I rediscovered Sunrise earlier this year, when I was looking for a calendar app that integrated with Todoist and offered a web app in addition to solid iOS clients. Sunrise, founded by Pierre Valade and launched last year, has quickly become one of the most popular free alternatives to the stock calendar apps on iOS and Android thanks to a polished design and integration with various web services such as Evernote, LinkedIn, and Songkick.
Sunrise 3.0 Brings Google Tasks and Eventbrite Integration, New iOS 8 Widget
Virtual: Space Age, with Matt Comi→
This week Federico and Myke are joined by Matt Comi to talk about the newly released Space Age. They talk about how the game was developed, the importance of music and the dialog.
If you want to know more about the excellent Space Age (my review), we interviewed Big Bucket’s Matt Comi on Virtual. We talked about the development process of the game, letting an idea evolve over time, and, towards the end, spoilers. You can get the episode here.
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Connected: Dig Up an App→
This week, Stephen explains Net Neutrality to the Europeans, Myke explains YouTube Music and why Evernote Context doesn’t bother him before Federico explains how bit rot in the App Store makes him sad.
I’ve wanted to talk about software preservation and curation in the age of the App Store for a long time, and I finally discussed the topic in this week’s Connected. You can get the episode here.
Sponsored by:
- Harry’s: An exceptional shave at a fraction of the price. Use code CONNECTED for $5 off your first purchase
- Igloo: An intranet you’ll actually like, free for up to 10 people.
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Space Age Review
Space Age is an adventure game from Big Bucket, the indie dev studio by Matt Comi and Neven Mrgan, who previously brought us the exquisite (and addictive) The Incident in 2010.
Space Age – first teased over two years ago – joins Monument Valley in my list of best iOS games of 2014, and it is the kind of game that I believe anyone with an iOS device should play. Space Age looks great, sounds fantastic, and is filled with witty dialog that powers an intriguing story of space exploration and distant memories.
Google Updates YouTube for iOS with New Music Section
Following the announcement of YouTube Music Key earlier today, Google updated its official YouTube app for iOS with a new Music tab in preparation for the service’s beta rollout next week.
The new tab, available at the top of the main interface, doesn’t bring Music Key functionalities, but instead showcases a selection of music based on popularity and your watching history on YouTube. In this section, YouTube is offering mixes (non-stop playlists based on songs or artists, like radio stations), recommended videos, a history section for music videos you’ve played before, plus trending and popular videos.
The selections in the new Music area of YouTube are solid when it comes to personal history and recommendations, but they feel a little impersonal as they lack any sort of editorial pick or curated content. The Music tab is very much user-centric at this point: music videos are either recommended based on your history and likes on YouTube or they’re already part of your subscriptions and playlists. The execution is nice thanks to large previews, a clean interface, and the ability to quickly start playing a mix or a playlist, but, right now, YouTube’s Music tab is obviously not meant to replace the home page of services like Beats Music or Spotify.
You can get the updated YouTube app with the new Music section on the App Store.
Twitter: “Several Updates” Coming for Direct Messages→
In a blog post published today, Twitter announced that native videos and more timeline experiments will come to the service. That’s great – especially if they’re planning more Cards features.
Towards the end, the company also mentions direct messages:
And we haven’t forgotten about Direct Messages. We have several updates coming that will make it easy to take a public conversation private. The first of these was announced today and will begin rolling out next week: the ability to share and discuss Tweets natively and privately via Direct Messages. Stay tuned!
“We haven’t forgotten” sounds like a curious statement from a company that, for some reason, decided to disallow sharing URLs in direct messages last year and never bothered to fix them. It sounds like Twitter will bring back the ability to discuss individual tweets in DMs, but, frankly, it makes no sense that people who follow each other shouldn’t be able to exchange any URL privately.
Google Announces YouTube Music Key→
Widely rumored for the past several months, Google today announced YouTube Music Key, a premium service that, starting at $7.99/month, will offer ad-free videos, the ability to keep listening to videos as music in the background, offline downloads, and access to Google Play Music (the new name for Google Play Music All Access).
