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Posts tagged with "facebook"

Sparrow Unveils Unified Inbox and Facebook Integration in Version 1.2

Sparrow, the minimal email client for the Mac that was born as a mix between Mail.app and Tweetie for Gmail and eventually evolved into a full-featured IMAP email application, has just announced version 1.2 at TechCrunch Disrupt, which will add a number of new features including the long-awaited unified inbox and a new social layer for your contacts. Since the app was first revealed as beta in October, Sparrow saw a terrific rise in popularity throughout the release of the various betas, and especially after the launch of a Mac App Store version and lite edition, Sparrow has quickly become many people’s favorite way to access Gmail and any other email provider with a convenient, simple interface that follows the latest trends set by apps like Twitter and Reeder for Mac. With the 1.1 update, the developers added IMAP support and integration with Google’s Priority Inbox, thus turning Sparrow from a lightweight client into a serious alternative to more complex apps like Mail and Postbox. The 1.2 update will bring the possibility to see all email messages in a single inbox without switching between accounts, as well as Facebook Connect integration to automatically add profile pictures to contacts. It’s not clear now if this new Facebook feature will also add photos to people that have emailed you using standard IMAP and Gmail accounts, but CEO Dom Leca says they’re “not adding social layers mail for the sake of it”, and Facebook Connect will let you add people as Facebook friends within the app.

Victor Ageda, Jr. from TUAW further reports Sparrow 1.2 will also add some kind of Tumblr integration. The Sparrow team has raised $250,000 in funding over the last months (funders include Twitter’s Loren Brichter), and the developers are looking forward to bring Twitter and LinkedIn support to Sparrow in future versions, turning an email client into a complete social messaging experience like no other on the Mac. The idea of grouping all kinds of social communication into a single app has always attracted users and developers, but no one really quite nailed it. Hopefully Sparrow will manage to blend it all together, yet retaining its nature of simple and powerful email client.

Sparrow 1.2 should be available later today or tomorrow on the Mac App Store at the regular price of $9.99. We’re looking forward to the update and the full list of changes in version 1.2.

Tap to Chat 2 Launches with New Design, Google Talk Support

When I first reviewed Tap to Chat back in December, what I stumbled upon was a very simple app with a nice and clean design to access Facebook chat and talk to your buddies without all the clutter of the Facebook website or other similar applications for iOS. The app was driven by simplicity in the way it put contacts on a grid, and let you simply tap on one to start chatting. No additional screens or options, just a tap and a chat. On top of that, notifications enabled me to keep up with the conversation even if I was busy doing something else on the home screen or another app. Tap to Chat 2, released last week, builds on the factors that made the original version so great and popular on the App Store, adding support for Google Talk but retaining the fundamental concept that online chat should be easy and accessible.

First and foremost, the app has got an updated UI to switch between Facebook and Google Talk: there’s an iOS-like multitasking dock at the bottom to switch between the services, but if you don’t like the dock idea you can hide it and simply swipe horizontally to change buddy lists. Friends available for chat are still displayed on a grid, though this time the design has been greatly improved to show better contact pictures, inline previews and a button to mark a person as “favorite.” Favorites will be placed on top of your lists when they’re online for quick access, and you’ll also receive a Growl-like notification on screen when they log in. These notifications are displayed for a few seconds like Growl on the desktop, but they obviously only work inside Tap to Chat as iOS doesn’t allow for other notification systems to be injected in the main Springboard. However, when you’re chatting with multiple contacts at once, the notifications make it super simple to jump from one chat to another, as does the aforementioned dock at the bottom – switching between services and chats is a real pleasure in Tap to Chat 2.0.

As for the chat itself, it’s really just a box with a text entry field and buttons to clear the conversation or go back to the grid. If you want, you can also tap on a friend’s profile pic to rename the contact, remove it, or open his Facebook profile in Safari. From the settings icon in the upper left corner, you can change your online status, account names, or color theme for the whole app. General settings include options to turn off sound effects, chat alerts and session alerts – if you really don’t want to be bothered unless you’re actively using the app, you can even turn on auto disconnect to make sure you’ll go offline once you close the app.

Tap to Chat 2 is simple, fast, incredibly reliable (I didn’t see a single connection error on Facebook or Google Talk) and it runs both on the iPhone and iPad. You can get it here at an introductory price of $0.99.

