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Twitter Updates iPad App for iOS 9→

Good on Twitter for living up to their end of the bargain: the redesigned, uninspired iPad app has already been updated with Slide Over and Split View, which lets you keep your Twitter timeline next to other apps. (Be careful, as that may lead to decreased productivity.)

Kind of odd that Twitter isn’t supporting Universal Links for twitter.com links on iOS 9, though. It’d make perfect sense to be able to tap a link to a tweet and view it in the native app.

Also absent, but not surprising: Safari View Controller. But we already know why.

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Apple Seeds First iOS 9.1 Beta, Includes New Emoji→

Following its event in San Francisco today, Apple released Golden Master seeds of iOS 9 and watchOS 2 (both launching next week), as well as the first developer beta of iOS 9.1, likely coming with the new iPad Pro in November.

As spotted by Owen Williams at The Next Web, the beta release includes new emoji from the latest Unicode specification:

Once you get the update to iOS 9.1 when it’s released at some point in the future — its only available to those with a paid Apple developer account right now — you’ll see a ton of new emoji on the keyboard including taco, unicorn, a stop hand, turkey, burrito and block of cheese.

Almost every category has had new emoji added — we saw a racecar, satellite, prayer beads, award medals, new square images showing camping and a ton more.

Adding new emoji may be the best way to convince millions of people to upgrade to the latest version of iOS.

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Apple Launches App Store Games Twitter Account→

Casey Newton, writing at The Verge:

Apple has launched a dedicated Twitter feed for gaming just days before the company is expected to reveal a new Apple TV that doubles as a gaming console. Apple confirmed the authenticity of the account to The Verge, which sent out its first tweet this morning. It included a GIF featuring some of the platform’s most popular games, including Clash of Clans and Angry Birds.

Staffed by App Store Games Editors, the new @AppStoreGames Twitter account will feature various kinds of content, as Apple told The Verge:

The Twitter feed will feature more than just the usual picks for app of the week, the company said. App Store editors will run the feed, and plan to populate it with sneak previews of games, tips and tricks, and profiles of talented gamers. Editors will also interact with game developers on the feed, Apple said.

This is far from Apple’s first foray into actively using social media, but in recent times they’ve become more sophisticated in the way they approach it, and the frequency to which they use it. Just a few short weeks ago Apple launched a Snapchat account for Apple Music, which has been incredibly well produced. Just looking at the first day of tweets from @AppStoreGames (a sample of which are embedded below) and it looks like this account is well worth a follow.

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YouTube Gaming Officially Launches→

YouTube Gaming, the company’s dedicated platform for all things videogames, has officially launched today. From the YouTube blog:

YouTube Gaming is your go-to destination for anything and everything gaming because it automatically pulls in all gaming-related videos and live streams from YouTube.

Viewers get personalized gaming recommendations based on the games and channels they collect. With over 25,000 game pages and even more gaming channels, it’s never been easier to connect with your gaming community.

We’ve also made it easier to create a live stream — check out the beta version of our new way to go live at youtube.com/stream today.

I took the app for a spin this evening on my iPad, and it’s well done. There’s a lot going on in the front page – live streams, reviews, channels, game pages, but the YouTube team has done a good job at figuring out ways to automatically categorize content. When watching a game review, for instance, a link to that game’s page is available in the video description; tap it, and on the game page you can find more videos of different types such as Let’s Plays, reviews, popular videos, past live streams, and more. It’s a busy interface, but there’s also a lot to watch and go through.

YouTube Gaming is going to be compared to Twitch a lot, and for good reason. The big advantage of YouTube Gaming is its direct integration with a vast archive of YouTube videos and video creators that produce new content just for YouTube every day (this includes trailers, reviews, how-tos, and lots more non-live stream content). The decision to create game pages with automatic categorization of videos seems like a smart one to me, and the entire app feels lively and fun (try to search for games, for example).

I wouldn’t be surprised if this becomes effectively the default way of finding gaming content on YouTube in the future, with the main YouTube app as a fallback for everything else. You can download the iOS app (US and UK only for now) here.

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Adobe’s Project Rigel→

Stephen Shankland, writing for CNET on Adobe’s plans for Project Rigel, a new photo editing app for iOS:

Photoshop is so well known that the product name is synonymous with photo editing. But the software itself is a success only on personal computers, not smartphones or tablets.

Photoshop’s maker, Adobe Systems, hopes that will change in October at its Max conference for developers and creative professionals when it introduces a new Photoshop app for editing photos on Apple’s iPhones and iPads. The free software, called only Project Rigel for now, is designed to bring a more accessible interface to what can be a dauntingly complex program on PCs.

Probably a smarter move than the old Photoshop Touch app to focus on photo editing for iPhone and iPad with advanced tools. The app will be free and act as a “bait” for the subscription-based desktop Photoshop. It’ll be interesting to compare this to existing apps such as Pixelmator and Snapseed.

