Facebook closes the doors on its Creative Labs

Facebook's Slingshot is one of the app's getting the boot.

You might not be familiar with Facebook’s Creative Labs but that team’s been responsible for introducing the social network’s standalone apps like Slingshot, Rooms, and Riff. All of these together with said team have been shut down. The three Creative Labs apps have been pulled from iOS App Store and Google Play Store. Slingshot was Facebook’s Snapchat-like service; Riff was for “riffing” on viral videos; and Rooms was the company’s anonymous chatroom app. Users who already have the apps can still use it. Those who use Rooms can continue to do so until December 23^rd. There’s no final posting day set yet for Slingshot or Riff.

Even though Facebook is disbanding its Creative Labs division, some of the features developed by the team are being integrated into Facebook’s main app. For example, Paper, a Creative Labs’ creation, is being used as an inspiration for the look of Facebook’s Instant Articles project. This goes to show that while Facebook is a successful social network, it doesn’t mean all their projects meet the same level of success as the others.

Source: MacWorld

Adobe’s mobile version of Lightroom is now free

Now you don’t need an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription to use Adobe Lightroom on Android. As Adobe says, “anyone can take advantage of the organizational, editing, and sharing abilities” of this tool. Lightroom lets you edit photos with a variety of tools to use and share these using different services. You can revert these changes at any time and copy edits to other photos, which will help you save time batch editing shots.

If you do have a subscription, you gain access to more features like being able to organize, edit, and share photo across mobile, web, and desktop, including photo edits. iOS users have had free access to Lightroom since October. It’s good that Android’s getting the same treatment.

Source: Droid Life | Download: Google Play Store (Free)

Minecraft heads to Nintendo Wii U

Mojang’s video game phenomenon Minecraft launches worldwide on Nintendo’s Wii U home console on December 17. Minecraft: Wii U Edition comes with multiple add-on content packs, and will be available in the Nintendo eShop on Wii U in North America for $29.99. Nintendo and Mojang are also collaborating on new content for Nintendo fans to be released at a future date. More details about this content will be released at a later time.

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IBM introduces Swift Sandbox, lets developers write and execute code on their browsers

In tune with Apple's move to release the Swift iOS an OS X authoring language to Open Source, IBM has revealed the Swift Sandbox, a clever interactive website that lets you write Swift code and execute it in a server environment – on top of Linux in a cloud infrastructure.

Each sandbox runs on IBM Cloud in a Docker container. In addition, both the latest versions of Swift and its standard library are available for coders to use. For more on IBM's work on Swift, head on over to their page.