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We speak to four winners of Apple’s 2021 App Awards
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With iOS 15.2 and macOS 12.1 Monterey available to all, users can download the updates to their devices, alongside updating any existing apps to take advantage of what these updates bring.

Apple’s App Store Awards are the company’s way of highlighting developers who created apps that stood out in their category compared to other apps, in a theme of what Apple calls, connections. Whether that’s in video editing, streaming or games, they take advantage of recent features brought out by Apple and its software in an innovative way.

The company announced the year’s winners this month, with Carrot Weather, LumaFusion, DAZN, and League of Legends each winning in their categories for certain devices.

We spoke to the developers behind these apps to find out the challenges in designing the apps and their plans for the future.

Reflecting on their past

Every developer received an award that mirrors the App Store logo and its icon made from 100% recycled aluminum. During a video announcing the winners, Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO said, “From self-taught indie coders to inspiring leaders building global businesses, these standout developers innovated with Apple technology, with many helping to foster the profound sense of togetherness we needed this year.”

First up, LumaFusion is a video editing app on the iPad and iPhone for $ 19.99 / £19.99 / AU$ 19.99, that allows you to edit multiple videos at once with transitions and features that make it easy to turn a video into an engaging narrative. Its improvements this year made it the winner of the iPad app of the year award.

LumaFusion’s developers, Terri Morgan and Chris Demiris try to approach every release, whether that’s hardware or software, in how its users can benefit from their improvements in the app. “We couldn’t imagine where the iPad would go after ten years. Now, with Thunderbolt support and the M1 chip, we always see how we can adapt these updates into LumaFusion. Some of these features are easy to implement, such as ProRes and external storage support, but we're always looking to see which features would benefit users most.”

Morgan explains. “We’re inspired by how so many have used the app to help follow their passion, especially during lockdown, and it does help drive us to make the app even better, and more widely available to other users on Apple devices.”

LumaFusion on iPad Pro

(Image credit: Lumafusion)

League of Legends: Wild Rift was the winner of the iPhone gaming app of the year. Made by Riot Games, it's one of few franchises that's successfully made the jump from a console game to mobile with no compromises.

Michael Chow, executive producer on the game, reflected on developing the game since the start. “Usually when a game makes the move to mobile, there's a lot of negativity from their communities, so we wanted to make sure we avoided it with Wild Rift.”

With our positive impressions of running Rift on an iPhone 12 Pro earlier this year, we wanted to know how Chow and the team felt about releasing the game after a very long beta-test period.

“We’ve spent the past year rolling out the game across the world, and the results are pretty stellar,” Chow exclaims. “It’s not been an easy journey, as we weren’t sure if it was physically possible to bring League of Legends to mobile, but the results speak for themselves.”

“We quit our day jobs to start the company, and with Apple’s relentless efforts to make the iPhone better, it couldn’t make us more proud to receive this award from the company.”

League of Legends: Wild Rift on an iPhone 12 Pro

(Image credit: Future)

DAZN is a streaming app for sports, and while it’s additionally available on iPhone and iPad, it’s available for AppleTV for which DAZN won the app award for. It allows subscribed users to watch sports such as MotoGP, UFC, UEFA, NFL and more for $ 19.99 / £19.99 / AU$ 19.99 a month.

Ben King, Director of DAZN at DAZN Group, explained to us that the aim of the app was to make it accessible, flexible and affordable to those who just wanted to easily access their sports for a price that didn’t lock them into two-year contracts.

“We’re absolutely honoured to receive this award from Apple, but it doesn’t mean we want to stop with how we can offer content to our users in way of features and more kinds of sports.”

The app uses push notifications for the latest updates in other matches, such as red cards and goals, while you’re using another app. You can also watch three consecutive sports or games at once, mirroring a scene in Back to the Future Part II when Marty Jr would watches 16 channels at once.

DAZN on Apple TV, Mac and iPad.

