Airbnb’s Lottie helps fellow developers add animations to their apps

Why it matters to you

Animations help give an app life and energy, but they’re also very pleasing to the eyes. Who can pass up an animated watermelon?

Airbnb might be best known for short-term rentals, but its engineers also created Lottie, which could be a handy tool for developers who want to incorporate fancy-looking animations to their native apps.

Created by Airbnb engineers as a side project, Lottie lets developers incorporate After Effects animations in real time without the need to rewrite them. At the time of this writing, Lottie supports masks, alpha mattes, trim paths, solids, and dash patterns, with more being added “on a regular basis.” There is also an optional caching mechanism that allows frequently used animations to load faster.

More: Splitting the cost of your Airbnb could get a lot easier if Tilt rumors are true

“Lottie allows engineers to build richer animations without the painstaking overhead of rewriting them,” wrote the team in a blog post. “With Lottie, digging through frameworks for reference, guessing durations, manually creating Bézier curves, and remaking animations with nothing more than a GIF for reference will be a thing of the past.”

The end result are animations that are visually pleasing and have a sense of life and energy to them, factors which Airbnb engineers hope will lead to increased engagement or interactivity for developers’ apps. You might even see Airbnb incorporate Lottie into its own app, so do not be surprised if you see more animations with a future update.

Airbnb engineers did recognize that other libraries similar to Lottie already exist, such as Facebook’s Keyframes and Marcus Eckert’s Squall. With Keyframes, though, Facebook picked a small set of After Effect features to support for its reactions, while Airbnb engineers want to incorporate as many features as possible within Lottie. Squall, meanwhile, is used in combination with Lottie, but the former only supports iOS, and Airbnb engineers wanted Lottie to be cross-platform.

Lottie is currently available for iOS, Android, and React Native.

The Old Gray Lady gets younger: New York Times to launch Snapchat channel

Why it matters to you

With Snapchat, The New York Times is trying to offer its news in a more easily digestible form for a younger audience.

The Old Gray Lady will try and bring in a younger audience in ways it never has before. On Thursday, The New York Times announced it will launch its first channel on Snapchat’s Discovery tab.

The Times’ Snapchat channel will publish daily weekday content inspired by the paper’s Morning Briefings feature in hopes of attracting the millions of young people who flock to ephemeral video platform.

More: Upcoming Snapchat feature will add augmented reality animations to scenes

“We’re seeing enormous interest on the part of younger audiences for the sort of smart, visual digital journalism for which The Times has become known. And Snapchat is an ideal place to reach that audience,” Kinsey Wilson, executive vice president, product, and technology at The New York Times Company said in the press release. No date has been set for the channel’s debut.

The Times is hoping to carry the digital success from the last three months into the new year. The newspaper added 276,000 net digital subscribers in the last three months of 2016. That is more digital subscribers added than at any three-month period since the paper first introduced digital subscriptions in 2011.

The daily briefings offer quick recaps on a variety of news stories across the world. Since debuting on The Times’ now-defunct NYT Now app in 2014, the feature has been integral in the paper’s digital footprint. The paper lauded its briefings as “among the most successful products that The Times has launched in recent years” and as “a digital manifestation of a daily newspaper,” in its recent internal report on the future of journalism.

For Snapchat, its Discovery page now adds one of the most prestigious news publications to its growing number of outlets. That list includes the Washington Journal, ESPN, Vox, Vice, and CNN.

AmpMe brings Spotify integration to its neat stereo music app

The app uses other devices and Bluetooth-enabled speakers to amplify music, so you can theoretically have a dance party anywhere.

Picture it: You and two of your friends jovially walking, with arms linked, towards the neighborhood bar. One of your friends starts whistling the piano intro to Cheers. You start singing, “Making your way in the world today takes everything you’ve got…” Your other friend whips out her phone, quickly queues up the song on Spotify, and starts blasting it at full volume. If only you could have this moment in stereo.

