apps
Message Aloud for iOS plays back your Facebook messages
If you’ve ever saw the need for an audio playback of your Facebook messages, a new app for iOS devices called Message Aloud will do just that. It has been developed by VoiZapp and basically it allows you to scroll through your Facebook messages and tapping a message plays it back to you in audio format.
According to Dr. Robert B. Wesson, VoiZapp’s CEO:
“You can now stay in touch with your Facebook friends while safely driving, walking, exercising – anywhere your eyes are otherwise occupied. Messages Aloud also gives the visually-impaired and elderly an audible window into their friends’ and families’ lives by allowing them to hear all of their messages read aloud.”
I guess if you communicate extensively through Facebook with clients or loved ones, this will be a good way for you to listen to messages while your hands are otherwise occupied. There is a Lite version of the app that will only play the last 10 messages, but the Pro version will apparently be able to playback messages while in the background and will cost $1.99.
Apple is well known to be a company that continues to push the envelope when it comes to technological advancements and firsts. This time around, Cupertino has introduced the first ever automated security update for Mac computers in order to assist them in preventing attacks from recently identified bugs, which are also the very same bugs that that security researchers have pinpointed and warned against, as those could be the gateway for hackers to actually gain remote control of machines.
Over in New Jersey, District Judge William Martini has come up with a ruling that the police are not required to actually pick up a warrant before opening a fake Instagram account. This is because the bogus account could actually be used to receive pictures shared by a suspect, and some folks wonder whether this would require a search warrant to be issued beforehand. Not so, according to Judge Martini in his ruling that stated whenever Instagram users post photos on the site, they happen to be practicing “consensual sharing.”
In other words, users who put up photos on Instagram are more or less in the know that should they “follow” or “friend” others, they will also end up sharing their pictures with them. All in all, one should always be extra careful with whatever one shares with others online, as you can never quite tell how something might end up to bit you in the rear some day down the road.
Both iOS and Android number close to a million apps each on their respective app stores, which is one of the reasons why smartphone users flock to either operating system. Of course there are other factors, such as hardware, pricing, availability and so on, but it is safe to say that app availability plays a big role as well. Well Blackberry seems to think so as well as they have revealed that the Blackberry World app store currently sits at about 120,000 apps, which while still pretty small compared to iOS and Android, is a pretty huge deal considering that the platform and its accompanying devices were only launched earlier this year! Blackberry’s CEO Thorsten Heins praised the thriving ecosystem, which we guess was boosted by Blackberry’s efforts where they held events to encourage developers to submit as many apps as they can, and even offering monetary rewards on top of earnings for every app successfully submitted to Blackberry World. We can see that Blackberry is going for quantity at the moment, and we suppose there are quality apps within those 120,000, but for now it looks like as far as apps are concerned, they may very well be edging Windows Phone out of the picture!