1Password update for iOS intros native Apple Watch app
1Password has released a massive update for iOS that makes it easy to sign up for a new account and to sync across devices regardless of their operating systems. For Apple Watch owners, though, it offers something bigger: a native app that’s much faster than the old one. You can import passwords from any vault into the smartwatch to be able to easily access apps and services on the wearable. Even better, you can import them en masse by pulling down on your item list to activate the “Select Items” screen.
Other great additions are the ability to pay for subscriptions in-app, to create Documents within the service, to sync those Documents across accounts and to fill text, email and password fields even if you didn’t create them within 1Password’s browser extension. You can see the full list of updates and changes on the website of the password manager’s developer. It’s pretty long, though — we hope you know how to speed read.
Source: AgileBits
Facebook Messenger gets a new camera with special effects
Facebook definitely isn’t depending solely on Instagram to take on Snapchat. It’s introducing an upgraded camera in Facebook Messenger that promises to not only be simpler, but help you spruce up your shots with Snapchat-style effects. The camera is quicker to access wherever you are in the messaging app, and shooting video is just a matter of holding down the conspicuously-placed shutter button. And the effects? You can now add 3D masks and special effects, such as turning yourself into a holiday-appropriate reindeer or adding a prop. There’s also a new picker that helps you find “thousands” of art objects and effects.
This attempt to jazz up your conversations applies to text, too. If you tap the palette icon near the shutter, you can add art and stickers to your written words.
Both Android and iOS users should see the features arrive in Messenger today, although holiday-themed effects will have to wait until December 21st.
The additions are clearly meant as hedges against Snapchat’s colorful, goofy conversations, although that doesn’t appear to be the only goal. To some extent, this is a response to Apple Messages, Google Allo and other relatively straightforward chat apps introducing some fun-oriented features. Facebook Messenger isn’t strictly boring, but it’s easy to imagine chatters drifting toward the competition if they find conversations more exciting in those rival apps.
Source: Facebook
Instagram hits 600 million users as its growth speeds up
Instagram’s growth isn’t slowing down just because it reached the half-billion user mark… if anything, it’s gathering steam. The image-centric social network reports that it now has over 600 million users, the last 100 million of which joined in the past 6 months. To put it another way, Instagram’s growth is accelerating — when it reported the 500 million figure, it had taken 9 months to garner the last 100 million. But what’s creating this momentum?
It’s not clear how many of those people are active. With its last update, Instagram noted that 300 million used its apps daily. Most of the 600 million total are likely very active, then, but there’s a chance that some of its new users only occasionally check things out.
The service doesn’t directly attribute its success to specific factors, but there are a few factors likely at work. For one, Instagram’s obsession with beating Snapchat is likely paying dividends. Why split your time between two services when you can create Stories or send disappearing photos in the same place you share many of your other shots? Twitter’s decision to effectively kill Vine may have helped, too, by drawing in people who needed a new home for their looping videos. Throw in increased media use of Instagram and ever-improving phone camera quality and it’s easy to see why Instagram would have room to grow. The question: are Snapchat-like features and live streaming enough to keep the gravy train going?
Source: Instagram Blog
Use Google Home’s voice controls to play Netflix
Google wants its Home speaker and virtual assistant to make you forget about Alexa. To do so, the device will need to add a bunch of new features to catch up to Amazon’s gadget. Just in time for your holiday binge watching, the company has added voice controls for Netflix. There’s one big caveat though: You’ll need to have a Chromecast connected to Home for your spoken commands to work.
If you meet that criteria, saying “OK Google, play The Crown from Netflix on my TV” or “OK Google, play White Christmas on Netflix on my TV” will begin streaming your show or movie of choice. You can also use spoken cues like “Pause this episode” to control playback when you need to grab a snack. Google says the ability to link your Netflix account to Google Home is available now in the speaker’s app for iOS and will arrive inside the Android version later this week.
Also using a connected Chromecast, Google Home can now display images from your Google Photos library on your television. Again, a simple voice command will sort out the task. Say something like “OK Google, show my photos of Joshua Tree on my TV” and you’ll be telling the stories from your vacation pictures in no time.
To keep you in the holiday spirit, Home will play Christmas music from your streaming service of choice when you give the command. “OK Google, play Christmas music” will queue up tunes from Google Play Music, Spotify, Pandora or YouTube Music. The speaker will also keep you up to date on Santa’s location next week with a little help from Google Maps. As you might expect, that info is accessible with by asking the connected device a question as well.
Source: Google
Evernote defends access to your notes in its new privacy policy
Evernote raised hackles when it revealed a new privacy policy that would let it read your notes in certain circumstances, but it’s not backing down. In a defense of the upcoming rules, Evernote’s Chris O’Neill stresses that the company will anonymize any notes it reads when checking on its machine learning system. Human observers won’t know who created the content, and the machine will automatically hide what personal info it recognizes. In other words, it’s trusting that its scrubbing process will keep your data safe. And of course, you can decline to offer your data for this purpose in the first place.