RockMelt Coming To The iPhone With “Desktop Sync” Feature [Update: Available]

RockMelt, the social browser based on the open-source Chromium engine that aims at enriching the desktop browsing experience with visual previews and Facebook / Twitter integration, is coming to the iPhone. As reported by Venturebeat, the developers – who have received several rounds of funding in the past months and are committed to making RockMelt the ultimate social browser for Mac & Windows, especially after the departure of Flock – have been busy creating a smaller iPhone version that’s not really a full-featured browser, but it’s focused on the “app edge” aspect of RockMelt. On the desktop, RockMelt features a series of vertical sidebars that display the latest updates from your Facebook and Twitter friends, or emails from Gmail contacts, and so forth. In the developers’ vision of today’s browsing, people are more likely to discover content through status updates from social media, rather than manually typing a URL or spend hours looking for news on Google. That’s why the iPhone version – coming soon to the App Store – will be focused on letting you quickly open the app, and check on the latest updates from your friends. You can search and browse the web regularly, too, but the focus is on “favorite feeds”, read later and most accessed bookmarks.

Most mobile browsers provide a similar experience to PC browsing, just with a touch interface and smaller screen. But RockMelt co-founder and chief executive Eric Vishria pointed out that when you’re waiting in line for a cup of coffee, you don’t want to whip out your phone and type in a long website address. Instead, you’re more likely to check the latest updates on Facebook or Twitter.

With Facebook and Twitter support, users will be able to send their own status updates, or check on links shared by their friends. These links will be previewed inline by RockMelt below a Facebook message or a tweet, and you can also decide to view them later thanks to the Instapaper-like “read later” option introduced in RockMelt beta 2. Last, the iPhone version will feature a “desktop sync” option that will allow you to sync your bookmarks and, we assume, read later material across the iPhone and RockMelt for the desktop. This sounds very similar to what Mozilla did with Firefox Home, and we’re looking forward to seeing sync in action.

RockMelt for iPhone will be available “in the coming days” on the App Store. Read more

Official Facebook App Updated, Gets Map View and “Unfriend”

An update to the official Facebook app for iPhone was released in the App Store a few minutes ago, and it adds a number of new functionalities and design improvements. The app, which reaches version 3.4, introduces a new Map view for Facebook Places: friends that have checked in places nearby are now displayed through thumbnail previews on a Google Map; also, the app can now let you check in to Events you’re attending.

The app feels slightly faster and more responsive than before; the News Feed and Notifications UI have been improved (although I still haven’t noticed visible changes) and, overall, switching between sections from the main dashboard should be snappier now.

Perhaps more importantly, Facebook now lets you “unfriend” people directly from the iPhone. Tap on the Friends tab, select a person and hit “Unfriend” in the action button. Previously, this feature was only available on the desktop.

You can find Facebook for iPhone here. More screenshots below.

Update: MG Siegler at TechCrunch details how the new event check-ins work:

To be able to check-in to an event you have to (obviously) be invited and RSVP’d “yes” to attending. Your location also has to match the location of the listed event venue, and it has to be the correct time of the event. All of this will help with gaming.

Read more

Friends 1.6 Released: Improved Facebook Support, New UI and Search

Over the past months we’ve followed closely the development of Friends, an iPhone app by Taptivate that aims at changing the way you stay in touch with your friends on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Version 1.0 was released in December, and the developers quickly iterated with version 1.5 released in February adding Read It Later support and improved notifications.

Friends 1.6, released a few minutes ago, is another major update to the app that introduces redesigned sections, powerful search functionalities and completely revamped Facebook support. Friends can now upload photos to Facebook, and users can also comment on photos posted on Facebook. This kind of integration with the service was highly requested in the previous versions, and works just as advertised. Furthermore, the app is now capable of searching for friends across Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn – again, a welcome addition that uses a beautiful toolbar running along the top of the app.

Every post comes with its own timestamp in version 1.6, and every post can also be retweeted at any time from within the timeline. The interface has been refined and looks more gorgeous than ever; I also noticed syncing times seem to be improved with this latest update.

Last, Friends is on sale at $0.99 in the App Store. Go get it now, as it’s an amazing deal for a great iPhone app. More screenshots below. Read more

Shazam Adds “Friends” Feature with Facebook Integration

Shazam, the popular music discovery tool for iOS, was updated earlier today to include a new feature that, similarly to Apple’s Ping or the recently reviewed SoundTracking, lets you connect with other people to see what music they’re listening to. The new functionality is called “Friends” and it’s displayed as a new tab in Shazam’s bottom toolbar. To get started with Friends, you’ll have to login through your Facebook account and link the device to your Shazam profile – all the social interaction of Friends happens through Facebook and your friends that are already using the mobile app to tag songs.

