Snapchat CEO posts a grainy video explaining how his app works
Snapchat may be four years old and raking in tons of investment money, but that isn’t stopping the messaging service from acting like a basement-based startup from 2007. The company has posted a an extra low-quality (240p!), obviously handheld video where CEO Evan Spiegel explains his app’s functionality and popularity using little more than hand-drawn sketches. The lack of production values is frankly baffling (splurge on a camcorder and a tripod, Mr. Spiegel, you’ve earned it). However, this grainy clip is at least insightful — you’ll find out why Snapchat relies on a swipe-driven interface, why the younger crowd likes the service so much and why the Stories feature is so important. We’ve reached out to Snapchat to unravel the mystery behind this footage, but it’s still worth watching even without the missing context.
Filed under: Cellphones, Internet, Mobile
Via: TechCrunch
Source: Snapchat (YouTube)
Gett’s latest expansion takes it beyond Uber in the UK
Uber is finally starting to ramp up its operations in the UK, but it faces tough competition from taxi-booking app Gett. Formerly known as GetTaxi, the company is expanding into 18 new cities today: Oxford, Cambridge, Reading, Slough, Milton Keynes, Brighton, Bristol, Bath, Cardiff, Portsmouth, Bournemouth, Leicester, Coventry, Sheffield, Nottingham, Bradford, Hull, and Newcastle. They join London, Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Glasgow and Leeds, taking the app’s coverage far beyond its ride-hailing rival.
Unlike Uber, Gett only uses licensed black cabs. The app still offers Uber-style conveniences though, such as in-app payments and the ability to track your taxi’s position. But it also goes a step further with the option to order cabs up to two weeks in advance. To compete with Uber, Gett is banking on two outcomes; that customers will be impressed with its quality of service, and that traditional taxi drivers will flock to its cause. Of course, it’s not the only company offering seamless taxi bookings — there’s also Hailo, Kabbee and experimental services like Maaxi. However, none of them can match Gett’s national coverage at the moment. In this crucial period where Brits are still discovering, adopting and switching ride-hailing apps, this could help the company to outmuscle Uber.
Filed under: Transportation
Source: Gett
Adobe brings its handy mobile design apps to Android
Back in October, Adobe delivered a new suite of mobile apps to iOS devices. Keeping its promise to include the Android faithful as well, the company’s Photoshop Mix, Color CC, Brush CC and Shape CC are now available for download over at Google Play. Creative types running Google’s mobile OS on their devices can expect to easily transform a photo taken with a phone into vector art with Shape CC, make images edits with Photoshop Mix and build a collection of hues with Color CC. If you fancy iOS, there’s a new color capture app called Hue CC. With this bit of software, capture colors from photos to create custom Looks that can then be applied to videos in Premiere and After Effects on the desktop or Premiere Clip on a phone or tablet. All of the mobile apps are free to use, but Creative Cloud subscribers can take advantage of desktop compatibility and cloud storage for all of the stuff created while on the go.
Source: Google Play (1), (2), (3), (4), iTunes
Spotify Taste Rewind time-shifts your music library
Spotify has quietly rolled out its latest feature: a time machine. Accessible through a dedicated site, ‘Taste Rewind’ accesses your current Spotify collection to suggest decade-specific playlists. The idea is to time-shift your current tastes to help open your mind to music from other eras. It works pretty well. After you log into the site, the process starts by asking you to select “three artists that you love” from a small but diverse selection (I went with Tom Waits, Jurassic 5 and Sia). It’ll then craft a set of five playlists; one for the ’00s, ’90s, ’80s, ’70s and ’60s. The site lets you preview the first track on each, share them or add them to your Spotify account.
