Announced today, Automatic aims at making cars more “smart” and “connected” by leveraging an iPhone’s Bluetooth connection and your car’s onboard computer. The Verge has a good overview of the announcement.
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Automatic: Smart Driving Assistant For iPhone
Apple Airs New iPhone Commercials: “Brilliant” and “Discover”
Earlier today, Apple aired two new iPhone commercials called Brilliant and Discover. The videos are available both on Apple’s website and YouTube channel.
Like Apple’s latest iPad ad campaign, the iPhone commercials focus on third-party apps with no narration, and just a series of words quickly shown on screen alongside apps/media available on iTunes. For “Brilliant”, the words are “sweet”, “rise” and “brilliant” and content includes Apple’s Cards app, UP, Passbook, MyScript Calculator, and Philips’ hue (Philips announced an SDK today as well). For “Discover” the words are “rock”, “sharp”, and “discover” and content includes GarageBand, Maps, Infinity Blade II, Cleartune, Solar Walk, Yelp, and Shazam.
You can watch the ads below. Read more
Sponsor: MindNode
My thanks to IdeasOnCanvas for sponsoring MacStories this week with MindNode.
MindNode is an easy to use and elegant mind mapping app for iOS and OS X. With a clutter-free interface, MindNode lets you brainstorm and connect ideas on an infinitely expanding canvas that can hold as many ideas as you like. MindNode’s focus on simplicity allows you to easily move between “nodes” and mark the most important ones with bold text or bigger font sizes.
MindNode has been one of my favorite apps for a long time. I don’t use iCloud much, but I found MindNode’s implementation to be extremely reliable at keeping my maps in sync across my iPhone and iPad, allowing me to start jotting down thoughts on one device and finish on the other. Whenever someone asks me for a mind mapping app recommendation, I personally mention MindNode because it’s been a great tool for me.
Find out more about MindNode here.
Philips Releases Hue API and iOS SDK
As reported by TechCrunch, Philips has released an API and iOS SDK for the hue, the company’s wireless lighting system that gives users control through an iOS app.
We’re now at a point where there are already about 10 applications that have been shared and built from the unofficial developer community for new applications around Hue,” explained George Yianni, Hue System Architect in an interview. “Now what we want to do as Philips is we actually want to help and grow and encourage this community, and give them tools and proper documentation. Also, we want to give them commitment that this is the API and we’re going to support it and it won’t change overnight.
Prior to the official release of an API and SDK, third-party developers had already reverse-engineered Philips’ apps to create their own solutions to control hue’s system (based on a “bridge” that communicates with the actual lightbulbs). An iOS app called Ambify lets users pair their music with hue lights; here at MacStories, I linked to a video back in November showing an unofficial hue Python library that could work with Pythonista to automate the process of switching lights on and off.
The API opens a lot of interesting possibilities for third-party software and hardware makers. The hue already shipped with its own options for remote control and “presets” (called “recipes”) for different lighting settings aimed at providing users with ways to easily replicate specific color combinations based on photos (available in the app’s photo library) or targeted towards lifestyle improvements (such as waking users up in the morning with a gradual light increase).
With an SDK and API, developers can now take advantage of these concepts: aside from the “simple” remote control features, imagine apps that could activate specific hue settings when you’re reading or watching a movie, parse voice-based commands with dictation, or integrate with an iOS device’s Reminders, Calendars, or Location Services. On the hardware side, it should be possible – at least in theory – to develop gadgets capable of combining personal data with hue to leverage Philips’ “smart” lighting system in completely new ways. An obvious implementation would be for health and fitness-monitoring accessories such as Nike’s FuelBand; as far as rumors go, an Apple iWatch could integrate with hue to exchange an user’s data and personal stats (Apple isn’t new to third-party collaborations of this kind).
Right now, Philips’ hue API is promising and shows great potential for more forward-thinking software and hardware implementations. You can read more on Philips’ website.
Google Field Trip
Earlier today, Google released Field Trip for iPhone, a tour guide app to alert users through notifications of “cool, hidden, and unique things” that are nearby. Using your location, the app can provide notifications for “your interests” such as Food, Drinks & Fun, Museums, Deals, and more. The app uses various data providers, including their own Zagat, to provide information about places to the user.
Released on Android in the Fall of 2012, Field Trip can “speak” notifications using either a Bluetooth headset or the iPhone’s speaker. A cool thing about Field Trip, in fact, is that you have control over audio output in the Settings: you can choose whether the app should speak the name of an interesting place or also its description, or if you want to enable the app’s audio notifications when device is docked, connected via wired headset, or through a Bluetooth device. This part of the app is really well done. Field Trip can even detect while you’re driving (my guess is through GPS).
The interface and data availability leaves much to be desired. In terms of UI design, my personal taste doesn’t like the choices made by Google: there’s a strange mix of fonts, plus rounded and non-rounded flat buttons that make browsing Field Trip confusing. Furthermore, the app puts buttons to switch between views in the title bar rather than a bottom toolbar – something that is utterly confusing on iOS in my opinion. Read more
Jailbreak Tweak Creates An iOS Services Menu with URL Schemes
I don’t normally cover jailbreak tweaks here at MacStories, but I’m intrigued by ActivityAction after reading Jeff Benjamin’s preview over at iDownloadBlog.
