Posts tagged with "iOS"

Angry Birds Rio: 10 Million Downloads In 10 Days→

Angry Birds Rio: 10 Million Downloads In 10 Days

Perhaps Rovio’s success with the Angry Birds franchise doesn’t surprise anymore as much as it did in 2010, but we still think the numbers these games for iOS and Android are generating are impressive. The latest game of the series, Rio, is based on a collaboration with Twentieth Century Fox to merge the gameplay of Angry Birds with the world of Rio. With a tweet, Rovio said that Angry Birds Rio hit “10 in 10” – suggesting 10 million downloads were achieved in 10 days since the release of the app for iOS and Android devices, both in free and paid editions.

A bit of investigation by Mobile Entertainment has proved that, as expected, said tweet referred to the number of downloads in the same number of days.

Rovio didn’t provide detailed numbers for iPhone, iPad and Android sales, nor did they specify whether the free version was downloaded more than the paid one. Still, 10 million downloads in 10 days is impressive. Now about that fake movie trailer…

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#MacStoriesDeals - Friday

Happy birthday Apple! If you didn’t already know, we’ve set up a new twitter account for Deals, it’s @MacStoriesDeals. We’ll tweet the daily deals there as well as exclusive weekend deals too. Help spread the word! Here are today’s deals on iOS, Mac, and Mac App Store apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get ‘em while they’re hot!

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#MacStoriesDeals - Thursday

If you didn’t already know, we’ve set up a new twitter account for Deals, it’s @MacStoriesDeals. We’ll tweet the daily deals there as well as exclusive weekend deals too. Help spread the word! Here are today’s deals on iOS, Mac, and Mac App Store apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get ‘em while they’re hot!

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Finally: Twitter Has Killed The Quick Bar

Following user criticism (an euphemism) and complaints from several aficionados of the official iPhone client, Twitter released an update to the iOS app today, and they have removed the Quick Bar. Kindly called “dickbar” by many users on Twitter in the past weeks, the bar used to appear along the top of the main timeline to show promoted and regular trends. We didn’t like it. Nobody liked it. And now it’s gone.

In an official blog post, Twitter explains:

Rather than continue to make changes to the QuickBar as it exists, we removed the bar from the update appearing in the App Store today. We believe there are still significant benefits to increasing awareness of what’s happening outside the home timeline. Evidence of the incredibly high usage metrics for the QuickBar support this. For now, we’re going back to the drawing board to explore the best possible experience for in-app notification and discovery.

Twitter also says the Quick Bar could have evolved into a full-featured notification system for mentions, direct messages, and more. I guess we’ll never know at this point, or perhaps in-app visual notifications will be implemented in other ways in the future. We’ll see.

The updated, Quick Bar-free Twitter app is available in the App Store now. The latest version also introduces bug fixes, and we hope the company is referring to the annoying DM bug here. The bug has been around for ages now, it was fixed in a previous update, then it mysteriously came back. It’d be nice to see that gone, too.

Apple Patent of the Day: Spaces for the iPad

PASpaces

PASpaces

Spaces are crucial to my daily workflow on my MacBook (I never was a ⌘⇥ guy), and the prospect of using Spaces on my iPad as a virtual workspace is amusing. While Spaces will still exist in Lion alongside Mission Control, Spaces itself is sort of taking a backseat in terms of what we traditionally think of in Leopard and Snow Leopard.  The patent suggests that Apple has been toying with the idea of Spaces on the iPad – shown running a version of OS X in the patent files – and suggests that multitouch gestures could manipulate items on screen and bring Spaces into view. Just like the desktop, gestures have been submitted which give users the ability to push a window to an adjacent space by dragging applications to the edge of the screen, and to drag windows between virtual the virtual desktops. The gesture to open Spaces is noted as a pinching gesture at the corner of the display, a perfect choice in that it also mimics the hot corner features in OS X. The patent was filed in Q3 of 2009, and give us a little insight into how Apple may incorporate a new multitasking system in iOS. I don’t think the multitasking bar is as nimble as HP’s Card view when it comes to multitasking on webOS devices, and mulling over a patent like this reminds us that Apple may make some big changes in the next iteration of iOS.

[via Patently Apple]

#MacStoriesDeals - Exclusive Wednesday

If you didn’t already know, we’ve set up a new twitter account for Deals, it’s @MacStoriesDeals. We’ll tweet the daily deals there as well as exclusive weekend deals too. Help spread the word! Here are today’s deals on iOS, Mac, and Mac App Store apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get ‘em while they’re hot!

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N.O.V.A. 3 Will Use Unreal Engine, Coming Later This Year→

N.O.V.A. 3 Built On Unreal Engine, Coming Later This Year

Pocket Gamer reports an interesting tidbit about software development studio Gameloft and its first-person shooter game N.O.V.A. for iOS:

Gameloft has confirmed what we already knew down here in the Rumour Mine - it’s busy working on four games utilising Epic Games’s Unreal Engine 3. But the Paris-based publisher hasn’t revealed what those games are.

Word has it that shooter sequel N.O.V.A. 3 is among the four titles built around the engine and will be out later this year.

I’m not a huge fan of Gameloft’s console-like approach to iOS, but I think it’ll be interesting to see how a new N.O.V.A. developed with the same engine that powers Infinity Blade will fit in the iOS gaming scene. Gameloft has plenty of time to make N.O.V.A. graphically more impressive than Infinity Blade or Rage HD come the 2011 holiday season. And – we’ll see if I’m wrong – I have a feeling a brand new N.O.V.A. with stunning graphics could make for the perfect demo at a certain Apple fall event.

Also: who else thinks Infinity Blade is going to win an Apple Design Award in June? [via Steve Troughton-Smith]

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HOW TO: Use Amazon Cloud Player With iOS Devices→

HOW TO: Use Amazon Cloud Player With iOS Devices

One of the standout features of iCab Mobile is the ability to change the browser User Agent. In other words, this lets the website think that you are visiting from a browser other than Mobile Safari. Changing the Browser ID to “Safari 5 (Mac)” will allow users to download music using the Mobile Safari method, even if Amazon does change how it serves downloaded files.

Christina Warren notes that there isn’t a technical limitation preventing Amazon from serving content to iOS devices, but currently you have to either use an alternative browser to change the User Agent or download each song one-by-one for playback in Safari. I’m still miffed that Amazon isn’t flexing their muscle and aggressively pursuing the iOS platform at launch, considering that’s really where the market for cloud based music streaming exists. The uploading and playback tools might be a little rough around the edges, but Amazon’s integration and incentives need to give Apple a run for its money on the platform that counts.

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#MacStoriesDeals - Tuesday

If you didn’t already know, we’ve set up a new twitter account for Deals, it’s @MacStoriesDeals. We’ll tweet the daily deals there as well as exclusive weekend deals too. Help spread the word! Here are today’s deals on iOS, Mac, and Mac App Store apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get ‘em while they’re hot! Read more