apps
Transfire iOS app translates your chat messages for you
You probably know a few people, or friends, whose command on the English language probably isn’t as good as yours, which is normal especially if you’re living in a melting pot society like the US. Or perhaps you communicate with overseas customers whose native language is not English and you’re having a hard time trying to explain things to them.
Short of heading to Google Translate and manually translating everything yourself, there’s now a free app on iOS called Transfire which apparently automatically translates your Google Chat messages into the language you have set up for your friends/co-workers. So if you have Japanese co-workers whom you communicate with on a daily basis, you can set their language to Japanese, and the text you send to them in English will automatically converted on their end.
When they respond to your messages in Japanese, it will then be translated back to English when you receive it, or whichever default language that you have set for yourself. It even features Phonetic Transliteration that will sound out and pronounced the translated message, and apparently it even comes with the proper accents.
It seems to work only for Google Chat, which we’re assuming connects and grabs its translations from Google Translate. We can’t speak for how accurate the app is, but if you’re interested go download it as it is free, but given that these automated translations end up being too literal sometimes, well, expect some embarrassing but sometimes amusing conversations.
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!