Cody Fink

1547 posts on MacStories since January 2010

Former MacStories contributor.

[email protected]

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Apple Now Offering Free Downloads in the Apple Store App→

Much like visiting Starbucks and picking up a free song, the Apple Store is now distributing their own freebies. This week it’s an app called Color Zen, which shows up in the Apple Store app alongside the store’s information. If you’re at home, the app just shows up in the list of things that Apple is currently featuring. Mark Gurman from 9to5Mac writes that it’s an incentive to get people to download the app.

We previously reported that Apple Store employees are instructed to install this application on a new iOS Device during Personal Setup (After a purchase). At an internal event in San Francisco last month, Tim Cook revealed that only a small percentage of Apple customers are aware of the app, but Cook wants to use the app as an element of his plan to boost iPhone sales in his stores.

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Is Chromecast Worth it if You Already Use AirPlay?→

Josh Centers from TidBITS takes a look at the Chromecast, its setup process, what apps it works with on Macs and iOS devices, and what you can expect from the device compared to AirPlay. This is a very thorough article, especially if you’re considering buying it for yourself or as a stocking stuffer later this year.

I should note here that the Chromecast’s “casting” is different in a key way from AirPlay. While AirPlay sends audio and video directly from your device to the Apple TV, Chromecast-enabled apps send only a URL, which the Chromecast loads through its own built-in Web browser. Also, unlike the Apple TV, the Chromecast does not have a hardware remote. You control the audio or video directly on your device, including volume. The Netflix iOS app even activates a remote mode when it sends video to the Chromecast.

Keep reading because a lot of it is, “And another problem is…” How Chromecast works is important since the quality of what’s shown to you on the TV ends up being inferior to AirPlay.

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Leap Motion and Better Touch Tool→

David Sparks writes about his experience with Leap Motion after pairing it with Better Touch Tool.

As you can tell. I already have a lot of affection for Better Touch Tool and Leap controller functionality is icing on the cake. So I’ve spent some time playing with this new feature and I’ve now got several gestures I can do in the air in front of my Mac. If I put one finger in the air and move it up, it closes the application, just like the gesture in iOS 7. If I put one finger in the air and pull it down, it closes the window just like my gestures I explained earlier on my trackpad. If I put two fingers in the air and swiped the left, I move right one space. Putting two fingers in the air and swiping to the right moves back one space to the left. All of this is a lot of fun. I’m only adding new gestures as I internalize the prior ones.

It’s great that people are at least finding some practical uses for this thing. I just think the Leap Motion is a solution in search of a problem.

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HEARD

HEARD appeared on the App Store at the end of June then suddenly disappeared without a trace. There was no blog post and no real explanation on Twitter — just a couple of Tweets asking to get in touch with so-and-so at the time. The whole thing was kind of strange, and I honestly believed the app had been acquired. The app looks to have been pulled due to a bug, and rather than risk poor app reviews, I surmise that the devs decided to pull it. The launch was quiet and there wasn’t too much to lose at the time. After several days, HEARD came back to the App Store with a small update. It’s here for good.

Correction: Apple pulled the application without warning after deciding the app didn’t need full background access. HEARD appealed and won their case, and the app returned to the App Store as it was originally introduced. My assumption was incorrect.

I was disappointed that I didn’t download the app right away after it disappeared (fearing I had missed the chance to try it), given that what it does is nothing short of intriguing. HEARD lets you save anything your iPhone has heard in the past five minutes. The idea that you can suddenly save a conversation to your iPhone that happened five minutes ago sounds magical. But then you start wondering if it’s even all that practical given that you’d likely want more than just five minutes if you’re intent on recording something.

HEARD is an app that runs in the background, its ability to record only limited to how much battery life you have left. By pressing a big red button, HEARD begins actively listening. There’s nothing to log into and no quirky settings to configure. Like you would see with apps like Skype or Voice Memos, HEARD changes the color of the status bar system wide to indicate that the app is listening. When you return to the app, pressing the button again saves whatever was buffered in the last five minutes to its library as a recording. You can then listen in, edit the file’s title, add tags, or delete it if you’re not happy with it. The app continues listening and the cycle begins anew.

That’s what makes HEARD kind of killer. It gives you the potential to record everything that happens. If your phone can hear it, it’s in the app’s buffer for at least five minutes.

