Dec 25
Santa brought you an Android phone or tablet. Congratulations and Merry Christmas you filthy animal. Now you need some apps. Here’s what you need to cop from the Google Play Store. More »
Dec 24
Third-party apps have started to become the best-in-class in iOS. This is good for third-party developers, users, and in the short-term, Apple. It gives third-parties, like Google, additional exposure and revenue. It provides better apps for users on iOS devices. And it helps sell more iOS devices for Apple. In the long-term, however, it may not work out so well for Apple. More »
Dec 24
Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery is probably a game familiar to many iOS users, and it is also a game that has recently made its way onto the PC as well. Now the good news is that Android users who were feeling a bit left out, you’re in luck as it looks like the full version the game has finally been released and is available for purchase via Google Play for a very affordable $1.99, which we have to say is definitely money worth spending not just for the unique gameplay, but for its soundtrack as well. The Android version of the game is essentially the same version on iOS and Steam and will require Android devices running Android 2.3 Gingerbread or higher. The game was previously released as a beta which its developers acknowledged that there were some bugs that needed ironing out, but we guess that was settled and gamers should be able to enjoy the full game without a hitch. So who else has played this game and loved it?
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Blizzard expands Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm beta to pre-purchasers, Five new Grand Theft Auto V screenshots revealed,
Dec 20
Flipboard has just launched its social magazine app to support Android tablets, including the Nexus 10, Samsung’s Galaxy Note 10.1 and Galaxy Tab line.
Flipboard is an app that aggregates your RSS info, social networks, etc. to create a beautiful, flippable magazine. In fact, the app won Best Touch Interface at the 2011 Crunchies. But making sure that interface creates the same experience across all platforms has proven tough, as Flipboard didn’t migrate over to Android at all until June of this year.
Since then, the app’s been available across the entire iOS ecosystem and Android smartphones, and the Kindle Fire and Nook tablets. But today marks a complete expansion into Android.
This is as big as Flipboard’s ever had to go in terms of optimization. But according to the release, Flipboard worked directly with Samsung to optimize page layouts for the wider screen of some Android devices. Users of these larger Android tablets will see larger story excerpts.
It’s unclear whether or not Flipboard will head to Windows Phone next. That seems the logical next step in terms of platform expansion, though there’s no indication that the company has any such plans. Then again, anything can happen. Flipboard may even throw a curve ball and hit BB10 when it finally launches.
Dec 18
SnapKeys Si Invisible Keyboard Gives The Finger To QWERTY On Touchscreen Devices
Posted in: Today's Chili
When all-touch tablets and smartphones hit the market, the logical evolution was touchscreen keyboards in the same QWERTY array we’ve grown accustomed to. Many of us have gotten used to it, thanks to predictive text, but we can all agree that the experience could be better.
SnapKeys, a startup that has rethought the whole touch keyboard thing quite a bit, is today launching a beta app that will totally revamp the typing experience on touchscreens. SnapKeys Si focuses predominantly on the predictive bit of typing, as opposed to the pressing of virtual buttons.
In fact, most of the keys on the SnapKeys keyboard have been tossed out. Instead, there are four buttons, each representing three different letters. On the far right of the screen, there’s an invisible spacebar and on the left there’s an invisible backspace.
Any letter that isn’t displayed on a key is chilling out in between the keys.
Once you learn where the 12 letters are on the new keys, you simply type without looking and SnapKeys Si gets everything right for you.
According to SnapKeys, the letters that aren’t displayed on the SnapKeys Si keyboard are actually only used about 18 percent of the time. Clearly, for something used so little, those keys sure do take up a lot of screen real estate while surfing, texting, emailing etc.
The main goal of SnapKeys is to give the user all the viewing space afforded by the size of the screen, without making any exceptions for even a single key.
That’s why, once you’ve gotten used to SnapKeys Si, the entire keyboard can be set to invisible.
Eventually, the company can serve ads and offer a premium version of the app for users who want an ad-free experience. Either way, users will still be seeing more of the content on their screen thanks to SnapKeys.
Download the beta here.
Dec 14
Sitegeist, Flickr, and More
Posted in: Today's Chili
It’s great when apps make things easier, like giving you a way to easily access information. And this round of the best iPhone apps of the week will help educate you about your neighborhood, make it easier to share photos, and much more. So dive on in! More »
Dec 14
Dropbox just released a huge update for its iOS app, and it comes with a complete redesign of the user interface, as well as the addition of a new Photos tab that comes with a timeline view of all your automatically uploaded photos and videos. They’ve also streamlined the way that you can upload files to your Dropbox from your iOS devices.
First off, Dropbox went for a more modern UI in its redesign, and everything looks a lot more flatter and square-shaped than before. This certainly isn’t a bad thing, though — it gives the app a more simpler look. However, Dropbox has stuck with their traditional blue interface, which has been around ever since its inception, and we don’t see that changing anytime soon.
The new Photos tab brings up a gallery of images that you uploaded from anywhere and lets you scroll through them and view the thumbnails. That tab, which was added earlier in the Android version, has replaced the Uploads tab, and all uploads are now done through an icon at the top of each folder.
Speaking of uploads and the new upload button, you can navigate to a specific folder and then either send files directly into it or create a new folder for the upload. The new + icon at the top of every page in the app allows you to do this, and frankly, it’s extremely nice to have that feature now, which is probably one of the greatest changes in this UI update.
Dropbox for iOS updates with complete redesign is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Dec 14
Google+ for Android updates with full-size image uploads, improved Hangouts, and more
Posted in: Today's ChiliA ton of new features have arrived on the Google+ app for Android. To celebrate “Season for Shipping“, Google decided to roll out several new and useful features for their social network service, especially for Android users. Google says a total of 24 new “treats” have come to Google+ in this update, which should be beneficial for a lot of users this holiday season.
