Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) kicks off on June 2nd, runs through June 6th, at its usual spot in Moscone West in San Francisco. Sign up. Hope to see you there!
Development
Writing Aid, a real assist for writers
If you are a writer, check out the Writing Aid, an iPhone app by Benjamin Mayo. The interface couldn’t be simpler. Launch the app, type in a word or phrase, and a banner appears at the top of the app, scrolling side to side with a list of synonyms. At the same time, the definition of the word appears in the main body of the app.
Tap a synonym to jump to a new page with more synonyms and a definition of that word. And so on. You can tap on the upper left of the screen to climb back out to previous synonyms.
Simple, elegant, effective.
Popular Google Play apps are hacked, secretly mining Bitcoins, Dogecoins, and Litecoins
Every time I read about Android and malware like this, I shudder at the though of bringing an Android phone or tablet into my universe. I know Android is popular, but I just can’t get my head around why people seem not to care about this problem. Am I missing something?
The making of 2048 (in a weekend)
To complement the earlier post about the Threes team, here’s some background on the creation of 2048.
The Threes team talks ripoffs vs originality, walks through their development process
It’s the nature of the App Store that as soon as original hits the store, the cloners start their copiers. There’s been a lot of talk about Flappy Bird and the huge number of clones it spawned. But it’s true of just about every successful app. The Threes team weighs in with their take on this.
Twitter rolls out two major new features
You’ll now be able to tag up to 10 people in a tweeted photo and attach up to 4 photos in a single tweet.
The secret room where the iPhone software was born
To go along with the Greg Christie interview, the Wall Street Journal also ran this small piece that focused on the room in which the iPhone was developed and tested.
Cut the Rope developer challenging King’s “Candy” trademark in EU courts
ZeptoLabs, the maker of Cut the Rope, is challenging the trademark in EU court. Re/code speculates that this might be a publicity stunt.
How your tweets reveal your home location
Geotagged tweets and images can breach privacy walls and even cost lives:
But it also raises privacy issues, particularly when users are unaware, or forget that, their tweets are geotagged. Various celebrities are thought to have given away their home locations in this way. And in 2007, four Apache helicopters belonging to the US Army were destroyed by mortars in Iraq when insurgents worked out their location using geotagged images published by American soldiers.
An unknown iOS 7 feature that is a real game changer
Ever hear of the Multipeer Connectivity framework? No reason you should, unless you are an iOS developer and keep up with the latest and greatest evolutions in networking. But this is a game changer. Read the post for details.
Apple adds Indie Game Showcase to iTunes
To get to the page, launch iTunes, click the App Store link at the top of the page to get to the App Store, then click the Indie Games Showcase banner at the top of the page (you might need to wait for it to rotate into view).
Colors of the iOS 7 App Store
Have an app or icon to design?
Have you ever wondered what the most popular colors are in each category of the iOS store? We did. So we crawled the iOS app store and grabbed the top 5 app icons in each category and ran a histogram analysis on each one to find which colors were used most often. What we found was very interesting.
Before you design you next app icon, take a look at the color palettes below.
Great idea. Pass this along to your dev friends.
Google watches and wearables will not run developer code, are notification devices
From Seeking Alpha (free reg-wall):
In effect, the watch is a device for using Google Now and cards that apps on the phone send to it.
This is an interesting model. It means that a Google watch is a satellite device that locks you in to the Google ecosystem. Since the watch without the phone is just a wrist-watch, or less, if it does not have the built in smarts to do its watch and alarm thing without its master.
Dear App Store game developers, knock it off with the useless push notifications
Well said, Mike. I feel exactly the same. I know I can turn these notifications off, but that’s an extra step I have to take and an annoyance.
The NEX band and the world’s first hardware app store
The NEX band is a wrist band that acts as a hub for clip-on hardware mods that add various notification capabilities. At first blush, this seems like a genius idea. The NEX band tackles some of the same ideas addressed by existing smart bands, but builds in a plug and play extendability.
I can only assume that the appropriate teams at Apple are digging in to this technology with great interest. Fascinating tech.
CodeWarrior shirts
This box arrived in the mail today. My brother Stu was cleaning out his garage and he ran across some of his (my?) old CodeWarrior shirts. He kindly packed them up and posted them to me. I must say, I was delighted and a big wave of nostalgia pushed me around a bit. [PICTURE in the main post]
Sampling colors in an image with the Mac OS X Color Picker
Consider my mind blown. I did not know you could drag and drop an image onto the Mac OS X color picker so you can sample colors from that image. This is incredibly useful. Read the article for all the details.
Time: More evidence that Apple won the app wars
Earlier today, we posted about United Airlines offering a free in-flight movie service, available to folks running iOS but not available on Android.
Now Time writer Harry McCracken uses that info to make the case that Apple has won the app wars. Not sure I quite see it the same way, but I do get his point. No matter the market share, the trend continues to be to develop for iOS first, if not only.
