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Virtual: Space Age, with Matt Comi→

This week Federico and Myke are joined by Matt Comi to talk about the newly released Space Age. They talk about how the game was developed, the importance of music and the dialog.

If you want to know more about the excellent Space Age (my review), we interviewed Big Bucket’s Matt Comi on Virtual. We talked about the development process of the game, letting an idea evolve over time, and, towards the end, spoilers. You can get the episode here.

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Connected: Dig Up an App→

This week, Stephen explains Net Neutrality to the Europeans, Myke explains YouTube Music and why Evernote Context doesn’t bother him before Federico explains how bit rot in the App Store makes him sad.

I’ve wanted to talk about software preservation and curation in the age of the App Store for a long time, and I finally discussed the topic in this week’s Connected. You can get the episode here.

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Twitter: “Several Updates” Coming for Direct Messages→

In a blog post published today, Twitter announced that native videos and more timeline experiments will come to the service. That’s great – especially if they’re planning more Cards features.

Towards the end, the company also mentions direct messages:

And we haven’t forgotten about Direct Messages. We have several updates coming that will make it easy to take a public conversation private. The first of these was announced today and will begin rolling out next week: the ability to share and discuss Tweets natively and privately via Direct Messages. Stay tuned!

“We haven’t forgotten” sounds like a curious statement from a company that, for some reason, decided to disallow sharing URLs in direct messages last year and never bothered to fix them. It sounds like Twitter will bring back the ability to discuss individual tweets in DMs, but, frankly, it makes no sense that people who follow each other shouldn’t be able to exchange any URL privately.

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Google Announces YouTube Music Key→

Widely rumored for the past several months, Google today announced YouTube Music Key, a premium service that, starting at $7.99/month, will offer ad-free videos, the ability to keep listening to videos as music in the background, offline downloads, and access to Google Play Music (the new name for Google Play Music All Access).

From the YouTube blog:

Thanks to your music videos, remixes, covers, and more, you’ve made YouTube the biggest music service on the planet. To turn YouTube into your perfect music service, we’re launching YouTube Music Key as a beta with our biggest music fans first, and then we’ll bring YouTube Music Key to the whole world together. So, if you see an invite in your app or email, try it out for six months for free.

YouTube Music Key follows a plan to revamp YouTube’s entire music strategy with a new dedicated section:

Starting today, you’ll see a new home just for music on your YouTube app for Android, iOS and on YouTube.com that shows your favorite music videos, recommended music playlists based on what you’re into and playlists of trending music across YouTube. You can find a playlist to perfectly fit your mood, whether that’s a morning motivators playlist or Boyce Avenue YouTube Mix. Check out the newest songs from channels you subscribe to, like FKA twigs or Childish Gambino. Or quickly find the songs you’ve played over and over and over again.

The YouTube Music Key beta will start rolling out next week, and it appears that current Google Music All Access subscribers will get access to it immediately.

I’m interested in Google’s plans with YouTube because the service has what other music streaming services have always lacked: a huge catalogue of videos from artists that go beyond albums and singles. As someone who regularly watches concert videos and demo recordings on YouTube, I’m curious to see how an ad-free experience with web and iOS access could improve content that I can’t get anywhere else.

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Integrating iThoughtsX with Marked 2→

Brett Terpstra writes about the new integration of Marked 2 with iThoughtsX:

iThoughtsX is currently my favorite mind mapping tool on OS X. Marked 2 is, obviously, my favorite way to preview Markdown. Now they work together. You can simply drag an iThoughtsX map file to Marked, and it will start previewing an outline of your map as you work. Every time you save your map in iThoughts, you’ll see the changes in the resulting Markdown document, previewed in whatever theme you’re working with.

As you can see in the video above, the integration is seamless: every change you make in a mind map is reflected in the Markdown preview of Marked.

Both iThoughts and Marked are excellent pieces of software. I miss the ubiquitous preview capabilities of Marked on iOS, but, fortunately, iThoughts developer Craig Scott worked out a pretty sweet integration with Editorial.

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Virtual: Lost in a Glass of Water→

This week Myke and Federico talk about what Nintendo is doing with Amiibo and the Quality of Life strategy, Fantasy Life and Sunset Overdrive.

On this week’s Virtual, the game that is slowly consuming my free time and a discussion on Nintendo’s curious plan for their Quality of Life initiative. Get the episode here.

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Monument Valley “Forgotten Shores” Expansion Launching Next Week→

Monument Valley, one of my favorite iOS games of 2014, will receive its first expansion next week. Titled “Forgotten Shores” and priced at $1.99 as an In-App Purchase, the expansion will add 8 new levels to Monument Valley and further explore the story of Ida and Totem.

Liz Stinson writes at Wired:

Monument Valley was designed as a complete story; the 10 levels formed a beginning, middle and end. When you closed the app for the final time, there was closure. But people didn’t want closure. They wanted more Monument Valley. Its designers were torn: They wanted to add more levels, mostly because people were asking for them. But they felt Monument Valley ended on a high note–1.4 million downloads, to be exact. “It was never 100 percent settled on that we were going to create more content for Monument Valley,” says Gray. “It’s very much a self contained experience. So the question was, how do we create something that doesn’t disrupt that?”

ustwo made a beautiful and poetic game with the original Monument Valley, and I can’t wait to get my hands on the expansion pack. You can read my original review of the game here.

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Connected: Come Grocery Shopping With Me→

This week Federico and Myke talk a little about photo storage solutions, before discussing the widgets in their Today Views, what’s on Federico’s iPad home screen and his impressions of the iPad Air 2.

Following the Home screen episode for iPhone, we couldn’t avoid mentioning widgets. Myke also wanted to know about my iPad Home screen. You can find the episode with detailed show notes (including links to apps and images) here.

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Expectations for WatchKit→

David Smith has been reading through Apple’s WatchKit documentation, and he believes that full apps for the Apple Watch will likely arrive at WWDC next year:

Next June at WWDC I then expect we will receive the tools necessary to build out more fully capable applications. Just like we have seen with iOS I’d guess this will be a progressive expansion of capability with each successive year. Just as early iPhone OS apps were severely constrained to save battery life, we’ll probably see strict limits on what types of apps we can build initially. We are essentially resetting the battery life equation with this new device. So no background processing or multitasking for a while (with the possible exception of music/audio playback).

According to recent speculation, the Apple Watch may be released in the Spring.

Back in 2010, a lot of developers struggled to create iPad apps between January and April without an actual iPad, so limiting WatchKit to notifications and glanceable information is probably the best strategy for now.

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