Once you have some friends using Shazam (right now, I don’t), the songs they tag will show up in the Friends tab alongside the album artwork, a preview you can listen to and a link to buy the song on iTunes. Tapping on an item brings you to the usual Shazam view where you can share, check lyrics and Youtube videos, get tour info for a specific artist or jump to Last.fm. The Friends functionality is very streamlined and doesn’t provide all the options offered by an app like SoundTracking, but it’s a start and a welcome addition to Shazam.

Shazam Encore is available for $5.99 in the App Store. The free version got updated as well. Read more

SoundTracking: More Than Just “Instagram for Music”

Last week I decided to refine my cloud storage and music streaming setup: I bought a Dropbox Pro 50 account and extended my Spotify subscription until September. In case you don’t know, I store my iTunes library on Dropbox so I can sync my iOS devices effortlessly across all the computers I’ve installed Dropbox on. But why using iTunes and Spotify together for storing and streaming music? For as much as I love Spotify – in fact, it changed my music listening habits since I started using it – not every artist I like is available on it. That’s why I care about keeping a well-organized iTunes library with the albums and songs not available on Spotify. This library is pretty huge and stored on Dropbox together with apps, books, movies and anything else that usually goes into iTunes.

With a 16 GB iPhone, the combination of iTunes + Spotify (which also happens to have an offline cache option) gives me the possibility of having any kind of music ready for listening whenever I like. SoundTracking, a new app for iPhone I installed a few days ago, aims at giving you the tools to share the “soundtrack of your life” and discover new songs shared by your friends, directly from your iPhone.

At first, SoundTracking might sound like an “Instagram for music” – that would actually make sense after all the Instagram alternatives and third-party apps we’ve seen recently, not to mention the Instagram for video SocialCam. SoundTracking starts from the same simple concept of Instagram: you open the app, tap on a button in the toolbar and share media with your social graph in seconds. In SoundTracking, that means you’re sharing the song and artist you’re currently listening to with friends using the app you discovered by logging into Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare. But the similarities with Instagram stop at the basic concept, as SoundTracking goes really in-depth to allow you to not only share, but also discover new music and people with your same music tastes worth following. Read more

Voice Brief: Listen To Gmail, Twitter, Facebook and Calendar On Your iPhone

Voice Brief, an iPhone app that’s free until this afternoon in the App Store, aims at enabling you to listen to information coming from your social networks, email inbox and more through text-to-speech technology. Voice Brief, available only on the iPhone for now, can plug into Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, RSS feeds as well as Weather and Stock Prices to “speak” rather than simply displaying information.

How does it work? You choose the voices you want in the Settings (announcer voice for when the app switches sections, reporter voice to read status updates and news), set the speed and then you add new contents. You can log in Twitter and Facebook from within the app and set the amount of tweets and updates to fetch, manually enter RSS sources (there’s no Google Reader support) and set other details for your location, and so forth. Once the contents you need are in place, the main page of Voice becomes a dashboard with a summary of all your events (Calendar integration is also supported), social activity, emails and news. Hit the play button, and all this information will be spoken out loud by the app. Voice quality is good, sometimes above iOS’ default text-to-speech capabilities, sometimes below average iPhone quality. Overall, I’ve found Voice Brief to perform very well with regular English sentences, but of course the app fails badly at Italian contents and status updates containing very specific terms like tech products and acronyms (very common in my Twitter timeline).

Voice Brief is an interesting project that’s worth checking out, for sure. I can see some people using an app like this in their car while driving to the office in the morning. Go download it here while the offer is still valid. Read more

CalendarBar Tucks Event Reminders In Your Menubar

Clean Cut Code is known for making beautiful apps like Cloud Calendar, and it was only a matter of time before they brought some of their talent to the OS X desktop. CalendarBar takes on the inefficiencies of a traditional calendar client by providing a quick list of events in a beautiful timeline that can grab events from iCal, Google Calendar, and Facebook. Clicking on an event takes you to the event listing in its parent application – CalendarBar removes the distraction of busy calendar utilities, but provides shortcuts so you can add entries and gather additional information. The app features a some iOS overtones in its design, most obviously via the settings and exit button that adorn the bottom of the pop-up panel. Launching yesterday, the app is only $1.99 in the Mac App Store.