app
app: A smartphone application; the American Dialect Society's 2010 word of the year. "There's an app for that." Example: "is there an app for that?"
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app: A smartphone application; the American Dialect Society's 2010 word of the year. "There's an app for that." Example: "is there an app for that?"
A $99 black puck for renting shows and streaming Netflix
The second-generation Apple TV, announced on 1 September 2010, shrank to a tiny black box with no storage, rented TV episodes for 99 cents and films from $3.99, streamed Netflix, and previewed...
"There's an app for that": 300,000 apps and counting
Apple's App Store passed 300,000 apps in late 2010 and had served billions of downloads since opening in 2008; the American Dialect Society named "app" its word of the year. Top sellers included...
Retina display, FaceTime, and the antenna you could not hold
Announced on 7 June 2010 and on sale on 24 June, the iPhone 4 introduced the 960-by-640 Retina display, a front camera for FaceTime video calls, a 5-megapixel camera with 720p video, and a...
A 9.7-inch tablet nobody knew they needed
Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad on 27 January 2010 and it went on sale in the US on 3 April, selling 300,000 on the first day and a million within a month. It ran iPhone apps and its own tablet apps,...
Check in, become the mayor
Foursquare made 2010 the year of the check-in. Users broadcast their location to friends, collected badges, and fought to become the "mayor" of their coffee shop. The app's success pushed Facebook to...
Multitasking, folders, and a new name
Apple renamed iPhone OS to iOS with version 4, released on 21 June 2010. It added multitasking (in a limited form), home-screen folders, wallpapers, a unified inbox, FaceTime on the iPhone 4, and...
Appearing in Twitter's trending topics list; by extension, popular right now.
trending: Appearing in Twitter's trending topics list; by extension, popular right now. Example: "#Inception is trending worldwide"
The 2009 iPhone that most iPhone owners still carried
For the first half of 2010 the iPhone 3GS was Apple's flagship, and after June it stayed on sale at $99 as the entry model. Its plastic curved back, 3.5-inch 480-by-320 screen and 3-megapixel camera...
Flash storage only, and an 11-inch model for $999
On 20 October 2010 Apple reintroduced the MacBook Air in 11-inch and 13-inch sizes with flash storage instead of a hard drive, instant wake and no optical drive. At $999 for the 11-inch, it set the...
A tiny touchscreen square that people wore as a watch
The 2010 iPod nano dropped the click wheel and video camera for a 1.5-inch multitouch square with a clip, the size of a postage stamp. Watch-strap accessories turned it into an unofficial smartwatch...
Reader mode and extensions, in brushed aluminium
Safari 5, released on 7 June 2010 for Mac and Windows, added Reader (a clean article view), extensions, Bing as a search option and a faster Nitro JavaScript engine. On the Mac it was the default, on...
The $29 upgrade with no new features, and the Mac App Store on the way
Snow Leopard, released in August 2009 for $29, was the Mac OS of 2010: brushed-metal was gone, the Dock was a 3D shelf, Exposé and Spaces managed windows, and Safari 5 arrived in June. In October...
The world's biggest webmail, redesigned
Hotmail, by then branded Windows Live Hotmail, had hundreds of millions of accounts in 2010, many of them the first email address people ever created. A mid-2010 update added Sweep, Office Web Apps...
Reviews of everything, and fights with restaurants
Yelp's crowd-sourced reviews of restaurants and shops were a habit for city dwellers in 2010, and its iPhone app was among the first with an augmented-reality feature (Monocle). Small businesses...
What most of the world actually carried
Smartphones were still a minority in 2010: roughly one in five phones sold worldwide that year was a smartphone, according to Gartner. Most people carried feature phones, from Nokia candybars and...
The iPad, the iPhone 4, and the war on Flash
Steve Jobs had his last great year of product launches in 2010: the iPad in January, the "Thoughts on Flash" letter in April, the iPhone 4 in June, the Antennagate press conference in July, and the...
