The iStick by Hypershop is a USB (Mac+PC) flash drive with an integrated Apple-approved Lightning connector. Made to work for any current generation iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch that has a Lightning port, the iStick allows users to easily and safely move data between computers, iPhones, iPads and iPod touches without using iTunes, the web, or any other online service.
Kickstarter - iStick: A USB & Lightning Flash Drive for iPhone and iPad
Castro 1.1 Brings UI Tweaks, Sleep Timer
We first talked about Supertop’s Castro, a podcast client for iPhone, when it came out in December, noting how the app fit well with iOS 7’s aesthetic and implemented cool features such as fast search and a peculiar scrubber. Today, Supertop has released Castro 1.1, a major update that further refines the app’s design and introduces new functionalities for playback controls.
Twitter Launches Mute Feature, Updates iPad App
Following screenshots first surfaced two weeks ago, Twitter officially started rolling out a mute feature today that will allow users to stop seeing tweets and retweets from other users in their timelines without unfollowing them. The feature, rolling out to Twitter for iPhone, Android, and web, will also be available to third-party Twitter developers through the service’s API.
From the Twitter blog:
In the same way you can turn on device notifications so you never miss a Tweet from your favorite users, you can now mute users you’d like to hear from less. Muting a user on Twitter means their Tweets and Retweets will no longer be visible in your home timeline, and you will no longer receive push or SMS notifications from that user. The muted user will still be able to fave, reply to, and retweet your Tweets; you just won’t see any of that activity in your timeline. The muted user will not know that you’ve muted them, and of course you can unmute at any time.
The mute feature can be accessed through a contextual menu available both on the web and iOS; muted users will be indicated by a red mute icon on their profile page, and they can be “unmuted” at any time.
Made popular by third-party clients such as Tweetbot and Twitterrific, muting has long been requested by users who wished to keep following somebody without necessarily seeing all their tweets in the timeline on a daily basis. Twitter’s implementation, however, doesn’t include the more advanced features found in Tapbots’ client for iPhone and iPad: in Twitter, muting is limited to users, while Tweetbot includes muting filters for hashtags and specific keywords. It’s unclear at this point whether third-party apps will switch to Twitter’s official mute feature soon, but it’s likely that developers will choose to keep their own custom solutions as options for advanced mute filters.
In today’s rollout, Twitter also updated their iOS app to version 6.5 to include changes to the iPad interface that mirror what the company brought to the iPhone months ago. Media from Vine as well as Twitter Photos are displayed in the timeline with inline previews, alongside buttons to quickly retweet, reply, mark as favorite, or follow other users. Navigation has been refreshed, search comes with tabs for Top and All tweets, and it’s now possible to apply filters to photos directly on the iPad.
Twitter 6.5 is rolling out on the App Store.
Scanbot: A Fast and Efficient Scanner App for iOS 7
Created by doo (makers of a now-discontinued document manager), Scanbot is a fast and elegant mobile scanner that I’ve been using for the past couple of weeks to digitize documents and receipts on my iPhone 5s with good results.
Pocket Casts 4.5→
My favorite podcast client for iOS 7, Pocket Casts by Shifty Jelly, was updated over the weekend to version 4.5, which added Chromecast support and some welcome additions to the app’s built-in Charts view.
When browsing podcasts in the app’s directory, you can now see Trending shows and change countries for Top Charts. Pocket Casts still has a general worldwide view, but now you can also filter charts by country; for me, this means I can easily find other Italian shows besides the excellent ones provided by the EasyPodcast network (pictured above; EasyApple is the best Italian podcast about Apple, hands down).
Pocket Casts continues to be a solid client that I particularly enjoy because it’s also available on the iPad. It’s $3.99 on the App Store.
Mobile Is Burning→
I am arguing that this is what we have forgotten in our chase for mobile profit, that we can’t see the creative woods for the data trees. For all our mountains of information we’ve collected about user habits and sales, the gut-level ability to give joy and inspire our audience remains the job of our industry’s creative people first and every other industry role second. Our ability to communicate to, reach and inspire the people that we make things for is the foundation for everything any artist or craftsperson ever produced.
The fundamental communication power of mobile as a platform to push gaming remains entirely intact. But the logic of chasing mountainous profit is self-defeating.
Inspiring, thought-provoking piece by Fireproof Games’ Barry Meade over at Polygon. Data and analytics should aid creativity, not dictate and restrain its genius.
If you read one thing about mobile gaming today, make it this one.
Facebook Pulls Poke and Camera Apps From The App Store→
To Facebook, Poke was always “more of a joke” than anything else — so why did the company leave it in the App Store for more than a year after its troubled debut? We may never know, but today, Facebook finally put an end to Poke. If you check the App Store for Facebook’s famed Snapchat clone, you won’t find it. Facebook also took the opportunity, seemingly, to remove Camera, its photo uploading app. A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the removals to The Verge, but provided no further comment.
Poke was indeed a joke, but Facebook Camera was a solid app with lots of clever details. From our original coverage in 2012:
Animations throughout Facebook Camera are fluid, the app is fast, and there’s a lot of clever interaction to take advantage of throughout the interface — clearly Facebook’s acquired talents have been hard at work in making the app to not just feel like a boring extension of Facebook, but rather a necessary addition that belongs, no, deserves to be on a Facebook user’s smartphone. Facebook has made an incredibly bold statement with Facebook Camera — they’ve stepped up to the plate to deliver a solid application that doesn’t feel tacked on or only done for the sake of their platform. It’s a serious release. Just look at their landing page.
In fact, the way uploads and editing were handled in Facebook Camera were so good, Facebook eventually integrated them into the main Facebook app, making Facebook Camera essentially useless. The app never received an iOS 7 update and I’m surprised it stuck around this long.
Chrome Canary Adds OS X Finder Integration for Chrome Apps→
Kevin C. Tofel, writing for Gigaom:
Google’s strategy to use the Chrome browser as a desktop replacement took another step forward on Friday. Users of Chrome Canary, an experimental version of Google’s browser, can now associate Mac files with supporting Chrome apps in the Finder. This means that instead of opening a basic text file with the native OS X TextEdit, you can open it with a Chrome app like Text, Caret or Simple Text.
Interesting move from Google, but not a surprise either. Google has been building an ecosystem of apps on iOS for over a year, and it’s only obvious that they’re going to continue extending the effort to OS X, where they have even less limitations.
On iOS, they redirect YouTube links to the YouTube app, leverage x-callback-url for Chrome, and make sure you always use Google apps when opening links; on OS X, the Finder’s “Open With” menu makes perfect sense to redirect users to Chrome – especially for Office-type documents.
Great Coffee App→
As listeners of Directional may have guessed at this point, espresso is my favorite coffee drink. Living in Italy and being extremely conservative with my espresso choices, I’ve never got into coffee-related iPhone apps (I don’t have a fancy coffee-making ritual; it’s just an espresso machine), but Great Coffee App is, as the rather bland name implies, actually pretty great.
Great Coffee App provides an introduction to 16 popular espresso-based drinks. The app is delightfully skeuomorphic in its presentation of espressos and coffee cups; there’s some nice background music when you browse the main screen, but it can be disabled. In the app, you’ll find descriptions and interesting facts for the classic espresso, the espresso lungo, the macchiato, as well as the more peculiar Irish Coffee and Cafeccino; you can tap on each drink and see zoomed-in view of its ingredients and layers. For each drink, the app comes with good localized descriptions (at least based on what I saw for the English and Italian versions), and a downloadable video showing the preparation process.
I found Great Coffee App to be beautifully done, informative, and a great visual introduction to popular espresso-based drinks. It’s only $2.99 on the App Store.