One of the big new features has to do with images. If you use Google’s instant upload feature on Android, Google is now letting you store up to 5GB of full-size photos for free. This 5GB of storage adds on to the already unlimited uploads for 2048-pixel photos. GIF images are also now supported in the mobile news feed, which is great news because people love posting GIFs.
Hangouts has also seen some improvements, and the service should now offer a smoother experience even on low bandwidth connections. So now, you’ll need only 150KB to connect to Hangouts on this new setting. The company has also streamlined the UI a bit and has hidden some of the annoying features that would show up, even when they weren’t being used.
The iOS version of Google+ also received an update, but not as big of an update as Android. Still, the new iOS version lets you swipe through photo albums inline, as well as tap on a photo to view it full-screen. Plus, the iPhone app now applies a pan-zoom-scale effect to pictures in the stream, which is subtle, but drastically improves the UI overall.
Lastly, Google+ Events received some improvements. You can now send messages to specific guests and see who’s opened up your invitation. You can also invite people through Google+ or by simply copying the event URL into an email or IM chat. Also, invites now have a slot for the number of guests an attendee is bringing, making it easier to keep track of the number of people coming to your party.
[via Android Community]
Google+ for Android updates with full-size image uploads, improved Hangouts, and more is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Dec 14
Hot on the heels of a big performance update for the Facebook Android app yesterday, the social network has also released an update of their iPhone app today. The update brings a rebuilt timeline and a faster-loading news feed. The app is technically only an incremental update, but the speed improvement makes it feel like a brand-new app.
While iOS received a native version of Facebook on iOS a few months ago that increased the overall speed of the app, the news feed was one item that still felt a little sluggish. Now, the news feed definitely zips along and can keep up with my scrolling without any problems, and while I don’t visit Timelines too often on my iPhone, it’s nice to know that the speed is there when I need it.
The new update for iPhone also lets you designate which album photos are uploaded to, an add-on to the recently-launched Photo Sync feature, which allows users to have any photos taken with their phone uploaded to Facebook automatically, similar to Dropbox’s and even Google+’s automatic upload offerings.
With the Android update releasing yesterday, Facebook now has both of their popular apps running native versions, and both are as speedy, snappy, and responsive as it gets. Yesterday’s Android update saw an increase in performance that nearly doubled the speed of the old version, thanks to the ditching of HTML5 and using all native code.
Facebook updates iPhone app with rebuilt Timeline, promises faster speeds is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Dec 14
OpenStreetMaps Map App Maker, Skobbler, Brings ForeverMap2 To Kindle Fire; Challenges Nokia Here With Fully Featured Offline Maps
Posted in: Today's Chili
Berlin-based OpenStreetMaps map app maker, Skobbler — which claims its map engine is ‘on a par with Google’s’ and last month relaunched into the Android app market with a hybrid online/offline map paid app (ForeverMap2) – is hoping to corner the map market on Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet, being as there’s no Google Maps app pre-installed or available for download on the Fire app store. Skobbler’s ForeverMap2 for Kindle Fire is expected to go live later today, having been approved by Amazon, giving Kindle Fire users another alternative to existing map apps on the Kindle Fire App Store – such as MapQuest, Nokia’s Here and Microsoft’s Bing maps.
Nokia’s Here is currently ranked second in the free download Navigation section of Amazon’s Appstore for Android, while the MapQuest app is ranked number one.
“The Kindle Fire has been wildly popular but with no Google Maps and no pre-installed map like most other mobile devices, this is a real opportunity to establish ourselves as the leading brand on this platform, and as a provider of the best map app for its users,” said Skobbler’s co-founder Marcus Thielking in a statement.
Skobbler reckons ForeverMap2′s combination of speedy map engine tech plus OpenStreetMaps data and fully featured offline maps give it the edge over rivals. “We feel that we have pretty much a map engine that is on the same level as Google’s — pure technology wise. And that’s way ahead of our competitors — the non-Googles, including Nokia by the way — out there,” Thielking told me last month.
Other features included in ForeverMap2 include address search, location finder, route calculation and POIs — which all function in both online and offline map versions
Skobbler says it is aiming to become the number one maps offering on the Kindle Fire. The company is taking a different tactic with the Kindle Fire than Google’s Play Store — offering ForeverMap2 as a free download with the offline maps component of the app only available via in-app purchase (on Google Play the app is a paid for download with one country offline map included in the initial price).
ForeverMap2 offline maps on the Kindle Fire app are priced at $0.99/£0.69 for Cities; $1.99 for States; $2.99/£1.99 for countries; $5.99/£3.99 for continents; and $9.99/£7.99 for a global offline map.
Asked how ForeverMap2 can beat Nokia’s Here (also free to download, and offering users the ability to “save map areas & wander without data coverage”), Thielking claims Here offline maps are very limited when compared to ForeverMap2′s fully featured offline maps — noting that Here only lets users download a “certain amount of map tiles”, at a “certain level of detail”. The size that can be downloaded is also “limited” — for instance, he says “you can’t get the entire city of Berlin”. Finally he says Nokia’s method gobbles up a lot of data — claiming that downloading Berlin offline maps via Here takes around 50MB of data.
Skobbler has also made its app available for Barnes & Noble’s NOOK Color, NOOK Tablet and NOOK HD/HD+ slates — in two versions: a free version with online maps, and a paid version which costs $5 that includes offline maps. Thielking says the reason for the two versions is that B&N’s store does not support in-app purchases at present.
Who's in charge here?
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.