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Angry Birds Space Downloaded 100 Million Times in 76 Days

This morning, Rovio Entertainment (@RovioHQ) tweeted that their latest franchise hit, Angry Birds Space, has been downloaded 100 million times in just over a period of two months.

When we last heard from Rovio, Angry Birds Space was touted as the “fastest growing mobile game” after hitting 50 million downloads within the first 35 days, and 10 million downloads within the first 3 days. Comparatively, when Angry Birds first launched in December of 2009, it took until June, 2010, to reach 5 million downloads.

As the popularity of the iPhone and Angry Birds has exponentially increased, Angry Birds fans are more than happy to get a dose of the kid and adult friendly gameplay. Rovio recently reported that Angry Birds was downloaded one billion times in May, after reporting 648 billion downloads in December. Apple’s all time record charts noted Angry Birds as the top paid iPhone app, with an HD version on the iPad being the second top paid app.

When we looked at Angry Bird’s success last November, we charted its exponential growth and made note of its addictive gameplay. At the time, gamers were racking up more than 300 million minutes per day playing Angry Birds, putting in well over 200,000 years of pig crushing, crate smashing, and star collecting fun.

[Rovio via iDownloadBlog]

MacUpdate June 2012 Bundle: 11 Mac Apps for $49.99

Today, there is a new MacUpdate Bundle that comes with a selection of top-notch Mac productivity apps, utilities, and games for just $49.99. The MacUpdate June 2012 bundle includes some of MacStories’ favorite Mac apps including the excellent Espionage (our review) and the ultimate calendar and to-do list manager for your Mac in BusyCal. If you tried purchasing the included apps individually you’d be paying nearly $450, so if you’re looking to beef up your collection of Mac apps this is a terrific deal at just $49.99.

The MacUpdate June 2012 Bundle includes:

  • Parallels Desktop 7 - The most trusted solution for running Windows applications on your Mac, as well as other operating systems.
  • BusyCal - The ultimate calendar and to-do list manager for your Mac.
  • ScreenFlow - A powerful, easy-to-use screencasting software for your Mac.
  • Civilization V - the latest installment of the legendary turn-based strategy game.
  • Jaksta - Capture audio and video from the Web with unprecedented ease.
  • Espionage - A data security solution that protects your files and folders in a unique and convenient way.
  • Speed Download - A lightning-fast download manager that ensures your Internet connection is utilized to its full extent.
  • Attachment Tamer - Gives you complete control over your Apple Mail attachments.
  • KeyCue - A handy utility for learning and memorizing keyboard shortcuts.
  • A Better Finder Rename - The most complete renaming solution available on the market today.
  • My Living Desktop - Transform your desktop into a moving, living environment.
  • If you help spread the word about this bundle, MacUpdate will give you a copy of RedHand, a $5 value, for free.

Disclaimer: For every bundle purchased through MacStories, we receive a small kickback. If you’re interested in the bundle and supporting the MacStories crew, please use the link here or any of the affiliate links above.

Apple Starts Decorating Moscone West with WWDC 2012 Banners

A few days earlier than expected, Apple has started decorating the Moscone West in San Francisco for its upcoming WWDC 2012, which kicks off on Monday, June 11. Last year, with WWDC 2011 set for June 6, Apple started decorating Moscone on June 2, famously showing the previously unseen iCloud logo ahead of the event.

Like last year, our friend @SteveStreza has managed to capture a series of photos of the work in progress at Moscone West. Right now, it appears only a large banner has been put in place, highlighting the focus on third-party apps with a “Where great ideas go on to do great things” tagline. The first banner, using the same colorful background seen on the official WWDC website, shows icons for various third-party apps and games including Tweetbot, Foursquare, Path, Hulu+, Instagram, SpellTower, Twitter, TED, Evernote, Facebook, CNN, and StockTouch.

We have received the first photos of Moscone West, and included them after the break.We will update this post with more photos as we receive them throughout the day.

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Agenda 3.0: Fast Event Creation, Custom Repeats and More

Agenda, by Savvy Apps, is a fantastic and minimal calendar replacement for iOS (universal) with many built-in options. We’ve covered Agenda a few times already but the new 3.0 update adds some excellent new features and updates.

The first, and most important update is a custom event creation screen that’s much faster than the default iOS one. It has a simplified layout that lets you access event elements without going into second and third screens. This means you only need to tap once to access the event title, start & end time, alerts, location, and notes. You can swipe between calendar months and the animation is very slick!  The dots beneath the calendar identify what month you are in - past, present or future. Agenda now imports your contacts from iOS so once an event is created, you can attach them by tapping the calendar icon and choosing what contacts you want to add to your event for things such as text, email, calls, or status taps.

Another great feature that Agenda now has is a set of customizable repeat options. While on the event creation screen, tap the icon next to the repeat section to choose dates for ending repeating events, create repeating events for specific days or dates of the month, and much more.

Defaults, defaults, defaults! I wish more apps had a larger set of defaults — it makes data entry much easier if there is a predefined set of options. You can now pick defaults for calendar, event alert sounds, view, duration, alert, and all day alert time via Agenda’s built-in Settings > Defaults menu.

iPad users also get a few new options: swiping right or left will now change views, year and week view now move up or down instead of right or left and you can now change settings to a smaller modal view.

To read the complete release notes for Agenda 3.0, Savvy Apps has a listing for your viewing pleasure. They also have a great little Tips & Tricks section on the Agenda page to help you enter events even faster. If you don’t like the new “Fast Event Creation” screen you can always toggle back to the native iOS event creation from Agenda’s settings, but the new way is so much easier and more fun!

