Software & Apps - Page 57

Microsoft has teamed with Kano on a new build-your-own Windows 10 PC kit, which will see the new Kano PC teaching kids how to not just build their own touchscreen laptops, but create content and even code on them. Check out the video below:

Kano was already making DIY computer kits before the new relationship with Microsoft kicked off, as it was building DIY rigs powered by Raspberry Pi 3s and Kano's own operating system. The new Kano PC is powered by Windows 10 (but in S Mode, so it only runs apps from the Microsoft Store) while inside we're looking at an Intel Atom x5-Z8350 quad-core CPU @ 1.44GHz, 4GB of RAM, and 64GB of storage upgradeable through microSD.

We also have an HDMI output, 3.5mm headphone jack, 2 x USB ports, Wi-Fi as well as Bluetooth.

LG has just introduced something very new: the world's first IPS-based display with a super-low 1ms response time in its new UltraGear series gaming monitors.

The new LG UltraGear monitors come in both 27-inch and 37.5-inch varieties with different resolutions, aspect ratios, and refresh rates. They will use the same high-quality Nano IPS technology from LG with support for DCI-P3 color gamut as well as NVIDIA's G-Sync technology.

As for specs, we'll begin with LG's new UltraGear 27GL850 which uses a 27-inch IPS panel with a native 2560x1440 resolution, 16:9 aspect ratio, 144Hz refresh rate, and 1ms GtG response time.

Ubisoft have announced the pre-registrations and pre-orders for their coming app 'Mighty Quest For Epic Loot' are now available for users.

Mighty Quest For Epic Loot pits players in a new action-RPG that is fast-paced, thrilling and rewarding. Players will battle their way through masses of undead skeletons and many other different enemies, while attempting to dodge and maneuver their way around obstacles and other nasties that are attempting to ruin players' fun.

The title also allows players to customize their character in the regards of skills, items, weapons, armor and artefacts. Ubisoft will be rewarding players who sign-up to the game with a bonus item, and if pre-registers reach 1 million players will receive the unique pet 'Bradley, the Doomsday Messenger'. Mighty Quest For Epic Loot is available on both the App Store and the Google Play Store.

League of Legends is one of the biggest games on the planet with 100 million monthly players, and that's only on PC. That could soon be changing as rumors have surfaced saying the game is being developed for mobile.

League of Legends (LoL) recently had Tencent buy a considerable amount of the companies shares in Riot Games, and as a result the LoL has seen a considerable amount of Chinese players join the scene. Since LoL is only on PC at the moment, Tencent wants to capitalize on the hot mobile market for MOBA games, essentially expanding their reach across the Chinese and Western markets.

Reuters has reportedly spoken to sources close to Riot Games who have said that Tencent and Riot are currently in the works for developing a League of Legends app. The sources say that this project has been under way for over a year now, but completion might arrive in 2019. If this news is accurate, Tencent will certainly penetrate the mobile market and other MOBA-like apps will certainly take a hit player-base wise. Hopefully more official news is announced sometime soon.

It has been a bit over a year since Valve released their dedicated desktop chatting service under their Steam umbrella. Now the company has brought out an official messaging app.

The new app has already been made available on both Android and iOS, and comes under the title of 'Steam Chat.' As expected, the app encompasses everything that was included within the desktop version of Steam Chat but instead aims to be much more accessible for the user.

Since Valve are moving more into communication and a better user experience across their Steam platform, it will be interesting to see if they can develop a service that would be good enough to pull gamers from communication programs such as TeamSpeak or Discord. It could be possible that Valve are aiming to spit out the ultimate communication platform that will render these programs obsolete, and keep Steam users on their platform.

Discord has become one of the most versatile utilities for gaming and many other subjects that require verbal communication. So how about the Nintendo Switch picks up some of that love?

On the official Twitter account for Discord, a fan has asked when we would see Discord for the Nintendo Switch. While this seems like a no brainer for the Nintendo Switch to have support for Discord, that isn't the case at the moment. Discord replied to the question saying "We would love to bring Discord to the switcht! But we'd need Nintendo's blessing for that to happen first." Discord even go on to say that Nintendo Switch users who support the idea of Discord on the Switch should "Vote up the idea here and maybe it could be a thing someday".

