Ryan Christoffel

684 posts on MacStories since November 2016

Ryan is an editor for MacStories and co-hosts the Adapt podcast on Relay FM. He most commonly works and plays on his iPad Pro and bears no regrets about moving on from the Mac. He and his wife live in New York City.

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Apple Highlights Indie Games in New Permanent Storefront

In a continuation of its current promotion of indie games, the App Store has now added a new section dedicated to featuring indie titles.

Chelsea Stark of Polygon adds:

The section kicked off today and will run indefinitely, according to Apple, featuring new games daily, along with highlighting older titles. The games are a mix of free-to-play and paid titles, all selected by the same editorial team that has been highlighting games through the App Store’s history.

The indie games section can be accessed by tapping the ‘Celebrating Indie Games’ banner at the top of the App Store. Currently it includes featured columns like:

  • Our 25 favorite indie games
  • Indie game debuts
  • Newly discovered indies
  • Indie greats: 99¢ for a limited time
  • Indie games celebrate innovation…

This new dedicated hub for indie games is available on the tvOS App Store as well, highlighting the kind of quality games that are available not only on Apple’s mobile devices, but also its television platform.

Though Apple has stated that the indie games section will be a permanent fixture, it’s unclear at this point in what location it will live on. After the current indie promotion ends, will it remain as the top featured banner a while? Or in another featured banner further down on the App Store page? We’ll have to wait and see. In any case though, in an App Store that’s often dominated by big players, it’s exciting to see extra attention pointed toward indies.

Alexa Comes to the Amazon iOS App

Today Amazon announced that its digital assistant, Alexa, is being integrated with its iOS shopping app.

Using the app’s current microphone button, which is available to the right of the search bar, users can make nearly any type of Alexa request. This request can consist of things you might ask of an Amazon Echo, such as playing music, turning on smart lights, checking the weather, and so on.

Both first-party and third-party skills will work from within the Amazon app. The one limitation so far, noted by Khari Johnson of VentureBeat, is that the Door Lock API is not currently available, so smart locks can’t be controlled through the app. Johnson also shares that while Alexa will be available to some users in the Amazon app today, it will be rolling out to all users over the next week.

Today’s announcement hopefully means that existing Amazon Echo users will have a solid first-party experience on iOS, something that surprisingly has not been provided by the company’s current Amazon Alexa app. It also opens up Alexa to any Amazon customer who doesn’t currently own an Echo.

Google Chrome for iOS Adds Read Later Feature

In its latest update, Google Chrome for iOS has added a native Read Later feature to quickly save articles for later consumption. From the app’s release notes:

If you find an interesting article that you want to read later, tap the Share icon and then Read Later to add the page to your Reading List. Articles on your Reading List are saved on your device so you can read them wherever you are, even when you aren’t connected to the web.

Although the release notes mention tapping the Share icon to save articles, I’ve found the quicker way to be long-pressing a link, which presents a menu that contains the ‘Read Later’ option.

In testing the offline functionality, I discovered that Chrome will not save a webpage’s full formatting for offline viewing; instead, it stores a stripped down version of the page. All of the necessary content, including images, is still preserved, but the viewing experience is not as pleasant as that of other read-later services.

Overall, although there’s nothing particularly interesting or innovative about the way Read Later works, it’s still a nice feature addition for Chrome users.

LiquidText 3.0: A Uniquely Digital PDF Experience

LiquidText is one of the few apps that feels uniquely built for the iPad. There is currently no desktop version available, nor iPhone version, and though that may be a negative in some ways, the positive side is that every new feature and enhancement is focused exclusively on iPad use. As a PDF reader, LiquidText has always provided tools that make its reading experience something you couldn’t get with a physical document. This is perhaps why it was recognized by Apple as the most innovative iPad app of 2015. But today, with version 3.0, LiquidText not only offers a reading experience that’s uniquely digital – it does the same with note-taking and annotation. And the Apple Pencil is a big reason for that.

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Pandora Announces On-Demand Streaming Service

Pandora has a competitor to Apple Music and Spotify on the way called Pandora Premium. The company announced today that its $9.99/month streaming plan will be launching soon, and it’s now taking signups for the first invitations to the service.

Though Pandora Premium enters the on-demand streaming market somewhat late in the game, Pandora seems to have worked hard to create a solid experience that’s not just a knock-off of its competitors. Besides many of the basic features you would expect, there are several highlights that seem noteworthy.

Quick playlist creation seems to have been simplified:

In Pandora Premium, start a playlist with one or two songs of your choice, tap “Add Similar Songs” and put the power of our Music Genome Project to work to quickly and effortlessly create the perfect playlist for any activity, mood or party.

In addition,

Thumb up a handful of songs on your favorite radio station and Pandora Premium will automatically create a playlist of these songs. Thumb more songs and we’ll add those to the playlist too.

Pandora Premium also claims to have more robust search than other services:

In Pandora Premium, we’ve done the hard work of separating the killer from the filler for you. We’ve filtered out karaoke tracks, knock-off covers and pet sounds (but not Pet Sounds) that slow down other services. You get fast, accurate search results that get even smarter over time.

Based on the screenshots, Pandora seems to have done a great job not only thinking through the features of the app, but also creating a visually appealing, simple app to navigate. Though I’m a mostly-content Apple Music user, I look forward to giving Pandora Premium a try.

