Balance is a macOS menu bar app that tracks the balances and transactions in your bank, investment, and online financial accounts. The app supports thousands of financial institutions and takes advantage of some of Apple’s latest innovations on the Mac like the Touch Bar and Touch ID. If you want immediate access to balance and transaction data across multiple accounts at your fingertips, Balance is worth a look.
Fire Emblem Heroes Arrives on the App Store
Nintendo’s third iOS title, Fire Emblem Heroes, is now available on the App Store. The game, which features characters from throughout the history of the popular Fire Emblem series, is also launching on the Google Play Store today.
Nintendo describes Fire Emblem Heroes as:
A world with two kingdoms: the Emiliano Empire, which wishes to rule all worlds, and the Askran Kingdom, which stands in its way. You are a summoner with the special ability to call upon legendary Heroes from different Fire Emblem worlds. In order to save the Kingdom of Askr from destruction, join the Order of Heroes and face a never-ending challenge.
Fire Emblem Heroes comes on the heels of Nintendo’s Miitomo and Super Mario Run titles, which were released in 2016. Earlier this week, Nintendo said it intends to release 2-3 mobile games each year. The next game, a mobile version of Nintendo’s Animal Crossing franchise, was originally set for release in March, but has been delayed until sometime during Nintendo’s next fiscal year, which begins in April.
Polygon has a great preview video that is an excellent explanation of how Fire Emblem Heroes works:
Fire Emblem Heroes is a free download on the App Store with In-App Purchases.
YouTube Updated with Chromecast Control Features
If you own a Google Chromecast or Chromecast-compatible device, you now have more options for controlling it from an iOS device. The YouTube app received an update that lets you play, pause, skip forward and back, and control the volume of streaming video from the Lock screen and Control Center of an iOS device, or from an Apple Watch. This functionality has been available on Android for a long time, so it’s nice to see it extended to iOS users who have a Chromecast too.
Apple Q1 2017 Results: $78.4 Billion Revenue, 78.3 Million iPhones, 13.1 Million iPads Sold
Apple has just published their financial results for Q1 2017, which covered the period from September 25, 2016 through to December 31, 2016. The company posted revenue of $78.4 billion. Apple sold 13.1 million iPads, 78.3 million iPhones, and 5.4 million Macs during the quarter.
“We’re thrilled to report that our holiday quarter results generated Apple’s highest quarterly revenue ever, and broke multiple records along the way. We sold more iPhones than ever before and set all-time revenue records for iPhone, Services, Mac and Apple Watch,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “Revenue from Services grew strongly over last year, led by record customer activity on the App Store, and we are very excited about the products in our pipeline.”
Chrome for iOS Open-Sourced→
Chrome for iOS was historically kept separate from Google’s open-source Chromium project. Chrome uses a rendering engine called Blink on every platform except iOS where it must run WebKit. That made incorporating Chrome for iOS into Chromium complicated, but today Google announced that Chrome for iOS has rejoined Chromium and been added to the open-source repository. Now,
developers can compile the iOS version of Chromium like they can for other versions of Chromium. Development speed is also faster now that all of the tests for Chrome for iOS are available to the entire Chromium community and automatically run any time that code is checked in.
Super Mario Run Earnings Top $53 Million
Nintendo shared some figures about the performance of Super Mario Run, which debuted last December. As reported by the Wall Street Journal, the game has been downloaded 78 million times, and 5% of users have paid $9.99 to unlock the full game, earning Nintendo more than $53 million in revenue.
Super Mario Run received an update today that adds an Easy Mode, new events, and Korean language support. The game’s Toad Rally mode was also adjusted, so you forfeit fewer toads when you lose a race. It is now easier to gather toads too.
In other Nintendo iOS news, the upcoming unnamed Animal Crossing title on iOS has been delayed until sometime during Nintendo’s next fiscal year, which begins in April. No details were provided regarding the nature of the delay. The previously-announced Fire Emblem Heroes game for iOS appears to remain on schedule for release this Thursday.
