TheAppleGoogle

Android Studio – An IDE Just For Android Developers

TheAppleGoogle — Wed, 15 May 2013 19:16:39 +0000

Android developers are getting a huge boost today. Google at Google I/O today announced the release of Android Studio – an IDE built just for Android developers so they can build and deploy Apps faster. This is nothing completely unique to the platform, but instead a much needed tool as most of the other major players in the market like Apple and Microsoft provide their own set of tools to ease the life of developers. Android Studio is a replacement for Eclipse.

Android Studio is built off of the IntelliJ IDEA.

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Android Developers Can Now Beta Test Before Pushing Out Updates

TheAppleGoogle — Wed, 15 May 2013 18:54:37 +0000

If you are a successful Android developer, chances are that you wouldn’t want to push out an update that is unstable and might cause distress amongst your loyal user fan base. At Google I/O today, Google announced that starting today, Android developers will be able to beta test their Apps before pushing it out to the masses. Within the developer console, there will now be three tabs – “alpha testing”, “beta testing” and “product”.

Using users from Google+ and Google Groups, developers can now select them to allow them to beta test the App before making it live. Constant feedback can be posted by the users which can be viewed using the Google Developer Console. This is definitely going to be a popular feature and make iOS users jealous. They always have TestFlight at their disposal though.

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Google Launches Unified Messaging App for iOS, Android and Chrome

TheAppleGoogle — Wed, 15 May 2013 18:45:16 +0000

At Google I/O today, Google launched a new unified messaging App for iOS, Android and Chrome dubbed “Hangouts”. Hangouts is now a standalone application instead of simply being a feature of Google+ and as Google describes it – “conversations which last” and “with people that you love.” Just like any other messaging App, you will find all your friends with whom you can chat, share photos, emoji and voice calls for free.

Icons for people will be displayed as well and the overall UI is absolutely stunning.

You can download Hangouts for iOS from here, for Android from here and the Chrome App from here.

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UniFrame For iOS – A Photo Frames App

mohini — Tue, 14 May 2013 17:22:05 +0000

UniFrame is the latest App in a series of photo presentation Apps which have hit the AppStore recently. But UniFrame has an edge over the other Apps with its unique feature which allows you to browse images from various sources – internet and your own – to create a beautiful, collage-style photo frame. Unfortunately, the execution of the App slightly lets down this brilliant idea.

UniFrame has a simple and slick UI. A swipe down brings up the menu, while swiping up closes it. With just a tap you can enlarge and close the photos. A tap-and-hold lets you take a screenshot which is saved to the Camera Roll and can be subsequently shared on Facebook and Twitter, or E-mailed. You have the ability to choose from various photo-sharing services such as Flickr, Instagram, 500px, Facebook Albums and your own photo gallery. (You can also access Google Images with the paid version for $1.99). But this is when the problems begin. First of all, UniFrame crashed several times when I tried to select more than two or three sources or if I changed the frame style. It complained about internet connectivity, although other Apps on my phone continued to work fine. If you select Photo Gallery first, followed by another source then pictures from your own gallery don’t appear. The only way to resolve this is to un-select and re-select the Photo Gallery option. Sometimes, changing the view (source or frame-style) leaves UniFrame slightly stuck, whereby it doesn’t display photos for a long time or one of the frames remain blank. There is also no way of pinning the photos to their frames or changing a single photo in a given selection, in order to achieve the look you may be after.

UniFrame has the potential to be a fantastic App which can make photo-browsing and photo-presentation extremely easy and enjoyable for the user; however, it does need to look at and resolve the above issues before it can achieve that.

TheAppleGoogle Rating – 6/10

You can download UniFrame for free (and for $1.99) from here.

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Steve Jobs High School GPA – 2.65

Francis — Tue, 14 May 2013 14:01:41 +0000

In life, nothing is certain. There are some kids with high grades in school that we expect a lot from but grow up to live mediocre lives, and there are those who we think won’t go far but end up becoming game changers. The late Steve Jobs is an example, we all know he was a college dropout when he started working with Atari. A miniaturization competition project paired him with Steve Wozniak and from there they eventually started a company that was to become the giant industry shaker known as Apple Inc.