140 characters and the Fail Whale
Twitter turned four in 2010 and became the internet's newswire. Users sent about 50 million tweets a day in February and roughly 90 million a day by September, the Library of Congress agreed to...
Reblogs, GIFs and the dark blue dashboard
Tumblr grew explosively in 2010. Its dashboard, a dark blue page of posts from the blogs you followed, made reblogging and animated GIFs the currency of a new creative culture, from fandoms to...
Square photos, filters, iPhone only
Instagram launched on 6 October 2010 as an iPhone-only app for square photos with retro filters and reached a million users by December. Its filters, such as X-Pro II, Lomo-fi and Earlybird, made...
The P2P client a court shut down in October 2010
LimeWire was the file-sharing program of a generation: a green-and-grey Gnutella client full of misnamed MP3s, fake files and viruses. On 26 October 2010 a federal court injunction forced it to stop...
Ten blue links, and results that appeared as you typed
Google in 2010 was a white page with a colourful logo, one box and ten blue links. The year began with Google refusing to keep censoring results in China, added a left-hand panel of search tools in...
Three and a half million articles and a new default skin
Wikipedia was nine years old in 2010 and by far the largest reference work ever assembled, with the English edition approaching 3.5 million articles. In May the site switched its default look from...
Collateral Murder, the war logs and Cablegate
WikiLeaks defined the news in 2010. It published the Collateral Murder helicopter video in April, the Afghan War Diary in July, the Iraq War Logs in October, and began releasing US diplomatic cables...
Flash on a phone, tethering, and a huge speed boost
Android 2.2, announced at Google I/O in May 2010, made Android phones two to five times faster with a JIT compiler, added Wi-Fi hotspot tethering, Chrome-to-Phone, apps on the SD card, and,...
The alternative browser with a thousand extensions
Firefox 3.6, released on 21 January 2010, was the browser of choice for people who cared, with about 30 percent of worldwide usage. It added Personas skins, plugin-crash protection and faster...
The plugin that ran YouTube, FarmVille and every banner ad
Flash Player 10.1, released in June 2010, ran the YouTube player, Hulu, Pandora, FarmVille, every browser game and most animated adverts; Adobe said it was installed on about 99 percent of...
A megabit or two on a good day, and the end of unlimited
Most smartphones in 2010 used 3G networks that delivered a megabit or two in practice, enough for email, Facebook and a slow YouTube video. AT&T ended unlimited data for new iPhone customers in June...
The 99-cent game that defined the smartphone era
Released for iPhone in December 2009, Angry Birds became the best-selling paid app of 2010, arrived free on Android in October, and passed 50 million downloads across platforms by December. Its...
The browser that made feature-phone internet bearable
Opera Mini compressed pages on Opera's servers before sending them to the phone, which made it the most-used mobile browser in the world in 2010, especially on feature phones in India, Indonesia,...
Native video, canvas and the end of plugins, still a draft
HTML5 was a working draft in 2010, but the fight over Flash made it a household word. YouTube launched an HTML5 player beta in January, Apple published a showcase in June, IE9 beta supported it in...
Ethan Marcotte names the idea, May 2010
On 25 May 2010, Ethan Marcotte published "Responsive Web Design" in A List Apart, combining fluid grids, flexible images and CSS media queries into one approach. Before it, most sites served a...
JavaScript on the server, one year old
Node.js, presented by Ryan Dahl in 2009, reached version 0.2 in 2010 and npm, its package manager, was first published in January 2010. Backbone.js, CoffeeScript and the first Node web frameworks...
The Ribbon everywhere, and Office Web Apps in the browser
Office 2010, released to consumers on 15 June 2010, put the Ribbon interface in every application, added the Backstage file view, and launched free Office Web Apps that ran Word, Excel and PowerPoint...
Content-Aware Fill, and Flash CS5's blocked iPhone exporter
Adobe CS5, released in April 2010, brought Photoshop's Content-Aware Fill (the demo video went viral), 64-bit Photoshop on the Mac, and Dreamweaver's CSS improvements. Flash CS5 could compile Flash...