Well, now you can, as long as you and your pals all have AmpMe installed. Today, the team behind the app announced Spotify integration so that you and your friends can play the same song, at the same time, from your respective devices. The app actually uses the secondary devices to initiate the “stereo sound.” It’s not only a neat trick, but a great way to immerse yourself in the music without having to invest in a lofty, expensive stereo setup.

And yes — the phrase “social media party” is admittedly a bit nauseating when uttered out loud, but it is quite a bit of fun when you simply allow yourself to feel the rhythm. AmpMe also lets you create playlists, so you can keep the party going for more than one song. In addition to Spotify, it works with YouTube, Google Play Music, and locally-stored music files.

Awesome cooking apps to make your Super Bowl snacks amazing

• Best First Overall
• Best for the Last moment
• Best for Sharing
• Best from TV

Best overall

Yummly Recipe & Shopping List

See at Play Store

Yummly is easily the best cooking app out there, especially when it comes to finding something great for Super Bowl Sunday. Filled to the brim with recipes, Yummly really shines by giving you tons of options for searching for recipes, including vegetarian-only options and the ability to filter recipes based on your dietary restrictions.

After you search and find that perfect recipe it delivers all the details, from what the ingredients you’ll need to step by step instructions on how to make it, to pictures of the finished product. Another huge perk of using Yummly is that it helps you organize your shopping needs based on the recipes you plan to make. From the recipe page you can save all of the ingredients to a shopping list, which is synced across all your devices provided you are signed into Yummly, and also organizes your shopping list so it’s quick and easy to grab what you need when you stop at the supermarket on the way home from work.

Bottom line: Yummly gives you the power to find the exact type of recipe you are looking for, and helps to make sure that you never forget a single ingredient when you are at the market.

One more thing: There are dozens of recipes uploaded by other users specifically for the Super Bowl.

Why Yummly is the best

Yummly delivers a great system that lets you filter and find the perfect recipe, as well as making sure you have a shopping list with each ingredient on it.

While there are plenty of apps out there that can help you find a great snack for the Super Bowl, few do it nearly as well as Yummly does. Their selection of recipes is seriously impressive with over one million recipes, and handy options for filtering your search to meet your needs. You can filter each search by dietary preferences, nutrition, tastes, techniques, prep time and more. You can also search for recipes related to events — right now there are over 11 thousand Super Bowl recipes available for you to browse through.

When you find the recipe that you never knew you needed, you also have the ability to save it. You can save as many recipes as you’d like, and separate them into collections. This makes it easy to save recipes for later and then easily find them when you’re ready to prepare them.

If you’re already prepared to head out to the grocery store, then you can add the items you need for a recipe to a shopping list. Yummly automatically separates every ingredient on the list by type or aisle, so that your trip to the store is as stress free as possible.

Best for the last minute

Allrecipes Dinner Spinner

See at Play Store

Let’s face it: life is busy and full of distractions, and small catastrophes can throw all of your plans out of whack. If you’re panicking that the Super Bowl is only days away and you don’t think you’ll have time for a proper trip to the grocery store, that’s the exact situation Allrecipes Dinner Spinner was designed for.

While Dinner Spinner gives you access to the massive library of recipes found at Allrecipes.com, it can also help you discover recipes using only the ingredients already in your kitchen. Usd the Dinner Spinner feature in the app to find recipes using specific ingredients, cooking time, or the type of dish you’re looking for. It isn’t perfect, but it is a great way to get ideas for something you can throw together in a pinch, without having to spend much time searching through recipes.

Bottom line: Allrecipes Dinner Spinner is handy for finding a brand new recipe, or just figuring out what you can do with ingredients that you already have on hand.

One more thing: When you find the recipes that you can’t bear to lose, then just favorite them. There on out, they will live in your favorites folder and are easy to find in a pinch.

Best for sharing

Cookpad

See at Play Store

Social media and sharing every aspect of our lives has become ingrained behavior for many people. If you’re the type who likes to share recipes already, or you’re looking for recipes with a more personal touch, then Cookpad is where it’s at. While Cookpad has a sizeable library of recipes with plenty of options to filter searches, it’s way more than that.