Before college, Steve Jobs still didn’t shine as much as he did after he started Apple. In High School he was just an average student with a Grade Point Average (GPA) of just 2.65 out of a scale of 4.0. This means he got mostly Bs and Cs. The information came to light when The Atlantic found the interesting information on while going through Steve Jobs’s FBI file which was released recently.

They found the high school information on page 79 of the file. This just proves that genius sometimes takes on certain specialized paths: that a person can be really good at one thing but doesn’t excel at everything. Steve Jobs might not have made good grades on all subjects but he certainly excelled with business and with technology.

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Fantastical Receives New Update

TheAppleGoogle — Mon, 13 May 2013 20:10:19 +0000

Fantastical, the calendar App that everyone is talking about has just received an update that takes it to version 1.1.2. Fantastical is available on the App Store for $4.99 and is a calendar App with many unique features and a gorgeous user interface that sets it apart. The durations tab now includes the much needed 45 minutes option.

Here’s what the new in this new version –

- Can now duplicate events from read-only calendars to writeable calendars
- Added 45 minutes to the default event duration settings
- Canceled events now appear crossed out in the event list
- Fixed a problem where some events would appear incorrectly when changing time zones
- Fixed a bug where an all-day event’s alert wouldn’t get set correctly on Exchange calendars
- Various other improvements and bug fixes

You can download Fantastical from the App Store.

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Smashing Egg Tido! For iOS – Deliciously Addictive

mohini — Fri, 10 May 2013 13:55:10 +0000

With so many strategy and survival games already available on the AppStore and more joining the ranks almost every day, what makes a game stand out? Wolfgang Kramer said, “A good game makes us long to play it again.” Or, in other words, a good game is one which is addictive. That is the main criterion for success. Smashing Egg Tido! ticks that particular box emphatically. Once you start playing it, you will not be able to put it down.

The objective of Smashing Egg Tido! is to ensure the survival of egg Tido and stop it from turning into an omelette. It sounds silly and it is silly, but it’s extremely entertaining. Tido’s enemies range from Slam Devil to Big Boss. They attack it with spatula, knives, rolling pins and clay balls, and burn it with hot lava. Tido can either zap them by jumping on the ground or run away on a path drawn by you. Every time it gets hit its lifeline reduces. An egg on the top left corner reflects this by slowly turning red. When it is completely red Tido turns sunny-side up. To keep up its strength, Tido has to occasionally eat various foods like pizza and what looks like a muffin. With every chef Tido zaps it gets points, which can be converted into one of eight power-ups, like Grenade Smash, Egg Shield and the most expensive of all, Nuclear Smash. These are not only helpful during the game, but also a lot of fun. Smashing Egg Tido! can be played on two fields: grass or ice, although there isn’t very much difference between the two, except for the graphics. The playing level can be set to slow, medium or fast which caters to both children and adults. In addition, you get an option to either use a joystick or touch. Your score can be uploaded to the leaderboard via Facebook or Twitter where you can compete with and beat your friends.

One area where Smashing Egg Tido! is lacking is the animation which is not brilliant. A cleaner animation would definitely give the game a boost. A minor annoyance is the tutorial which plays out before every game and turning it off is not obvious. It would have been better to build it into the “Settings.” Overall, Smashing Egg Tido! is a very entertaining game and worth the price. You can play it anywhere, at anytime. Have fun and smash some chefs!

TheAppleGoogle Rating: 8/10

You can download Smashing Egg Tido! for $0.99 from here.

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Apple Might Call It iPhone 6 Instead Of The Expected 5S

Francis — Fri, 10 May 2013 05:31:21 +0000

A leaked photo, allegedly coming from a Vodaphone UK inventory shows an entry for a 4G iPhone 6. This leads to a speculation by tech experts that Apple will be bypassing their usual naming routine and skip directly to naming the new device iPhone 6 instead of iPhone 5S as expected. It has been speculated that at mid 2013 Apple will be unveiling an iPhone 5S and a lower cost iPhone version like the iPad which was given a lower cost version the iPad mini.

