If you thought Google Glass was a major potential distraction before, just wait until Glass users start spending hours getting cute cat pictures projected onto their eyeballs. Developer Malcolm Nguyen has created his own homemade Reddit app for Google Glass that includes the top 25 posts from your own Reddit front page and refreshes every hour. It also gives users the ability to vote posts and comments up or down, and the ability to both share links and to leave your own comments. More →
Perhaps the most fascinating trend in App Annie’s new March statistics is the transformation of the Google Play Android app store into a messaging app distributor. No fewer than three out of four biggest revenue generators in the non-game app chart are now messaging apps; LINE at No.1, WhatsApp at No.3 and KakaoTalk at No.4. The iPhone’s non-game revenue chart is a bit lighter on messaging app but still features LINE at No.1 and WhatsApp at No.8. More →
Apple’s next-generation OS X 10.9 software is obviously launching this year, and a new report claims to reveal several details about the upcoming OS that will debut at WWDC 2013. 9to5Mac on Monday reported a number of features seemingly set to debut in OS X 10.9, which it says has been given the codename “Cabernet” internally at Apple. OS X 10.9 will not be a major overhaul according to the report, which may be fitting considering the lackluster MacBook refresh expected to be showcased at WWDC. Apple’s updated PC platform will include a number of interesting new features, however, and it will also reportedly pull in some “core features” from iOS. More →
Swype, the popular Android typing application owned by Nuance, may be making its way to the iPhone in some form. In a Reddit Ask Me Anything session, Swype vice president Aaron Sheedy said that his company has “chatted with” Apple about bringing Swype to iOS, although no deal is imminent at this point. 9to5Mac notes that Swype owner Nuance is already licensing out its voice recognition technology to Apple to use for its Siri personal assistant software, so the two companies do have a good relationship. At the very least, 9to5Mac says, the talks with Nuance over Swype mean that Apple is likely “looking to make some big improvements to its built-in iOS keyboard,” which could involve adopting Swype or licensing some of the technologies it uses.
Facebook Home may have been downloaded more than 500,000 times in its first week but new research from BTIG suggests that it could take significantly longer to get its next 500,000 downloads. Using data from AppAnnie, BTIG found that Facebook Home’s ranking in the Google Play charts peaked at No. 50 on April 19th before quickly declining to No. 130 less than a week later. While Facebook debuted its Home application to great fanfare earlier this month, the app has been poorly received by many Android users who have been bombarding it with one-star reviews that account for more than half of all its total reviews on Google Play. BTIG says that because Facebook plans monthly updates to Home, it stands a chance to rebound if it can improve the user experience.
When hedge fund ValueAct announced it had taken a $2 billion stake in Microsoft earlier this week, questions arose about what changes the activist investor would try to make to improve the company’s value for shareholders. ZDNet reports that ValueAct’s first declared goal for Microsoft is to get it to release its Office suite of enterprise software for rival mobile platforms iOS and Android. This is particularly important because a report from earlier this month indicated that Microsoft wouldn’t have Office for iOS and Android ready until 2014 at the earliest. If ValueAct is using its newfound clout within the company to get Microsoft to focus its efforts more on developing Office for other platforms, then we could see Office release on iOS and Android sooner than we’d expected.
Amazon apparently isn’t willing to let Apple and Google hog the market for voice-enabled personal assistants. Unnamed sources have told TechCrunch that Amazon has purchased Evi, a Siri-like voice assistant application that had been developed by True Knowledge, “a British startup with a natural language search engine developed in university labs.” Although TechCrunch has been unable to get official confirmation from Amazon, the publication’s sources say that Amazon paid around $26 million to acquire the app. Given Amazon’s investment in both Evi and voice recognition software company Ivona, TechCrunch speculates that the company may be inching close to developing its own smartphone to compliment its Kindle Fire line of tablets.
While Windows 8 has a lot going for it, it’s also proven to be a very polarizing operating system that many users have criticized for departing too much from earlier versions. The most common complaint lobbed at Windows 8 is that it lacks the classic Start button that Microsoft users have long relied on as a central navigation tool. But with rumors percolating that Microsoft is considering dialing back some of the changes it made to Windows with the next major update to the operating system, Forrester analyst J.P. Gownder is encouraging the company to go all-out and bring back the Start button as a nod to users’ constructive criticisms. More →
Windows 8 hasn’t exactly been the huge boost PC vendors were looking for to reinvigorate the slumping PC market. In fact, a few reports suggest it’s actually having the opposite effect on sales. While some users seem to really enjoy the new tile-based user interface found on the Start screen, it’s also mentioned in nearly every complaint about Windows 8 we have seen — many people would like to bypass it and boot directly to the Desktop. The lack of a Start button is also a big problem for a number of users, but both of these issues are rumored to be addressed in Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8.1 update. Of course, as we’ve discussed before here on BGR, there’s no reason to wait: You can boot directly to the Desktop and get the Start button back in Windows 8 right now with one simple, free app. More →
Windows 8′s luddite-scaring Start Screen has managed to frighten enough people that Microsoft may be backing away from making the new view central to the Windows experience. According to a new rumor from The Verge, Microsoft’s next major Windows release will include an option to boot and log in straight to the desktop view, allowing users to bypass the polarizing tile-based Start interface that been the target of much criticism. The new option will be disabled by default in Windows 8.1, according to the report, but it will be simple enough to enable. Sadly for some, users will still need to download free third-party software if they want the classic Start button back.
If early reviews are any indication, Google doesn’t have to worry too much about Facebook Home winning the hearts and minds of Android users. Facebook Home’s Google Play page shows that roughly 47% of Android users have given the new software just one star so far, while another 14.5% have given it two stars. Taken together, 61.5% of Google Play users so far have given Facebook’s newest Android software a below-average rating and Facebook Home’s overall rating on Google Play stands at 2.3 stars. Among other things, negative reviewers complained that Facebook Home “hid most of my other apps,” that it had “no support for my other widgets” and that it “made my phone so frustratingly complicated to use that I uninstalled after just four or five hours.”
Everyone seems to following be Pandora into the music discovery business these days and Twitter has decided getting into the game by releasing its own music app on Friday. There’s just one catch, however: As AllThingsD writes, Twitter is only making the app accessible to select “influencers” such as Ryan Seacrest before making it available to the non-famous portion of the public. The music app apparently “suggests artists and tracks to users based on a number of personalized signals, including the Twitter accounts a user follows on the microblogging service” and will let users “listen to clips of music from inside the app, using third-party services like iTunes and SoundCloud.” AllThingsD says that the music app will likely be released for all users some time next week.