A few Engadget editors tried the feature out already, and all got completely different results. My playlist set is pretty great, featuring a nice mix of tracks that I’d either heard and not added to Spotify, or had straight up never heard before. I liked them all, but the strongest of the five was the ’90s selection, which makes sense given that was the decade when I started forming my music tastes. You can check out the site for yourself here, or just listen to “my” ’90s playlist and call it a day:
Filed under: Software
Via: Spotify (Twitter), VentureBeat
Source: Spotify Taste Rewind
The original number-pushing puzzle game, ‘Threes,’ goes free
Threes is a deceptively simple puzzle game. You slide numbered tiles across a 16-slot board, combining twin numbers to rack up the highest score possible. It seems like something timeless, like it should have been next to the crossword puzzle in The New York Times back when your grandpa was a kid (if newspapers supported touchscreens, that is). In reality, it took Threes creator Asher Vollmer and artist Greg Wohlwend over a year of careful planning to create the perfect number-squishing puzzle game. When they released Threes, Vollmer and Wohlwend charged $1.99 on the iOS App Store. Just 21 days later, clones of Threes began popping up in mobile stores, most of them for the low, low price of free. You’ve probably heard of 2048, the Threes clone that refuses to disappear. Now, Threes is closing the gap between itself and those clones, and opening itself up to even more players by launching — you guessed it — for free.
“After the clones started to crop up there were certainly discussions of, ‘Should we just put out a free version now?’ but I’m glad we didn’t,” Wohlwend tells Engadget. “It would have been rushed and we would have made mistakes and probably treated the player poorly in some way like so many free games do.”
Threes has had a successful run, despite the clones. It’s on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, the Amazon App Store and Xbox One, and it took home the 2014 Apple Design Award plus an Honorable Mention in the 2014 Independent Games Festival. There’s even a new gallery of adorable Threes art available to buy on iam8bit. Threes is most popular on iOS, Wohlwend says, and that’s not surprising since the game hit Apple’s App Store first. Even the Xbox One version has “definitely” been worthwhile — it’s playable in Snap mode, a unique feature on the console.
“I’m ecstatic,” Wohlwend says. “Threes has done better than I ever imagined it would…. We want to do everything we can to continue establishing Threes as the original, premium and best sliding-number-tile game out there. Is that a genre?”
To that end, the free version of Threes doesn’t contain pesky in-app purchases or unsolicited pop-up ads. Instead, download Threes Free and you’ll have a certain number of plays. Watch an ad to get another play, or download the $2 version for completely uninterrupted gameplay. Ads won’t play unless you specifically choose to see one. The Threes team put as much thought into its free strategy as it did into the actual gameplay, and Wohlwend is pretty proud of that.
“We have figured out how to make Threes Free properly and honestly,” he says. “I wouldn’t have it any other way. While the clones are somewhat a byproduct of a market moving towards free, we’re excited to introduce some new ideas into how to make that sustainable for both players and developers.”
Google (finally) adds Chromecast support to Google Slides
Google Slides is the company’s answer to PowerPoint, the ubiquitous presentation tool of the business world. Just like other solutions, one of the limitations of Google Slides is getting a presentation from the computer to a large screen for the audience. Until now, this frequently required the use of a projector and an assortment of cables to connect all the hardware pieces. In a move that has been long sought by users of Google Slides, Google has finally enabled Chromecast support, as well as AirPlay support for Apple users, meaning presentations can be done wirelessly a lot easier than it has in the past.
Since Google Slides is a cloud-based product, users can work on putting their presentations together at their desktop or laptop. No need to lug those around or move the file onto a thumb drive though as a user can just fire up their tablet or smartphone to access the presentation on their mobile device. Users can then hit the cast button to launch the presentation. The Google Slides app on their mobile device gives users the ability to advance slides, check speaker notes, and it even comes with a built-in timer.
If you do not have Google Slides already, you can grab it with the download link below.
Click here to view the embedded video.
source: Google for Work Blog
Come comment on this article: Google (finally) adds Chromecast support to Google Slides
Send destination info from your desktop to Google Maps for iOS
If you’re looking for an easy way to send places from Google Maps on the desktop to your trusty iOS device, the wait is over. The folks in Mountain View updated the software for iPhone to allow you to send restaurants and other spots you search for on the desktop to your mobile device for reference while in route. You’ll need to be signed in on both your computer and your iOS device with notifications enabled on the latter. From there, hunt for a new dinner spot and click “send to device.” When you do so, a notification delivers the address alongside options for getting directions or skipping straight to navigation. Version 4.7.0 of the app also lets you edit business hours for those listings and view all of your reviews and photos from the Your Places section of your profile. If you’re iOS device hasn’t alerted you to the new version yet, you can nab it from iTunes now.
