MacRumors report that the OS X 10.9.2 beta that has been released to developers includes FaceTime Audio.

With Messages, FaceTime, and FaceTime audio on iOS and OS X, Apple will have a complete communication system in place.

With a simple way to answer telephone calls and chat requests from all devices, those in Apple’s ecosystem will have little reason to resort to alternative VoIP apps when communicating with other Apple users. FaceTime audio is also a high-quality VoIP choice, as it uses the AAC-ELD codec for Full-HD Voice. AAC-ELD is designed to provide CD-like audio quality for voice calls, delivering high speech and audio quality at a low coding delay.

I love using iMessage. It allows me to reply messages while working on my Mac, without having to pick up my iPhone. Sure, I can do the same with Facebook messages and Google Hangouts but those require an additional step of firing up the browser. I still prefer to use a native app solution. The only service that comes close is LINE, with its Mac app.

It will be very useful to be able to make FaceTime Audio calls on the Mac. I have a feature request. Let me be able to shift between my iPhone, iPad or Mac during a call and it will be the perfect seamless experience.

Matthew Panzarino writes on TechCrunch about why people keep investing in Foursquare.

Previously, we mentioned about how Foursquare is moving away from the check-in game by making check-ins public.

In this piece, Foursquare CEO Crowley wants to get things straight.

“The misunderstanding [in days past] was that Foursquare was about “who’s really going to check into a bar”,” Crowley says. Now, with the passive notifications and the increasing complexity of the signals that Foursquare is able to sift through to provide them, people are beginning to turn the corner on how they perceive it.

When they improve Foursquare, it is not just about making the app or service better. It is about how Foursquare can help other apps more than it already has.

Is there, for instance, a benefit for Instagram to know that you’re taking pictures at a specific restaurant or at Disneyland? Maybe. Could OpenTable’s utility be increased if it had access to a background parsing system like Foursquare’s? Almost definitely.

Foursquare’s current point-of-interest database is good. I speak with a lot of developers and it’s consistently mentioned as the go-to source of location data for apps that need it. Better than Google and certainly better than Apple — which actually uses Foursquare’s database to flesh out some of its place info. But what Crowley is talking about is far more than just a solid API and a big list of locations.

A lot of people seem to believe in the future of Foursquare, judging from its $600 million valuation. Just this week, it raised another$35 million in funding.

The good news is that the popular email app Mailbox now supports iCloud and Yahoo Mail, so the app isn’t restricted to Gmail users any longer. There isn’t any indication that support for traditional IMAP email clients is arriving anytime soon, though.

Mailbox: now for iCloud and Yahoo Mail

Today we’re thrilled to announce we’ve added Mailbox support for Yahoo, iCloud, me.com, and mac.com email accounts. This is a big step for us — we get more requests for Yahoo and iCloud support than for any other feature.

The bad news is that support for Yahoo Mail now seems to be broken, apparently because Yahoo Mail servers aren’t permitting connections from Mailbox. There isn’t any indication whether this is due to a violation of any of Yahoo’s terms of service, or something related to the email problems that Yahoo has been facing recently.

It’s often said that Snapchat is a popular tool for sexting, but regardless of whether you agree with that or not, there is no doubt that Snapchat is popular. The next question people should ask is “what about text messaging?”

After the Edward Snowden leaks, there has been increased interest in private messaging, but as we’ve seen, it’s not easy to be achieved, so could disappearing messages be the solution?

Depending on the situation, Snapchat messages can be requested by law enforcement agencies. The solution to prevent that would be to ensure that messages can’t be retrieved by the service provider itself, something that Wickr is currently promoting. Another alternative would be to check out Ansa which allows you to delete messages that you’ve sent to others in the past.

Suddenly, Messages Are Disappearing All Over—On Purpose

Wickr, a messaging service that completely erases your communication, uses military-grade encryption called CDH521 to safeguard your messages. The company uses a different key for every message generated on your mobile device, meaning you are protected from both hackers and law enforcement.

Wickr lets you send texts, picture, voice, video and PDF messages that have a self-destructing time limit of up to five days. When the message expires, a so-called shredder built into the application deletes it from the device’s memory. Wickr’s shredder works in the background of the device, rewriting all the data users trash—including emails, photos, and messages not stored in Wickr.

Vine has announced a new version of its app for Android that runs on Gingerbread devices. The app only allows content consumption but not creation.

Please note that due to device limitations, this version of Vine doesn’t allow for video creation. However, there are tons of great Vine videos to entertain you. We hope you enjoy watching!

You can have your pie, or gingerbread, but you can’t eat it. Would it make you hungry enough to want to upgrade your phone?

The Atlantic writes about how Apple’s launch of the iPhone forced Google to scrap their Android project and start over.

For most of Silicon Valley—including most of Google—the iPhone’s unveiling on January 9, 2007 was something to celebrate. Jobs had once again done the impossible. Four years before he’d talked an intransigent music industry into letting him put their catalog on iTunes for ninety-nine cents a song. Now he had convinced a wireless car­rier to let him build a revolutionary smartphone. But for the Google Android team, the iPhone was a kick in the stomach.

“What we had suddenly looked just so … nineties,” DeSalvo said. “It’s just one of those things that are obvious when you see it.”

Android prior to the iPhone was scrapped when the iPhone was unveiled.

A lot was wrong with the first iPhone too. Rubin and the An­droid team &emdash; along with many others &emdash; did not think users would take to typing on a screen without the tactile feedback of a physi­cal keyboard. That is why the first Android phone &emdash; the T-Mobile G1 from HTC, nearly two years later &emdash; had a slide-out keyboard. But what was also undeniable to the Android team was that they had underestimated Jobs. At the very least, Jobs had come up with a new way of interacting with a device &emdash; with a finger instead of a stylus or dedicated buttons &emdash; and likely a lot more. “We knew that Apple was going to announce a phone. Everyone knew that. We just didn’t think it would be that good,” said Ethan Beard, one of Android’s early business development executives.

Within weeks the Android team had completely reconfigured its objectives. A phone with a touchscreen, code-named Dream, that had been in the early stages of development, became the focus.

The Android team did not believe a touchscreen would work, until they saw the iPhone. The author is mistaken to write about touchscreen on iPhone being something wrong with the iPhone. As John Gruber puts it:

That first sentence is fine — the original iPhone left much room for improvement. But Vogelstein’s supporting example — the on-screen keyboard — is an example of something the original iPhone got right, and which took the rest of the industry, including Andy Rubin and the entire Android team at Google, years to come to terms with and accept. What percentage of smartphones sold today have a hardware keyboard? I’m guessing it’s in the single digits and dropping.