Plex Now Available on Apple TV, and Apple Adds Top Charts to Apple TV App Store

The highly anticipated official Plex app for the new Apple TV is now available on the App Store as a free download. The Plex Apple TV app can play all of your video, music, TV and photo collections from any computer or NAS device that you install the Plex Media Server on. You can view more screenshots of the Plex Apple TV app on the Plex Blog.

There truly isn’t any other platform we’ve wanted to be on for as long as we have the Apple TV. Today’s the day, and we’re celebrating. The app is free in the app store for everyone, and requires the latest media server.

Meanwhile, Apple appears to have listened to some of the complaints about the lack of discoverability in the Apple TV App Store and added a Top Charts section. Just as it does on iOS, the Top Charts section is broken down into Top Free, Top Paid and Top Grossing lists.

Top Charts is currently limited to the US App Store, but it seems likely that the feature will roll out to international stores over the coming days. Unsurprisingly, the lists for the Top Paid and Top Grossing apps are dominated by games, whilst the Top Free list is mostly occupied by media and entertainment apps. If you don’t have access to an Apple TV or live outside the US, you can see the top 10 apps in each list on MacRumors.

Perhaps in another effort to increase the discoverability of Apple TV apps, Apple has refreshed the App Store Featured page and is now highlighting some new apps. Typically on the iOS App Store they only refresh the App Store Featured page once a week on Thursdays. Hopefully this happens more frequently on the Apple TV App Store, at least until they introduce categories or some other ways to discover apps that aren’t featured or trending.

Ministry of Supply: Inventing Apparel [Sponsor]

Dress shirts should be smarter by now. They should be designed to work with your body, not against it, and keep you comfortable throughout the entire day. From the crowded train, to the cold office, to your favorite nightspot, we should expect more from the clothes that we wear everyday.

This is the vision that drives Ministry of Supply, a performance menswear company that launched out of MIT three years ago. The company uses the latest in apparel technology to make clothes that fit better and provide technical benefits, like body temperature regulation to keep you from overheating, moisture management to keep you dry, and wrinkle resistance to keep you away from an iron. Each product begins with a problem statement and comes to life through a human-centric design process that involves studying the human body, prototyping, testing, and iterating based on ongoing feedback. Once a product launches, they start the process all over again, continuously refining and evolving the products to perform better.

That process led to the Apollo and Gemini Casual dress shirts. The Apollo is their most tech-forward dress shirt, optimized for temperature management and mobility. It’s made with moisture-wicking polyester fibers that are infused with NASA-engineered phase-change material for temperature regulation. A light knit construction with four-way stretch enhances the Apollo’s breathability and mobility. The Gemini Casual is a tailored button-down designed to be worn untucked. It’s made with a more traditional cotton/spandex blend for a full range of motion that is also infused with phase-change material. The laser-cut chest pocket, button holes, and shirt panels round out the shirt’s clean, sleek aesthetic.

You can shop Ministry of Supply online – and risk-free, with free shipping on all US orders and any international orders over $250, free returns, and a 100-day return policy. Alternatively, you can visit one of their retail locations in Boston, San Francisco, and New York City.

Our thanks to Ministry of Supply for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Giphy 2.0 Makes It Easy to Find and Share GIFs

I was familiar with Giphy’s iPhone app, but today’s 2.0 update makes it something worth keeping on my device for the sheer utility of finding any GIF I want quickly.

Giphy is, quite possibly, the leading destination for GIFs on the Internet. The service is integrated with a variety of third-party apps and it’s become a staple of our Slack conversations thanks to the often perplexing, sometimes amazing /giphy slash command. In many ways, Giphy is the GIF backend sating our daily appetite for stupid Internet memes and reactions. Especially when I’m on Slack, I expect Giphy to be my worthy GIF assistant in times of need.

The Giphy app for iPhone now has a revamped interface that simplifies the process of finding GIFs. In the main screen, you can view the newest and most trending GIFs on the Internet for the current day. Auto-play can be turned off on slow connections, and I’d like to point out the delightful animation of the back button (top left corner) when navigating back and forth between the initial screen and individual GIFs.

At the bottom of the screen, a list button next to the omnipresent search box lets you view categories of GIFs so you can continue browsing specific subsets of GIFs. These include smiles, LOLs, crying, cats, Taylor Swift, One Direction, and a whole range of other pets and human emotions. The Giphy database doesn’t disappoint here, with some of the most absurd, creepy, and hilarious collections of GIFs I’ve seen around.

Finally, GIFs can now be shared with built-in shortcuts for Messages, Mail, Messenger, and Twitter, as well as the iOS share sheet. If you’ve ever dreamed of automating doge GIFs with Workflow, now you can. Or, you can use the excellent Linky for iOS to share animated GIFs on Twitter with a tweet sheet that is vastly superior to Twitter’s one.

As a huge fan of stupid GIFs (with a hard G), Giphy 2.0 for iPhone is easily my favorite surprise this week. The share sheet integration is a good addition to share GIFs with any app on iOS, and, for me, it removes the need for a dedicated GIF keyboard (which are typically slow to load and don’t return as many results as Giphy). You can download the app for free on the App Store.

Turning the iPhone 6s Into a Digital Scale→

Ryan McLeod, Chase McBride, and Brice Tuttle created Gravity, an iPhone app which ingeniously used the 3D Touch display of the iPhone 6s to turn the device in a digital scale and weigh objects with an accuracy of ~1-3 grams. Alas, the app has been rejected from the App Store:

With the force values linearly correlated to weight, turning any force into a weight was going to be as simple as recording the force of known weights and creating a linear regression. It’d even be possible to use some statistics to predict how well the calibration went (there are many factors that can throw off a calibration). We opted to use coins for calibration, with a framework that made it easy to internationalize in the future.
[…]
To make a long story short the final answer over the phone was that the concept of a scale app was not appropriate for the App Store.