(Image credit: DAZN)

Brian Mueller, is the developer of Carrot Weather, and won the 2021 App Award for the Apple Watch. Its complications to allow certain weather forecasts on watch faces, alongside its push notifications for upcoming weather changes, has allowed Mueller to bring the app, and its sass to the watch with no compromise.

“When the app launched in 2015, it was purely an entertainment app, with its achievements and Carrot’s personality,“ Mueller explained. “It wasn’t until the Apple Watch arrived that forced me to focus on making a really great weather app, instead of relying on Carrot’s jokes and the bizarre imagery.”

As the app grew since watchOS 2, Mueller realised that he could add more complications to the watch faces. “I found out a workaround in early versions that could allow me to add more than the one complication per watch face that the operating system allowed.” Mueller reveals. “ After this, users were asking me for certain weather sources to add to the watch faces, and I still love that, that fans of the app are giving me feedback to make the watch app better.”

Three variations of CARROT on an iPhone 12

(Image credit: TechRadar)

Where next for these apps?

While these developers are celebrating their success, they aren't stopping. We asked what’s coming up for their apps in the near future. 

“We have a long list of feature requests, and in the past there's been features such as CoreML and smart background removal. But we have to pick and choose each time to really focus on how they best fit for LumaFusion.” Morgan explains. “I can see us doing cooperative editing with SharePlay eventually, but in the immediate future, key-frame easing where you can bring in images to videos, alongside subtitling and speed ramping are all coming soon.”

We also wanted to know whether there were plans for LumaFusion coming to macOS natively. “While you can export a project to Final Cut, we’re aware that there’s a need for LumaFusion on macOS.” Demiris explains. “We are working on a more complete version for macOS to take advantage of what the Mac brings.”

A screenshot showing LumaFusion

(Image credit: Luma Touch LLC)

With League of Legends: Wild Rift, Chow was enthusiastic about how the on-screen controls work well on the iPhone. But we asked if keyboard support in games, a feature of iPadOS 15, would come to the game to help users control their character more easily on the bigger tablet.

“Control in Rift is something that we spent a lot of time on, so I don’t think we’ll implement keyboard support anytime soon,” Chow explains. “But gamepad support is something that could work, especially for the Apple TV, so who knows.”

With DAZN, SharePlay support is something that’s of interest to King and the rest of the team. ”We’re all about flexibility, and while you can already join with friends in watching a game, SharePlay does bring something to the table. If enough users give feedback to us that it’s a feature they want on their iPad or Apple TV, it’s something we’ll consider for a future update.”

Finally, with accessibility a big part of Apple’s focus in software interaction, we asked King if there’s upcoming features to help with those with certain impairments when using DAZN.

“We have some really interesting ideas for accessibility,“ King reveals. “We don’t have to give you one audio stream for instance, so there’s no reason for using sign language as an alternative commentary, but for the moment, subtitles and closed captions for pre-recorded content are something that we’re currently working on. But there’s far more options compared to cable content that we can provide to help cater to someone who is either visually or auditory impaired, and we want to help them.”

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Adobe announces Creative Cloud Express, a hint towards its freemium future?
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If you're keen to use Adobe's powerful creative tools, but are less excited about their high prices, the company's new Creative Cloud Express app could be for you. Effectively a lite version of its software suite, the app is free to use on mobile devices or via web browser, with extra features costing $ 9.99 / £10.10 / AU$ 14.29 a month.

Creative Cloud Express is designed for students, small business owners, or for those who want to turn a hobby into a career. Instead of a collection of apps, here you download just one app that gives you features to edit photos, trim videos and create GIFs, while making content that’s relevant to your customers.

It’s the first freemium product from Adobe, and with Christmas fast approaching, it could be a great entry point for those who want to try out Adobe’s products on their new devices.

Who would want this?