YouTube Launches ‘Uptime’ App for Social Video Watching

Today YouTube launched a new iPhone-only app called Uptime. Uptime adopts many of the social features commonly found in social video streaming apps like Periscope – live comments, reactions, etc. – and applies them to YouTube videos.

Inside the app, you browse videos in a feed consisting of content shared by people you follow in Uptime. You can also tap the search box at the bottom to search for videos or pick from a list of videos based on your YouTube subscriptions and viewing history.

When viewing a video in Uptime, what you’re watching will be publicly available to your followers in their Uptime feed, so they can join in and watch alongside you. You also have the option to directly share a video with others, whether by sending them a link using the iOS share sheet or by inviting them inside the app.

As a video is being watched, all current viewers are represented by their profile pictures on a track that covers the borders of the screen. As the video moves closer to its end, you’ll be further along the track, and you can manually drag and drop your avatar to navigate through the video. During playback, you can type comments, use one of six built-in reaction emoji, or move your finger around the screen to create a sparkle effect. Videos can be viewed in both portrait and landscape, but currently there is no way to type comments while in landscape.

Uptime is available in the App Store, but it requires an invitation code to setup your account. The code PIZZA is currently working.

Google Hangouts Evolves to Better Compete with Slack→

Dieter Bohn of The Verge reports on some major changes coming soon to Google Hangouts. Google’s new strategy for the service aims to make Hangouts a formidable Slack competitor as a team collaboration tool. The changes are focused in two main areas:

  • Hangouts Chat will add new group chat rooms, similar to channels found within Slack, but with all the nice Google perks – Docs and Sheets integrations, extensive search tools, and a bot that can look at users’ Google Calendars and suggest the best meeting time.

  • Hangouts Meet is the new name of Hangouts’ video functionality, which Google promises will tie up far less processing power than before. Meet will also provide easy methods for adding people to a group call.

Bohn adds:

Google Hangouts has been having an identity crisis ever since Google tried to relaunch it as an end-all, be-all replacement for Gchat. It’s been ping-ponging between Google Plus, business video chat, Google Voice, Project Fi, SMS, and lord knows what else. Focusing on business chat seems like a better strategy — and thankfully one that doesn’t feel beholden to some other Google product with a dubious future. Hangouts is fully a Google Cloud / G Suite product now, and it will be developed for those users.

Google’s changes to Hangouts follow recent moves by Facebook and Microsoft in the collaborative chat space. These days, it seems everyone wants a piece of the workplace collaboration pie.

Apple added collaboration tools to iWork last year, but otherwise the company has shown no signs of creating its own competitor to Slack. I do wonder, though, how iMessage could potentially evolve in the future to serve many of the needs that tools like Slack currently meet. The user base is already there, and iMessage Apps could provide the extensibility needed to compete with Slack.

The question, however, is not “Could Apple do it?” Instead, it’s “Would they want to?” They could very well be content to simply serve as the platform where these competing services live.

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The Way Siri Learns New Languages→

Stephen Nellis, writing for Reuters, shares an interesting look into Apple’s method for teaching Siri a new language:

At Apple, the company starts working on a new language by bringing in humans to read passages in a range of accents and dialects, which are then transcribed by hand so the computer has an exact representation of the spoken text to learn from, said Alex Acero, head of the speech team at Apple. Apple also captures a range of sounds in a variety of voices. From there, an acoustic model is built that tries to predict words sequences.

Then Apple deploys “dictation mode,” its text-to-speech translator, in the new language, Acero said. When customers use dictation mode, Apple captures a small percentage of the audio recordings and makes them anonymous. The recordings, complete with background noise and mumbled words, are transcribed by humans, a process that helps cut the speech recognition error rate in half.

After enough data has been gathered and a voice actor has been recorded to play Siri in a new language, Siri is released with answers to what Apple estimates will be the most common questions, Acero said. Once released, Siri learns more about what real-world users ask and is updated every two weeks with more tweaks.

The report also shares that one of Siri’s next languages will be Shanghainese, a dialect of Wu Chinese spoken in Shanghai and surrounding areas. This addition will join the existing 21 languages Siri currently speaks, which are localized across a total of 36 different countries.

Debating the strengths and weaknesses of Siri has become common practice in recent years, particularly as competing voice assistants from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have grown more intelligent. But one area Siri has long held the lead over its competition is in supporting a large variety of different languages. It doesn’t seem like Apple will be slowing down in that regard.

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Prisma Launches Store for User-Created Filters

Prisma, the popular photo editing and sharing app, launched a filter store today with its latest update. The store allows filters created through a new desktop tool to be shared with others publicly. At this time, only the most active Prisma users can access the desktop tool and share their filters in the store, but according to The Next Web, the app’s developers hope to expand the option to more users in the future.

The filter store can be accessed whenever you’re taking a photo by tapping the orange icon in the center of the screen. The store’s main page presents a number of filters, currently categorized as ‘New Releases,’ ‘Popular in Your Country,’ and ‘All the Old Styles.’ There isn’t a particularly large selection of filters currently available, but that should change with time.

My favorite part about the store is that when you tap an available filter to view it, you’ll also see a feed of images that have used that filter. I find this helpful for evaluating whether a particular filter might work well with the type of photo I’m editing.

One other thing worth mentioning about the store is that on its main page there’s a bookmark icon in the top-right corner. Tapping this will present a list of all the filters you currently have installed. This is a nice way to gain a quick overview of all your current filters and remove any you may not want. You can also view filters you’ve removed in the past from this screen.


Prisma is a free download on the App Store.