Yesterday, Apple kicked off their annual WWDC conference in San Francisco. They had a lot to reveal, but one of the things that affects most people is the details surrounding iOS6. They have made a lot of changes including kicking Google Maps to the curb. Get all the details after the break. Continue reading
It must be nice to have lots of money, even as a company. Zuckerberg just posted that Facebook has purchased Instagram and the estimated price is just under $1B dollars. This comes off the tail of Instagram’s recent release of an Android app. Here’s what he had to say:
I’m excited to share the news that we’ve agreed to acquire Instagram and that their talented team will be joining Facebook.
For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests.
We believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.
That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.
We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience. We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks, the ability to not share your Instagrams on Facebook if you want, and the ability to have followers and follow people separately from your friends on Facebook.
These and many other features are important parts of the Instagram experience and we understand that. We will try to learn from Instagram’s experience to build similar features into our other products. At the same time, we will try to help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook’s strong engineering team and infrastructure.
This is an important milestone for Facebook because it’s the first time we’ve ever acquired a product and company with so many users. We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all. But providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together.
We’re looking forward to working with the Instagram team and to all of the great new experiences we’re going to be able to build together
When I first heard about Skylanders and how action figures interacted with a game, I was kind of skeptical. I refuse to join in on the craze and judge it for myself, but I’ve seen a lot of positive feedback and it seems to be a hit. That’s why I wasn’t surprised this morning when I saw an email announcing Skylanders: Cloud Patrol for iOS.
This new game/app comes with one playable Skylander and you can unlock others by either spending in-game money (bought with real money) or using a code that comes with Skylanders figures. The game itself is played with your Skylander flying a ship and using tap and swipe gestures to take out enemies. It looks interesting enough…Cloud Patrol is now available in the iTunes store for $0.99.
It’s been a long day of going through all of the fake announcements on the interweb. The internet is full of companies like ThinkGeek and Kodak announcing things like a wizard’s hoodie, a kodak printer that prints kittens, among many other things. So to make ourselves sane again we recorded episode 5. Here’s what we discussed:
WPCentral has posted some footage of a beta Audible app for Windows Phone. The app looks to function well with all the expected features, and kudos to audible for the work done in making it mesh well with the Metro UI.
Since starting up an Audible account last year I typically go through two books a month. With my planned switch back to Windows Phone coming soon, access to an Audible app would have been greatly missed.
As I’ve told people before, live tiles are a great balance between app launcher and widget. Being able to pin a book to the start menu is a fantastic way to reduce taps when trying to get at the content you want.
With Audible (hopefully) coming soon to the Windows Marketplace that’s one more must have app to check off our list for the OS.
Source | WPCentral
Yesterday, EA and Apple released the Mass Effect 3 Datapad app into the wild for iPhone and iPad users. This app is pretty damn cool if you’re a huge ME fan. It utilizes EA’s Origin service to sync the app with your game. Just running the app introduces a sort of “desktop” feeling and will continuously run as a clock/screen saver. Within that desktop are a few menu options listed below:
I’m loving this so far since I can finally increase my readiness, even a little. You can download the app now for free in the iTunes App Store. A gallery of app screenshots is after the cut.
Download | iTunes