Sunrise calendar app officially closes its doors on August 31st

Different things happen to apps when they get acquired. One of the scenarios is the technology and team behind the purchased company gets absorbed into products developed by the one who purchased them. And that is what’ll happen to Sunrise. The calendar app bought by Microsoft last year will be officially shutting its doors on August 31^st. They are already pulling the app from the app stores and no new features or bug fixes will be heading its way. After the end of August, the app will stop working altogether.

The Sunrise team says they are busy working on the Outlook app for iOS and Android. So if you use this app, you should be seeing some Sunrise features show up there.

 Source: Sunrise

Instagram debuts new look and icons

It wasn’t just a test. Instagram has changed the look of its apps to, as they say, “put more focus on your photos and videos without changing how you navigate the app.” Part of the redesign are new flatter yet more colorful icons for Instagram and its other creative apps: Layout, Boomerang, and Hyperlapse. As rainbow-inspired the icons are, the app itself gets more monochromatic. The update should be rolling out to your device soon. It’s already made its way to my devices (including a trusty old LG G3).

 Source: Instagram

Microsoft says that their Canadian Cloud is open for Business

Microsoft announced that their Canadian datacentres are officially open to power even more businesses in Canada. With this announcement, Microsoft Azure is generally available from local datacentre regions located in Toronto and Quebec City, and Office 365 is now offering data residency for Canadian business customers.

Microsoft offers Canadian businesses and public sector customers the most complete cloud. The Microsoft Cloud is enterprise grade, hyperscale, with the highest standards of data security and privacy, all hosted locally in Canada.

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Disney to discontinue ‘Disney Infinity’ and drop out of game publishing

Disney dropped a bombshell and announced that they were shuttering Disney Infinity. But that wasn’t the only big news Disney dropped, Disney said they will be closing down its “self-published console games business.” In an earnings report, Disney said they will write down a $147 million charge in relation to the shutdown of the console business, mostly due to Infinity. The company said in the report that there was a slight decrease in revenues and income from its Consumer Products & Interactive Media division partly due to “lower results for Infinity.” Right now, there are two final retail releases coming out, including three new characters from Alice Through the Looking Glass later this month and the Finding Dory Play Set coming out in June.

Source: Disney Interactive + Ars Technica