While having this kind of power can certainly be useful, is it impractical? Sometimes. Obviously if you want to record a thirty minute meeting then you’re dead in the water unless you use another app. HEARD will let you turn off background audio to record audio snippets, but it only records as long as you hold down the button. If I can put myself in the mindset of the developer, what they’re trying to do is prevent you from accidentally recording something for so long that you run out of storage space. Personally I would like the option of not having to hold down that button, even if it meant I couldn’t leave the app if that’s the tradeoff the developers want to make. I want to use HEARD over Voice Memos and as my destination for everything, both for whatever stuff I happen to capture from the airwaves and stuff that I want to record intentionally.

I would love IFTTT integration. Just imagine saving a snippet and having it automatically end up in Evernote or another app. That’s my only want for this app going forward.

There are some aesthetic things I don’t like, particularly the ‘HEARING’ button in the center of the tab bar. I keep pressing it trying to pause and start recordings to no avail. As for recordings, those text boxes look a little dated. And the only real way to turn off background listening is to flip a switch in the settings or close the app from the multitasking bar (I feel there should be a way to pause background listening). For these things, the app does encourage feedback via a button in the settings.

Given the premise and despite being a sort of purposefully limited voice recorder, HEARD works. I felt this way when HEARD first disappeared, and I still feel this way today, that it’s something that was built for attracting attention from bigger fish in the pond, and I wouldn’t be surprised if someone did snap it up just for the idea. Yet, I do recommend at least trying out HEARD. It’s free, the limitation being that only things heard in the past few seconds can be saved. An in app purchase of $1.99 will unlock the full five minutes. Download it from the App Store.

Update 5:00 pm: @heardapp reached out to me on Twitter to point out an inaccuracy in my review of the app concerning the app’s sudden disappearance. I’ve embedded the tweets below and have updated the review.

The Relevancy of App Store Search Results→

Allen Pike looks at the relevancy of search results on the App Store and walks away concerned. For developers it’s frustrating — apps that legitimately belong under a search result or fall in the category of that keyword are overshadowed by unrelated apps with buzzwords in their titles.

In my echo chamber, Twitterrific and Tweetbot are used by many and praised by all. In the real world, most people are not looking for a paid Twitter app. The App Store is curated with this in mind, and I get that.

Still, it’s frustrating that the Store search algorithm cares almost exclusively about downloads, app title, and keywords. Paid apps get fewer downloads than free apps, so they’re lost in the noise. Instead of Twitterrific, we get Instagram at #2. This isn’t because Instagram is about “Twitter” at all, but because it’s insanely popular, and meets the minimum keyword relevance requirement to appear.

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Crowsflight Points You in the Right Direction→

I think maps are useful when choosing your destination, but when navigating the city streets, orienting yourself by finding landmarks on a tiny screen can be tricky. I like this idea of having a pointer, a directional compass that at least tells you you’re heading in the right direction.

I like the concept behind this app. I could have used something like this a couple months ago when I ended up parking several blocks away from my destination (yay city parking). Maps got me close to my destination, but the walking directions didn’t quite follow the walking paths available and it’s semi easy to get lost in your phone instead of paying attention to your surroundings. Crowsflight shows you were you should be looking for your destination, features a quick search feature (useful when stuck on slow 3G), and built-in maps as an additional way to find nearby points of interest. It’s one of those things where you ask yourself why you need another compass, and end up realizing that it can be super useful when smart features are attached.

You can download Crowsflight for free from the App Store, and unlock all of the features for a dollar via an in-app purchase.

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Learn to Code with Treehouse for the iPad→

Quick note: I’d link to a proper blog post, but I don’t see one on Treehouse’s site yet. The link will currently take you to the iTunes Preview page.

You need to have a subscription to use the app (starting at $25 per month), but this is a very cool bonus for those that are learning to code websites and are just starting down the path towards making their own iOS apps. Languages include HTML, CSS, Javascript, Ruby, Objective-C, and more. Treehouse has video tutorials, badges that you can collect as you progress through lessons, and a members forum so you can get help from Treehouse’s community of learners and self starters.

[via VentureBeat]

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‘How strange is Apple’s iMessage? The strangest.’→

Craig Mod has a few suggestions that would go a long way towards improving iMessage. He talks about conflicting IDs, unsynced histories (and someone else had to make an app to fix how terrible searching history is on the Mac), and the lack of proper profiles for the people you’re conversing with.