I'm not sure if Nintendo will accept Discord on the Nintendo Switch due to them already having their Nintendo Switch Online app that allows for voice communication across games. With that being said, the addition of Discord on the Switch would certainly undermine their already established communication method. This makes me think that Nintendo would decline the inclusion of this third-party software and instead stick to their own.

Most of the time artificial intelligence is brought up one of the main questions raised is how badly will the implementation of artificial intelligence in jobs be, and how many peoples jobs will be made redundant. Perhaps artificial intelligence if further along than we think and some serious amount of jobs could be at risk.

A new study has come out of MIT Technology Review Insights which has conducted the study in association with ADP, Infocomm Media Development Authority of Singapore, Genesys, Splunk and the Asia School of Business. The study features a executive survey of 900 leaders as well as "data set provided by Faethm, a future-of-work cloud software company, the report shows, by country and industry, the proportion of formal sector jobs that will become redundant through automation, and the jobs that will be augmented by AI, making them more productive and highly skilled".

The study says that "AI will affect one in five jobs in Asia-eliminating one in eight" and that across 11 Asian markets, 12% of current jobs are in the "high-risk" of being automated in the "next five years". The AI effect on jobs are said to be more prominent in the more wealthier economies than the poorer ones. Percentage separation clocks in at 14% in wealthier communities, and 10% in poorer ones.

A new update has been issued out to the official Nintendo Switich Online app, the update brings the app up to version 1.5.0 and adds some new features.

The new update doesn't add a whole tonne of new features to the app but it has enough substance to consider it an update to the app. Version 1.5.0 brings "Various performance and usability improvements implemented, including changing the button display position." The update also adds numerous fixes to bugs and increases what is required operating system wise for both Android and iOS.

According to the patch notes, users that have the Nintendo Switch Online app will be required to have iOS 10.0 or later or if they on Android have 5.0 later. If you want to get onto the Nintendo Switch Online app, a link to the Google Play Store can be found here, and a link to the Apple Store version can be found here.

We have reported on the progress of Niantic's Pokemon Go app for quite some time now, and now another analytics report has come out claiming the company has reached another milestone.

A new report has come out from the analytical website Sensor Tower, the report says that just before the third anniversary date for Pokemon GO the app has reached a new revenue milestone of $2.5 billion. According to Sensor Tower Store Intelligence, Pokemon GO has raked in a staggering $2.5 billion in player spending since its creation back on the 7th of July, 2017. Sensor Tower also reports that there has been a $700 million dollar increase in revenue since the apps last anniversary.

This means that Pokemon GO has earned around $78 million per month since its last anniversary. Moving on to 2019 statistics now, since the first quarter of 2019 Pokemon GO has grossed $205 million, which averages out to an insane $2.3 million per day. When comparing to 2018's first quarter, Sensor Tower claims that there is a 40% increase in revenue year-over-year due to 2018's Q1 sales being $147 million. If you are interested in more information about Pokemon GO, check out the Sensor Tower Store website here.

Microsoft has announced that Windows 10 has hit a couple of major milestones, where it was spread far and wide today that over 800 million devices have Windows 10 installed.

The other big milestone for Windows 10 is that it has the highest customer satisfaction in the history of Windows, something underlined by Microsoft Corporate VP of Modern Life & Devices Yusuf Mehdi. Mehdi tweeted: "Thank you to all our customers and partners for helping us achieve 800 million #Windows10 devices and the highest customer satisfaction in the history of Windows".

Microsoft predicted it would have 1 billion users with Windows 10 within 2-3 years, but it hasn't quite hit that peak yet. However, Windows 7 is about to die finally and that should see Windows 10 adoption skyrocket.

Facebook has followed in the steps of Twitter as the company has issued out a brand new 'Dark Mode' to its global communications app 'Messenger'. The new mode can be activated by any user and here is how.

Facebook has snuck in the 'Dark Mode' feature in the latest update of the Messenger app, the new feature can be activated by users that are both on Android and iOS devices. Here is how to do it; all you have to do is send the crescent 'moon' emoji in a chat with either yourself or someone else and the app will respond with "You found Dark Mode!" Below will be a short-cut for turning dark mode on in the settings, selecting that option you take you to the Messenger settings where you will have to select that you want dark mode to be on.

