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Posts in Linked

Microsoft Bringing Back Sunrise Integrations as Calendar Apps for Outlook→

Since Microsoft acquired Sunrise last year and began the process of integrating it with Outlook, I’ve been wondering when they’d bring back the popular third-party integrations of Sunrise. That became clear today with the launch of three Calendar Apps for Outlook on iOS – Wunderlist (obviously), Facebook, and Evernote.

Here’s the Outlook team, writing on the company blog:

This is why we are launching Calendar Apps for Outlook on iOS and Android. With Calendar Apps, you can connect your apps—Wunderlist, Facebook and Evernote to start with—to see all your tasks, events and notes from your digital life in one place: your Outlook calendar. By connecting your calendar with a wide range of services, Outlook will be able to provide you with a far better view of your day, week and months ahead.

Those of you who use and love Sunrise will be familiar with this capability. Since the Sunrise team joined Outlook, we’ve been hard at work bringing all the goodness and extra features from their app directly into our calendar to give you a single, powerful app for managing your personal and professional life. Calendar Apps, along with a two-week mini-calendar, three-day view and iOS calendar widget, have already made it to Outlook, with Connected Calendars up next.

Smart move, and something I don’t see Apple doing either. I hope they’ll open up the platform to more services soon.

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Disney Crossy Road→

One of my favorite iOS games in recent years, Crossy Road, has received a Disney tie-in aptly named Disney Crossy Road. It’s out on the App Store today for free, and it features over 100 Disney and Pixar figurines hopping their way through worlds from The Lion King, Toy Story, Inside Out, and more.

It looks like Hipster Whale (creators of the original game) and Disney did a good job in keeping the essence of Crossy Road alive while also enhancing the formula with new gameplay mechanics and world-specific challenges. I’m going to play the game over the weekend – in the meantime, The Verge has a nice behind-the-scenes piece on how the game was created:

Disney Crossy Road goes in a different direction. While the first area is exactly the same as the world from the original game, the rest are all based on different Disney properties and feature new gameplay characteristics to suit them. Some of the changes are just visual — in the Lion King world you’re avoiding charging animals instead of cars — while others are twists on the Crossy Road formula. In the Tangled world you have to avoid barrels falling down a hill, while Inside Out tasks you with collecting colorful memory orbs.

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Improving MFi Controller Support on iOS→

Craig Grannell, writing on how Apple could make MFi controller-enabled games more user friendly on iOS:

That’s assuming anyone could find a compatible game in the first place, because Apple oddly broadly ignored controllers in the iTunes Store. You’d think the company would at least flag controller support on game pages (something it does on Apple TV), and also automate an App Store page listing compatible games. Instead, it’s left to third-party sites like Afterpad to pick up the slack, which is baffling.

Today, the MFi ecosystem is fairly mature, with a reasonable range of controllers. (My personal recommendation is the Nimbus, unless you’re desperate for a form-hugging option, in which case grab a Gamevice, in the knowledge it may not fit the next device you buy.) But Apple needs to do more to help.

It is baffling that the iOS App Store still doesn’t display controller support or offer a filter to show games with MFi controller integration. It seems like they’re not taking them too seriously.

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Macminicolo Merging with MacStadium→

Brian Stucki, writing on the Macminicolo blog, has some big news today:

In short, I’ve decided to sell ownership of Macminicolo and merge it with another company. I will stay on as President of Macminicolo and also serve as a Vice President of the parent company, MacStadium.

Now, I could just announce this with no explanation and be done with it . I could also write one of those generic acquisition posts focused on sunsets and brands and blah. Instead, I’ll be forthright and real like I’ve always tried to be with customers.

Macminicolo is the Mac mini hosting company in the Apple community, and this move feels right to me.

MacStories is hosted on Macminicolo (and has been for several years now). Moving to a dedicated mini has been one of the best decisions we’ve made in seven years of MacStories, and I’m excited to see what MacStadium brings to the table. I wish them all the best.

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Slack on Release Notes→

Anna Pickard, writing on the Slack blog, describes how Slack approaches writing release notes for their apps. In the modern App Store, Slack is one of the few companies that publishes good release notes – informative, just the right amount of funny, and detailed.

If you want to produce something that people will want to read, it’s only polite to make it enjoyable to read it. So in release notes — as in everything else we do — a large love for language, and a little humor, go a long way. Once you’ve gone that long way, it’s tempting to go further still, but we try and remind ourselves to hold back.

(Compare and contrast: the people who write release notes for Medium.)

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Connected: Pokédex of iMacs→

Myke is back, and has a surprise for Stephen and Federico. After they recover, the trio talk about the current state of home automation and the iMac’s place in the world.

Come for the title, stay for the surprise topic (which I wasn’t expecting either). You can listen here.

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Instapaper Launches Instaparser API→

The Instapaper team, writing on the company blog:

Since the launch of our new parser in January, we’ve gotten lots of inquiries from developers about using our parser for third-party applications. With the new Instaparser API, app developers can use our parsing tools to provide users with a lightning-fast browsing experience optimized for mobile devices. Data scientists can use the tools to normalize input for text analysis. And hackers can do, well, whatever hackers might like to do with lightning-fast access to clean, standardized web page data.

The addition of an API makes sense to me – now third-party developers (think Twitter clients or news readers) can access the same powerful parser that Instapaper uses (which is excellent). I’m curious to see which iOS apps will implement it in the near future.

There’s also a free tier available here.

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Hey Siri, Play Ball!→

The Verge reports today that Siri has been upgraded with a load of baseball facts, just in time for Opening Day:

Siri now has some more baseball smarts: it can answer questions about more detailed statistics, according to Apple, including historical stats going back to the beginning of baseball records. You can also get information on career statistics, and there’s now specific information for leagues other than the Majors — there are 28 other leagues, including the Minors, that are covered now.

I tested out a number of questions with Siri and, like Dante D’Orazio of the Verge, found that certain questions like “Who hit the most home runs ever in baseball?” tended to return either Google search results or in the case of the home run question above, the results for the 2016 season, not all time.

In case you were wondering, right now Troy Tulowitzki and Corey Dickerson are tied for the lead with one home run each.

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Apple Classroom First Impressions→

Fraser Speirs:

Yesterday, I got Apple Classroom up and running at school thanks to the release of Casper 9.9, which supports the new features of iOS 9.3. Here are some early impressions. I’ll mostly focus on the technology and how well it works, rather than how effective it is for teaching since I’ve only had a day or so to play with it.

There are some missing features and issues in this first release (low frame rate for screen monitoring or the use of Bluetooth, for instance), but it sounds like Apple shipped a solid foundation for Classroom on iOS 9.3.

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