O’Neill reiterates that other forms of access to notes will only occur in “very limited cases” where there’s no other choice. Evernote may have to comply with a warrant, for example, or investigate claims of harmful content or technical issues. There’s only an “extremely limited” number of people allowed to look, and O’Neill helps vet them.
The defense is slightly clearer and more reassuring than before, but it ultimately amounts to a repetition of what the company already said: trust us, we’ll do our best to avoid reading anything you don’t want us to see. It doesn’t really address some of the outstanding questions, however. How do you know that the machine learning system will always scrub identifying data? What about confidential business info that’s unlikely to be cut? And when Evernote staffers have to read info for reports of abuse or troubleshooting, how do you know that they won’t read more than they have to? It’s doubtful that Evernote will abuse its power when the policy takes effect on January 23rd, but that won’t be completely comforting if you want a guarantee that the company won’t mishandle your sensitive material.
Via: Chris O’Neill (Twitter)
Source: Evernote Blog
‘Super Mario Run’ is now available
Finally, there’s a Mario game on smartphones. As promised, Nintendo has released Super Mario Run today, giving iPhone and iPad users a new way to run, leap and spin through the Mushroom Kingdom. It’s an auto-runner, meaning the portly plumber will jog, hop and vault over obstacles automatically. You tap the screen to jump, leaping across gaps and goombas to collect colorful coins. It sounds simple, but there’s a surprising amount of complexity to the platforming. Like Rayman Jungle Run, timing is essential to unlock contextual moves, such as rolls and wall jumps.
The game has a one-time fee of $9.99. Nintendo is keen to avoid the free-to-play mechanics that plague so many smartphone games, focusing instead on quality and traditional replayability. The levels are challenging enough, tasking players to collect coins of increasing difficulty. With plenty of stages and worlds to explore, they should keep you preoccupied for hours. There’s also Kingdom Builder, a basic village design mini-game, and Toad Rally, an aysnchronous multiplayer mode that emphasises style over brute-force level completion. The three modes feed into one another too, unlocking one-time “rally tickets,” enemy score multipliers and more.
It’s not all rosy, however. Nintendo has been criticised for demanding an always active internet connection. (The company says it’s to stop piracy.) If you’re the type of person that likes to game on their morning commute, or has to ration a modest data cap each month, this could be a deal-breaker. Regardless, it’s a landmark moment for the company and it’s beloved mustachioed mascot. Miitomo was an interesting experiment, sure, but it pales in comparison to the potential of Super Mario Run. This is a true platformer, albeit one with limited controls, that could make a ton of money and improve Nintendo’s standing in the public conscience.
Source: Super Mario Run (iOS)
Twitch takes on YouTube and Facebook Live with ‘IRL’
Twitch wants vloggers to leave YouTube and Facebook Live behind. The Amazon-owned video streaming site is launching a new “IRL” section that will allow allow streamers to share their experiences at events, on trips abroad or even just to document their day-to-day lives. Videos can either be live streamed or uploaded for on-demand viewing, and from next year users will also be able to use their smartphone cameras to broadcast through the Twitch mobile app.
To date, Twitch has mostly focused on live content relating to video games. This isn’t the first step it’s taken to remove itself from that niche, but it’s certainly the most significant. Previously capitalizing on its community’s love of cosplay, the site launched the gaming-inspired arts and crafts category, Twitch Creative, before testing more mainstream waters with its social eating channel. Twitch has also been slowly adding uploaded videos to its repertoire over the past year, although that feature remains in beta.
Adding the ability to upload vlogs is a clear attempt to steal some of YouTube’s market. YouTube has been pushing its gaming-specific service hard over the past year, and recently beat Twitch to 4K streaming.
Mobile broadcasting is also a big deal for Twitch. After the success of Facebook Live and Periscope, the company is playing catch up a little, but it’s also ensuring that successful streamers on the platform keep all of their content inside Twitch.
With these markets already cornered by Facebook and YouTube respectively, though, enticing non-gamers to start using the platform may prove difficult.
Aaron Souppouris contributed to this article.
Twitter built and cancelled a messaging app
For years, it’s been rumored that Twitter is working on a standalone messaging app. Direct Messages, or DMs, are certainly popular with some of the service’s most dedicated users. According to BuzzFeed News, a messenger app was in development as recently as September — but its form was a little different than you might expect. It packaged tweets and new “instant messages” around particular topics — a news story or a football team, for instance — which were set by chosen “influencers.” They were threads, essentially, similar to Reddit or Slack where groups could chat.