Available from today, you can download Creative Cloud Express for free, from the Microsoft store, Apple App Store or Google Play Store. The free plan includes:

  • Create on both web and mobile.
  • Thousands of templates, design assets, and Adobe Fonts.
  • A limited collection of royalty-free Adobe Stock free collection photos.
  • Basic editing and photo effects including removing backgrounds and animations.
  • 2GB of storage.

You only need to sign up and you can use the above features straight away. It’s a new angle that Adobe is offering here, as you would have had to sign up for a free trial for Creative Cloud at least, to see if apps such as Photoshop and Premiere Pro were suited to your needs.

The paid plan includes a 3-month free trial with more images and templates to use, alongside the ability to export a project into PDF and other useful features. You can sign up and get a feel for whether Express or the full Creative Cloud package is best for you.

Its press release also stated that an Enterprise edition of Express is coming in 2022, which would help businesses offer the package to its employees in one go.

Analysis: A hint towards the future? 

So far the new offering from Adobe looks impressive, with its demos showing both tablets and web browsers using Express. With many users going through their favored web browser to use certain web apps, it could show what the future holds for Adobe and Creative Cloud going forward.

Express looks to be the start of this, and if its features expand to those that are inspired by Adobe’s other apps such as Illustrator and XD, this new package is an enticing and exciting start.

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This Microsoft Edge update will help you spot why your browser is running so slowly
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Spotting potential browser slowdowns in Microsoft Edge could soon be a lot easier thanks to a new tool that will allow users to debug memory leaks.

Memory leaks occur when an application's JavaScript code retains more and more objects in memory that it no longer needs instead of releasing them for garbage collect (GC).

For apps that run for a long time without being closed, small memory leaks of only a few kilobytes can add up to noticeably degrade performance over time according to a new blog post from Microsoft.

Detached

React, the open source JavaScript library for building front end user interfaces, maintains a virtualized copy of the DOM (Document Object Model). However, failing to properly unmount components can lead to an application leaking large parts of the virtual DOM.

For this reason, the Microsoft Edge team worked together with Microsoft Teams to build the browser's new Detached Elements tool that allows users to investigate and resolve DOM memory leaks.

Although there are valid reasons for detaching elements, DOM memory leaks occur when an application keeps references to more and more detached elements without actually reusing them later. As the code used in applications grows in size and complexity, it becomes easier to make mistakes and forget to clean things up which could unknowingly lead to keeping DOM elements in memory. 

This is particularly a problem for long running applications. For instance, if an email client detaches DOM elements every time an email is opened and closed and a user keeps the app running for a whole week, it could amount to really high memory usage and slow down a user's business laptop or workstation over time.

While Microsoft's new Detached Elements tool has been available in Edge Canary since version 93, it will roll out to the stable channel of Microsoft Edge when version 97 of the browser launches this month.

To access this new tool early though, you'll first need to open DevTools in Edge by pressing F12 and click on the gear icon to open the DevTools Settings. From here, navigate to Experiments on the left side of the Settings pane, type in Detached Elements and click on the tool to enable it.

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Google Calendar update will stop people clogging your day with needless meetings
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Google is rolling out improvements for its calendar app that should help people better manage their busy schedules.

As described in a blog post, Google Calendar users will soon benefit from the ability to prevent unwanted invitations from being added to their calendar.

Under the updated system, users can choose for meetings and other events to be added to their calendar only after they have responded to the email invitation. The effect, says Google, is a less cluttered calendar interface and less time spent on administration.

The new Google Calendar feature should go live for all Workspace users (both business and personal) within the next two weeks.

Google Calendar invitations

Since the transition to remote and hybrid working, many more meetings have taken place over video conferencing and VoIP services. Managers have also been encouraged to check in more frequently with employees, in the absence of a quick chat or coffee break at the office.

All of this means a larger volume of meetings and more unwieldy calendars, which is somewhat of a nightmare for anyone who already spent more than their fair share of time in meetings before the pandemic.

