Kiran Upadhyay

You can now run the latest version of Internet Explorer on your Android, iOS, OS X or non-Windows 10 Windows machine. Microsoft has built and released something it calls RemoteIE, which allows developers to run the company’s browser preview builds without requiring them to be on the most current version of Windows. Microsoft wants developers to build their websites to be compatible with its browser. At the same time, the company can’t expect all developers to use Windows. RemoteIE, which is powered by Microsoft’s cloud computing platform Azure, provides a reasonable compromise. (For some live examples, head here and here.) The service is just for testing, with Microsoft noting that “[s]essions are limited to conserve server resources. Sessions idle for 10 minutes will be logged out and no session can last more than 60 minutes – you’ll need to start a new session.” RemoteIE is free. In short, regardless of your operating system or development environment, you can now quickly sp...

Spare a thought for Microsoft, a relative newcomer to the mobile making business, after Redmond completed its $7.2BN+ acquisition of former European mobile making powerhouse Nokia earlier this year. If Microsoft was hoping to see quick marketshare wins in Europe once its hands were fully on the levers of production that has not come to pass. The latest 12-week smartphone sales figures from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, up to this September, indicate that Windows Phone’s already small share of the smartphone market has shrunk in Europe — dropping 0.3 percentage points in aggregate across the top five markets in Europe (the UK, France, Spain, Italy and Germany). Breaking those markets out individually, only Italy continues to see marketshare gains for Windows Phone, with a 1.5 percentage point rise on the year ago period in that market — giving Microsoft’s OS a 15.2 per cent share on smartphone sales in the country (where it is second only to Android’s 71.8 per cent). But Italy rem...

Apple has moved quickly to release iOS 8.0.2, the update that fixes iOS 8.0.1’s problem of zapping cellular reception on iPhone 6 and 6 Plus devices. It also includes all the fixes listed in iOS 8.0.1 originally, including a fix for the HealthKit bug that held up release of compatible Health apps in iOS 8. It also addresses a problem whereby third-party keyboards wouldn’t stick when activated in apps, meaning it would default back to Apple’s stock keyboard. Apple released the following statement alongside the update: iOS 8.0.2 is now available for users, it fixes an issue that affected iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus users who downloaded iOS 8.0.1, and includes improvements and bug fixes originally in iOS 8.0.1. We apologize for inconveniencing the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus users who were impacted by the bug in iOS 8.0.1. Apple says that less than 40,000 iPhone and iPhone 6 Plus devices were affected by the bad release, which was up for just over an hour until the company pulled i...

Since the launch of iOS 8 last week, there’s been a huge run on custom keyboards in the App Store. That includes the likes of Swype, Fleksy and SwiftKey, all of which have been designed to help users more quickly type and share what they are thinking. But what if they want to share what they are feeling? For that, there’s no better tool than the animated GIF. And now, thanks to a company called Riffsy, you can quickly and easily search for, discover and share a wide variety of animated GIFs directly from your keyboard. Arriving today on iOS, Riffsy GIF Keyboard can be installed alongside all your other keyboards to send out funny animated GIFs via SMS, Twitter, Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp in the same way you would send a text. The app leverages a collection of millions of GIFs that the company’s users have created or shared with the Riffsy Creator app over the past year. And because those GIFs are usually tagged and identified with specific hashtags like #HAPPY, #EXCITE...