The spin-off messaging service was designed by Twitter’s Indian engineering center in Bengaluru. It was meant to be a lighter, newcomer-friendly version of the social network for users in emerging markets. The hope was that they would see the tweets and the valuable discussions they spawned. They would then be encouraged to dive into Twitter proper, following the accounts that they had appreciated in the messaging app.
“Look, as a product, Twitter isn’t easy to figure out for most people,” an unnamed source who reportedly worked on the app said. “Everyone around us was hooked to WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, and I think internally, there was some concern about how much people were engaging with those platforms versus ours. Instant messaging seemed like a natural choice to build something around.”
BuzzFeed News says the app was shelved in September after poor user testing. “It didn’t test out so well in the market surveys that we did with college students,” the source said. The team was let go a few weeks laters, ahead of a larger, global round of layoffs affecting roughly 350 people.
The app’s failure comes with a silver lining: Twitter is aware of the interest in Direct Messages, and the role instant messaging could play in its service. There’s no guarantee that it will ever materialize in a standalone app, however. Twitter has announced its plans to shutter Vine, a creative six-second video-sharing platform. Periscope’s broadcasting functionality is now baked into the main Twitter app, putting its future as a standalone service in doubt. It would seem that Twitter wants fewer apps, not more, in order to focus its business and product strategies. For now, the dream of a dedicated DM app seems to be just that — a dream. Sorry, Twitter fans.
Source: BuzzFeed News
Facebook is using third-party fact-checkers to fight fake news
Last month, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg previewed a number of steps the social network would take to combat fake news. Today, the company provided an update on the initiative which starts by making it easier to report a hoax. You can report what you think might be a fake news story by clicking in the top right corner of the post. If enough people do just that, Facebook will send the link to a third-party fact-checker to determine if it really is fake.
Facebook will also start flagging disputed stories from those fact-checkers. You’ll still be able to read and share the link, but each one will be labeled so you and your friends know exactly what you’re getting into. They will also appear lower in the News Feed. So, who’s doing the checking? Facebook is working with Poytner’s International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) to determine if a story is real or not.
The company also says it noticed when people read a story past the headline, it makes them less likely to share it. Facebook plans to use this behavior to determine if what appears in the News Feed may be misleading in some way. Finally, as previously reported, the company will also cut off the financial incentives for spammers posting fake news and grabbing a share of ad revenue. Sure, this is just a start, but Facebook says it will continue to combat the problem to improve “the quality of our service.”
Source: Facebook
Fibaro Reveals First HomeKit-Enabled ‘Flood Sensor’ to Detect Potential Water Damage
Home automation manufacturer Fibaro today announced a new set of HomeKit-enabled products that offer basic motion detection and home security, as well as a Flood Sensor, which the company calls “the first water sensing and leak detection device in the Apple HomeKit ecosystem.” Each of the three new products — Fibaro Flood Sensor, Fibaro Motion Sensor and Fibaro Door/Window Sensor — include Bluetooth low energy and are all compatible with Apple HomeKit.
The Flood Sensor detects water as soon as it appears, and warns users of potential impending water damage with an acoustic alarm system. Fibaro says the device can also “trigger a smart home scene,” so users can connect the Flood Sensor to other HomeKit products to serve as a back-up warning system. Temperature detection is included as well so users can check the levels of rooms in their home, which the company says can be useful in the winter to “stay ahead of burst pipes and potential problems.”
The other two products Fibaro announced focus on motion detection around a home and near its entryways. The Fibaro Motion Sensor measures movement, ambient temperature, and light intensity to accumulate information about a user’s home and warn them about intrusions and other anomalies. Similarly, the Door/Window Sensor can be placed on any door or window to add another layer of security onto a home and alert users about security breaches for each potential entry point.
All three devices can be connected to the Fibaro iOS app [Direct Link], which includes features like device status checks and notifications. Thanks to the introduction of the new Home app in iOS 10 users can also access the Fibaro products directly through Apple’s first-party app, as well as in Control Center, and use Siri to control their features. With Apple TV, users can check in on the Fibaro devices when they aren’t home.
“Expanding our product line to include support for Apple HomeKit was a natural choice for Fibaro. The HomeKit platform offers a simple and secure solution for expanding the many benefits of smart home to a new category of consumers that up to this point, may not have had the means or knowledge to participate. Working with companies like Apple to expand the mainstream consumer smart home market is very exciting for us,” said Rich Bira, Managing Director of Fibaro in the U.S.
The Poland-based company sells its products through authorized resellers — like The Home Depot — and has priced the Fibaro Flood Sensor at $59.99, Motion Sensor at $69.99, and Door/Window Sensor at $59.99.
Tags: HomeKit, Fibaro
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