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Apple Releases iTunes Festival 5.0 with New iOS 7 Design, SXSW Streaming

Apple pushed version 5.0 of its iTunes Festival app on the App Store today, updating the app’s UI for iOS 7 and the upcoming iTunes Festival at SXSW, which starts next week on Tuesday, March 11.

The app, which can be opened on iTunes or the App Store through this link, isn’t however available for download at the moment. While the link redirects to the app’s iTunes page that shows updated screenshots, icon, and changelog, the app can’t be downloaded, as iTunes returns an error that says that the item is “temporarily unavailable”.

According to recent speculation by Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, Apple was preparing an update to the iTunes Festival app to launch alongside iOS 7.1, which, according to his sources, will be required to run the updated app. On iTunes, technical requirements for iTunes Festival 5.0 don’t mention iOS 7.1 and report that “iOS 7.0 or later” is required, though the fact that the app can’t be downloaded may indicate an early release by Apple.

Update: According to initial reports via Twitter, it appears that the updated iTunes Festival app can be downloaded on some international App Store and run using the current version of iOS – iOS 7.0.6.

Retro Game Crunch Collection Released, Includes Seven Games

In November 2012, Shaun Inman, Rusty Moyher, and Matt Grimm launched a Kickstarter campaign for Retro Game Crunch, a project to develop and release six games in six months. As we wrote when the campaign was launched:

Each month backers (of $15 or more) will submit and vote on a theme and Shaun and his team will build the game that gets the most votes… in 3 days. Based on player feedback and Shaun and his team’s original aspirations, they will then polish and perfect the game for thirty days. Backers will then get to download a complete version of the game. This will happen each month for 6 months.

For each thirty days, or each game being developed, the Retro Game Crunch team will document the game process and progress with posts, screenshots and podcasts. Backers that contribute $25 or more will also get to download the entire Super Clew Land, which is a great game, when this project ends.

This week, the Retro Game Crunch team released their first official collection, made of 7 games created during the course of the initiative and based on feedback and input from the Kickstarter backer community. The games, heavily inspired by the 8-bit videogame era and chiptune music style, are Super Crew Land (the game that started Retro Game Crunch), End of Line, GAIAttack, Paradox Lost, Wub-Wub Wescue, Brains & Hearts, and Shūten. While the games were released separately during Retro Game Crunch, the new unified release brings smaller file sizes, a single download for all games, an app launcher to easily switch between games, and support for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 4 controllers.

The Retro Game Crunch Collection is available now for $11.99 (20% off) on the Humble Store and through the Retro Game Crunch website, it’s DRM-free, and made for both Mac and Windows (a Steam Greenlight campaign has also been launched to help make the collection available on Steam). For those who didn’t follow the original Retro Game Crunch initiative, a journal with details on the development of the games is publicly available here.

Wello iPhone Case Will Track Heart Rate, Blood Pressure, Lung Function, and More

Wello, a new iPhone case by technology and science company Azoi, aims at providing an easy way to monitor vital signs with sensors embedded directly in the accessory. As first reported by GigaOM, Wello will become available this Fall in the US at $199.

Just like most iPhone cases, the Wello covers the back of the iPhone to offer protection for the device. Inside the case, however, Azoi built sensors and a chip that, communicating with Bluetooth Low Energy with an iPhone app, can track and archive heart rate, blood oxygen levels, blood pressure, temperature, electrocardiography (ECG), and respiration. Through a separate, attachable spirometer, Wello can also measure lung capacity and air flow; to use Wello, you just hold your phone up as shown in the promo video and wait a few seconds for the system to process data and pass it to the app.

Wello won’t offer diagnoses or prescribe medications – it’s meant to replace checkups that normally require specialized equipment at a doctor’s office, or a basic knowledge on how to operate them at home. By using a simple touch interaction and the convenience of software, Wello can store and track data digitally, finding patterns over time that can be shown to a doctor to offer a better representation of health stats. The Wello is waiting for FDA approval, and, according to today’s announcement, daily usage will grant the device two months of battery life on a single charge.

Azoi is also thinking on making sure Wello can understand physical activity data from fitness-oriented wearable devices: today, the company has confirmed that Wello will be compatible with the FitBit API, allowing Wello to sync with a FitBit and keep data in one place. The Wello app will have support for multiple users, providing a personalized dashboard for each family member.

Wello comes at an interesting time, with Apple reportedly getting ready to announce a wearable device capable of measuring health data and interacting with iOS devices later this year. More details, including a FAQ, can be found at Azoi’s website.

