Posts in Linked

The Prompt T-Shirts→

If you listen to The Prompt and you’ve ever wished you could express your appreciation for the show in a very visible way, well, we now have t-shirts.

We’re excited to announce the world’s greatest t-shirt. With a two-sided color design and printed on black, it celebrates the culture surrounding Apple and a community that’s bigger than any country or accent. We’ve been testing the design for a while now, and we really like it.

All orders and shipping are being handled by Teespring, so there’s no doubt about the quality of the product and the service. The best part? They’ll be at your door well in time to pack for WWDC.

Get yours on Teespring today, and you’ll have it by WWDC.

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Asking Users For iOS Permissions→

Brenden Mulligan has an interesting post on various ways to ask users for permissions to access photos, contacts, and notifications on iOS. Brenden and his team experimented with different user flows and designs for Cluster, and what they ended up using seems like a good balance to me: there are multiple dialogs, but they’re often contextual and they explain to the user how data will be accessed before making a decision.

The “trick” of showing a custom permission dialog before the real iOS one seems to be a common trend these days – I’ve seen it in Facebook Messenger and other apps, and the general idea is that the user will be prepared when iOS will pop up the permission dialog to grant access to private data. There are many ways to approach this problem (dialogs integrated with welcome tutorials, custom dialogs with screenshots, etc), but I agree that making permission-granting contextual to a user-initiated action is much better than a deluge of permission dialogs on an app’s first launch.

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The Prompt: I Am Your Middleman→

This week, Federico, Myke and Stephen reflect on their input into the world of dental healthcare, then move on to discuss Dropbox’s recent news, shake-ups in Apple’s design department and the WWDC lottery system.

For more on Carousel, see my thoughts on the app – I like its browsing experience a lot, but it needs more options for uploads and folder-based structures. Get the episode here.

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Don Melton’s Memories Of Steve Jobs→

Let me be clear. Steve was not some mercurial ogre or cartoon autocrat. He was just very, very busy. He didn’t have time for “yes men,” the easily frightened, or those who didn’t know what the fuck they were doing or talking about.

In that way, he wasn’t different from any other executive. At least those with good sense.

Steve expected excellence. Which is why he so often got it.

Fantastic collection of stories about Steve Jobs and working at Apple by Don Melton (an extended, unified version of what first appeared on The Loop Magazine).

If you read one thing today, make it this one.

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Inside Monument Valley→

Cult of Mac’s Luke Dormehl posted a look behind the scenes of Monument Valley, one of the most unique and beautiful iOS games I’ve played this year. There are photos of early sketches and an interview with Monument Valley designer Ken Wong, which includes this important quote about movies and game design:

A lot of games make too much sense,” Wong says. “Their makers try and emulate movies, for example — wanting to look like Star Wars or The Godfather. Games can be so much more. The titles that excite us the most here at ustwo are the ones where you get to do really strange things. It doesn’t have to make sense. That’s where Monument Valley came from conceptually.

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Mailbox for iOS Gets Auto-Swipe, Mac Beta Coming Soon→

Alongside Carousel, today Dropbox also announced an update to Mailbox for iOS and showed the first screenshots of a Mailbox beta for OS X. In Mailbox for iOS, Dropbox is introducing a feature called Auto-Swipe, which will let the app learn a user’s patterns for archiving, deleting, or snoozing emails containing certain addresses or subjects and try to perform the same action automatically in the future:

Today, we’re proud to announce a new service built directly into Mailbox that learns from your swipes and snoozes to automate common actions. Mute that thread you don’t care about, snooze messages from your friends until after work, and route receipts to a list — automatically. We call this service Auto-swipe.

According to a post on the Mailbox blog, Auto-Swipe is made possible by the service’s new infrastructure, likely helped by resources made available by Dropbox (the company was acquired by Dropbox in March 2013). In a feature story at The Verge, Ellis Hamburger has shared details on how Auto-Swipe will work and even integrate with Mailbox for Mac:

If you want to manually archive any thread for good before waiting on Mailbox’s suggestion, you can open it up, and then tap and hold on the archive button. Similarly, if you keep snoozing your Groupon emails until after work, or your club soccer emails until Friday afternoons, Mailbox will notice your actions and offer to do them for you for incoming emails of those kinds. Or you can manually invoke action by tapping and holding on the snooze button. The goal is to remove all the clutter you didn’t even know existed — the messages that you assumed needed to stay in your inbox because they showed no signs of stopping.

Mailbox for Mac will sport a design inspired by the popular iOS app, with support for quick gestures and snooze (two of the app’s marquee additions to classic email) and a clean widescreen layout to manage accounts and lists. The Mailbox Mac app isn’t available today, but Dropbox is letting users apply for a beta invitation here.

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Vlambeer’s Nuclear Throne Early Access Adds Mac Support→

Nuclear Throne, the upcoming game from Vlambeer (Super Crate Box, Ridiculous Fishing, Luftrausers) currently in development and available through Steam Early Access, will receive native Mac support today. Previously, the game was only playable through Early Access on Windows machines.

Nuclear Throne is now live and should be stable on Mac. It’s also live for Linux, but we can’t promise stability (or even functionality) just yet, but rest assured we’re working closely with YoYo Games to make sure the Linux build will be up to speed. If you own the game on Windows, the Mac and Linux builds should show up on Steam right around now, and the Humble builds will be uploaded later.

Nuclear Throne is an action roguelike title from the award-winning studio that can be played during the development process thanks to Early Access; Vlambeer is regularly hosting live streams on Twitch to offer a glimpse into the game’s creation and showcase the latest additions.

You can more on Vlambeer’s “performative development” of Nuclear Throne at Edge and watch Polygon’s demo and interview with Vlambeer from last month’s GDC. The Mac build of Nuclear Throne will be available today on the game’s Steam page.

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Directional: Shahid Ahmad Of PlayStation→

This week, Myke and Federico are joined by Shahid Ahmad, senior business development manager at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe. They talk about Shahid’s role at PlayStation, indie games and PS Vita, passion for game development and video games, and the importance of human curation.

Shahid Ahmad is widely regarded as the man behind Sony’s indie revolution, and we had a fantastic chat on Directional about his career and the work he does to bring great indie games to PlayStation. You can get the episode here.

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Deep Belief Image Recognition on iOS→

Pete Warden:

I am totally convinced that deep learning approaches to hard AI are going to change our world, especially when they’re running on cheap networked devices scattered everywhere. I’m a believer because I’ve seen how good the results can be on image recognition, but I understand why so many experienced engineers are skeptical. It sounds too good to be true, and we’ve all been let down by AI promises in the past.

That’s why I’ve decided to release DeepBeliefSDK, an iOS version of the deep learning approach that has taken the computer vision world by storm.

A fascinating demo, especially in how the prototype app Pete built starts recognizing his cat in real-time – through the camera – towards the end of the video. Developers can check out DeepBeliefSDK here.

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