News

Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) once again reached an all time high as its share price closed at $109.01 on Friday. On Thursday this week (November 13), the company will pay out a record quarterly dividend of $0.47 per share. The ex-dividend date was last Thursday (Nov. 6), which means that all shareholders as of that date will receive the dividend payment, regardless of who holds the stock.

A note to investors issued last Tuesday by Canaccord Genuity analyst, Michael Walkley indicated that Apple is dominating the handset market. Analysis shows the Cupertino giant accounts for a whopping 86% industry profits, while chief rival Samsung has dwindled to just 18% (the two account for over 100% because rivals like Motorola and Microsoft lost share).

The biggest news of last week (well actually the previous Friday) was Pangu's release of a jailbreak for iOS 8. If you had a jailbroken iOS 7 iPhone or iPad, now you can get back all of your favorite tweaks, as it is fully integrated with Cydia as of Thursday. If you plan to jailbreak, now is the time, as Apple released iOS 8.1.1 beta on Monday, which includes a patch that blocks the jailbreak.

A mysterious Apple webcrawler was discovered last week by developer Jan Moesson. The bot can be traced back to October 15th, and it seems to only request HTML pages. Its purpose is currently unknown, but there has been speculation that it has to do with improving Spotlight.

The Pangu jailbreak team and Cydia creator Jay Freeman (saurik) have finally released a stable version of the Pangu iOS 8 jailbreak tool with a fully functioning Cydia app store. Freeman announced on Thursday that Cydia has officially started accepting payments for paid tweaks and apps, and Team Pangu released Pangu version 1.2.0 with major big fixes. As of right now the iOS 8 jailbreak is available for Windows only, but a English Mac version should be available any day now. This means we should see an increase in jailbreak tweaks that take advantage of the iOS 8 software. You can learn how to jailbreak your device running iOS 8 - iOS 8.1 here. Also don't forget to follow us on Twitter so you never miss a tweak.

On Friday, Blizzard announced its first Hearthstone expansion titled "Goblins vs Gnomes". The expansion will include 120 new cards that players can purchase with in-game gold or real world money. You can see a preview of some of the cards being released here and the trailer at the bottom of this post. Goblins vs Gnomes will be available this December.

Anyone waiting to update to iOS 8.1 and jailbreak can breathe a sigh of relief. After several updates released by Cydia creator Jay Freeman (saurik) and the Pangu jailbreak team, the iOS 8 jailbreak has stabilized. Saurik announced that thanks to everyone's hard work, including his own, the Cydia store would begin accepting payments for jailbreak tweaks and software.

At the moment, the Pangu jailbreak version 1.2.1 is available for Windows only. China-based Pangu Team is actively working on an OS X version, which could be released by the weekend. Cydia Installer version 1.1.16 introduced several bug fixes for iOS 8 users. Developers can now mark their creations as iOS 8 compatible and begin using Cydia's payment structure.

On Thursday, Microsoft announced that its Office apps for the iPad have been updated with iPhone and Dropbox support. The software company also launched a sign-up page for its Office for Android tablet preview and noted that it is working on new, touch-optimized Office apps for Windows 10.

Microsoft's Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps are available separately for free on the Apple App Store. Users can create and edit documents with a free Microsoft account, but a "qualifying Office 365 subscription is required to unlock the full Office experience". A yearly Office 365 Personal subscription is available for $69.99 through Microsoft's online store. A Personal subscription can be used with one mobile device and one additional computer.