This leaked photograph however is not conclusive proof that Apple will indeed release an iPhone 6 on their next unveiling. It is a known practice of retailers and even network providers to use placeholder names for the devices they are expecting in their inventory. The actual name of the device then is still shrouded in mystery which is of course to be expected of the highly secretive Apple Inc.

Whatever the final name of the new iPhone will be, whether it will be called iPhone 5S or iPhone 6, the new phone would probably still have the 4-inch display screen used on the iPhone 5. Sources say display screen manufacturers in Japan has started production of the screens of this type. It is also expected that the A7 processor chip will not be available for retail use until 2013 so the new devices would still be using the A6X processors currently exclusively installed on the iPad 4. The new device might also be equipped with invisible sliders and buttons which uses LED lights and sensors to detect movement (same principle as how your mouse works), but the sketches leaked by Patenly Apple could be intended for another device because the sketches are little more than schematics and there is no way to tell if it is intended for the iPhone but we can always dream.

Whether the new iPhone would be called iPhone 6 or not still remains to be seen. There is only one thing for sure; we will never know the actual name and what features would be on the device until Apple’s unveiling.

via GottaBeMobile

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Apple Rumored to Release New Colored iPhone 5S in July

Francis — Mon, 06 May 2013 08:12:07 +0000

The buzz of what will be coming for this year from Apple has been making the rounds on the internet for some time. The latest of it involves the release of the new colored versions of the iPhone 5S in July. Ming-Chi Kou, an analyst at KGI Securities made some of the predictions and he has been right in his predictions of Apple’s moves in the past. It is predicted Apple will roll out the iPhone 5S, cheaper iPhone versions and fingerprint identification technology to go with them in July. There are also hints that the new iPhone will come in different colors with a casing made of anodized aluminum but it could be that the cheaper version will be the one getting the colorful casings in plastic; it is cheap to produce colorful plastic casings.

The lower cost iPhone will cut production cost by having a fiberglass and plastic casing and a slightly simplified chipset. Another of the rumored features of the new device is the fingerprint identification technology and a fingerprint sensor which would be located under the home button of the iPhone. This would not be surprising because Apple acquired Authen Tec last year. Authen Tec is a fingerprint sensor and security software company. Neither Apple nor Authen Tec confirmed the integration of the technology into any Apple device yet but we know that Apple is always tight-lipped about all of their technology before it is finally rolled out. Another not-so-surprising development on the iPhone 5S would be a faster processor, it is public knowledge that Apple has been developing their A5X chips successfully so far.

There is still no confirmation as to what the new Apple devices in July will be. Everything is just pure speculation at this point. We can never be sure until Apple will announce their new devices for the July roll out, in June. All we can do is sit and wait and see if Apple will be able to “surprise and shock” us this July.

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Apple Holds 39% of the US Smartphone Market: Another Victory for Apple

Francis — Mon, 06 May 2013 08:00:47 +0000

Despite the recent news of Apple’s probable fall due to the lowered value of Apple stocks as well as news that the company is being overtaken by Android based smartphones in the world market, Apple still holds its ground in the US. According to ComScore, Apple holds 39% of the US smartphone market showing that despite the issues that plagued the company the past few months, it is still going strong.

Apple saw an increase of 2.7% between the last quarter of 2012 to the first quarter of 2013. Samsung Electronics on the other hand, the second largest in market share and currently holds 21.7% market share only saw a growth of 0.07%. Other smartphone manufacturers HTC (9.0%), Motorola (8.5%), and LG (6.8%) saw a decrease in market share in the first quarter of this year when compared to the sales of the last quarter of 2012.

For the mobile platform category, Google Android still holds top spot at 52% market share, which is a decrease of 1.4% from last year’s 53.4%. Apple iOs, even if it just follows second with 39% market share saw an increase of 2.7% from the previous year’s 36.3%. Other contenders include Microsoft who grew its market share by 0.1% in the first quarter and BlackBerry and Symbian each showed a decrease in market share since last year.

The statistics are showing hope for Apple especially since Apple holds 39% of the US smartphone market. This could mean that the company is not going down any time soon as some analysts predict.

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