The biggest problem I have with iMessage is that it’s capable of but really poor at handling group conversations. Our issues revolved around the “Send and Receive” settings. For a group chat to really work, everyone has to be sending from the same address. More often than not, this was different between a Mac and iOS devices. If someone in the group was sending a message on their iPhone, the default was likely a phone number. If someone in the group was sending a message on their Mac, the default was probably an email address. Linking helps, but keeping track of all these settings is difficult. If one person in the group was sending from a different address, it would cause a new conversation to appear in iMessage (thus “splitting the thread”) for the receivers. For the sender, everything would appear to be the same. With a big group of people this became a daily annoyance because it became difficult to follow conversations when different instances or pieces of it showed up in different places. It’s a hard problem to describe, especially when receivers can opt to receive messages at multiple email addresses (and if the same person you’re conversing with decides to send you something to an alternative address, I believe the message should show up in the same conversation). The reality is that the settings are kind of a mess and talking about this stuff caused a lot of frustration and we eventually gave up.

And we won’t even get into the problems that the iMessage for Mac app has. But that was a mess for a whole different reason, the main problem being that it would lock up our Macs when they awoke from sleep as hundreds of messages were downloaded. This is why our team fled to Google Hangouts once those apps became available on iOS (more on that in a minute).

iMessage is fine for its intended use, as an SMS replacement for talking to friends or family one-on-one, but people are treating it as the next Aol. instant messenger. And can you blame people? Our expectations are measured by how fast iMessage is at sending messages. Today’s virtual keyboards allow us to rapid fire messages and hold conversations a lot longer than our T9 phones did years ago. The days of traditional slow texting are over.

Google Hangouts has its own problems. The iOS apps in particular aren’t terrible aesthetically, but they slow down and I get frustrated waiting for messages to be sent and received a lot. I’m mostly happy with the Chrome extension, except when I play video in the background and the app gets bogged down because of something intensive happening in the browser. The good thing is that we haven’t had a problem following conversations and Google’s history (especially for images) is fantastic. The bad news is that it’s the opposite of iMessage: Hangouts fixes the history and contact stuff, but isn’t very good with the sending and receiving part on mobile. It has a desktop app (Chrome extension) that works but mobile apps that struggle. Ugh!

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Indiegogo: Canary is Your Connected Home Security Camera

Home security systems have a reputation for being a hassle to install, difficult to use, and expensive to boot. Instead of entrusting a company to monitor you home for a monthly fee, what if you could monitor your home yourself?

Canary is personal monitoring device with a focus on home security. Not dissimilar from a modern baby monitor, Canary uses its widescreen HD camera and microphone to keep an eye on your home. Combined with night vision, motion detection, and smartphone alerts, Canary quickly becomes an inexpensive tool for apartment dwellers or renters. The monitoring device also includes some sensors for monitoring temperature, air quality, and humidity, which could be useful for determining whether a fire has broke out in your home.

What makes Canary unique is how it informs you of changes in your homes environment. Notifications will inform you of movement in your home, letting you then sound an alarm and call 911. It can also send notifications for sudden changes, like if hears audio when nobody is normally home or if the temperature suddenly drops. Kind of like the Nest, Canary is supposed to build a profile that knows when you’re home and when you’re not, and can use the iPhone’s geofencing features to automatically enable and disable Canary as you leave and enter your home.

I think the main thing that people like about security systems is that they feel like they’re a deterrent. Doors beep when people enter and leave the home and the house alarm will sound if a someone intrudes while you’re away, hopefully letting the neighbors know something isn’t right. There’s also all sorts of sensors that can detect when a window is broken for example. For people who want full home security, Canary won’t offer that kind of stuff. You can, however, connect multiple Canary monitors together if you want more coverage. The current suggestion is to put Canary in a place that covers the most entrances or where multiple places converge. For people who don’t have the option of installing a traditional alarm in their condos or apartments, I think Canary covers all the right bases in a compact device. You simply buy the device and there are no subscription fees to use the app and its monitoring service. For people who want more, Canary will offer that down the road.

Canary does away with keypads and codes, turning a smart camera and a plethora of sensors into an IFTTT like service that engages when you go to work or head out to take care of errands. It’s available to pre-order for $199 in white or $249 in black or silver. The campaign has already raised $146,284 in contributions, already ahead of the $100,000 goal. Learn more and contribute here.