We were—and still are—bummed to say the least, but we understand some of the reasons Apple might not be allowing scale apps at this time.

I understand why Apple may not be sure about an app that requires placing a spoon on screen. Still, I hope that, eventually, novel uses of 3D Touch like Gravity will be accepted on the App Store. Make sure to read the technical details behind Gravity (and watch the video as well).

See also: weighing plums with 3D Touch.

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Apple TV’s Siri Search to Include Apple Music Early Next Year→

Another of the criticisms mentioned in early reviews for the new Apple TV is lack of Siri search for Apple Music. In a statement sent to BuzzFeed, Apple has confirmed a software update will enable the feature early next year:

One of the most useful features of Apple’s new Apple TV is its Siri-enabled universal search. It’s something Apple TV owners have been asking about for years — the ability to quickly and effectively search across multiple video platforms simultaneously. And now that Apple’s enabled it for video, the company is working to extend it to music as well. In a few months, Apple TV owners will be able to tell the device to find a song or album the same way they’d tell it to find a movie.

Apple confirmed to BuzzFeed News that Siri is coming to Apple Music on Apple TV at the beginning of next year.

Hopefully Siri search on Apple TV will also be extended to the App Store.

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Nilay Patel’s Apple TV Review→

Speaking of Apple TV reviews and criticism to the setup experience, Nilay Patel explains in his review for The Verge:

Take setup again: yes, the tap-to-get-settings-from-an-iPhone feature is cool, but you can’t restore anything from a previous Apple TV, so when you first get started you have to head into the App Store and search for and download every streaming app you use. Then, once you’ve got them all, you have to authenticate all of them individually — even apps like HBO Go and Watch ESPN that require the same cable provider TV Everywhere username and password. And the iPhone Remote app doesn’t work with the new Apple TV yet, so you’re stuck either swiping around the onscreen keyboard or digging up a laptop to enter an activation code. It’s frustrating — I found myself reluctant to download new apps because I didn’t really want to log in yet again. If the future of TV is really apps, adding new apps has to be virtually frictionless.

That’s a fair criticism, and I’m surprised that Apple hasn’t figured out a universal “Download & Login” setup flow for TV apps yet. It also sounds like a typical American problem – the issue with cable bundles and provider logins applies to the States, but I’m not sure how it’d reflect, for instance, on European countries.

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Christina Warren’s Apple TV Review→

The Apple TV embargo lifted last night, and the first reviews have been published with a general consensus that the device is a worthy upgrade with some annoyances for search and logging into apps.

I recommend starting with Christina Warren’s review, which gives a great overview of the platform and the brand new Siri remote:

Swiping faster on the touchpad moves faster across the interface, slower goes slower. Movements are extremely precise and never felt out of control. The remote is Bluetooth — not IR — so you don’t need direct line of sight to navigate — which is nice. On some Bluetooth-based remotes, I’ve noticed lag between a selection and what happens on screen but the Siri remote always keeps up.

Tapping the Menu button will take you back one level or give you a menu of an app you’re in. Tapping the home button will bring you to the core home screen. Double tapping the home button opens up an app switcher, so you can easily navigate between screens. If you want to close out an app, swiping up on the trackpad will dismiss it.

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Nintendo Announces First Free-to-Play Mobile Title ‘Miitomo’, New ‘My Nintendo’ Cloud Service

At an investor meeting, Nintendo announced today that their first smartphone app will be called ‘Miitomo’ in the Japanese market, and it’ll be a free-to-play title with a focus on communication for the company’s Mii avatars. Miitomo will launch in March 2016; first screenshots are available at Nintendo’s Japanese website.

From a statement sent by Nintendo to Vooks:

Miitomo, Nintendo’s first smart device title, is a free-to-start communication application that helps friends share fun personal facts and interests. Consumers create and use their own Mii characters to engage friends in a welcoming social environment, answering questions and sharing information to discover more about each other and what they have in common. Miitomo is designed to appeal to a wide range of global smart device users and introduce them to uniquely Nintendo experiences beginning with Miitomo and carried through future applications.

From The Wall Street Journal’s live blog:

The new smartphone game will be “Miitomo”. It will be free to play, with attractive add-ons that people can pay for, Mr. Kimishima says. Other smartphone games will be pay-to-download, he says.

Looks like Miis go ahead and communicate with other Miis without your knowledge. This will help people who are hesitant to talk about themselves to communicate with others, and reveal a side of your friends you never knew, Mr. Kimishima says.

Based on information shared by the company today, Miitomo appears to be a riff on Nintendo’s Tomodachi Life, a 3DS game focused on Mii communication and collectible items.

In addition to Miitomo, Nintendo has also revealed a new ‘My Nintendo’ membership service, which will allow users to register a profile and store information about their characters and game data in the cloud, transferring it across mobile devices and dedicated consoles. My Nintendo (also called ‘Nintendo Account’ by the company today) will be compatible with popular signup services such as Facebook and Google accounts, and it’ll offer the ability to view game purchases, game information, and game-related messages on the web. Friend lists will be supported by My Nintendo, and they will work on both console and mobile platforms.

My Nintendo will also be a replacement for the discontinued Club Nintendo program to earn digital and physical rewards for buying Nintendo games. Unlike the old Club Nintendo, My Nintendo will offer points for buying and playing Nintendo games on consoles and mobile debices. Customers will be able to use points for physical goods, game coupons, and DLCs.

At this point, it’s not clear on which mobile platforms Miitomo will be released, but it’s fair to assume Nintendo will launch the title on iOS next year. Nintendo has once again confirmed they’re aiming to release a total of five mobile titles by March 2017, created in collaboration with DeNA.

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