS 8 for iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch:
Microsoft has today launched Send, an experimental iPhone app that offers a kind of cross between email and instant messaging. Microsoft says that it is designed for “brief, snappy communications” where you want an instant response but also want to retain a record of what was said within Outlook. The app was previously leaked as Flow by Outlook.
While tools like text messaging and IM are great for short messages, you often don’t have your co-worker’s cell phone number or an IM app on your work phone. And we’ve heard loud and clear from people at work, they want all their communications available in Outlook—even if they send them from other apps. This is where Send comes in! Send gives you the simple, quick text message-like experience while allowing you to reach all co-workers and have all of your communications in Outlook for reference later.
Tellingly, Microsoft is launching first for iPhone – ahead of not just Android, but also its own Windows Phone platform …
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Deep Dream has caused something of a stir online in recent weeks. Google’s neural imaging network has an uncanny ability of taking ordinary images and turning them in to something you’d normally only see if you were sleeping (or under the influence of banned substances). Now, creating your own fun and trippy images is simple.
Realmac just announced that its Deep Dreamer public beta is available to download for Mac, so you can create your own weird pics using a native app. While in its beta state you can buy a full license for $14.99. Once out of beta, a license will set you back $24.99.
If you’d rather use a free service, Dreamscope is a web app which lets you upload any photo or picture and run it through one of its many Deep Dream patterns. The end results is normally weird, scary, or both. There are 20 filters to choose from in total, some scarier than others. Depending on the size of your image, the time it takes to process your nightmare varies. I experienced anything from a few seconds to around half a minute. For extra-trippy effects, re-upload your Dreamscope’d image several times and see what happens.
Take a look at our gallery below and you’ll see some of the virtual hallucinations it conjured up for us:
If you want to create your own, head on over to DreamScopeApp.com and start uploading or check out Deep Dreamer for Mac. There’s also a gallery to look through of images created by others. Some might be NSFW, so be careful where you view them and who you view them in front of. You have been warned…
Nice Yosemite reference, Instagram
Instagram first started as an iPhone-only photo sharing social network and has since expanded to other smartphone platforms, but the experience for interacting with Instagram on the Mac never been at feature parity. Today Instagram is making small steps to improve the experience with using the service on the web by introducing the ability to search for content using the official Instagram website.
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Pocket, the popular app that allows users to save articles and read them later, has received an update that adds another way to consume saved articles. Announced in a blog post, Pocket for iOS now supports Listen, the company’s popular text-to-speech feature that was previously available only on Android.
Listen is a way for users to consume their news hands-free. The feature offers the ability to start listening from anywhere in the article, skip portions you aren’t interested in, and adjust the reading speed to be either faster or slower. Perhaps most notably, Listen is available in all languages.
Today, we’re excited to bring Listen, our Text-to-Speech feature, to iOS. It’s the hands-free way of returning to everything you’ve saved in Pocket. You can start listening from anywhere in the article, skip paragraphs with ease, and adjust the reading speed for when you want to fly through an article or let it slowly soak in. Plus, it has automatic language detection, making Listen available in all languages.
To access Listen, simply open up an article, tap the three dots in the lower right corner, and choose the Listen option. Download the latest version of Pocket for iOS from the App Store now.
Image: n3rdabl3.co.uk
Popular iOS and Android apps from companies like Walmart, ESPN, Slack and SoundCloud have been found vulnerable to password cracking, according to a recent report from AppBugs. The security firm found that dozens of the most popular apps are lacking, in that they allow you to make any number of attempts to login without restriction. These clearly opens up a gap for attackers who have the means to guess those passwords and gain access to your accounts.
The most secure apps will force you to reset your password if you don’t enter it correctly, or they’ll lock you out after you’ve made a certain number of attempts.
AppBugs tested the most popular apps to see how they stacked up. It checked 100 popular apps which support password-protected web accounts and limited themselves to apps which had been downloaded at least 1 million times. Of those 100 apps, 53 were found to have the vulnerability.
[youtube=https://youtu.be/0yOU_o4oc_I]
With the latest installment in the Mission Impossible series set for a theatrical release later this month on July 31st, an official iPhone and iPad game for the movie has just launched on the App Store.
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Misfit, makers of the popular Flash and Shine wearables for fitness and sleep tracking, today launched a new iOS app that turns its Flash hardware into a remote control for a connected iPhone’s camera, music functions, and more.
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Microsoft today released a new update to OneNote for iPhone that makes it a universal app, now OneNote for iOS. That means that the existing OneNote for iPad app is being replaced by a single, universal app that runs on both iPhone and iPad.
The benefit, aside from having a single version, is that the iPad app is gaining some recent features introduced in the iPhone app including a OneNote widget in the today view of Notification Center. iPad users will also notice a new “recent notes” section for notes made on either device, and landscape mode on the iPad now presents a column of page previews.
Catch the full release notes below:
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It seems an age since Angry Birds first rose to prominence as the best-selling mobile game going. After countless spin-offs and movie tie-ins, it’s about to get its first proper sequel. Rovio announced in a blog post this morning that Angry Birds 2 will officially launch on July 30th.
With 3 billion game downloads, millions of fans across the globe, multiple mashups and spin-offs, collaborations with A-list celebrities and much more, we’re really proud that Angry Birds is the mother of all mobile game apps. And now we’re proud to announce the mother of all sequels – Angry Birds 2!
Rovio hasn’t announced exactly what to expect or which platforms it’ll be available on, but it does say that it will make its way to “app stores worldwide” in two weeks, suggesting that it will almost certainly be available on the most popular platforms: Android and iOS.
Hit the Angry Birds 2 website to sign up and be notified as soon as it’s available. In the mean time, you can grab a bunch of the more popular Angry Birds titles for free, or just $1 in Rovio’s iOS sale.
Hulu is out today with a neat update to its iPhone app that puts a remote for controlling playback and more right on your Apple Watch. Like most Apple Watch apps, the Hulu remote app is limited in what it can do on its own, but it becomes a handy utility once you start video playback on Hulu from your iPhone.
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Twitter has quietly added support for iOS 8’s native, customizable share sheet, replacing its own limited share menu previously used. Custom share sheet support enables users to send URLs and other items to various apps and services on iOS without ever leaving the Twitter app.
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One of the long-running complaints among TiVo users has been the company’s decision to block Apple’s AirPlay mirroring feature, preventing users from streaming content from the TiVo iOS app to an Apple TV. That’s all changing today as the company plans an update to the app that enables the functionality for the first time, allowing TiVo hardware owners to stream any content accessible via the iOS app to an Apple TV connected to the same network.
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The BBC announced in a blog post this morning that mobile downloads are coming to its iPlayer Radio app just in time for the BBC Proms. For the first time – using the iPlayer Radio app – customers will be able to download radio shows (and the Proms) to listen offline and keep them for up to 30 days. To make use of this new service, all you need to do is ensure you have the latest version of the BBC iPlayer Radio smartphone or tablet app for iOS, Android or Kindle.
Pixelmator for iPhone and iPad has today been updated to version 2.0.2 bringing even more features to the popular image editor for iOS and Mac. This update adds a new kind of brush stroke called Dynamic Touch, which simulates pressure sensitivity by examining the size of the finger input that touches the screen. Larger surface area produces thicker strokes on the canvas. Similarly, using just the tip of a finger results in fine lines in the app.