Apple released another installment in its iPhone 7 ‘practically magic’ video series today that celebrates stickers. The spot, called ‘Sticker Fight’ pulls sticker packs out of the Messages app and into the physical world. Set to a single by The Monks called ‘Boys are Boys and Girls are Choice,’ which has a fantastic 60s-style beat, the video features a sticker fight that breaks out across a city with people slapping stickers on each other and practically everything else in the landscape.
Apple Promotes Sticker Packs with New Video
Pandora Announces On-Demand Streaming Service
Pandora has a competitor to Apple Music and Spotify on the way called Pandora Premium. The company announced today that its $9.99/month streaming plan will be launching soon, and it’s now taking signups for the first invitations to the service.
Though Pandora Premium enters the on-demand streaming market somewhat late in the game, Pandora seems to have worked hard to create a solid experience that’s not just a knock-off of its competitors. Besides many of the basic features you would expect, there are several highlights that seem noteworthy.
Quick playlist creation seems to have been simplified:
In Pandora Premium, start a playlist with one or two songs of your choice, tap “Add Similar Songs” and put the power of our Music Genome Project to work to quickly and effortlessly create the perfect playlist for any activity, mood or party.
In addition,
Thumb up a handful of songs on your favorite radio station and Pandora Premium will automatically create a playlist of these songs. Thumb more songs and we’ll add those to the playlist too.
Pandora Premium also claims to have more robust search than other services:
In Pandora Premium, we’ve done the hard work of separating the killer from the filler for you. We’ve filtered out karaoke tracks, knock-off covers and pet sounds (but not Pet Sounds) that slow down other services. You get fast, accurate search results that get even smarter over time.
Based on the screenshots, Pandora seems to have done a great job not only thinking through the features of the app, but also creating a visually appealing, simple app to navigate. Though I’m a mostly-content Apple Music user, I look forward to giving Pandora Premium a try.
YouTube Launches ‘Uptime’ App for Social Video Watching
Today YouTube launched a new iPhone-only app called Uptime. Uptime adopts many of the social features commonly found in social video streaming apps like Periscope – live comments, reactions, etc. – and applies them to YouTube videos.
Inside the app, you browse videos in a feed consisting of content shared by people you follow in Uptime. You can also tap the search box at the bottom to search for videos or pick from a list of videos based on your YouTube subscriptions and viewing history.
When viewing a video in Uptime, what you’re watching will be publicly available to your followers in their Uptime feed, so they can join in and watch alongside you. You also have the option to directly share a video with others, whether by sending them a link using the iOS share sheet or by inviting them inside the app.
As a video is being watched, all current viewers are represented by their profile pictures on a track that covers the borders of the screen. As the video moves closer to its end, you’ll be further along the track, and you can manually drag and drop your avatar to navigate through the video. During playback, you can type comments, use one of six built-in reaction emoji, or move your finger around the screen to create a sparkle effect. Videos can be viewed in both portrait and landscape, but currently there is no way to type comments while in landscape.
Uptime is available in the App Store, but it requires an invitation code to setup your account. The code PIZZA is currently working.
Game Day: Link Twin
Link Twin is an atmospheric puzzle game from Bucharest-based indie development studio Lorraine that follows the story of Lily and Tom, twins in search of their lost parents. The constraint that defines the way each puzzle works is that Lily and Tom can only move through their world in tandem - moving one character forward necessitates moving both forward. It’s a simple mechanic that’s beautifully implemented through great art and sound direction combined with challenging puzzles that evolve over the course of the game to keep it intriguing.
Food Genie Review: The Perfect Restaurant Selection Tool
When I’m going out to eat on the weekends, I often run into the same dilemma: my friends and I can’t decide where we want to eat. For the most part, we are all pretty flexible, but narrowing down a wide range of options takes more time and causes more frustration than we’d prefer.
Food Genie cuts the unnecessary back-and-forth by offering random suggestions based on criteria set by the user. Through location data, restaurant identification and a spinning wheel of food, your next set of weekend dinner plans can be a lot less stressful.
Remaster, Episode 30: Nintendo Switch Review→
Our review of the Nintendo Switch, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (with no story spoilers).