With this latest update, however, Google Workspace users will be able to manage their calendars more effectively with less manual effort, as well as highlighting the events and meetings most important to them.

Of course, the ability to divert invitations doesn’t address endemic problems with meetings culture in this new world of hybrid working, but it will at least go some way to alleviating the symptoms.

To activate or deactivate the new feature, use the following pathway in the Google Calendar web app: Settings > Event settings > Add invitations to my calendar.

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Google Chrome gets a speed boost for Windows 11 (and Windows 10)
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Google has tweaked its popular Chrome browser, making it perform faster in both Windows 11 and Windows 10.

While Google Chrome is the most popular web browser in the world by quite a margin, it’s also notorious for hogging system resources, especially memory, which can result in it running poorly.

Google is understandably keen to address these issues, and as Windows Latest reports, Google has been working on a project known as Native Window Occlusion, which aims to reduce the strain tabs you’re not looking at put on your PC. If a window or tab isn’t visible – for example if the window is minimized, or there’s another window open in front of it – the tabs in the window will be put into a state that takes up a minimum of system memory and resources, freeing up your PC to concentrate on the tabs that are visible.

Google has been working on this project for three years, and it’s now rolling it out to Windows 10 and Windows 11 users.

Promising results

According to Google’s blog post on the improvements, Chrome is now 25.8% faster on startup, and GPU memory usage has dropped by 3.1%. This has led to 20.4% fewer renderer frames and rendered crashes have also been reduced, this time by 4.5%.

By focusing resources on foreground windows, there’s now a 3% improvement in first input delay. Basically, Chrome now behaves faster and feels more responsive, especially when you first open it up on your PC.

The results are certainly promising, and hopefully Chrome users on Windows 11 or Windows 10 will see the benefits soon.

Calm female executive meditating in front of a laptop

(Image credit: fizkes / Shutterstock)

Analysis: Getting better

These improvements from Google are very welcome. Many of us use Chrome every day, but it’s increasingly becoming an app we begrudgingly use due to the fact that it hogs so many resources, slowing down even the most powerful of PCs.

By continuing to improve Chrome’s performance, Google could make this a browser people love to use once more. Microsoft has also been working on improving Chromium-based browsers, including Chrome, to help speed up its own Chromium-based Edge web browser.

With both Microsoft and Google working on improvements, Chrome may no longer be the notorious RAM eater it used to be.

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WhatsApp introduces new privacy settings to keep you safe
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WhatsApp is giving its legions of users greater control over who can see data about them. As part of a move to protect people from unauthorized third-party apps, new privacy controls are rolling out.

If you've noticed that you have been unable to see the online status of businesses or contacts you are trying to connect with, these changes help to explain just why this is.

If you have never chatted with a particular account, you will not be able to see either their online status, or details of when they were last seen. The same is true of other people's – and apps' – ability to see information about you.

WhatsApp says of the changes that “to improve the privacy and security of our users, we're making it harder for people you don't know and haven't chatted with from seeing your last seen and online presence on WhatsApp.”

To allay fear about the implications of the change, WhatsApp adds: “This will not change anything between you and your friends, family, and businesses who you know or have previously messaged”.

Keep it private

On the face of things, this feels like quite a small change, but it's just one of a growing number of privacy and security tools available to WhatsApp users.

It also helps to close a fairly significant security loophole that was being used by some third-party tools. There are a number of apps available for download that can be used to track people's online status – or at least they could be used fore this purpose before WhatsApp introduced the changes.

For anyone who is concern about their privacy, but particularly anyone who has been a victim of cyberstalk, these changes are great news that will be warmly welcomed.

Via WABetaInfo

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Microsoft Teams update will eliminate a common business bottleneck
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Getting your next big project or idea approved by your manager or boss can often slow down productivity which is why Microsoft launched its new Approvals app in Microsoft Teams earlier this year.