Agenda 3.0 is a great upgrade to a great product — anytime you can streamline manual data entry into one screen gets a big thumbs up from me. The Tips & Tricks are worth 2 minutes of your time to read so that you can fully understand the new “Fast Event Creation” screen. Agenda is a universal app and available in the App Store for 99¢, while existing users get the 3.0 update for free.

ProductiveMacs Bundle: 8 Great Mac Apps for $39

Bundle season for the Mac is in full effect, but this one isn’t about games. This bundle throws together some really powerful utilities that will help you get work done such as RapidWeaver, DEVONthink, Printopia, MailTags, HoudahSpot, Trickster (brand new, read our review) MacJournal and Voila. If you purchased all 8 of these productive goodies separately they would cost $290 but this bundle is priced at the super-low total of $39.  The ProductiveMacs bundle, organized via Apparent Software, are hosting a bundle that features a fine collection of seriously powerful software for your Mac.

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Comic Zeal Updates with Retina Graphics on the iPad→

Comic Zeal Updates with Retina Graphics on the iPad

From the App Store:

Hi all, do we have retina for you! CZ 5 looks wonderful with retina graphics on the new iPad. Hope you all enjoy. Also added auto sorting and the ability to put comics in the home page. Turn both of those on if you’re after the ‘ol CZ 4 experience.

- Added option to auto-sort a series when new comics are added to it on import.
- Added option to auto-sort the home page after an import.
- Retina graphics throughout.
- Comic Zeal will generate high resolution thumbnails when the device has a retina display.
- Comic Zeal will now try harder to find thumbnails to represent a series if there are dividers present in the series.
- Comics downloaded from bitolithic are no longer backed up.
- The ‘new comics are western/manga’ is infinitely more reliable.

I don’t read too many comics, but when I do, I always use Comic Zeal. I’m very happy to see this much awaited update finally happen for the 3rd generation iPad — comics have always showed up fine but the pixelated interface was a letdown when we last checked out a group of comic apps in May. Bitolithic’s blog post discussed the update on May 3rd in anticipation for its eventual release — Comic Zeal 5.1.4 was finally made available on June 3rd. Comic Zeal is available on the App Store for $4.99.

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May 2012 In Review

May was a huge month for new apps and app updates with everything from Spotify for iPad, Diet Coda and TouchArcade launching to Flipboard, Sparrow and Tweetbot seeing sweet updates - and that’s only scratching the surface, there was a lot more. As for news, we saw another Siri ad (this time with John Malkovich), confirmation of the Mac App Store sandboxing deadline of June 1st, WWDC Keynote announcement and Rovio had two big pieces of news. Finally, we had some great stories go up in May and Lukas keeps writing awesome app reviews in his Inspiring UIs series. So without further ado, jump the break and enjoy the recap of May and sorry we’re a few days late this month!

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Airlines Increasing Fuel Efficiency By Adopting The iPad As An Entertainment Device→

Airlines Increasing Fuel Efficiency By Adopting The iPad As An Entertainment Device

Bloomberg reports today that startup airline Scoot Pte (their maiden flight is today) will save fuel and have increased profits by deploying the iPad as the passenger entertainment device. By cutting out old entertainment systems weighing more than two tons, they’ve saved fuel while still flying older airplanes and even expanding traditional seating capacity by 40 per cent. Increasing profit, the post-PC way.

The tablets helped the carrier cut 7 percent off the weight of planes obtained from parent Singapore Airlines Ltd. (SIA) even after a 40 percent increase in seating, Chief Executive Officer Campbell Wilson said. The savings will help Scoot, which makes its maiden flight today, cope with fuel prices that have jumped about 36 percent in two years.

Scoot Pte will rent the iPads for $17 a flight to economy-class passengers and offering them for free to those in business class. It follows moves by other airlines such as Jetstar, AirAsia and Qantas which have deployed the iPad in trials and small test runs since late last year.

Cutting costs and finding new sources of revenue will be key for Singapore-based Scoot as it seeks to make a profit flying older planes than other low-cost carriers and selling tickets as cheap as S$158 one-way to Sydney, a flight of more than seven hours. Singapore Air formed Scoot after budget operators led by Jetstar and AirAsia Bhd. won 26 percent of the city’s air-travel market.

By reducing fuel costs, parent company Singapore Airlines hopes that it can turn over a new leaf with Scoot after it tumbled 28 percent this year, exceeding the 14 percent decline for the Straits Times Index. It’s really crazy to think that something like the iPad can have such a huge impact on fuel efficiency of airplanes - today’s story is on top of  the existing trend of airlines replacing flight manuals with iPads that Tim Cook gladly shared earlier this year.

Scoot plans to increase its fleet to as many as 14 777s by the middle of the decade. The carrier will be able to pare maintenance costs by working with its parent, Wilson said.

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Updated Editor’s Choice Section Hand Picks Best of the Best

Last week’s App Store update introduced Editor’s Choice banners on the iOS and Mac App Stores that highlighted that week’s best apps. In turn, App of the Week became Apple’s way of promoting cherry picked apps while offering them for free (similar to app deals found on Amazon’s App Store for the Kindle Fire). This week, Apple has subsequently introduced a rebranded “App of the Week” as the Editor’s Choice section in the iOS App Store, showcasing both iPhone and iPad apps. The Editor’s Choice section of the App Store aims to showcase the highest quality and the most innovative apps on their store, with the showcase being divided into new and previous picks. Apple recommends that you check back often to check for new applications.

The Editor’s Choice section for the iPad can be found here, while the Editor’s Choice section for the iPhone can be found here.