Cookpad actually functions as it’s own social media platform, revolving entirely around food. You can share your own recipes, see what your friends are experimenting with, and discover recipes that don’t seem as manufactured as those found elsewhere. There is even a location feature that allows you to see what people in your area are cooking up for themselves. You can even search out recipes for specific occasions — and that definitely includes the Super Bowl.

There is even a chat function, which allows you to privately chat with other users or create a group. If you’ve decided to roll with a potluck Super Bowl, the chat is a great way to easily discuss what everyone is bringing to the game. Especially since you can swipe between searching out the recipe you’re looking for and your conversation.

Bottom line: Cookpad offers a full social experience for your culinary adventures, with plenty of features, and occasion specific recipes.

One more thing: Cookpad is available in 8 different languages making it accessible for anyone who does not read English.

Best from TV

Food Network in the Kitchen

See at Play Store

There are plenty of folks out there that find new recipes or improve their skills in the kitchen by watching the Food Network on TV. If you missed part of an episode, or you’re trying to find a specific recipe you saw made on a show, then their app is most definitely the place to check out.

You can filter your recipes search for recipes by celebrity chef, type, event and even cooking difficulty to find something new. If you’re looking for something from a specific chef or show, you can also find recipes that way. Some of them may have video accompaniment, and there are new recipes added each month.

Bottom line: Food Network in the Kitchen delivers tons of great recipes from your favorite cooking shows. They also deliver tons of unique recipes you would have never considered, which will help you to deliver excellent food for guests at your Super Bowl party.

One more thing: If you aren’t a pro, don’t be worried. Each recipe comes with a difficulty level so that you can be prepared for whatever dish you are cooking up and don’t bite off more than you can chew.

Pokémon GO surpasses $1 billion in worldwide gross revenue

In case you were wondering if Pokémon GO was still an absolute juggernaut in the world of mobile gaming.

Just over seven months after it’s release last July, Pokémon Go has surpassed $1 billion in worldwide gross revenue, according to data collected from both the Google Play and iOS App Store and reported by Sensor Tower in their latest blog post. Since the game is a free download from its respective app stores, that means that number comes strictly from players invested their own cash into in-game purchases. That’s a lot of Poke Balls!

This is an absolutely incredible achievement for the developers at Niantic. To illustrate that point, Sensor Tower compared Pokémon GO’s success to another wildly popular game from 2016, Clash Royale:

By comparison, Supercell’s Clash Royale, which is itself closing in on $1 billion spent in-app by players, was released nearly 10 months ago, on March 2, 2016. In its first seven months, it grossed approximately $550 million worldwide according to our Store Intelligence estimates.

The report points out that while Pokémon GO’s daily revenue has significantly diminished from the it’s record $18 million earned in just one day back in late July, it’s still averaging between $1.5 to $2.5 million dollars a day recently and saw revenue jumps around the limited-time events launched around Halloween and Christmas.

With more limited-time events on the horizon, along with expansions to include the second generation Pokémon into the game, there doesn’t appear to be

Oh, and if you’re wondering what other mobile games have broken the $1 billion barrier, the first game to do so was Puzzle & Dragons which reached the milestone back in 2014.

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Plex now supports Alexa commands via new skills for your Amazon Echo

Get the party started and much more with the Plex skills for Amazon Alexa!

If you use Plex to manage your personal media collection, it’s time to get an Amazon Echo speaker. Plex has finally come to Alexa, allowing you to not only control your media with your voice, but also use Alexa to help recommend music, TV shows or movies for those times when you just can’t figure out what you want to listen to or watch. Coupled with the ability to order Dominos pizza, we may never leave the couch again!

For those unfamiliar with Plex, it’s an incredibly powerful media server that allows you to store all your media in one place, then access it across all your devices via the wide selection of Plex apps — it’s available for Android, Amazon Fire TV, Android TV, Chromecast, Kodi, NVIDIA Shield, Roku and much more so you’re definitely covered no matter what devices you got around your house.