On this week’s Remaster, we share our first impressions of the Nintendo Switch after a week of play, and I spend 30 minutes going through my notes on Breath of the Wild. This is a good one. You can listen here.
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Indie Game Promotion Takes Over App Store
The App Store looks a little different today. If you opened it and thought you accidentally landed on the Games category page, it would be understandable. But that’s not what’s happening. Instead, Apple has launched a major promotion of the finest indie games available on iOS. According to the App Store Games Twitter account, the promotion is running for the next twelve days.
There are many classics featured: Super Hexagon, Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery, Monument Valley, Severed, Her Story, and Space Age to name just a few standouts. In addition to indie classics, the banner across the top of the App Store is promoting Mushroom 11 a new game by Untame that looks great, though I haven’t had a chance to try it yet.
The sheer volume of games on the App Store can make the choices feel overwhelming at times. That’s why it’s great to see Apple spotlighting the very best indie games available on iOS. With 12 days to go in the promotion, I expect it will be worth revisiting Apple’s picks. There are currently some gaps in some of the categories highlighted that I expect will fill in with more games as the promotion continues.
Google Hangouts Evolves to Better Compete with Slack→
Dieter Bohn of The Verge reports on some major changes coming soon to Google Hangouts. Google’s new strategy for the service aims to make Hangouts a formidable Slack competitor as a team collaboration tool. The changes are focused in two main areas:
- Hangouts Chat will add new group chat rooms, similar to channels found within Slack, but with all the nice Google perks – Docs and Sheets integrations, extensive search tools, and a bot that can look at users’ Google Calendars and suggest the best meeting time.
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Hangouts Meet is the new name of Hangouts’ video functionality, which Google promises will tie up far less processing power than before. Meet will also provide easy methods for adding people to a group call.
Bohn adds:
Google Hangouts has been having an identity crisis ever since Google tried to relaunch it as an end-all, be-all replacement for Gchat. It’s been ping-ponging between Google Plus, business video chat, Google Voice, Project Fi, SMS, and lord knows what else. Focusing on business chat seems like a better strategy — and thankfully one that doesn’t feel beholden to some other Google product with a dubious future. Hangouts is fully a Google Cloud / G Suite product now, and it will be developed for those users.
Google’s changes to Hangouts follow recent moves by Facebook and Microsoft in the collaborative chat space. These days, it seems everyone wants a piece of the workplace collaboration pie.
Apple added collaboration tools to iWork last year, but otherwise the company has shown no signs of creating its own competitor to Slack. I do wonder, though, how iMessage could potentially evolve in the future to serve many of the needs that tools like Slack currently meet. The user base is already there, and iMessage Apps could provide the extensibility needed to compete with Slack.
The question, however, is not “Could Apple do it?” Instead, it’s “Would they want to?” They could very well be content to simply serve as the platform where these competing services live.
The Way Siri Learns New Languages→
Stephen Nellis, writing for Reuters, shares an interesting look into Apple’s method for teaching Siri a new language:
At Apple, the company starts working on a new language by bringing in humans to read passages in a range of accents and dialects, which are then transcribed by hand so the computer has an exact representation of the spoken text to learn from, said Alex Acero, head of the speech team at Apple. Apple also captures a range of sounds in a variety of voices. From there, an acoustic model is built that tries to predict words sequences.
Then Apple deploys “dictation mode,” its text-to-speech translator, in the new language, Acero said. When customers use dictation mode, Apple captures a small percentage of the audio recordings and makes them anonymous. The recordings, complete with background noise and mumbled words, are transcribed by humans, a process that helps cut the speech recognition error rate in half.
After enough data has been gathered and a voice actor has been recorded to play Siri in a new language, Siri is released with answers to what Apple estimates will be the most common questions, Acero said. Once released, Siri learns more about what real-world users ask and is updated every two weeks with more tweaks.
The report also shares that one of Siri’s next languages will be Shanghainese, a dialect of Wu Chinese spoken in Shanghai and surrounding areas. This addition will join the existing 21 languages Siri currently speaks, which are localized across a total of 36 different countries.
Debating the strengths and weaknesses of Siri has become common practice in recent years, particularly as competing voice assistants from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have grown more intelligent. But one area Siri has long held the lead over its competition is in supporting a large variety of different languages. It doesn’t seem like Apple will be slowing down in that regard.