After these steps are done the app should appear black. Some users have reported the app not converting straight away, but this can be fixed with a quick restart of either the phone or the app. Facebook brought this new feature to Messenger as apart of the Messenger 4 updates, which detailed the dark mode in the 'personal' section. Other aspects of the update can be viewed here. Facebook commented on the roll out of the 'dark mode' in a blogpost, saying "We're over the moon to share that dark mode for Messenger is finally making its debut. One of the most highly anticipated features from the launch of Messenger 4, dark mode is a sleek new look that goes easy on the eyes by switching the background from white to black."

Maxon and its Cinebench R15 benchmark have been a big part of CPU benchmarking for quite some time now, with Cinebench R15 launching all the way back in September 2013 but the company has finally released a new version of its benchmark with all of the advancements of Maxon's Cinema 4D technology inside.

The new Cinebench R20 benchmark is a CPU-only benchmark, with Maxon removing the GPU benchmark portion out of the new run. In the new CPU benchmark it's also much more stressful on your hardware, with Maxon noting that "Cinebench R20 uses a much larger and more complex test scene than R15, requiring about 8x the computational power needed to render it. The test also requires about 4x the memory. Therefore, R15 and R20 results cannot be compared".

AMD unleashed its super-threaded Ryzen Threadripper CPUs in 2017 and continued that trend last year, and will have even more cores and threads in the third-gen Zen 2-based Threadrippers arriving soon. We need benchmarks like Cinebench to continue to expand and grow with next-gen CPU offerings, and here we have it. But there's one gigantic problem.

It baffles me why people are still using Microsoft's ancient Internet Explorer, and now even Microsoft themselves have kindly asked Explorers users to upgrade and let the browser die.

Microsoft has taken to their official blog to address the issues surrounding the use of Internet Explorer. Microsoft's senior cyber-security architect Chris Jackson has said that the use of Internet Explorer while may be easier compatibility wise in the short term, provides substantial "technical debt" in the long term. According to Jackson, the use of Internet Explorer creates costs do down the line for companies, and also provides difficulties when creating web-pages for future use.

Microsoft has recommended users to try and stay ahead of the curve and transition to new modern browser for not only compatibility improvements but also security reasons as well. It should be noted that Microsoft don't even support Internet Explorer anymore, since the company announced back in 2016 that they will be killing support for Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 9 and Internet Explorer 10. If you happen to be one of the few users that are still cruising about the Internet on Internet Explorer it is highly recommended that you upgrade to a more modern browser such as Edge, Chrome or FireFox.

There is no doubt that within this day and age that everyone who is using mobile messaging apps regrets some things that they have said to other people. Users never had the ability to delete this messages, but now they can.

Until today, users on Facebook Messenger never had the ability to delete or edit sent messages via their app. Facebook actually previously rejected the idea of allowing users to remove or edit their personal sent messages, but now it seems their tune has changed on the topic. Perhaps the reconsideration for the option being available to the public came after Facebook's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg was caught removing messages from his personal messenger account.

Users on both iOS and Android will now have the ability to delete messages within 10 minutes after its being sent. If you desire to delete messages that have been sent longer than 10 minutes ago, there could be a way around it. Users could attempt changing the date and time within their phone after clearing the app data, this could make the Messenger app think that those messages were sent only 10 minutes ago which in turn could allow for the 'delete' option to be available.

If you are a PC user and have never heard of VLC Media Player then you must of been hiding under a comfy rock somewhere, this media player is the go-to application for video streaming content in all of the whacky formats you can get.

VLC Media Player recently reached an awesome milestone, the program has been recorded to of been downloaded now over 3 billion times. The above Twitter post from founder of VLC's parent company, VideoLan, Ludovic Fauvet showcases VLC reaching 3 biillion downloads. The President and Lead Developer for VideoLan, Jean-Baptiste Kempf sat down with VentureBeat to discuss the success of VLC and what the developers have in-store for it in the future.

Kempf says that he plans to bring VR support to the application, this will add 3D interactions, stereo sound and add a virtual theatre feature. VLC recently rolled out an update that pushed the version of the program to v3.0.6, included within this update was support for HDR videos in AV1. Kempf says that when update 4.0.0 is ready it will be bringing playback improvements in scaling and video quality of HDR files. Looking towards the future now, Kempf also mentions that he would like to bring the media player to the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4. I don't know how possible this idea would be, but it would be good to see VLC on both of these platforms.

Later in 2019 Breaking Bad fans will be gifted with their very own mobile strategy game from Plamee. The game will feature elements from the TV and of course the spread of main characters.