With Alexa, you can make requests to play specific content on whichever Plex-enabled devices you have around your home. For example, you could say “Alexa, tell Plex to play The Big Lebowski on Chromecast” or, if you and your mate are struggling to agree on something to watch, you can say “Alexa, ask Plex to suggest something to watch” and it will recommend something from your library. You’ll also uncover wonderful easter eggs as you go. You can find a full breakdown of everything Alexa can do with Plex here.

These new Plex skills are currently only available in the U.S. and UK Alexa Skills Stores. If you’ve got Plex up and running in your home along with an Amazon Echo speaker, we’d love to hear your experiences with it!

Apple’s ‘polarizing’ new products are paying off

Throughout much of 2016, it seemed like lots of Apple fans were unhappy. The year brought few updates to the Mac (and the one big change was quite polarizing), a barely redesigned iPhone with no headphone jack, AirPods that shipped two months late and a new Apple Watch that was a modest improvement to a product still seen as nonessential.

But it’s time to accept that the complainers on the internet (including those of us in the media) might not have our fingers on the pulse of Apple fandom. Case in point: Apple just reported a massively successful quarter. According to CEO Tim Cook, both iPhone and Apple Watch sales hit records for both unit sales and revenue. In the case of the iPhone, that reversed three consecutive quarters of declining sales. The iPhone turnaround had to be a huge relief for Apple: The product is the company’s biggest revenue source by far.

Mac sales also generated record revenue, despite the fact that the new MacBook Pro was limited in supply and the rest of Apple’s computer lineup hasn’t been updated in a long time. Meanwhile, Apple’s services business (iCloud, Apple Music, Apple Pay and so on) increased 18 percent over last year. Tim Cook has been talking up the company’s services for a year now and says the goal is to double its size over the next four years. The one weak spot in Apple’s quarter was the iPad, which is facing three years of declining sales and had the second-worst holiday quarter in its history. (The worst holiday quarter for the iPad was in 2010, when the original iPad was less than a year old and just carving out a place in the market.)

The iPad’s ongoing struggles aside, this quarter suggests Apple might actually be giving customers what they want. Or, more cynically, customers who’ve become locked into the Apple ecosystem decided that now was the best time to upgrade, not jump ship to another platform. The truth is likely somewhere in the middle. While power users might miss the MacBook Pro’s full-size USB ports and longer battery life and those with great headphones might be annoyed at having to use a dongle with the iPhone 7, it seems the majority of “normal” consumers out there are not rejecting Apple’s new products en masse because of these changes.

The iPhone’s strength was particularly surprising when you consider how many viewed the iPhone 7 as an iterative update. It has essentially the same design as the iPhone 6 and 6S, and many believe that Apple is saving a radically redesigned smartphone for later this year, the iPhone’s 10th anniversary. But dismissing the iPhone 7 because of its looks does the phone a disservice. The dual camera and portrait photo mode in the 7 Plus are huge steps forward in mobile photography, and they appear to resonate with customers. Tim Cook specifically called out unexpectedly high demand for Apple’s larger phone in this week’s earnings call.

Waterproofing and the expected battery and performance improvements make for less-dramatic but nonetheless welcome updates. And when you figure it’s been two years since Apple’s positively massive quarter that accompanied the iPhone 6 launch, it stands to reason plenty of people were in the market for a new phone.

It’s a little harder to explain the Mac’s successful quarter. But the simple answer is that the Mac is fitting customers’ needs, despite the relative lack of updates over the past 18 months. Indeed, last year’s tech is more than enough for the average consumer at this point. Pros might bristle about not having the latest Intel processor, but for those who aren’t rendering video or dealing with massive Photoshop files, the Macs out there are more than capable. That plus a bump from the new MacBook Pro was enough to put the Mac back in the black.

A year of iterative updates that were nonetheless successful with consumers last quarter speaks to an industry-wide trend of modest improvement in both PCs and smartphones. These product categories are extremely polished at this point, and there are simply not going to be sweeping, massive changes every year anymore. That might be a bummer for those of us who breathlessly await new products from the tech industry’s biggest companies. But you can currently buy a Mac or iPhone and rest assured that it’ll last you years, even if it doesn’t have a shiny new form factor or the latest Intel processors in it. For the average consumer who just wants to buy something that works well with minimal fuss, that maturity is a good thing.

