YouTube's never shy about changing its products in order to celebrate an anniversary of something it deems important, and today is no different.
In two rather surprising moves, Google today changed the way users will interact with two of its post popular services; YouTube and Maps. One has received an all-new mode for people to use, whilst the other is going the way of Google Reader.
Apple may have been keen to remove any remnants of Google from its iOS ecosystem with iOS 6, but even though the removal of the Big G's Maps service turned out to be a great mistake. However, ditching the YouTube app - which had remained basically untouched since the introduction of the iPhone back in 2007 - was more of a case of good riddance to bad rubbish. The stock app had become severely antiquated, but while native support scrapped, a revamped, smooth iteration was released to the App Store, and today, said app has been given a generous update.
App updates are consistently being talked about at the moment, more often than not in the context of developers pushing out updates on the iOS platform to support iOS 6 and the new iPhone 5 which Apple released last week. The official YouTube app have probably been cropping up in conversation more than Google would like, especially as users are wondering where the native iPad app is and when it will be launched, but that hasn't distracted them from pushing out a fairly sizeable update to the official Android YouTube app today.
If you enjoy being sociable, catching up on trends or just generally wasting time on the web, then the past week's releases will have been pretty useful to you. Facebook finally pulled its finger out and delivered a decent mobile app (well, at least for iOS), so your social networking can be done at light-speed, and now the new YouTube app for Xbox 360 is said to be up to five-times faster than its predecessor.
YouTube is by far and away the most popular viral video site out there, but unfortunately, it's often let down by applications (or lack thereof). Take iOS for example; the native YouTube app is a sluggish affair which has seen little change from the days of iPhone OS, and most now use the vastly superior web-based app to catch up on the latest music videos, drop tests, and amateur comedy sketches.
It wasn't that long ago when we brought you the news that YouTube was planning on bringing their services to PlayStation Vita owners through the simple download of an official app. Considering the insane popularity which YouTube enjoys and the fact that it is the number one video viewing website in the world, an official app for the Vita was always going to go down a storm with those handheld owners who want to transcend the device’s gaming capabilities.
I'm not sure which is more annoying; the fact Apple has decided to allow the native iOS YouTube app to fester with little-to-no improvement since the initial iPhone launched all the way back in 2007, or that whenever a YouTube link is selected, one is forced - by default - to view the video in aforementioned app.
If you cast your minds back to last year, you may remember a little feature introduced by Google-owned YouTube, which allowed users to effortlessly convert standard videos to 3D.
A newly released iPad app promises to change the way we watch not just YouTube video content, but much of the online video content that we now consume on a daily basis.