Automating Sleep Tracking with Hello Sense
Sleep is one of those things I’ve been trying to do better for a while. I have a tendency to cheat at both ends when I get busy, waking up earlier and going to bed later to squeeze more out of each day. The trouble is – that only works for so long. The fatigue...
Linea: An Elegant Sketching App for the iPad from The Iconfactory
Drawing and sketching apps present difficult interface challenges. On the one hand, they should maximize the space reserved for their intended use – drawing. On the other, they need to include sufficient tools for users to create what they envision. It’s a balance that many apps get wrong. Some are too simple, forcing too many constraints on users, while others are horribly complicated and intimidating to new users. Linea, a new sketching app for the iPad from The Iconfactory, is exceptional because it manages an ease-of-use and approachability that is rare while maintaining just the right set of tools.
Linea is a sketching app, not a full artist’s toolbox. It won’t replace a more complex app like Procreate, but that’s not its purpose. Instead, Linea is focused on delivering the best possible sketching experience whether you are drawing, prototyping an app interface, storyboarding, taking notes, or something else. The point is to get visual ideas down with the least amount of fiddling, which is exactly what Linea delivers.
Dropbox Introduces Smart Sync for Business Customers and Paper Emerges from Beta
Last April, Dropbox announced Project Infinite, a way to see all of your Dropbox files without having to store local copies. Today, Dropbox released the renamed feature as Smart Sync, which is available exclusively to Dropbox Business customers.
An interesting thing happened in the transition to SSD storage. File space on computers began to shrink after growing year after year. The shift posed a problem for Dropbox. By default, Dropbox syncs all of the files it stores to your local drive. Suddenly, customers’ storage on Dropbox could be larger than their local storage. Add to that increases in file sharing and users were left picking and choosing which files to sync, adding friction to what is otherwise a nearly invisible service.
Smart Sync solves that problem for Dropbox Business customers by eliminating the need to store all of your Dropbox files on your local drive. Every file is visible in Finder and can be previewed with Quick Look, but if it has a cloud icon in the corner, the file is stored in the cloud, not on your local drive. As Dropbox explains it:
Users working with just 128 GB of hard drive space can easily comb through terabytes of files to find exactly what they need—right from Windows File Explorer or macOS Finder. Now, they won’t need to take extra steps—like switching to a web browser—just to view files. And whenever they need to access files stored in the cloud, users can download them with a quick double click.
Removing documents looks just as easy: highlight files, right-click, and choose ‘Remove’ from the contextual menu.
Dropbox also announced today that its collaborative document creation product called Paper is officially out of beta. Paper, which is available as an iOS and web app, has come a long way since first entered beta in late 2015, although it still lacks many of the more advanced features of products like Google Docs and Quip.
Dropbox is positioning Smart Sync and Paper as collaboration tools for sharing knowledge with colleagues. As Scott Rosenberg of Backchannel explains in an in-depth piece on Dropbox’s strategy:
Dropbox … think[s] Paper could become a sort of universal glue that connects teammates working together on updating a spreadsheet, designing a web page, reviewing code, or editing a press release. Once in place, it will save you from having to be “an archaeologist,” in [Dropbox CEO Drew] Houston’s phrase, putting an end to excavations of long email threads and chats, treasure hunts for the latest version of a file, and reconstructions of who said what.
That’s the same problem that companies like Slack are trying to solve but from a very different angle. Instead of approaching collaboration from the perspective of messaging, like Slack, Dropbox is approaching it from a content-centric point of view. Also from the Backchannel article, Dropbox’s CTO Aditya Agarwal says:
… the jury’s still out on whether, as he puts it, “everything is going to be keyed off a unit of communication, or communication is going to be keyed off some core unit of content.”
That’s an interesting way of approaching collaboration and one that turns business customers’ love/hate relationship with email on its head in a way that plays to Dropbox’s strengths.
For now, Smart Sync is only available to Dropbox Business customers, though Harry McCracken reports for Fast Company that Dropbox ‘is actively considering how to roll the feature out to consumers,’ which strikes me as an important next move for Dropbox. After all, as Rosenberg points out, Dropbox Business began with ‘engineers and other early adopters [who] embraced Dropbox… [and] started smuggling it into the workplace.