The barrier to entry for the Unity game rendering engine for developers on iOS and Android has gotten lower, as use of Unity tech is now free on both mobile platforms. Unity CEO David Helgason announced the changed terms today during the Unite Nordic trade conference, according to Pocket Gamer’s Keith Andrew. The dropping of licensing fees for the engine’s basic tier means that features which once… → Read More
Las Vegas-based apparel retailer Zappos rolled out an update to its iOS app today that saw the company fold some neat new features into the mix. Strictly speaking though , it’s no drastic overhaul — the Zappos mobile team instead focused largely on improving the fit and finish of their iOS-centric mobile experience.
There are a few new graphical flourishes here and there (users can now change… → Read More
I remember waking up 6am, going downstairs, and firing up my Atari 800XL. The disk labeled Karateka inserted, the drive would grunt a few dozen times and the screen would flash. Suddenly, with barely any warning, the opening titles would appear and then the music would start – six notes to signal a game that was menacing in its simplicity. The story was simply told. Characters stood in darkened… → Read More
eBay has just updated its mobile app with a whole host of new features and a revamped look. To start, the refreshed UI makes it clear that eBay wants a more heavy-duty offering for its mobile users. You can now enjoy larger photo views, a better system for auctions that are about to end, and the added feature of being able to checkout multiple items at the same time.
But all that’s just fluff… → Read More
Flipboard has just updated its iOS app to add a few more features for its 50 million+ readers. Back in March, Flipboard announced a new feature that would include user-created magazines, which seems to have excited Flippers.
In fact, the company announced that users have already created 500,000 curated magazines. Like our’s. → Read More
So far, the Pebble smart watch has done little besides offer up watch faces for users to tinker with, but the apps are starting to come in, and today marks the much-anticipated debut of early marquee partner RunKeeper. RunKeeper was an early player in the smartphone-based activity tracker market, and continues to be an industry leader. It was a natural partnership for both Pebble and RunKeeper… → Read More
If you do much photography at all, you probably have come across and enjoyed Adobe Lightroom, the digital darkroom suite that makes photo editing a snap, especially for RAW files, which preserves a wide variety of information for better results when tweaking things like exposure, sharpness and color balance. Now, Adobe’s Lightroom lead Tom Hogarty has demoed an upcoming version of the software for… → Read More
In case you can’t wait for Jony Ive to give iOS a complete revamp, there’s Classic Note, an app that will bring back a bit of the Woz-Jobs magic in fully 128K glory. The app includes a note taker and calculator into a package that harkens back to the days of the original Macintosh. → Read More
Don’t write off Microsoft’s chances in mobile just yet. It may still be struggling to make itself count in the smartphone space but early signs are more promising for Windows plus tablets. Microsoft has gone from having no share of the global tablet OS market in Q1 last year to taking 7.4% one year later, with 3M Windows 8 tablets shipped in Q1 2013, according to Strategy Analytics. → Read More
Pictorious is a photo sharing startup that is faced with the unenviable task of crawling its way out of Instagram’s gigantic shadow. Today they’re releasing a bevy of updates to their iOS app, which will hopefully help it mount a better challenge against the photo sharing juggernaut. → Read More
Toronto-based Wave, the online finance software startup that has built a growing business around a freemium model of cloud-based accounting, is launching its new iOS payroll application today. The tool is a companion to the company’s web-based payroll platform, adding a much-needed mobile element to the overall product suite and building on the recent launch of the receipt scanner applications the… → Read More
Apple has just released the official announcement for its 2013 Worldwide Developers Conference. Every year, it releases tickets for the developer-focused event at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, and every year, they sell out faster than the year before. Last year, on April 25, they sold out in just two hours, so if you want some, doen’t hesitate when they come out tomorrow, because they’ll be… → Read More
A/B testing has long been a fundamental part of developing applications and products for the web, and, with the explosion of smartphones, developers are naturally eager to use the process to test new designs and updates for mobile apps. The problem is that, traditionally, this has been tricky to manage, especially on iOS given Apple’s approval process, requiring app developers to wait weeks to… → Read More
The U.S. real estate market is seeing a bit of a rebound right now and, with it, real estate-related online services like Zillow, Redfin and Trulia and newcomers like Houzz are also getting back in the groove of launching regular updates. Trulia today launched its redesigned iPad app, which now features new listing pages with large photos, a new navigation menu and an improved map view. The… → Read More
Yahoo! acquired startup Summly for somewhere around $30 million just one month ago, but it’s already bearing fruit. First, there was the Summly summarized version of its Q1 2013 earnings last week, and now there’s a brand new flagship Yahoo! iOS application out today (for U.S. users only for now) with Summly summaries built right in. → Read More
Word of a standalone music service out of Twitter has been floating around for a week or so, but today the company took to the Good Morning America show to officially announce the service, comprised of both a web platform and an iOS app.