ActivityAction is a an extension of Ryan Petrich’s Action Menu – one of my favorite tweaks when I had a jailbroken device. ActionMenu extends Apple’s Copy & Paste popup menu with additional actions and services to deal with selected text or an app’s content area. ActivityAction adds a button that lets you set up UIActivity-like actions based on app’s bundle identifier and its URL scheme. Read more
Kickstarter: Thermodo by Robocat - The Tiny Thermometer for Mobile Devices
Robocat, a Danish software studio co-founded by Michael Flarup and Willi Wu, has been building unique digital products out of Copenhagen for the last 3 years. They’ve created several weather-related apps like Outside, Ultraviolet, Thermo and Haze, which was featured by Apple as Editor’s Choice a few weeks ago.
Today, Robocat launched a Kickstarter project based on weather – but this time as hardware, not software. It’s called Thermodo. Thermodo is a tiny electrical thermometer that lets you measure the temperature in the exact location where you are by using a piece of hardware that connects to the headphone jack on your mobile device. It’s for iPhone, iPad, Android & more. They’re looking to get $35,000 in 33 days to pay for the further development of Thermodo.
Thermodo consists of a passive temperature sensor built into a standard 4 pole audio jack enclosed by a sturdy housing. This allows your mobile device to read Thermodo’s temperature straight from the audio input. Thermodo sends an audio signal through the temperature sensor. This sensor will then attenuate the signal amplitude depending on the actual temperature. This attenuation can now be detected on the microphone input and through software we calculate the corresponding temperature. Easy peasy! We call this the Thermodo Principle™. Simply plug Thermodo into your device and start the companion app or any other Thermodo enabled apps of your choice. The temperature reading takes place instantly. Thermodo is powered by your device. No external power is required, it can even run in the background while you do important stuff.
You can measure the temperature indoors as well as outdoors. Track the temperature and see how it rises after you turned on the radiator or check how the temperature drops during a summer night. No network connection required. Thermodo comes with a neat little keyring so you’ll always have it with you.
Video and more after the break. Read more
Fantastical 1.1 Brings Clipboard Detection, Multiple Alerts, Calendar Improvements
Fantastical is my favorite calendar app for iPhone. From my review of the first version:
Fantastical for iPhone gets many things right without cluttering the interface or forcing me to learn a new set of rules and menus. Like Tweetbot’s tap & hold actions, Instapaper’s footnotes, or Launch Center’s presentation of shortcuts, Fantastical’s DayTicker and natural language support made me ask myself: Why hasn’t anyone else done this before?
Fantastical was already a part of my daily workflow on the Mac; with the iPhone app, I’ve found myself using the app even more thanks to its beautiful and easy to use interface that makes it super simple to get a quick overview of a day’s events. Combined with my OmniFocus-to-Calendar system, I wouldn’t be able to go back to Apple’s Calendar app after using Fantastical.
Fantastical 1.1, released today on the App Store, adds a series of improvements that make the app even better to use.
In terms of UI tweaks, there are new options in the Settings to highlight weekend days and dim past events for the current day. Both changes are welcome as they make it easier to quickly “read” the calendar; weekend days are dimmed both in DayTicker and calendar view. Another option that has been added in 1.1 – but which I don’t use – is the possibility to hide empty days from the DayTicker. The Dock icon can now show a badge indicating the current day of the month or remaining events for the current day (I prefer day of the month).
For calendar management and event creation, Fantastical 1.1 comes with new features that I really like. Events can be moved or duplicated by tapping & holding them and choosing Duplicate or Move from a popup menu; the same tap & hold gesture can be performed on the title bar (where the date is shown) to bring up a beautiful date picker that uses the same “loupe” effect of the DayTicker (shown above). If you don’t want to manually pick a date, you can now scroll the entire event list instead of being limited to the current month; scrolling will also automatically scroll the DayTicker or calendar views.
Alongside time zone support, pending invitations management, and multiple alerts (I managed to add 20 alerts to a single event, more than Week Calendar), Fantastical now has a smart clipboard detection tool that will look for date strings in your clipboard and offer you to quickly create a new event. For me, this has been particularly useful for dates of app releases or Skype calls that I frequently receive via email; I can copy the date, open Fantastical, and the app will parse it, letting me type the name of the event and save it.
Fantastical 1.1 is a solid update to my go-to calendar app for iPhone, and it’s available on the App Store.
MacUpdate March 2013 Bundle: 10 Awesome Mac Apps for Only $49.99
We have an excellent new Mac bundle from our friends at MacUpdate! The MacUpdate March 2013 Bundle comes with a selection of top-notch Mac productivity apps, utilities, and fonts for only $49.99. The MacUpdate March 2013 bundle includes some of MacStories’ favorite Mac apps including iStat Menus 4 (our preview), DiskAid (our sponsor this week!), and the #1 way to run Windows apps alongside OS X in Parallels. If you tried purchasing the included apps individually you’d be paying nearly $618, so if you’re looking to beef up your collection of Mac apps this is a terrific deal at just $49.99.