Flipboard Acquires Personalized Magazine Zite

Flipboard

Flipboard

Zite, the personalized magazine that categorizes news based on popularity and reader interest, has been acquired by Flipboard, the social magazine that defined the genre back in 2010. According to TechCrunch, Flipboard acquired the company from CNN (which bought Zite in 2011 for $20 million) for a deal valued at $60 million and that includes CNN content (feeds and special magazines) coming to Flipboard in the future.

Flipboard and Zite has always shared some similarities: both companies started as iPad apps, and they both enabled readers to discover interesting articles by intelligently scanning sources from Twitter, Facebook, and other social services. Unlike Flipboard, however, which has been focusing on its editorial and user-created magazine efforts in the past couple of years, Zite has continued to prioritize automatic, algorithm-based discovery of content: Zite had a mechanism that allowed users to vote for the quality of articles offered by the app, as well as a propretary engine to analyze web trends, topics, and user interests to further filter articles.

In a blog post, Zite co-founder and CTO Mike Klaas has confirmed that the Zite app will be discontinued, although tools to migrate accounts and user data to Flipboard will be offered to existing Zite users. In a separate post on LinkedIn, Zite CEO Mark Johnson announced that, unlike the rest of the Zite team, he won’t be joining Flipboard, and that the combination of the two companies will be an “epic force”.

Behind the deal, what’s interesting is the kind of technology that Zite will bring to Flipboard. Besides the obvious social aspect that enabled Zite to look at links shared by a user on Twitter and other services, Zite had built algorithms to calculate the credibility of a user, match names and places in articles, characterize writing style and parts of speech with semantic classifiers, collect article metadata, and analyze context with text mining techniques to better summarize content. And these were just a part of the system Zite had in place: as the company detailed two years ago, Zite could collect and match user interests over time, aggregate reading habits and interests of a community of users, and find relationships between similar articles and related topics.

The interest graph and artificial intelligence that Zite created has high potential for Flipboard, which has long allowed users to browse Cover Stories, a feature that shows popular articles (based on the Ellerdale tech that Flipboard acquired in 2010), but that isn’t as powerful as Zite for discovering new, interesting stories.

Flipboard, launched in July 2010 three months after the debut of the original iPad, has now over 100 million users, and recently started rolling out an update to their Cover Stories layout to organize articles by source, social network and topic.

Twitch Announces SDK For Mobile Games

Twitch

Twitch

Video game live streaming service Twitch has announced a mobile SDK, which will allow developers of smartphone and tablet games to add gameplay recording and broadcasting functionalities to their games, taking advantage of many of the features that Twitch supports on the web and home consoles. As reported by Polygon, the mobile SDK hasn’t been released yet, and Twitch’s official press release doesn’t clarify whether or not it’ll be available for both leading mobile platforms, iOS and Android.

Twitch, which passed 45 million unique monthly viewers at the end of 2013 and 10 million installs for its official mobile app, is seeking to expand on as many platforms as possible, building a platform that lets players easily record and broadcast gameplay, while allowing viewers to watch streams and chat through various community features. Launched in June 2011 as a subsidiary of Justin.tv, Twitch now comes pre-installed on Sony’s PlayStation 4; on March 11, a Twitch app will officially launch on Microsoft’s Xbox One with more functionalities than the PlayStation’s counterpart such as video archiving, a split layout for streaming and text chats, and media achievements for spectating games.

According to details shared by Twitch so far, the initial version of the mobile SDK will more closely resemble the experience offered on PC and Xbox One: besides the ability to record gameplay video and audio, Twitch will allow players to capture video from the front-facing camera, capture audio from an internal or external microphone, and archive videos for immediate streaming on Twitch. The SDK will come with settings to control brodcast quality, and there will be chat integration and discovery features to browse and follow live streams from other gamers.

“Facilitating the ability to ‘broadcast anywhere’ by bringing live streaming functionality to mobile has the potential to convert millions of Twitch’s passive viewers into active broadcasters,” said Michael Pachter, video game analyst, Wedbush Securities. “Now that Twitch has cornered the PC and console markets with turnkey broadcast integrations, given the proliferation of gaming due to the massive penetration of mobile devices, they are in a unique position to change the game once again.

The addition of mobile games is interesting for Twitch: the service isn’t available on the 3DS and PS Vita portable consoles, and Twitch has typically been associated with longer, more articulated gameplay experiences granted by dedicated home consoles and PCs. While new console-quality games can be found on Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store and ports of older console games are common at this point, it’ll be interesting to see if developers of mobile games that are usually played in short bursts of time will consider adding Twitch streaming functionalities to their games.

