Google Music has always been a very nice music locker, but while European users were able to use its iTunes Match-like scan-and-match feature since last month, U.S.-based users only got access to this tool on Tuesday. Until now, U.S. users had to upload all of their music to the service, which could obviously take a while. since Tuesday, Google can just scan your music collection and rebuilt it on Google Music without the need to transfer gigabytes of data.
Apple is pushing out iOS 6.0.2, a minor update that is said to provide a possible fix for Wi-Fi issues on the iPhone 5 and iPad mini, along with other bug fixes, but it’s proving hard for users to install. Multiple reports on Twitter, elsewhere on the web, and among our own staff find that there’s a problem connecting to Apple’s update servers over the air from iOS devices.
YouTube has launched Capture, a new app for iOS. It lets users take quick video, make minor adjustments, and upload that video to YouTube, Google+, Facebook, or Twitter. The app is built specifically for iPhone and iPod touch and is available in the App Store now. The app was built specifically with speed and convenience in mind — it's ready to shoot video as soon as you open it — and users can shoot and upload a video in as few as three taps.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) yesterday took two significant steps down its double-track path toward standardizing HTML, the core language of the Web. First, it released a candidate recommendation of Hypertext Markup Language 5, which means HTML5 is settling down in the eyes of the standards group. Second, it released a first draft of HTML5.1, a smaller set of changes it's developing simultaneously.
Google will begin to phase out its Sync service for consumers and discontinue several other services in early January. The shuttering of the services, described as winter cleaning by the company, was announced in a post on its official blog. Google Sync allows access to mail, calendar and contacts via Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync. Google said it will continue to offer the same functionality through the IMAP and CardDAV protocols.
Google has released a native maps app for the iPhone and it's fast, full-featured, and quite frankly the best-looking mobile maps experience on the market today. After months of problems and a formal apology in the wake of Apple's own Maps app on iOS 6, many have been waiting for Google to offer a solution that could serve as a viable replacement. If the brief demo Dieter Bohn saw earlier this week is any indication, Google has delivered.
Big changes to Firefox's private mode - the private-browsing feature that turns off recording cookies, history, and temporary files - landed in the Firefox Nightly build. When it reaches the general public a few months from now in Firefox stable, the feature will allow you to run the private-browsing feature in a new window, without closing your regular instance of Firefox.
Yahoo may not be the internet giant it once was, but over 110 million people still use its mail services — now, that experience has been upgraded with a new Yahoo Mail web client as well as new apps for iOS, Android and Windows 8. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer introduced the changes herself in a blog post. She said that Yahoo's new mail client minimized distracting elements and made speed a key focus, something that should be a major improvement over the somewhat bloated service of old.
YouTube announced on its Google+ page that it has updated its Android app and mobile web to better align those experiences with the most recent update to its homepage. The big change is the addition of a Guide for navigating through videos from channels that users have subscribed to, as well as allowing users to discover new channels that they might not already know about. That will be added to the new YouTube Android app, as well as the mobile web site optimized for tablets, like the iPad.
Adobe has made good on its promise to deliver Retina Display support to two of its most-used graphics programs, Photoshop and Illustrator CS6. That means owners of Apple’s Retina MacBook Pro (both the 13- and 15-inch versions) will now be able to edit and create graphics using the programs in native resolution, instead of seeing the admittedly ugly non-optimized visual resources both previously provided.