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Facebook Starts Testing New ‘M’ Personal Assistant in Messenger→

Facebook has begun testing M, a new personal assistant built into the Messenger app that can look up information and perform actions on the user’s behalf. Wired writes:

It won’t take long for Messenger’s users to realize M can accomplish much more than your standard digital helper, suspects David Marcus, vice president of messaging products at Facebook. “It can perform tasks that none of the others can,” Marcus says. That’s because, in addition to using artificial intelligence to complete its tasks, M is powered by actual people.

The people supervising M in the initial rollout are called ‘M trainers’ inside Facebook, and the company is hoping to expand the team to thousands of people eventually.

Here’s Facebook’s David Marcus on what M is:

Today we’re beginning to test a new service called M. M is a personal digital assistant inside of Messenger that completes tasks and finds information on your behalf. It’s powered by artificial intelligence that’s trained and supervised by people.

Unlike other AI-based services in the market, M can actually complete tasks on your behalf. It can purchase items, get gifts delivered to your loved ones, book restaurants, travel arrangements, appointments and way more.

This is early in the journey to build M into an at-scale service. But it’s an exciting step towards enabling people on Messenger to get things done across a variety of things, so they can get more time to focus on what’s important in their lives.

As Wired notes, M won’t use data gathered from Facebook accounts, at least not initially:

For now, M doesn’t pull from the social data Facebook collects to complete tasks. So, if you request a gift for your spouse, the service will make suggestions based only on your answers to questions it asks you and previous conversations you and M have had. Marcus says that may change “at some point, with proper user consent.” The service is free, and will be available to all Facebook Messenger users eventually.

Interesting that Facebook is using a conversational UI for an assistant baked into its popular Messenger app. I’ll be curious to see how it scales.

See also: this idea by Matt Galligan from earlier this year.

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NewsBlur Adds RSS Feeds for Folders→

Speaking of useful web services and Slack, here’s something I’m now using to make my own news-gathering filters available to others via Slack. NewsBlur, my RSS service of choice (I’ll write about it eventually, I promise), has launched support for RSS feeds of entire folders:

These folders keep track of sites you add and remove from them. They also allow you to filter out stories you don’t want to read or even choose to only show the stories you have in focus.

All of your feed subscriptions in the folder, including subfolders, are merged into a single river of news in RSS format. Technically we use Atom 1.0 format for NewsBlur’s many RSS feeds, but I’m not choosing a side here.

This wouldn’t normally be exciting for most RSS people like me, except that NewsBlur lets you train the service to promote stories you like and hide others you don’t want to see, and now you can output a stream of important stories-only via RSS.

For us, this means that the filters I’ve been building for news I care about can be useful to others so that a) they don’t have to subscribe to dozens of blogs themselves and cull their headlines over time and b) they can receive highlights with rich previews in a Slack channel. Great implementation by NewsBlur, and a perfect fit for how we’re using Slack.

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iMore’s Apple Music Guide→

The iMore team has been doing a fantastic job at covering Apple Music and how the service works on various platforms and devices. Last week, they released an eBook version that collects of all their articles in one handy guide, expertly put together by Serenity Caldwell, Rene Ritchie, and the rest of the team.

I was on vacation when the iBooks version came out, but I still downloaded it and read it on my iPhone to see if there was anything I had missed in Apple Music and Beats 1. I discovered a lot of details I hadn’t paid attention to before, and I like how screenshots throughout the book always have informative callouts and descriptions. Fantastic resource (150+ pages) for anyone interested in or trying Apple Music, and just $4.99 on the iBooks Store. Recommended.

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Apple’s App Search API Validation Tool→

I haven’t seen this linked before – and I certainly didn’t see it when I first wrote about iOS 9 search – but Apple has a new validation tool to test websites for App Search, coming with iOS 9 in Spotlight.

Apple writes:

Test your webpage for iOS 9 Search APIs. Enter a URL and Applebot will crawl your webpage and show how you can optimize for best results.

As I wrote, iOS 9 won’t be limited to searching for local app content:

To enhance web crawling with structured data and, again, give developers control of indexed content, Apple has announced support for various types of web markup. Developers who own websites with content related to an app will be able to use Smart App Banners to describe deep links to an app (more on this in a bit) as well as open standards such as schema.org and Open Graph.

Apple calls these “rich results”: by reading metadata based on existing standards, Apple’s web crawler can have a better understanding of key information called out on a webpage and do more than simply parsing a title and a link. With support for schema.org, for instance, Applebot will be able to recognize tagged prices, ratings, and currencies for individual listings on Airbnb, while the Open Graph image tag could be used as the image thumbnail in iOS search results. An app like Songkick could implement structured data to tag concert dates and prices in their related website, and popular concerts could show up for users with rich descriptions in the iOS 9 search page.

The validation tool does indeed analyze information that will be used to power iOS 9 search results – such as thumbnails, descriptions, and deep links to apps. You can try it out here.

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