Posts in Linked

Philips Releases Hue 1.1, Announces IFTTT Integration→

I keep being intrigued by Philips’ smart lighting system. Philips released an official API with iOS SDK in March, and today’s update brings great new features such as geofencing, which you can use to automatically activate your hue lights as you walk in or out of your house.

In terms of automation, hue is now officially integrated with IFTTT, which should allow for some interesting “workflows”. Examples mentioned by Philips include changing the color of your lights based on Instagram pictures, the weather, or your favorite sports team. I can’t wait to get a hue set and start playing around with IFTTT triggers.

You can read more on hue/IFTTT integration here.

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Play Breakout In Google Search (Also On iPad)→

Drew Olanoff, writing about Google’s Breakout easter egg:

The game’s introduction was 37 years ago today, in 1976. Google decided to commemorate the occasion with a little easter egg in image search that will suck all of your free time from you. It’s good to see Google doing these kinds of things away from their normal doodle, especially since a lot of their users might not remember Breakout.

You can also play it on the iPad. I tried with Google Chrome, but Safari had much faster, smoother scrolling (I guess because of Nitro). Alas, I couldn’t find a way to get an iPhone-optimized version.

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Vector Tiles for MapBox Streets→

MapBox is a platform for creating custom maps, integrating with social networks like Foursquare and services like Hipmunk to provide relevant points of interest on top of data sourced from the OpenStreetMap project. MapBox Streets is a component of the platform that lets developers beautifully stylize OpenStreetMap data, providing an opportunity for businesses to customize map views to better fit their brand.

MapBox is announcing vector tiles for MapBox Streets, which will offer developers working with the platform a single format for powering custom maps that can be shared on mobile devices and on the web.

TileMill, our open source design studio, is going to relaunch with vector tiles fully integrated to be a powerhouse tool for custom cartography. Design iterations can happen in seconds and be applied to a full global vector tileset without lengthy downloads, imports, or time spent tuning database queries. In short, anyone will be able to make a totally custom branded map, of the entire globe, that is lighting fast on every device.

As we’ve seen with Apple’s Maps and Google Maps, vectors make for a lightweight, data efficient way to display what’s around you. Vectors load much more quickly than rasterized images, and their small footprint allows map data to be cached on devices without taking up lots of storage space. MapBox claims that, when powered by vector tiles, their MapBox Streets’ dataset of the entire world can fit onto a single thumb drive.

[via Daniel Jalkut]

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ofexport for OmniFocus→

An interesting project by Paul Sidnell:

ofexport is a command line utility that reads and exports the task database from the OmniFocus application.

While similar to Robin Trew’s export utility, ofexport has a series of extra options worth trying out. I’m particularly intrigued by the control you can have on date and calendar filters, as well as regular expressions. I constantly check on my OmniFocus todos through the calendar, so I’ll make sure to test ofexport. [via Sven Fechner]

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Two-Step Verification for Apple IDs Now Available in More Countries→

AppleInsider writes,

Users from Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Italy, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Germany, Mexico, the Netherlands and Russia are reporting the appearance of Apple’s new two-step verification feature, which was previously limited to the US, UK, Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand.

As updates are rolling out, Apple’s support documentation hasn’t been updated to reflect the changes. For those that now have access to Apple’s Two-Step Verification for your Apple IDs, I’ve written a comprehensive how-to that should clear up questions about anything you might see as you go through the process.

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Amazon Cloud Drive Photos Copies Your Photographs to the Cloud→

Mel Martin from TUAW has a nice overview of Amazon’s latest iOS app, which utilizes the capabilities of their Amazon Cloud Drive for storing up to 5GB of photos for free from your iOS device.

Amazon offers more free storage than Apple, and Apple will only store up to 1000 of your photos for 30 days compared to about 2000 photos with no expiration from Amazon. With Apple, after 30 days you must sync to your main computer. I see the Amazon service as a nice extra backup to what Apple offers.

If you use Amazon Cloud Drive, you can also access documents, music, and photographs through the desktop application for transferring files to and from the web.

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Marco On Free Trials→

Some great counterarguments by Marco Arment on the (annual) debate on App Store free trials.

Personally, I think that free trials would help the sales of apps priced at $9.99 and above. While it’s true that we, as geeks, tend to try as many apps as possible, I admit that I would feel uncomfortable with spending $40 on four apps that may not even be what I’m looking for. But I also agree that trials may create new problems for the “middle class” of apps that get tried but not bought. It’s a difficult problem to solve. Surely Apple must have better data and insight to corroborate whatever decision they’ll end up making.

From Marco’s post, I’d also highlight this footnote:

Abolishing the “top” lists from all App Store interfaces and exclusively showing editorially selected apps in browsing screens would do a hell of a lot more than trials to promote healthy app economics and the creation of high-quality software.

Exactly.

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