Items tagged with Apps
Do you get nervous and start sweating bullets when you have to make a left-hand turn at a busy intersection with no stop light? The scenario is a little more common in big and busy cities like Los Angeles, and to make commutes a little less stressful for drivers, Waze created a new routing feature that bypasses intersections altogether when possible. The feature is rolling out first to to L.A., one of the busier and more crowded places in the U.S. to drive, particularly during rush hour. To identify the intersections that are most troublesome to drivers, Waze said it worked closely with the local map editor and employee community. "They shared lists of what they perceived to be the most difficult...
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Live broadcasting is one of the hottest trends right now, and Periscope is one of the most popular means of sharing with the world what exactly it is you're seeing or experiencing in real time. Prepare to get a new perspective on live broadcasting. We mean that literally, as Periscope is adding support for DJI brand drones. The Twitter-owned service said the feature update works with iOS (no mention of when it will roll out to Android). To broadcast from a supported DJI drone, all you have to do is connect your iPhone to the drone's remote. Periscope will automatically fetch your drone's video feed while you offer up narration on the action as seen from above. You can also switch between the...
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Tinder, a popular mobile app that purports to help "meet interesting people nearby," is testing a new feature called Tinder Social. The concept behind Tinder Social is to bring together groups of friends and it works the same way as finding dates—swipe and match with other groups that are also headed out to do something interesting. That's fine and dandy except that Tinder users are automatically opted into Tinder Social; if you're using Tinder on the down low (or simply don't want to advertise your participation to your friends), you'll have to opt-out before you're discovered. Naturally Tinder doesn't think that's a big deal, in part because it views its app as more than a hook-up tool. Tinder...
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A couple of years ago, Google introduced its "App Runtime for Chrome" - ARC for short. With it, the company allowed certain Android apps to be ported over to Chrome OS, helping bolster that platform's software portfolio. Since then, we've seen ARC help apps come to other platforms, including Windows and Mac OS X. Since its introduction, it's felt a bit like ARC would eventually lead up to allowing all Android apps to run on Chrome OS, and thanks to a new leak, we've received the first hint that it could happen sooner rather than later. Image Source: InauspiciousPagan The upcoming feature was discovered by reddit user TheWiseYoda, who was a bit baffled when a prompt revealed that it would allow...
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Apple has begun informing customers that it's pulling the plug on its iTunes Allowances feature that allowed parents to load up their kids' iTunes account with anywhere from $10 to $50 each month. As an alternative, Apple is encouraging parents to manage iTunes purchases by taking advantage of its Family Sharing feature.This is a bit of a bummer for those who were taking advantage of monthly allowances. We've all read our fair share of horror stories involving kids and teenagers running up enormous bills on their parents' dime because of things like unchecked in-app purchases. Though that's tougher to do these days with all the protections that are now in place, being able to send a monthly iTunes...
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Social media can be such a buzz kill sometimes. Take Microsoft's recent attempt to introduce an A.I. chatbot named Tay named to Twitter. Within 24 hours, Twitter had turned an innocent experiment into a hate spewing, racist chatbot that Microsoft had no choice but to shut down and apologize for. That's not how social media should be, and perhaps it's why Nintendo's Miitomo app is off to such a fast start. Miitomo is Nintendo's first smartphone app. It's also a social network comprised of those Mii avatars that were first made popular on the Nintendo Wii. It's limited in what you can do and say, compared to other apps and social networks, but there's a charm that's captured the attention of millions...
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Could your smartphone be listening in on your life? If you download mobile apps without much care for their permissions requests, you might not ever know. The privacy threat is so significant though, that the Federal Trade Commission has stepped in and warned us to be aware of it. On Thursday, the FTC sent a letter to a dozen app developers warning them against their use of "audio beacons", which listen in on the environment and pick up hidden noise signals from TV shows. This is made possible with technology from an Indian company named Silverpush, and in effect it lets the app figure out what you're watching, because it has the ability to listen in at will. The app would also be able to tell...
