Read It Later, the most popular way for users to save content they find on the web, has just received a new name, stacks of new features, and lost its price tag in a major update released today. Now called Pocket, the new app is free across Android and iOS devices, and delivers a new user interface, video and image filters, favorites, and much, much more.
Many of us feel a deep personal connection with our iPhones, and small wonder: the average person’s smartphone knows more about them than their spouse or significant other. Our iPhones hold our contacts, photos, videos, music, banking data, texts, emails, voicemails, web logins, apps and more. We use our phones to pay our bills, send texts to our girlfriends, check-in to our favorite club, play games with friends, and much more besides.
That makes our iOS devices a juicy target for tracking, and what most people aren’t aware of is that, historically, Apple has made it very easy to anyone to tell what you do with your iPhone. It’s called a Unique Device Identifier or UDID. Every iOS device has one, and using it, third-parties have been able to put together vast databases tracking almost everything you do with your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad.
The good news for privacy advocates is that the days of UDID are numbered. Following the recent stink the U.S. Congress raised over how iOS apps handle a user’s personal information without permission, Apple has given an ultimatum to third-party App Store developers: either stop tracking UDIDs or get kicked out of the App Store. Now ad networks and developers are scrambling to agree on a way to track your device in the future.
But are these replacements any good, or do they pose even bigger privacy concerns than UDIDs did?
Apple has filed for all sorts of patents related to 3D technologies over the years, sparking speculation that the company will one day bring us 3D-capable Macs and iOS devices. But evidence that it’s about to get serious about 3D technology for iOS devices comes from a recent job listing on its website for a “Computer Vision specialist to strengthen its multi-view stereo research group.”
Quickoffice announced its new cloud service known as Connect at the end of last month. The service is designed to sync Microsoft Office documents between your iOS devices, Android devices, Macs, and PCs. It’s an extension to the Quickoffice apps for iOS and other mobile platforms that offer the ability to create, edit, and view Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files on the go.
Connect by Quickoffice is now available from the App Store and it’s a very slick app and a great addition for any iOS user or mobile professional.
If, like many people, you find Mondays just too much to cope with, you might want to avoid today’s app. It’s not the sort of thing that’s going to make your Monday feel any better, and in some cases it will just fry your brain until next Monday. Which would be a shame, because you’d miss out on a whole weekend.
Be forewarned, then: The Fourth Dimension is an app which will mess with your head. Deliberately. Even though the aim is education and expansion of knowledge, it will still mess with your head. You will emerge from the experience only fractionally the wiser, and quite a lot more confused than you were at the beginning. Don’t worry, this is perfectly normal.
Recently, we’ve been highlighting some of the major partnerships that are beginning to form between mobile management and mobile/cloud services vendors. These partnerships are strategic and aim to enable IT workflows that better secure, support, and monitor iPhones, iPads, and other mobile devices than what any one company could offer. So far, these partnerships and the integration of solutions that they offer haven’t included Apple or the basic management tools that Apple makes available for free – until now.
Mac and iOS management provider JAMF has posted a guide to integrating the company’s signature solution with Apple’s free Configurator tool to streamline iOS deployment.
We were hugely exited for SoulCalibur when the classic fighter made its debut on iOS back January. And while we were very impressed by Namco Bandai’s efforts, like many reviewers, we were disappointed by the lack of any multiplayer modes. After all, that’s what fighting games are all about, right?
Thankfully, Namco has now rectified that with an update that brings local multiplayer over Bluetooth… except for the iPod touch.
One of the traditional ways for IT professionals to highlight their knowledge of specific technologies and technical concepts is through the acquisition of certifications. There are a number of vendor-crafted certifications available as well as vendor-neutral certifications that illustrate competence in various technical disciplines like troubleshooting and repair, security, healthcare, and overall network management. Certifications have never guaranteed a job in and of themselves, but they do help candidates sell themselves to recruiters and IT managers.
One of the many challenges with the consumerization of IT, mobility, and cloud services trends is that they are dramatically shifting the skill sets required to succeed in the IT field. As a result, the perceived value of certifications has fluctuated as softer skills like business integration and project management have become more desirable. The need for professionals that have extremely specialized skills is being surpassed by the need for IT generalists.
It seems that every week for the past few months, there’s been at least one or two announcements of app developers, cloud service providers, and mobile management vendors developing strategic partnerships to create or integrate their products into a single unified workflow.
Box’s OneCloud initiative, in which the storage provider teamed up with more than two dozen app developers to create seamless workflows for several different business and productivity tasks, is probably the biggest example of this trend. Others include Quickoffice launching its own cloud service as well as integrating with Accellion’s kitedrive, LogMeIn’s new Cubby service, and CloudOn’s virtualized version of Microsoft Office that integrates with Box and Dropbox for storage.
Apple CEO Tim Cook was reportedly spotted at the headquarters of PC gaming platform Valve this morning. The Washington-based company boasts the most robust and established desktop gaming network in existence. Think of Valve as the iTunes of PC gaming. Is a Valve/Apple partnership in the works?
