Flappy Bird Creator Coming Back with New Game Launching This Week

Dong Nguyen, the creator of Flappy Bird, is coming out with a new game for iOS, which, like Flappy Bird, will be free to download from the App Store. TouchArcade has published an exclusive preview of the game, which is called Swing Copters and that will be released this week on Thursday (August 21).

Swing Copters will have a similar mechanic to Flappy Bird, but unlike its predecessor it will launch with a $0.99 In-App Purchase to remove ads.

Swing Copters captures all the “just one more try” of Flappy Bird, and seems even more brutally difficult. In the game, you play as a little dude who has a propeller on his head. Swing Copters coaxes you to tap the screen, at which point you’re airborne, wildly flying to one side. Tapping changes your flight direction, and the goal is similar: Fly through as many gates and get as high as you can. Sort of similar to Flappy Bird, but going up instead of to the side.

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Connected: Mindset of 2001→

Federico, Myke and Stephen discuss the origin and evolution of the iPod.

In the first episode of Connected, we take a look at the history of the iPod and consider the impact of Apple’s music player on entertainment, consumer technology, fashion, our lifestyles, and more. It’s a special episode not only because it’s the first one – it includes several audio clips from Apple’s iPod keynotes, plus a variety of relevant show notes. I remember how the original iPod got me interested in Apple and technology, so we had fun doing research for this one.

Get the episode here.

Sponsored by Igloo, TextExpander from Smile, Squarespace (use code WORLD for 10% off), and Omnifocus 2 from The Omni Group.

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Albums for iPhone

In the increasing complexity of music streaming apps that put several layers of interface and navigation between the launch experience and listening to your favorite songs, Albums is a refreshingly simple music player that lets you search, bookmark, and play your favorite albums. Developed by Louie Mantia and Caleb Thorson, I was skeptical about the app’s premise when I saw its one screenshot and read its iTunes description, but there is something about it that resonates with me and that has been elegantly executed in this first release.

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The Mac Gamer→

A great retrospective on Mac gaming by Jeremy Parish:

Mac games were actually pretty weird and unique in the olden days, and I actually could see someone being a Macintosh-exclusive gamer in the ’80s. The platform offered (1) mouse-based controls and (2) no color, or at least no guarantee of color support until they stopped selling the Mac SE and pre-PPC PowerBook lines in the mid-’90s. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mac games felt a little different from console and DOS counterparts. Another factor there came from the fact that Macintosh had system-level support for graphics, it using a visual interface and all, whereas other computers kind of needed to be tricked in various degrees before they’d display images.

I’d argue that the Mac App Store has helped in facilitating distribution of modern Mac games, although, from a gamer’s perspective, it’s still inferior to other services – especially for clarifying hardware requirements.

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Shazam Rolls Out Beats Music Integration→

As noted by several users yesterday, Shazam has begun rolling out Beats Music integration in their app, allowing users to stream tagged songs off Apple’s service. Similarly, both 9to5Mac and Engadget report that Spotify integration is back in Shazam, as also confirmed by a support document. The feature mirrors Rdio integration for songs recognized in Shazam, launched last month.

With Shazam becoming Apple’s official partner for Siri in iOS 8, it makes sense for the dedicated Shazam app to offer more options to its users – hopefully, this time Shazam won’t decide to pull these integrations.

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The Next Assistant from the Creators of Siri→

Steven Levy has a story on Viv, the next assistant from the creators of Siri:

Viv strives to be the first consumer-friendly assistant that truly achieves that promise. It wants to be not only blindingly smart and infinitely flexible but omnipresent. Viv’s creators hope that some day soon it will be embedded in a plethora of Internet-connected everyday objects. Viv founders say you’ll access its artificial intelligence as a utility, the way you draw on electricity. Simply by speaking, you will connect to what they are calling “a global brain.” And that brain can help power a million different apps and devices.

I’ve often argued that the ability to understand context between sentences and learn the true meaning of voice commands is one of Siri’s biggest limitations. Viv wants to go beyond that, offering intelligence as a “utility” much like WiFi or Bluetooth. That’s a bold statement.

If Viv lives up to its promise – check out the examples in the story to see what it should be capable of – other companies will have a lot to catch up to. The last image in Levy’s article is particularly impressive.

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A Database of Intentions→

Speaking of Pinterest, I enjoyed this interview at The Atlantic with co-founder Evan Sharp:

And they are just getting started. They’ve got 30 billion pins now, half of them in the last six months. They’ve got 750 million boards. A full 75 percent of their traffic comes from mobile devices, and according to researchers, they’re the top traffic source to retailers’ websites and an important secondary source after Facebook for some media sites, like Buzzfeed.

In this wide-ranging interview, Evan Sharp talks here about what Pinterest is now, what it could become, the potential the company has to make money, and how Pinterest competes (or doesn’t) with Google and his old company Facebook.

I use Pinterest to collect videogame gadgets I want to buy, and I’ve been impressed with the discovery features powered by the enormous database of pins collected and categorized by users over the years. (YouTube videos and animated GIFs also look much nicer on Pinterest than other services.)

I can’t wait to see how the Safari extension for iOS 8 will make pinning even easier and more natural.

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