Arduboy is a business card that can play Tetris and other games
[VIDEO] Could this be the future of business cards? Based on the Arduino Pro-Mini, the programming is done on a computer and downloaded into the chip. A lot of hand work and not flexible, but if the market likes this, I suspect automated manufacturing and a more flexible form factor will follow. Video embedded in the post.
Sweet!
The Youngest Technorati
From The New York Times:
Ryan Orbuch, 16 years old, rolled a suitcase to the front door of his family’s house in Boulder, Colo., on a Friday morning a year ago. He was headed for the bus stop, then the airport, then Texas.
“I’m going,” he told his mother. “You can’t stop me.”
Stacey Stern, his mother, wondered if he was right. “I briefly thought: Do I have him arrested at the gate?”
But the truth was, she felt conflicted. Should she stop her son from going on his first business trip?
Ryan was headed to South by Southwest Interactive, the technology conference in Austin. There, he planned to talk up an app that he and a friend had built. Called Finish, it aimed to help people stop procrastinating, and was just off its high in the No. 1 spot in the productivity category in the Apple App store. Ryan was also eager to go because, as he put it: “There were really dope people, and I really like smart-people density.”
A great read.
Candy Crush maker, King, seen as one hit wonder
King Digital Entertainment, best known as the makers of Candy Crush, recently filed for a widely publicized IPO. Are they a one hit wonder? Interesting article.
Google locking down approval process for Chrome add-ons
This might seem like an obscure change in a small part of the Google universe, but it might just be signaling a sea change in Google’s stance on the apps and add-on approval process.
Google has been talking up the auto-removal of unsanctioned extensions since November, when the company characterized the policy as a security necessity, claiming that “bad actors” were using loopholes to continue installing malicious add-ons without user approval or knowledge.
New web site trend – scrolling animations
New trend in web page design uses a single page featuring scrolling animations that keep you on the page, walk your eyes through the page’s elements.
Brilliant app uses WiFi as SOS beacon in disasters
I love the simplicity of this idea.
The team consulted emergency workers from the Haiti and Fukushima disasters and developed a “victim app” and a “seeker app”. “They wanted it simple, unencrypted and smart,” says Al-Akkad.That meant avoiding known problems like low-power, low-range Bluetooth radio links, which often fail to connect – or “pair” – with each other amid the clutter of metallic debris in broken buildings. So they stuck to the much more robust and receivable Wi-Fi radio.
With the victim app a trapped person can write a 27-character message such as “broken leg stuck in bank” or “need help fire on 4th floor” and a seeker app up to 100 metres away can pick it up. The app found two “trapped” people in a large-scale, simulated terrorist attack at a seaside chemical plant in Stavanger, Norway – an exercise organised by the Norway-based research organisation Sintef.
This is the kind of thing that should just ship on every phone.
iOS background monitoring exploit
The FireEye blog announced an iOS proof of concept that was able to run in the background and record a user’s actions:
We have created a proof-of-concept “monitoring” app on non-jailbroken iOS 7.0.x devices. This “monitoring” app can record all the user touch/press events in the background, including, touches on the screen, home button press, volume button press and TouchID press, and then this app can send all user events to any remote server, as shown in Fig.1. Potential attackers can use such information to reconstruct every character the victim inputs.
The evolution of the importance of the developer
Fascinating read:
It’s simple: Businesses that are agile and willing to embrace cloud infrastructure will have an advantage over ones that don’t. And employers willing to accept the developer’s newfound prominence will fare better than ones that are slow to adjust to this new reality. As O’Grady puts it in his book:
“Developers are now the real decision makers in technology. Learning how to best negotiate with these New Kingmakers, therefore, could mean the difference between success and failure.”
The technical details behind the bug that triggered Apple’s security update
Earlier today I posted about Apple’s recent security patches.
Follow the headline link to read Adam Langley’s take on the details behind the bug. [Via Matt Abras]
Google unveils phone designed to build 3D map of your surroundings
This is fascinating technology.
The device’s sensors allow it make over 250,000 3D measurements every second and update its position in real-time.
Google said potential applications may include indoor mapping, helping the visually-impaired navigate unfamiliar indoor places unassisted and gaming.
Watch the video in the post to get a better sense of this. I think this is a great idea, long time coming. The question is, can Google make this useful and usable. The potential is huge.
A call for a fix for the App Store
Dave Verwer on the clones that continue to infect the App Store rankings
Why indie developers go insane: One dev’s take on the Flappy Bird craziness
This is a great, insightful take on the stresses faced by indie developers.
Dong Nguyen is a young guy. He wrote a game for fun, put it out there, and found himself at the target end of a massive wave of attention, much of it negative. I can’t stress enough how insanely terrifying this can be, and he wasn’t ready.