From the YouTube blog:
Thanks to your music videos, remixes, covers, and more, you’ve made YouTube the biggest music service on the planet. To turn YouTube into your perfect music service, we’re launching YouTube Music Key as a beta with our biggest music fans first, and then we’ll bring YouTube Music Key to the whole world together. So, if you see an invite in your app or email, try it out for six months for free.
YouTube Music Key follows a plan to revamp YouTube’s entire music strategy with a new dedicated section:
Starting today, you’ll see a new home just for music on your YouTube app for Android, iOS and on YouTube.com that shows your favorite music videos, recommended music playlists based on what you’re into and playlists of trending music across YouTube. You can find a playlist to perfectly fit your mood, whether that’s a morning motivators playlist or Boyce Avenue YouTube Mix. Check out the newest songs from channels you subscribe to, like FKA twigs or Childish Gambino. Or quickly find the songs you’ve played over and over and over again.
The YouTube Music Key beta will start rolling out next week, and it appears that current Google Music All Access subscribers will get access to it immediately.
I’m interested in Google’s plans with YouTube because the service has what other music streaming services have always lacked: a huge catalogue of videos from artists that go beyond albums and singles. As someone who regularly watches concert videos and demo recordings on YouTube, I’m curious to see how an ad-free experience with web and iOS access could improve content that I can’t get anywhere else.
Flashlight Extends OS X Yosemite’s Spotlight with Plugins
Developed by Nate Parrott, Flashlight is an interesting tweak for Spotlight that aims to extend Yosemite’s search utility and app launcher with plugins. Available for free on GitHub and based on a plugin system written in Python, Flashlight extends the capabilities of Spotlight with features such as Google and Wolfram Alpha search, weather forecasts, Terminal integration, and support for online search on various websites.
In spite of a major redesign for OS X Yosemite, Spotlight didn’t get the more advanced functionalities that have become a staple of third-party apps such as Alfred and LaunchBar; Spotlight can return selected Bing results, but, for instance, it can’t fire up traditional Google searches in Safari or provide results directly in the Spotlight UI. Compare that with the useful and time-saving workflows created by the Alfred community, and it’s easy to understand why the average OS X power user may prefer the versatility of a Spotlight replacement.
Flashlight is an official Spotlight API and a “horrendous hack” according to its developer, but it proves a point. I installed Flashlight on my system running the latest Yosemite developer seed, and Flashlight displayed a small popup window with the ability to enable plugins. I activated Google, weather, and Wolfram Alpha, then I invoked Spotlight and typed “g MacStories Tweetbot” – that’s a shortcode for Google queries in Spotlight through Flashlight. Google search results were displayed in a mini-web view inside Spotlight, and I could either type Enter to open the Google search results page in Safari, or click the results in Spotlight.
I got similar results with weather and Wolfram Alpha integration, although also I stumbled across bugs as Parrott cautioned in the release notes. Weather correctly fetched my location, but Wolfram Alpha didn’t accept the (theoretically supported) “wa” command and some queries just didn’t work. And, obviously, being this a rough hack that’s not officially supported by Apple, memory consumption of the Flashlight plugin occasionally went through the roof with hundreds of MBs reported in Activity Monitor.
Flashlight may be an unfinished and hacky workaround, but it offers a glimpse of what an extendable Spotlight for Yosemite could be. While I don’t think that Apple will ever allow users to write their own plugins for Spotlight, Flashlight may grow into a relatively stable and popular utility – and if things don’t work out, there will always be Alfred and LaunchBar.
Overcast 1.1 Brings iPad App, New Landscape Mode
Overcast, Marco Arment’s excellent podcast player that I reviewed back in July and that became my favorite way to listen to podcasts on the iPhone, has been updated today to version 1.1. The new version, which I’ve been testing on my iPad Air 2 and iPhone 6 for the past couple of weeks, brings a welcome iPad interface, further optimizations for iOS 8 with bug fixes, and a new landscape mode on the iPhone.