Messenger has launched as a standalone web site, but it won’t be disappearing from Facebook’s core site.

Messenger, Facebook’s messaging platform, is now available as a standalone service on the web. In the past users had to use Facebook’s website to message their friends and family, but starting today they can do so without all the extra distractions. Facebook recently held a conference in which they detailed various ways they planned to further tap Messenger as a platform of its own.

The new web address for the Messenger is pretty simple to remember, Messenger.com. When users access this page they will log in with their Facebook credentials and then have access to a list of conversations. Breaking it out this way allows you to message and stay in touch with the people you need, without having distractions of event notifications and various timeline posts.

Facebook does not have any plans at the current time to remove the messaging capabilities from the main site as they did on mobile. With the focus that Facebook has been putting on Messenger as a platform, the move of this to its own domain is not a huge surprise.

Source: Messenger

Messenger, Facebook’s messaging platform, is now available as a standalone service on the web. In the past users had to use Facebook’s website to message their friends and family, but starting today they can do so without all the extra distractions.

Images and videos eating up all the storage on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac?

With iCloud Photo Library you never have to worry about running out of space again. Thanks to “optimized storage”, Apple can intelligently keep track of and manage your free space, ensuring your recent, favorite, and frequently accessed images and videos are immediately available on your device, while your older, less frequently accessed one are kept safely off your device and up on Apple’s servers, just a download away. It’s not magic, but if you’re tight on space, it’ll absolutely feel that way.

Best of all, “optimize storage” is really “set it and forget it”. Once you turn it on, you can turn off that part of your brain that worried about how many photos and videos you kept on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. The part that constantly stressed you’d run out, or need to delete older content to make way for new.

From now on it’ll just work, so all you have to do is just shoot!

How to turn on optimize storage on your iPhone or iPad

For most people, most of the time, turning on “optimize storage” for iCloud Photo Library is an excellent way to both save space on your iPhone or iPad, and keep a backup of your images and videos on Apple’s servers.

Once that’s done, iCloud Photo Library will start managing the images and videos on your iPhone or iPad. To make sure you save space, it’ll move original, full-quality media to Apple’s servers and only keep screen-sized versions of recent, favorite, and frequently accessed photos, and thumbnails of older, seldom-accessed photos on your device.

1. Launch Settings from your Home screen.
2. Scroll down and tap on Photos.
3. Make sure iCloud Photo Library is toggled On.
4. Tap on Optimize iPhone/iPad Storage (you’ll see a check mark appear to its right).

How to turn on optimize storage on your Mac

If you only have one Mac and it has a ton of storage, you may not need to worry about “optimize storage”. If you have a MacBook you use for travel, or don’t have a lot of storage, you’ll also want to consider turning on “optimize storage” to save space and keep an online backup.

1. Launch Photos for OS X on your Mac
2. Go to the Photos > Preferences menu (or type Command + ,)
3. Click on the iCloud tab
4. Click on Optimize Mac Storage

Are you a Rogers customer who purchased their BlackBerry Passport from Rogers but haven’t received 10.3.1 yet? If so, you might want to go ahead and check for software updates if you don’t already have a notification showing. As reported by several folks in the CrackBerry Forums and Twitter and checked through Sachesi, Rogers has now officially released OS 10.3.1.2576 (Software version 10.3.1.1779) to BlackBerry Passport owners.

Read More »

Another weekly photo contest has come to a close, giving us plenty of pretty pictures to look at involving the prompt “fruit.” Through the pages in the forums we narrowed it down to two winners, who you can see after the break — read along with us.

Photos for OS X uses the same hierarchy as Photos for iOS — intelligently grouping images and videos into moments, collections, and years.

That lets Photos for OS X show you small moments in time and space, like yesterday at the park, but also collections of moments marked by larger changes, like that party across town or that week at the beach, and even an entire year all at once. That way you can quickly zoom out, drill down, or scrub through to find exactly the photos and videos you want to look at, edit, or share. And all it takes is a few clicks and swipes!

• How to move between Moments, Collections, and Years smart groups
• How to scrub through and quickly jump to a picture or video in Collections or Years

Note: You can’t manually add an item to a specific moment, collection, or year — not without some metadata hackery, at least. They just take whatever you bring in and intelligently sort them into the right time and place.