100,000 apps, and the Angry Birds free-for-all
Android Market, the store that became Google Play in 2012, passed 100,000 apps in October 2010. Its green robot storefront was messier than Apple's and full of free, ad-supported apps; when Angry...
m.facebook.com, WAP pages, and a web that did not fit
In 2010 the mobile web meant separate m.sites with stripped-down layouts (m.facebook.com, m.youtube.com), WAP pages on feature phones, and pinch-zooming full desktop pages on an iPhone. Responsive...
"Hey Apple!": the web series that became a TV show
Dane Boedigheimer's Annoying Orange, a talking orange with a human mouth and eyes, was one of the biggest channels on YouTube in 2010, with episodes routinely passing tens of millions of views. Its...
Apple's music event introduced Ping, a social network inside iTunes that flopped, a touchscreen iPod nano, an iPod touch with cameras, and a tiny second-generation Apple TV.
Verified Supported Editorial Labels show how well each record is documented; open any result for its sources.
The social network at 500 million users
In 2010 Facebook was six years old, had just overtaken Google as the most-visited site in the United States on some weekly measures, and passed 500 million users in July. Its blue-and-white pages...
Ten billion songs sold, and the Beatles arrive
The iTunes Store was the centre of legal digital music in 2010: it passed ten billion songs sold in February, iTunes 10 arrived in September with the ill-fated Ping social network, and in November...
Apple showed iPhone OS 4 (renamed iOS 4 in June) with multitasking, folders and iAd, and changed its developer rules to block apps built with cross-compilers such as Flash CS5's...
Apple introduced 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Airs with flash storage from $999, previewed Mac OS X Lion, and announced a Mac App Store that opened in January 2011.
The American Dialect Society voted "app" its word of the year for 2010, beating "nom" and "junk"; the New Oxford American Dictionary had chosen "refudiate".
Google revealed that it had been hit by a sophisticated attack from China (Operation Aurora) and said it was no longer willing to censor results on google.cn, setting up its...
At a San Francisco event, Apple introduced a 9.7-inch tablet starting at $499, mocked for its name and praised for its screen. It went on sale in April and sold almost 15 million...
Apple announced the ten-billionth song download from the iTunes Store, cementing it as the world's largest music retailer in the last years before streaming.
Gizmodo paid $5,000 for an iPhone prototype an Apple engineer left in a bar and published photos and a teardown two months before the launch; police later raided an editor's home.
Ethan Marcotte's A List Apart article combined fluid grids, flexible images and media queries into a single approach and gave it a name that stuck.
Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone 4 with a Retina display, FaceTime and a glass-and-steel design; the Wi-Fi in the packed hall failed during the demo. It went on sale on 24 June...
Apple released Safari 5 with a Reader mode for articles, an extensions system and a faster JavaScript engine.
Adobe shipped Flash Player 10.1 for desktops and, within weeks, Android 2.2 phones, with hardware video acceleration and touch support, while Apple's devices remained Flash-free.
Office 2010 arrived with the Ribbon in every app and free Office Web Apps in the browser, Microsoft's answer to Google Docs.
Hulu introduced a $9.99 subscription with full seasons and apps for the iPhone and iPad, its first step from free ad-supported TV toward paid streaming.
After weeks of reports that gripping the iPhone 4 dropped its signal, Steve Jobs held a press conference, insisted all phones had weak spots, and offered every buyer a free case.
Facebook added location check-ins to its iPhone app and mobile site, taking direct aim at Foursquare and Gowalla.
Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger released a free app for square, filtered photos; it gained 25,000 users on its first day and a million by December.
Rovio released Angry Birds free with ads on Android; demand crashed the GetJar app store that hosted it, and the game passed 50 million total downloads by December.
After years of negotiation, the Beatles catalogue went on sale on the iTunes Store, with Apple's homepage devoted to the band for the day.
Google opened an app store for its browser, unveiled Chrome OS, and began shipping the unbranded Cr-48 notebook to testers.