On mobile devices, Twitch will also have to take into account technical aspects such as cellular and WiFi streaming, battery life, and hardware fragmentation. On iOS, Apple has traditionally been against solutions to record videos of the device’s screen, although it’s possible that, by leveraging streaming rather than local video archiving, Twitch has figured out ways to enable this sort of functionality.

Details on release date and platform availability of the Twitch mobile SDK aren’t available at this point. You can read Twitch’s press release here, and wait for updates on the Twitch developer website.

CloudyTabs Puts iCloud Tabs In Your Mac’s Menu Bar

CloudyTabs

CloudyTabs

Since I switched to Safari as my primary browser, I’ve been enjoying the convenience of iCloud Tabs, which allow me to easily find webpages that I have open on my devices and re-open them anywhere, at any time. iCloud Tabs have been reliable and fast in my experience, and I cannot imagine going back to a browser that doesn’t have this sort of functionality.

The problem with iCloud Tabs is that they’re limited to Safari, so if you’re using Chrome or Firefox on OS X, you can’t access the tabs that you have open on your iPhone or iPad. For this reason, Josh Parnham has devised a simple and clever solution: CloudyTabs is a menu bar app that lists iCloud Tabs open on all your devices. CloudyTabs reads data from the .plist file that stores iCloud Tabs data on OS X, which is why the app isn’t available on the App Store and has been released on GitHub.

Once installed, CloudyTabs will need a few seconds to find open tabs and after that it’ll present a dropdown menu listing devices and webpages open on each one of them. You can CMD-click tabs to open them in the background in your default browser, and there’s a handy shortcut to open all tabs from a specific device at once. You can also type the first few letters of a tab’s title to select it.

If you don’t use Safari on OS X and wish there was a way to open iCloud Tabs without copying and pasting URLs, CloudyTabs gets the job done quite elegantly, and it’s free. You can download it here.

Volvo Shows CarPlay Integration for XC90 SUV

In a press release (via setteBIT), Volvo has confirmed that CarPlay – officially announced by Apple today – will be coming to their new XC90 SUV this year, allowing drivers to use Volvo’s on-board system and CarPlay simultaneously on a single, portrait-oriented screen.

“Apple’s clean and intuitive user interface is a perfect match with Volvo’s Scandinavian Design approach and our focus on fluid functionality,” says Håkan Samuelsson, President and CEO of Volvo Cars.

The first car to offer Apple CarPlay will be the all new XC90 SUV which will be introduced later in 2014, one of the most anticipated cars of recent years, replacing the original XC90, which redefined the SUV and became the best selling model in Volvo Cars’ history.

In a video released today, Volvo shows how Apple’s CarPlay will essentially become a feature of the existing on-board system, providing drivers with a way to invoke the CarPlay interface manually to show the grid of icons configured to work with an iPhone. As Volvo notes in the press release, this approach removes “the need to switch between a dedicated car and iPhone screen”, and the video shows, for instance, how CarPlay can remain visible in the background while the driver adjusts the climate control through a separate overlay.

In the video, Volvo also demonstrates Siri integration in Messages, Apple Maps for navigation, and there’s a brief appearance of the Spotify app for CarPlay. Various interactions are shown by Volvo, such as the possibility to read and send messages through voice or with large buttons in the middle of the screen, the possibility to scroll through multiple results for map search, and a Siri UI reminiscent of the facelift Apple’s voice assistant received with iOS 7.

Last, Volvo shared a few technical details of their CarPlay implementation in the press release as well:

Apple CarPlay allows connection of the device to the car through a Lightning cable – with Wi-Fi coming in the near future. The connection is based on a streaming H.264 video feed that returns user input from the touchscreen. Apple CarPlay will be available in forthcoming Volvo models based on the new Scalable Product Architecture (SPA), starting with the all-new Volvo XC90 later in 2014.

You can watch Volvo’s video on YouTube here.

Apple’s “iOS in the Car” Renamed CarPlay, Coming This Year

CarPlay

CarPlay

Apple’s “iOS in the Car” initiative, first introduced at WWDC in June 2013, will launch as “CarPlay”, the company announced today in a press release. Premiering with an initial lineup of auto manufacturers that include Ferrari, Honda, and Mercedes-Benz at the Geneva International Motor Show this week, CarPlay will provide a dedicated interface for iOS features in the car, working with existing touch screens, buttons, knobs, and other physical controls to allow drivers to reply to messages, answer phone calls, listen to music, and more. CarPlay is an extension of iOS 7, and will work with the iPhone 5, iPhone 5s, and iPhone 5c through the Lightning connector. Read more