The Approvals app can be accessed from any chat or channel conversation or by using the dedicated app entry point in the left navigation bar in Teams.

With the app open, all you have to do is fill in the details of the approval like the title, description and the users who need to approve it and hit 'Send'. However, you can also add attachments from Microsoft's office software or custom responses to tailor the request to your business needs.

Once submitted, the approvers are notified within Teams and can act on an approval request either from the chat directly using the Approvals card or from within the Personal app. They can also quickly review the details of the approval right within Teams before making a decision to approve or reject it.

Microsoft 365 groups as approvers

After launching in January of last year, Microsoft is now working on a new feature for the Teams Approval App that is slated to roll out next month.

According to a new post in the Microsoft 365 Roadmap, the software giant is adding the ability to select Microsoft 365 groups as approvers when creating a new approval request within Teams.

For those unfamiliar, Groups in Microsoft 365 let you choose a set of people that you wish to collaborate with and easily set up a collection of resources for those people to share. These resources may include a shared Outlook inbox, shared calendar or a document library in OneDrive for collaboration on files.

When this new feature becomes available, Teams users will be able to send approval requests to their Microsoft 365 groups which could be useful if approvers aren't using the company's video conferencing software and online collaboration tool.

Looking to improve your video call experience? Check out our roundups of the best video conferencing software, best business webcams and best headsets for conference calls

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One of the biggest proxy service providers just launched a VPN
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The web data platform and proxy service Bright Data (formerly Luminati) has announced the release of its new completely free VPN service.

BrightVPN aims to disrupt the traditional VPN market by offering the same features as paid, subscription-based VPNs while remaining 100 percent free to its users.

Also, unlike traditional VPN services, no email or account is needed to use BrightVPN which means its users retain complete anonymity.

BrightVPN

In addition to being completely free to use, BrightVPN requires zero technical skills and its VPN client can be downloaded, installed and used to further protect your privacy online in just 40 seconds.

The new VPN service stays true to Bright Data's mission to make the web more transparent to all by enabling users to reach any website, in any country while avoiding both regional and other reasons for site blockages. BrightVPN is powered by the company's extensive infrastructure which is currently used by more than 10,000 customers including several Fortune 500 firms.

By installing and using Bright Data's VPN, users become part of a larger crowdsourcing network that allows researchers and companies to easily access public web data for multiple purposes. However, as part of the company's commitment to transparency, BrightVPN allows users to see and control which sites are accessed by Bright Data with settings that allow them to control when they allow their IP address to be used and even grant or deny access to specific sites.

Users looking for an alternative to costly premium VPNs or less reputable free VPN services, can download BrightVPN here to remain anonymous online and protect their IP address from being tracked for commercial reasons.

We've also featured the best VPN, best business VPN and best proxy services

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Google takes aim at Microsoft 365 with small but important update
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Google is taking the fight to Microsoft with an update for Workspace that introduces new synergies between its productivity and collaboration apps.

As detailed in a new blog post, Google Workspace users will soon be able to launch into various applications easily from within messaging platform Chat.

“While you’re having a conversation in Google Chat, you can now more easily take actions in other Google Workspace products. The options vary by context, and can include Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Photos and Calendar,” explained Google.

“This will make it easier to take action across Google Workspace and enable a faster and more seamless workflow.”

The update will begin to take effect for Android and desktop users over the next couple of weeks, but won’t land on iOS until the new year.

Google Workspace update

Since the birth of G Suite in 2006, Google has competed directly with Microsoft in the office software space, going up against the famous Microsoft 365 suite, which houses the likes of Word, PowerPoint, Excel etc.

One of the defining features of Microsoft’s offering is tight integration between apps and services, extending all the way out to the Windows operating system on which most business devices run. And although Google stole the march on Microsoft when it came to the cloud-based model, individual G Suite apps have historically felt much more isolated.