Twitter Music, as it were, is the brainchild of We Are Hunted, a startup quietly acquired by Twitter just last year. The app pulls in music from Rdio, Spotify… → Read More
MinoMonsters launched in early 2011 on a mission to become the Pokémon of social games, allowing gamers to explore a world inhabited by bite-sized, furry monsters, taking them on quests and battling their friends. For this reason — and because founders Josh Buckley and Tyler Diaz were Y Combinator’s two youngest graduates at 18 and 17-years-old, respectively — the startup found some early buzz. → Read More
The overall landscape of mobile apps is an interesting one, with most of the top free titles on Apple’s App Store being games or services pushed by massive companies like Twitter (Vine) or Google (Maps). Is there a place for yet another service to pick up steam before a larger network like Facebook re-creates copies its functionality? That’s the interesting future that lies ahead… → Read More
Mobile malware remains a small and nascent issue, especially when compared to the scale of threats crowding around desktop OSes, but the threat that is out there continues to mostly affect Google’s Android platform. This despite Apple’s iOS technically having more vulnerabilities, according to a new report by security software firm Symantec. → Read More
The real estate market in the U.S. is quickly picking up pace again, and last month, Zillow‘s mobile traffic hit a new record with 89 homes viewed per second (up from 75 homes the month before). Today, almost exactly four years after it first launched its Zillow for iPhone app, the service is relaunching its iOS apps with an updated homescreen and restructured navigation. On the iPad, Zillow… → Read More
We all know the Foursquare story quite well: The app launched at SXSW four years ago, and a fair amount of people have been using it to check-in ever since. The company is releasing a new version of its flagship iOS app, which will put those 3.5 billion check-ins in the forefront with search and explore functionality. It’s a move that we saw coming ever since they did practically the same… → Read More
iOS App Discovery Service AppGratis just confirmed that it was indeed pulled from the App Store on Friday. At the time, commentators were left wondering what was wrong with AppGratis’ app. Founder and CEO Simon Dawlat wrote a long blog post explaining the full story. “AppGratis is very much up and running,” Dawlat said. “The reports of our death are greatly… → Read More
Google has quietly rolled out an update to its Google Search app for iOS, and before you get your hopes up, I’ll go ahead and tell you that there’s no “Google Now” anywhere to be seen.
The update does, however, bring with it some improvements to voice search. According to the official iTunes page, users will have “faster and significantly improved voice recognition with text streamed on the… → Read More
After Facebook introduced “Home,” its new launcher for Android phones that will help you engage with your friends quickly without having to open the actual app, I asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg if such a product could ever find its way to iOS. Clearly, the reason for “starting with Android,” as Zuckerberg put it at the beginning of the Home event, is because… → Read More
Microsoft just launched SkyDrive 3.0 for iOS, and it took the company quite a while to get the upgrade into the App Store. Rumor has it that there was a bit of back and forth between the two companies over the 30 percent revenue cut that Apple would take when users buy additional storage for their accounts through the app. It’s not clear how the two companies finally resolved this issue… → Read More
Udemy launched in 2010 to help students of all ages continue their education through video-based, online courses — and in turn, give teachers (and experts) a way to make a buck by sharing their knowledge with the masses. Capitalizing on the growing interest and buzz around online learning and MOOC platforms pioneered by sites like Khan Academy, Udemy has been on a mission to create the largest… → Read More
LocalSqr is an app that aims to encourage healthy eating by promoting locally grown food. The app locates farmers markets and other organic produce suppliers in your vicinity, and if you end up shopping at one of these locations often, it rewards you with a special discount you can redeem from the vendors there. It’s a little like an app we reviewed today called Mango Health that rewards… → Read More
A group of MIT students created an app at a PennApps Hackathon that can do amazing things, connecting multiple iOS devices into a single, interactive screen. The app itself, which doesn’t require any kind of jailbreaking or special access and is currently available in the App Store for free, is impressive enough, but Mosaic has much bigger plans: They’ve also created an SDK to let other developers… → Read More
The big winners in the three-month period ending in February in terms of smartphone share globally and in the U.S. were Android and Windows Phone, according to Kantar Worldpanel, with BlackBerry experiencing significant declines in consumer interest and iOS remaining fairly level in most markets. The bad news for BlackBerry is that it saw its smartphone OS share decline even in the U.K., where it… → Read More
I’ve long believed that touchscreens leave a certain something to be desired when it comes to playing games, and if a new (and very curious) report holds true, Apple may feel the same way. According to PocketGamer.biz’s Jon Jordan, Apple has been meeting with developers on-site at this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco to talk about a forthcoming Apple game controller. → Read More
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