Introducing the new Engadget app!

We have some big news today: Engadget has a new app for iOS and Android! (About time, right?) The new mobile app has been completely rebuilt and redesigned. You get all the same great content from our site, including breaking news, reviews, galleries and videos, but there’s so much more:

• Topic Subscriptions: You can now customize your Engadget experience by subscribing to the topics that are most important to you. This creates a personalized feed of articles and videos.
• Customized Push Notifications: Based on your subscriptions, the app will notify you of the breaking news that are important to you.
• Enhanced Video Experience: The app provides full access to all our shows and amazing video reviews. The experience is designed exclusively for phones, and makes finding and viewing videos faster than ever.
• Save-for-Later: You can save your favorite stories for later on your mobile, tablet or on the desktop.

And this is just the beginning: We will continue adding features in the months ahead. So stay tuned!

If you already have the Engadget app, please go ahead and update; the new app will replace the old one. If you don’t have the app, you can download it here for iOS and Android.

Source: iTunes, Google Play

‘Rocket League’ cars are the new hot wheels

In Rocket League you slam around a Thunderdome-style pitch in hot rally cars while trying to smash a gigantic “rocket ball” into a goal… Basically, it’s the perfect marriage of soccer and demolition derby. Now imagine bringing that into the real world with these new tiny replicas of the digital autos from the hit game itself.

Collectible toys that tie-in to video games are hot, with properties like Activision’s Skylanders, Nintendo’s Amiibo and Disney’s Infinity selling well with consumers.

The initial run of 12 digital racing cars from Rocket League will go on sale this spring, each packaged in a tiny little “rocket ball,” which doubles as a soccer ball in the game.

The cute little toy line is based on the Original Minis series from Zag Toys, and some will come with special codes redeemable for in-game cosmetic upgrades for the digital autos. To play with one of these analog toy cars, you’ll just place it on the floor, pull back, and let fly — just like the little cars we all played with as kids.

Check out this gif to see for yourself.

Cute, right? The first Rocket League racers coming to the toy line are named Octane, Dominus, Masamune, Hotshot, Grog, X-Devil, Merc, and Backfire, with four other as yet unnamed variants vying for your dollar. If you’re waiting for even more Rocket League mini car fun, VentureBeat says that Zag is on it.

Via: VentureBeat

Source: RocketLeague

Microsoft asks for exceptions process in Trump’s immigration ban

Trump’s immigration (read: Muslim) ban has already negatively impacted America’s tech industry. Microsoft alone has 76 employees, along with their 41 dependents, who are subject to the president’s executive order. And while the rest of the industry has slowly begun rumbling in opposition, Microsoft is taking the lead. The company has not only thrown its support behind Washington State’s lawsuit against the federal government. On Thursday, Brad Smith, Microsoft’s President and Chief Legal Officer, called on the State Department and HHS for specific exemptions to the immigration ban.

“There currently are law-abiding visa holders who are parents that were outside the United States last Friday and therefore cannot re-enter the country,” Smith argued in the Microsoft on the Issues blog. “These parents are stranded and separated from their children. Other individuals are confronting genuine family emergencies such as the need to visit a critically ill parent.”

The proposed exemptions, dubbed the “Responsible Known Travelers with Pressing Needs” provision, would require those detained to meet four requirements:

• The person would need to either hold a valid work visa sponsored by an American employer enrolled in the E-Verify program, hold an F-1 student visa, or be an immediate family member of the visa holder and possess a derivative nonimmigrant visa.
• The person would need to have a clean criminal record.
• The person must have an “exigent family-related emergency or for the business need of an employer” and not be out of the country for more than two weeks.
• The person must not be travelling through any of the seven nations subject to the ban.

Smith admits that this proposal doesn’t wholly solve the issues created by the immigration restriction, however he argues that it is at least a start and is calling on others to help improve the provision. There is no word if this provision has been seen or is under consideration by the State Department or Department of Homeland Security.

Via: Brad Smith (Twitter)

Source: Microsoft