How to move between Moments, Collections, and Years smart groups

1. Launch Photos for Mac.
2. Click the Back button to move from a photo to moments, moments to collections or collections to years.
3. Click on the Forward button move from years to collections or collections to moments.
4. Click on a section of a year to move to that collections, or a section of a collection to move to that moment, or an item in a moment to move to that image or video.
5. Tap an arrow key to move between photos and videos in a moment.
6. Click on a photo or video to select it or double-click on a photo or video to go to it.

How to scrub through and quickly jump to a picture or video in Collections or Years

Because of the volume of photos in collections or years view the thumbnails are small and can be hard to see. Luckily there’s a scrubbing gesture that not only lets you get a better look, it also lets you jump immediately to that picture or video so you don’t have to click all the way through.

1. Click and hold down on the year or collection view.
2. Move your mouse or trackpad pointer around, in any direction, to get a larger thumbnail preview.
3. Let go when you get to the picture or video you want, and you’ll be taken directly to it.

iTranslate Voice has been updated to version 3.0, and now lets you save your most-used phrases for quick and easy access.

Phrasebook in iTranslate Voice, one of our favorite translation apps lets you save commonly-used phrases, letting you easily access them when you need them. Your phrases will sync over iCloud, letting you access them on both iPhone and iPad.

Below is the full list of changes in iTranslate Voice 3.0:

Introducing Phrasebook:

With Phrasebook you finally have a way to save frequently used phrases, sentences or questions. Imagine you are a doctor and need to ask patients with different native languages the same 5 questions over and over again. Or you travel to many different countries and want to have a list of the 10 most important phrases always at hand?

With Phrasebook you can now save those phrases and instantly translate them into whatever language we currently offer. Of course your phrases are synced with iCloud, so you’ll never lose them.

• Added full voice recognition support for Hindi
• Added full App localization for 15 more languages

You can download iTranslate Voice 3.0 from the App Store right now.

• $4.99 – Download Now

They say you learn something new every day, well that goes for us too. We have just become aware of a wearable that joins the Microsoft Band on the Microsoft Store site. The Gameband Minecraft device allows PC players of the popular sandbox game to never lose their worlds for the price of $79.99.

How do you type Mr. Spock’s live long and prosper (llap) Vulcan salute emoji on your iPhone or iPad?

After posting the iOS 8.3 emoji keyboard how-to earlier, of course this was the question that quickly flooded my inbox. It’s part of the same new unicode emoji set Apple has added to iOS 8.3 and OS X 10.10.3, so if you’ve updated to one or both of those, you can see it. The problem is, Apple hasn’t yet added it to the emoji keyboard, so you can’t type it. Unless you’re logical about it…

Right now the quickest and simplest way to enter the LLAP — or “raised hand with fingers separated between the ring and the middle finger” as the standard calls it — symbol with your iPhone or iPad is to set up a keyboard shortcut. That way, when you type a combination of letters, iOS will automatically replace them with the live long and prosper symbol. It should be short, so it doesn’t take long to type, but it also needs to be unique, so you’ll never type it as part of another word and trigger the replacement by accident. After some experimentation, I’ve settled on “llap” — obviously! — but you’ll need to find what works for you.

How to set up the LLAP Vulcan salute symbol as a keyboard shortcut in iOS

1. Copy the symbol from this tweet
2. Launch Settings
3. Tap General
4. Tap Keyboards
5. Tap Shortcuts
6. Tap + at the top right
7. Double tap next to Phrase to bring up the edit menu
8. Tap Paste to insert the symbol
9. Enter your shortcut of choice (I’m using “llap”)
10. Tap Save

Now you’ll be able to type your shortcut of choice on your iPhone or iPad and insert the green-blooded, pointy eared symbol wherever and whenever you like. Live long and prosper! (Peace and long life!)

For those of you rocking an iPhone 5c or later on UK carrier EE’s network, today’s iOS 8.3 update has brought support for the carrier’s recently-launched Wi-Fi calling feature.

An EE community manager confirmed that the recently-released iOS 8.3 update includes support for the carrier’s Wi-Fi calling feature on iPhone models ranging from the iPhone 5c up to the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. To enable Wi-Fi calling, you simply navigate to the Wi-Fi Calling option in the Setting menu where you’ll be presented with an option to turn the feature on. After enabling it, EE notes that it may take up to a day for Wi-Fi calling to be fully enabled on your device.

If you’re unfamiliar with Wi-Fi calling, it enables you to overcome poor cellular reception by using a Wi-Fi connection to place a call instead. EE just launched its Wi-Fi calling a few days ago, but it is currently limited to just a few specific devices.

Source: EE Community Forums