Filed under: Software, Mobile, Apple, Google
Via: 9to5Google
Source: iTunes
Instagram tidies up web profiles with bigger pictures and less clutter
It may be a tad late for spring cleaning, but Instagram redesigned profile pages on the web to cut down on the clutter. On both mobile and desktop, profile pages, hashtag collections and your home feed are all getting tweaks to make things a bit neater. Desktop profiles, for example, nix the rotating image header up top and display larger images in rows of three instead of five. The changes get rid of the added boarders, button styles and more that the mobile app’s redesign already updated in favor of a cleaner, flatter look. Not seeing the new design yet? Don’t worry, it’s rolling out now and you should be seeing it by the end of the week.
Snapchat for iOS switches cameras with a double-tap
If you’re recording a Snapchat clip on your iPhone, it’s now much easier to show friends both your handsome face and whatever you’re looking at. The video messaging service has updated its iOS app with a feature that switches between the front and rear cameras with a double-tap of the screen. Snapchat is also tackling some of its security woes by optionally sending an SMS code to make sure that it’s really you signing in. There’s no mention of a corresponding Android upgrade, but it’s easy to see that coming soon.
[Image credit: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images]
Filed under: Cellphones, Internet, Mobile
Source: App Store
Apple Music unites streaming, radio and social for $10 a month
It’s finally here. Well, it will be soon, but at least the announcement is official. At WWDC today, Jimmy Iovine revealed Apple Music: the long-rumored music service that follows the purchase of Beats last year and it provides all of your music content in a single app. That’s a streaming service, radio, album purchases and more all in the same place. Yes, you read that correctly: radio. Apple will offer live radio 24-hours a day with stations that are curated by real humans — like Beats Music’s playlists. What’s more, “tens of millions” of iTunes songs will be available for streaming or saving for listening offline. There are recommendations based on your listening habits too, but instead of using some algorithm to find something you may like, experts “who know and love music” will serve up the suggestions. For artists, Apple Music has Connect where they can post exclusive tracks, tour photos, new material and more, giving fans a glance at what’s going on behind the scenes. So, what about unsigned artists? They can share music through Apple’s new effort, too.
When you open up the new app, you’ll be greeted with a collection of your recently added tunes for quick and easy access. The software’s UI got a refresh over the player that’s in iOS 8 now, with cleaner a look and simplified controls. Once you start playing a song, a single tap lets you browse the rest of iTunes for other albums/songs from the artists. Just like Beats Music — we’re talking exactly like it — Apple Music takes some of your preferences in the For You section and selects tracks based on your input. If the app finds something you like, you can add those tracks to a playlist for later. And yes, music videos are available here, too. If you’re a big fan of using Siri to pick songs, you’ll be able to do that with Apple Music. The virtual assistant can pick tracks based on the year of release, artist or chart position for a given month and year (April 2012, for example). During the demo, though, when asked to play songs from the movie Selma, Siri pulled the band Imagine Dragons instead.
If you’re itchin’ to give it a go, you’ll have to wait until the end of June. On the 30th, you can try Apple Music for free for three months, but after the trial period expect to pay $10 a month. Like Spotify, Rdio and others, there’s a family plan that allows up to six people access for $15 a month through iCloud Family Sharing. There’s no word on an on-going free tier like Spotify, Pandora and the like offer. As you might expect, the service will be available on iOS first, but it’s heading to Android and Apple TV this fall. It’ll be available in over 100 countries at launch, equipping iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac and Windows devices with the music-streaming repository and content at the end of the month.
Filed under: Portable Audio/Video, Internet, Software, Apple
Source: Apple
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