Weekly Digest - 2020.49

Weekly Digest - 2020.49

Salesforce buys Slack

Saleforce, a cloud computing giant will acquire the Chat service - Slack - for $27.7 billion. Slack is one of the most popular communicator in the computer industry.

It is still unknown what are Salesforce's plans for the application, but it is quite possible they will be related with enterprise customers.

Apple announced the most downloaded apps and games from the App Store in the 2020.

The top 3 free apps:

  1. Zoom
  2. TikTok
  3. Disney+

Top 3 paid apps:

  1. TouchRetouch
  2. Procreate Pocket
  3. FaceTune

Top 3 free games:

  1. Among Us
  2. Call of Duty Mobile
  3. Roblox

Top 3 paid games:

  1. Minecraft
  2. Plague Inc.
  3. Heads Up! Best Charades game

Apple's Best App of 2020

Apple also announced the best apps of 2020:

  • iPhone App of the Year: Wakeout!
  • ‌iPhone‌ Game of the Year: Genshin Impact
  • iPad App of the Year: Zoom,
  • iPad‌ Game of the Year: Legends of Runeterra
  • Mac Game of the Year: Disco Elysium
  • Mac App of the Year: Fantastical
  • ‌Apple TV‌ App of the Year:  Disney+
  • ‌Apple TV‌ Game of the Year: Dandara Trials of Fear
  • Apple Watch App of the Year: Endel
  • Apple Arcade Game of the Year: Sneaky Sasquatch

Also, winners will get a physical trophy.

Image credits: Slack

Weekly Digest - 2020.14

Zoom's security issues

Intel's 10th Gen CPUs

Apple acquires Dark Sky

AirTag Confirmed?

Weekly digest - 2019.45

Weekly digest - 2019.45

Photoshop for iPad

Almost a year after it was first announced, Photoshop for the iPad has been released. And it is not just a psd viewer. It is fully featured Photoshop optimized to touch interface. Of course it doesn't have all the futures that desktop brother has, nevertheless it is one of the most powerful image editing applications for the iPad.

One other fact worth pointing out is that Adobe now have the ARM engine for the Photoshop. This might be important in the future, when Apple decide to transition from Intel to ARM processors.

Office app for iOS & Android

Microsoft launched new Office app for mobile devices. It combines Word, Excel and PowerPoint into single download. Beside from the ability to read and edit Office files, it will allow to browse documents and create a new ones using ability to scan text and tables.  

At the moment Office app is still in Beta, but soon it should replace Word, Excel and PowerPoint in the AppStores.

Image credits: Adobe

Weekly digest - 2019.20

Weekly digest - 2019.20

2019 iPhone design

Mark Gurman tweeted a photo of alleged case molds for upcoming iPhones. Those molds align with previous rumors and shows much bigger, square camera bump. The bigger bump could be justified on the next iPhone XS ans XS Max, which are suppose to get 3 rear cameras, but XR model, despite the rumors about having only 2 cameras, also has square bump, almost the same size as XS will have.

Next Star Wars movies

Last week we got confirmation of the next Star Wars trilogy. This week, Bob Iger confirmed the rumors that David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, Games of Thrones show runners, will create next movie.  I'm stoked to see next movies, but looking at the turmoil the last season of Games of Thrones created I'm also a little bit worried.

Beside this, we also got more detailed release dates:

  • Part 1 - 16th December 2022
  • Part 2 - 20th December 2024
  • Part 3 - 18th December 2026

3rd Star Wars TV show

Bob Iger also revealed that during 3 years break from the movies we will get 3 Star Wars TV shows. So far we know about The Mandalorian and Cassian Andor series. The third one was a surprise and becomes an interesting mystery.

App Store Monopoly Lawsuit Against Apple

The U.S. Supreme Court decided to proceed with the class action lawsuit against Apple. The lawsuit was filed in 2011 by some iPhone users who believe that Apple violates federal antitrust laws by requiring apps to be sold only through  the App Store. This allows Apple to collects a 30% cut from all purchases, which leads to inflated prices of the applications.

Long story short, iPhone users believe that apps would be priced lower outside of the App Store, as Apple's 30 percent cut would not be calculated into  prices.

I have mixed filings about this. I agree that 30% cut is a big one and it didn't change since the beginning of the AppStore, but I also doubt that apps would be priced differently outside of the AppStore.  

Image credits: Mark Gurman