News

There was a lot of App Store activity this week but before we jump in here are two quick news items. Touch Arcade discovered a countdown page and inactive mini site referencing Dungeon Hunter 5. The clock is counting down to January 12th, so expect more to be revealed about the game on Monday. You can watch the teaser video titled "Stand Against Chaos" in the trailers section below.

Microsoft is now offering the first month of Office 365 for free. The free month is available on both Personal and Home subscriptions. Users need an Office subscription to access the advance features on Microsoft's Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps for the iPad and iPhone. Subscriptions can be bought through any of the three Office apps.

It is easy to fill your iPhone or iPad with too many photos that take up precious storage, but it is not easy to quickly delete them from your Photos app. You can store up to 5GB of photos on iCloud for free, but what do you do with all the duplicates, blurry mistakes and pictures of your ex? AppJester has an answer called Purrge.

Purrge is a new app that allows you to quickly search through your photo library and delete multiple photos at once. You can do this by either swiping across multiple photos while in a grid view, or you can view them individually and swipe up to move them to your Purrge trash bin. You can then tap the tiny Purrge logo in top right hand corner to delete the marked images from your phone. The app is so simple to use there is really nothing else to say about it.

With over 10 billion photos uploaded in 2014, Flickr has plenty of data to crunch on popular cameras. Each year the company takes a look at the ongoing trends in camera use amongst its 100 million users. Smartphone ownership continued to grow last year, with Apple and Samsung making significant gains on Flickr.

According to the Flickr blog, Apple has now overtaken Nikon in the race for second place ranking. Canon retains the top spot with 13.4 percent ownership, with Apple and Nikon following at 9.6 and 9.3 percent respectively. For its part, Samsung surpassed Sony in 2014, taking fourth place with 5.6 percent. This leaves Sony in fifth place at Flickr with 4.2 percent ownership.

While Telltale Games has been busy snatching up licensing deals for hot properties such as Game of Thrones and even Minecraft, Orpheus Interactive has inked a deal with Fox Digital Entertainment to develop a mobile game based on the popular television series Sons of Anarchy. The game titled Sons of Anarchy: The Prospect will be an extension of the series, which aired its final episode on FX in December.

The Prospect will be an interactive game with its own original story based on an unknown chapter of the motorcycle club. The game promises to give "fans a chance to experience the treachery, graphic action, intrigue and life and death decision making they have come to anticipate from the show." The outcome of the game will be influenced by decisions made by the player, much like Telltale's story-driven titles.

After spending most of December fluctuating on almost a daily basis, Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) stock saw five consecutive positive days for its first full week of trading in the new year. The share price opened last Monday at $106.25 and closed the week at $112.01. Stocks surged $4.14 on Thursday, almost 4%. It seems the fluctuations are persist however, as the share price is currently down 2.4%. Apple will announce its Q1 fiscal 2015 earnings on Tuesday, January 27th 5 PM ET.

Despite the recent roller coaster, analysts are still bullish about Apple's holiday quarter sales. Investment firm UBS notified its clients last week that it believes Apple may have sold upwards of 69 million iPhones in the December quarter. This would outstrip the Wall Street consensus of 65.5 million sales and would make for a record breaking quarter for Apple.