Ideas is an iOS app for managing, organising and sorting your ideas and thoughts. It stands out from the crowd thanks to a refreshingly different interface that does the job very well. It usually costs two bucks, but right now it’s on sale for one dollar.
Mobile technology is playing an ever bigger role in the workplace. According to a recent study by IT training and certification giant CompTIA, 84% of knowledge workers use an iPhone or other smartphone for at least some work tasks on a daily basis – unsurprisingly email and using web-based services ranked as the most common and universal uses.
Despite that level of use, the survey – which didn’t break out numbers for corporate-owned versus employee-owned devices – found that only 22% of businesses have an official policy regarding the use of mobile technology. An additional 20% indicated that they are exploring options for mobility policies but haven’t yet completed them.
Unlike some of EA’s recent iOS games (I’m looking at you, Battlefield 3: Aftershock!) Mass Effect Infiltrator has become a huge success. It’s great gameplay and entertaining storyline have earned it some really glowing reviews, and it recently featured in our selection of the best Retina-ready games for the new iPad.
Today it receives a “massive” update that adds a new bonus mission, manual aiming, more optimizations for the new iPad, and more.
With its iBooks Author software, Apple has made it incredibly easy for almost anyone to write and publish their own e-book. And it hopes to make it just as easy to create iOS apps. One patent application shows the Cupertino company has been working on a tool that would allow users without any programming knowledge at all to build their own iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch software.
In an effort to increase security for your Apple ID, Apple is forcing users to set a number of security questions and answers that will help “verify your identity in the future.” If you forget your password or your account is compromised, you will be asked to answer these questions to prove who you are.
LogMeIn has launched a new cloud-based storage, syncing, and sharing service that hopes to compete with services like Dropbox, Box.net, and the upcoming Google Drive. Called ‘Cubby’, the service offers 5GB of free storage which is protected by LogMeIn’s 128-bit SSL encryption, and it can be accessed from a web browser or using the official Cubby apps for Android and iOS.
Got a little corner of your property that you’d like to keep a closer eye on? Or are you just concerned that the babysitter is not shaking your kids hard enough when they start acting up? Then what you need is the Dropcam HD, a Wi-Fi video camera designed for remote monitoring.
It’s been some time since we’ve seen an update to the popular productivity app Springpad, and for good reason. After fishing through months of feedback from over 3 million users, it appears the Springpad team has been hard at work improving their “Smart Notebooks,” and readying the release of their new and improved Smartpad 3.0. Released today, Springpad for Android and iOS features a complete redesign, with a clean UI and a plethora of new functions.
Rebus Show is an iOS Rebus puzzle game with visual style and flair.
Google’s beautiful magazine-esque news reader has received its first major update today. The update takes care of a slew of issues but most importantly, it takes care of the painfully slow syncing. Users will now have instant online sync as well as sync speeds 7x faster than the previous version. Other improvements to the app include:
There’s been a lot of news stories this year about iPhone and iPad use by U.S. federal agencies. Most of those stories have been reports of agencies ditching BlackBerries for iPhones and/or iPads.
This week’s news from the FAA is different in that the FAA already has iPads in the hands of employees and the agency is planning to expand their user dramatically – to the point where employees will be offered a choice between an iPad and a laptop as their mobile computing device.
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After teasing the game way back in October, Criterion will finally release Burnout Crash! for iOS tomorrow, April 12. The top-down racer will be Criterion’s first mobile game, and it’s already shaping up to be a huge hit. Even David Hasselhoff loves it, as you can see from the clip above.
Adobe Reader for Android and iOS received a hefty update today, adding a slew of new features and enhancing performance across the board. We’ll highlight these new features for you below and then send you over to the Adobe blog where they have done an excellent job at explaining what has been added and improved in the latest Adobe Reader update.
Whispers have been circulating for months about Apple releasing a larger iPhone later this year. Since the original iPhone launch, Apple has kept the iPhone’s essential dimensions intact, and we still have the same 3.5-inch display size Steve Jobs demoed at Macworld in 2007. While the rest of the smartphone industry has been experimenting with all kinds of crazy screen sizes and aspect ratios, Apple has stuck with a simple 3:2 aspect ratio and 3.5 inches.
There have been plenty of arguments made for why Apple will release a 4-inch iPhone in the future, but one smart forum user has put together an argument that trumps the rest.
Today CloudOn released the first major update to its cloud-based Microsoft Office solution. Like OnLive Desktop, which recently made changes to comply with Microsoft’s Windows licensing model, CloudOn delivers virtual copies of Windows versions the three core Office tools. Unlike OnLive, however, CloudOn doesn’t provide a virtual Windows desktop and the company doesn’t provide its own cloud storage for user documents.
Instead, CloudOn integrates with Box and Dropbox to provide document storage and sharing. The interface of the company’s iPad app provides a simple launcher and file browser. When one of the Office apps (or the newly added Adobe Reader app and File Viewer) is launched a virtual instance of that app is provided from the CloudOn servers.