• 500,000 iOS apps in the App Store and Counting

    // Gradly // Apple, blog, Featured, Infographic, News, Rants & Raves, Rumors 1 Response

    The App Store has apparently crossed 500,000 app approvals in two years and ten months since its inception. The news came from Chomp, 148apps and EA-owned games publisher Chillingo. They posted an awesome infographic which you can see below. According to Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt:

    Sometime after midnight Tuesday morning,  the iTunes team pushed through a batch of app submissions that sent the total over a six-figure milestone. In 34 months, Apple has approved more than 500,000 iPhone, iPad and iPod touch apps for the company’s U.S. store. (Through attrition, replacement and withdrawal, number of apps currently available for download is 20% lower, around 400,000.)

    To celebrate the event, three app-related companies — mobile app blog 148apps, search company Chomp and game developer Chillingo — have issued a jumbo-sized infographic, a portion of which is reproduced above. The fact-packed poster includes a timeline, loads of factoids and a best-seller list topped by Angry Birds, which spent 275 days in the No. 1 spot.

    As of January, more than 10 billion apps had been downloaded from Apple’s App Store. Its closest competitor, the Google Android Marketplace, launched 8 months later, currently boasts 294,000 apps and 3 billion app downloads.

  • Over 500 New Features in the Upcoming Windows Phone 7 Mango

    // Gradly // blog, Microsoft, Mobile, News, Rants & Raves, Rumors, Software No Responses

    Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has promised over 500 new features for the next release of Windows Phone 7 dubbed ‘Mango’ and will get version 7.5.

    Speaking at Japanese Microsoft Developer Forum 2011, Ballmer promised the features to be unveiled in the Mango event today. The software giant is also expected to unveil new developer tools for Windows Phone applications. Microsoft is currently hard at work on “Mango”, its next major release of Windows Phone. Nokia is also reportedly waiting for the next release of Windows Phone before it unveils its first Windows Phone device. Watch Ballmer speaking about the 500 new features in the video below:

    Neowin is adding additional rumor before today’s Mango activities kick out. Windows Phone 7.5 may be released to Manufacturers today, and will be coming out to all phones in September.

  • Glasses Free 3D App For iPhone 4 & iPad 2 Free Download

    // Gradly // 3D, Apple, blog, Gadgets, iPad, iPhone, Rants & Raves, Tech. No Responses

    Do you remember the Glasses Free 3D on iPad 2 and iPhone 4 via Head Tracking Demo? If you don’t, no worries the video is embedded below, but in short, a research team came up an amazing tech demoes by combining head-tracking technology that uses the iPad’s front facing camera to deliver glasses-free 3D experience that doesn’t require the accelerometer, but it’s entirely based on the camera and the movements of a user’s head in front of the screen. The position of the user will give the illusion of tridimensional objects moving on the display. Now that team has released the free i3D app, so you can see the 3D illusion effect yourself.

    Apps official description:

    i3D is an overview of Head-Coupled Perspective (HCP) on iOS devices. HCP uses the front camera of the device to track the face of the user in real time. This information tells the app how the user is looking at the display. The app updates the perspective of the 3D scene accordingly, giving the user the illusion that he looks at a small window.

    i3D contains several 3D scenes that you can observe with HCP. It only relies on face tracking. It does not use the accelerometers or the gyroscopes.

    The face tracking system does not detect and track the face in every lighting condition. Read the instructions in the app to get a good tracking.

    Head-Coupled Perspective does not create a stereoscopic display! It provides a kind of monocular 3D display: the same picture is seen by both eyes. In the future, it might be combined with a stereoscopic display for a better 3D effect.

    i3D has been developed by Jeremie Francone and Laurence Nigay at the Engineering Human-Computer Interaction (EHCI) Research Group of the Grenoble Informatics Laboratory (LIG), University Joseph Fourier (UJF).

    Here is the original video to watch it again:

  • The Online War: Transparency vs Anonymity [INFOGRAPHIC]

    // Gradly // blog, Infographic, Rants & Raves, Social Networks No Responses

    In the online world there’s a transition from hyper-transparency, real identity all the way to obfuscation, anonymity. The poles are represented by Facebook and 4Chan. In this infographic, we take a look at these opposing philosophies and some of the space in between.

    Are you who you say you are?


    [via Namesake]