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Snapchat, the popular mobile app that allows you to send and receive timed photos, videos, and text messages, just added a potentially game changing feature—URL profile sharing. That's right, this simple feature addition could turn out to be huge for a social app that has big aspirations of generating billions of dollars. The developers at Snapchat have been working to make it easier to share and link accounts. In the old days, you had to type in someone's username and hope Snapchat would find them. Since then, Snapchat's added the ability to use QR Snapcodes, sift through your phone contacts, and a location-based "Add Nearby" feature. But none of them have the same impact that URL...
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Part of the reason why Uber is so popular is because of its feedback system. Drivers rate passengers and passengers rate drivers, a sort of check-and-balance system between two parties. But what if negative feedback isn't warranted? As a means of investigating complaints, Uber has launched a pilot program that uses smartphone technologies to see how a driver performs. "Gyrometers in phones can measure small movements, while GPS and accelerometers show how often a vehicle starts and stops, as well as its overall speed. If a rider complains that a driver accelerated too fast and broke too hard, we can review that trip using data," Uber explains. "If the feedback is accurate, then we can get in...
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WhatsApp is eliminating its $0.99 subscription fee in favor of a new business model, one that won't bother you with advertising. Well, not for now, anyway. Instead of replacing the nominal yearly subscription fee with ads, WhatsApp will experiment with bringing businesses on board. "Naturally, people might wonder how we plan to keep WhatsApp running without subscription fees and if today's announcement means we're introducing third-party ads. The answer is no. Starting this year, we will test tools that allow you to use WhatsApp to communicate with businesses and organizations that you want to hear from," WhatsApp explained in a blog post. "That could mean communicating with your bank about whether...
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Microsoft is porting yet another app over to iOS, this latest one called Word Flow, a smartphone keyboard app that's similar to Swype. Word Flow allows you to type without lifting your finger off of the keyboard -- you start by touching the first letter in the word you want to type an then slide your finger to each subsequent one. It's the latest app or service to make the migration over to a competing platform. This has been part of Microsoft's strategy for quite some time now, one that it's ramped up rather aggressively since introducing Windows 10. You can find services like Microsoft's Cortana digital assistant and Office on both Android and iOS, and while Word Flow isn't as big as either...
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It was a ho-ho-hot holiday season for Apple and its App Store, which set new records in the two weeks covering Christmas and New Year's. In the two-week time period leading up to January 3, iOS and Mac OS X users spent a combined $1.1 billion on apps and in-app purchases, setting back-to-back weekly records for both traffic and money spent. Customers also set a single-day record on January 1, 2016, by forking over $144 million, besting the record that was set just a week earlier on Christmas Day, Apple said. While Apple keeps a percentage of purchases, developers to date have pocketed nearly $40 billion since 2008, and a third of that has come in the last year alone. "The App Store had a holiday...
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Microsoft's been spending time and resources releasing mobile applications for competing platforms, and while there's a certain logic in that, its latest app for iOS is, well, an interesting submission, to put it nicely. Called "Microsoft Selfie," it's essentially a version of its Lumia Selfie app, except for iPhone users. "Microsoft Selfie is a selfie and portrait enhancement application. The app takes age, gender, skin tone, lighting, and many other variables into account, applies different models automatically and finishes enhancement with just a single click," the app's description reads. "Users can transform average photos into more presentable portraits in seconds. Key features of this...
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Coordinating an activity with a group of friends isn't always easy. It looks like Google wants to change that -- as well as tap into your spontaneous side -- through a new app for Android and iOS deviced called "Who's Down - Fall 2015" (just Who's Down from here on out). The only thing is, you need to an invite to use it.Based on the app's description and accompanying screenshot, the premise seems simple. When you're bored or otherwise free to do something, you flip the slider on the app's main page "to let friends know you're down to meet up." Your status lasts for a set period of time -- a screenshot shows 3 hours, though we imagine it's something you can customize.You then pick from a list...
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