Breaking Bad being one the most critically-acclaimed television shows ever created will soon be getting its very own mobile strategy game. As expected, the mobile strategy game will put players in the shoes of Walter White and creation of his meth empire. Players will have to grow the empire while also making difficult decisions that will impact the game.

The mobile app will be created by game developer Plamee Games and published by FTX Games and has been titled Breaking Bad: Criminal Elements. A recent statement from Breaking Bad's Creative Lead, Vince Gilligan says "[FTX Games] care as much about the details as our creative team, and I have been very impressed with their commitment to building an authentic extension of the series' story universe. I think this will be a fun experience for fans, to interact with characters from Breaking Bad in a completely new way." Unfortunately, gameplay and a release date for Criminal Elements has not been disclosed as of yet. At the moment all we have to go off of is the broad 2019 release window.

No doubt one of the most popular apps on both iOS and Android is any of the Candy Crush Saga games, this extreme popularity has generated King a collective yearly revenue of around $1.5+ billion for 2018.

According to Sensor Tower Store Intelligence, Candy Crush saw average player spending increase by about 6.5% in 2018 when compared to the previous year. When combining both the sales from the App Store and the Google Play Store, King managed to rake in a staggering $1.5+ billion in revenue, which equates to about $4.2 million per day.

Surprisingly though, the original Candy Crush that was released back in 2012 was the main contributing factor towards that $1.5 billion, pulling in $945 million - 63%. Candy Crush Soda Saga followed marginally behind with $443 million, or about 29%. The three year old Candy Crush Jelly Saga came next, equating to about $90 million of the $1.5 billion - or a minuscule 6%. The Candy Crush games aren't slowing down either, in 2018 King released Candy Crush Friends Saga which manged to generate $3 million by 2018's end and was also the second most downloaded game in the franchise with over 30 million installs.

Jagex's re-release of RuneScape has proven to be more than popular with the release of the mobile version of the game. Old School RuneScape mobile has officially reached 5 million downloads.

Throughout the year of 2018, Old School RuneScape has had their player-base flourish. The re-rolled servers have attracted more and more new and old players, so many that the 2008 record of most paid memberships at was broken in 2018. "The franchise has been growing consistently for five years, and we've seen a surge of further community growth with the move to mobile." says Jagex boss, Phil Mansell.

With the now available Old School RuneScape Mobile, players that want to take their experience gains portable, now have the luxury of doing so. The app is available on both the iOS and Google Play Store and when combining the download amounts from both of those available platforms, the app has seen a massive 5 million downloads in total.

The release of Old School RuneScape Mobile has gone underway and a result of the launch has caused the ancient MMORPG to reach over 100,000 players concurrent.

At the beginning of the month, I gave a detailed breakdown of RuneScape for both new and old players. The re-introduction covered how the game works, the history behind the re-rolled servers, what RuneScape is exactly, RuneScape Mobile and much more. Within that post, I mentioned that even though RuneScape is a very old, the game still manages to achieve around 60,000 - 80,000 concurrent players, now that Old School RuneScape Mobile has launched that number has risen to 100,000.

For those that don't know, Old School RuneScape Mobile is exactly what it sounds like, it is basically an app that gives players the ability to train their accounts wherever they like, as long as they are connected to the internet of course. A Moderator for RuneScape named Mod Ed, has taken to Twitter after the launch of Old School RuneScape Mobile and posted an image, the image showcased that the game has reached 100,000 concurrent players, at the time of writing this there is 135,000 players, quite an achievement for a game that is famously old. Old School RuneScape Mobile can be downloaded from the App Store here and the Google Play Store here.

Niantic's Pokemon GO is far from dead, so if you thought that you are sadly mistaken as the Pokemon catching frenzy app has just had its highest month in revenue since November 2017.

Sensor Tower has reported that Niantic's Pokemon GO has had both massive achievements in revenue earnings and downloads for the month of September. According to Sensor Tower, Pokemon GO grossed a massive $85 million in revenue over September, making it the most grossed month in terms of revenue since November of 2017.

Since August, Pokemon GO has had a month-over-month increase of about 15%, meaning that when put into a year-over-year metric the hit app has a whopping 89% increase when compared to September 2017. Moving onto to downloads now, over September the AR app came in with a massive 8.86 million downloads worldwide, making it the biggest month in 2018 for downloads so far. From the birthing of Pokemon GO to the recent moment, the app has grossed a revenue of $2.01 billion worldwide, with 522 million downloads.