When Google rebranded its productivity suite as Workspace last year, however, the company announced it would make a concerted effort to create a more “deeply integrated user experience”, by improving the level of interoperability between its various productivity apps.

The latest Workspace update takes steps towards achieving this goal, but is just one of a number of improvements Google has made in recent months where interoperability is concerned.

In June, for example, the company announced an integration between Chat and Calendar, which helps users connect quickly with co-workers ahead of or after an upcoming meeting. This was later followed by a separate integration that allows users to share documents and messages with meeting attendees from within the calendar marker.

At its annual Cloud Next event, meanwhile, Google announced it will invest heavily in the Workspace Marketplace, the third-party app library that services its product suite. The goal is to create ways to expand the functionality of its services and cut the number of apps workers are required to juggle at once.

While these updates might appear insignificant in isolation, each contributes to the goal of stitching together Google Workspace in a way that will make the user experience feel less disjointed and more coherent.

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Vivaldi CEO accuses Microsoft of being ‘blatantly anti-competitive’ in pushing Edge browser
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Vivaldi’s CEO has fired a copious amount of flak at Microsoft in a fresh move in the browser wars, accusing the software giant of going “back to its old tricks” with promoting the Edge browser in Windows.

Jon von Tetzchner, chief executive of the rival Vivaldi browser, wrote a lengthy blog post which complains about how it’s “frustrating in 2021 to find Microsoft blatantly engaging in anti-competitive practices once again”.

We have, of course, made plenty of comments in recent times about how Microsoft is walking a thin line in terms of pushing too hard with promotion for Edge within its desktop operating system Windows.

Most recently, that has included pop-ups that attack Chrome specifically (‘that browser is so 2008!’) and pushing ads for other Microsoft services within Edge, as well as making it more difficult to change your default browser away from Edge within Windows 11 (the latter is a course Microsoft is apparently now reversing, fortunately, at least in preview builds for now).

As Tetzchner points out, when he got a new Windows laptop, the first thing he did was to use Edge (which is the default choice of browser, of course) to search for Vivaldi in order to install that, but the OS warned him that ‘there’s no need to download a new web browser’ because, basically, Edge is the best around.

Tetzchner further points out that Microsoft asks for confirmation of a switch away from Edge to a new browser as the default, and even after that, when you next use Edge, it’ll pop-up a panel to try to reclaim the position of default browser.

He further observes: “Microsoft’s moves seem desperate. And familiar. It is clear they don’t want you to use other browsers. They even offer to pay you to use the browser via their Microsoft Rewards program.

“This is not the behavior of a confident company developing a superior browser. It’s the behavior of a company openly abusing its powerful position to push people to use its inferior product, simply because it can.”

He urges folks to ask for Microsoft to be investigated for these “obvious anti-competitive practices”.

Analysis: Overzealous pushing of Edge is arguably unnecessary anyway

We’ll leave any arguments of Edge being an ‘inferior product’ aside, because we don’t agree on that score. It’s actually a pretty good browser in many ways, and that kind of makes Microsoft’s actions and pushing it in an overzealous manner all the more mystifying (and frustrating). Edge should really sell itself, given time, so hey Microsoft, why not do just that: play the waiting game, keeping improving the browser, and watch the adoption level tick up as time rolls on.

We do agree that Microsoft needs to steer clear of all this Edge promotion within Windows 10 and 11, as if anything, it’s likely to backfire and push people away from the browser, anyway. And certainly any underhandedness when it comes to trying to change default browsers must absolutely be stopped.

The path of popups and countermeasures trying to stop you switching away from Edge as the default browser will be nothing new to experienced Windows users, of course. But these kind of dialog boxes could confuse the less tech-savvy, and even cause them to switch back to Edge by accident, potentially, which really isn’t on.

Windows – or any operating system – should be built around user-friendliness, and that friendliness extends to allowing the user their choice of browser without any catches or ‘reminders’ that they could get confused about or stumble over.

Via Neowin

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