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Connected Data Opens Transporter Developer Program

Connected Data has officially launched the Transporter developer program today, which will allow third-party developers to integrate Transporter cloud storage and sync features into their desktop and mobile apps. Transporter is a private cloud storage platform that turns any USB drive (with Transporter Sync) or local storage (original Transporter) into a personal cloud storage space that’s private and has no monthly fees.

In a blog post, Connected Data has announced that initial partners for the Transporter developer program will include Smile’s PDFpen for iPad and Readdle’s Scanner Pro:

Not only have we used the Transporter SDK to develop our own applications, but we’ve also spent months creating a core services layer that eliminates complexity and allows third-party apps to make simple, native calls,” said Dave Mendelson, CTO of Connected Data. “Combined with extensive documentation, sample code, a developer community and dedicated support infrastructure, we’ve worked hard to make integration as simple as possible for our partners.

Starting at $99 for the Transporter Sync and $199 for the 500 GB model, Connected Data’s Transporter provides a different solution from traditional cloud services such as Dropbox and Google Drive. Developers interested in adding Transporter storage and sync features to their apps can register for API access at the Transporter developer portal.

Twitter Rolling Out Photo Tagging, Up To Four Photos In A Tweet

In an update to their iOS app released today, Twitter has started rolling out two enhancements to make photos “more social”: one is the ability to tag people in a tweet; the other is an option to include up to four photos in a single tweet.

With photo tagging, Twitter aims at increasing conversations between users by allowing people to be tagged with @usernames that don’t count against the limit of 140 characters in a tweet. As noted by Matthew Panzarino, tagged @usernames count as metadata in the new photo tagging feature; up to 10 people can be tagged in a photo, and they will be alerted of the new tag through a notification. Photo tagging has long been a marquee feature of networks such as Facebook and Instagram, and it’ll be interesting to see if Twitter will eventually roll out new gallery views on profiles to browse or filter photos by tag.

The second change in today’s update is an option to attach up to four photos in a tweet. From Twitter’s blog post:

And now, you can also share a series of photos that automatically create a collage. Just tap on a preview to get the full image and slide through the group. The ability to upload multiple photos is starting to roll out today on iPhone, and is coming soon to Android and twitter.com. Whether you’re on iPhone, Android or twitter.com, you can view Tweets with multiple photos.

Both tags and multiple photos will be enabled in embedded tweets, and, while the statement has been made by Twitter’s developer team before, “there’s no reason” today’s new features couldn’t be available for third-party clients as well.

Twitter 6.3 for iOS is available on the App Store.

Why Is Candy Crush Saga So Popular?→

Stuart Dredge:

Really, though, if you want to find out why Candy Crush Saga is so popular and makes so much money, you should ask the other people: the ones actually playing it. Mums and dads, aunts and uncles. Grandparents, even. Housewives and househusbands. Commuters from office juniors through to CEOs.

Your non-gamer friends, especially. Even if you’re not quite as aware of how much they’re playing Candy Crush Saga and similar games since you figured out how to turn off their Facebook alerts begging for help. Candy Crush Saga’s audience isn’t just huge: it’s hugely mainstream.

The question is whether King will end up like Zynga or not.

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Dark Game Design→

Tadhg Kelly, writing for Edge:

In the short term, your game’s player numbers may go up and your revenue might explode, but you inevitably sacrifice integrity. You might have onboarded a few players to pay for stuff, but you’re teaching many more to ignore any messages that the game spits out. It becomes harder to communicate with players and you lose their loyalty or the possibility of a game building a unique, defensible culture.

“Integrity” – most tech pundits will tell you that it doesn’t matter when you can monetize free-to-play with behavioral strategies that increase engagement and other meaningless buzzwords.

Luckily, there are exceptions, even on the App Store.

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The Omni Group Announces OmniFocus 2 for Mac Coming This June, Resumes Beta Testing

First teased in December 2012, shown at Macworld 2013, and scheduled for a 2013 release date, The Omni Group has today announced that the new version of their popular GTD app OmniFocus, OmniFocus 2 for Mac, will be released this June. The Omni Group is resuming beta testing of the app with 30,000 testers today, and expects the final round of testing to focus on the changes the app has gone through in the past few months. Read more

fnd Brings Fast, Convenient iTunes Store Search and Product Pages To The Web

Created by Jeremy Mack and Ryann Pierce and launched during EmberConf yesterday, fnd is a new iTunes search tool that allows users to search for any kind of iTunes content through a fast and responsive web app available at fnd.io.

While Apple’s iTunes and App Store clients for OS X and iOS ship with search and browse functionalities built-in, they aren’t, arguably, the fastest or most efficient ways to scroll through hundreds of items and find a specific song or app on the iTunes Store’s vast catalogue of content. On desktop computers, search through iTunes is slow, clunky, and based on an old iOS 6-inspired design that is inconsistent with Apple’s revamped iTunes Store and App Store apps on iOS 7. On the iPhone, the native App Store client received solid improvements in iOS 7, but search is still limited to cards; in general, given the lack of an iTunes app for iOS devices, there’s no unified solution to search for any kind of iTunes media in a single app/service on iOS, and that’s one of the areas that Mack and Pierce focused on with fnd.

“In August 2013 I became enamored with Launch Center Pro. However, the App Store search was entirely broken, by no fault of Launch Center Pro”, Mack told me over email earlier today. When I asked about the reason fnd came to be, he recounts how the first quick prototype evolved into the final project: “I wanted something better, so I made a prototype using Ember in three hours. I almost shipped the prototype and called the problem solved. However, over the next week using fnd, I discovered there was something amazing about having a web experience for the App Store that worked on all devices. Being able to share a link with a friend that doesn’t this and then this to happen. I pitched the idea to my talented designer-friend, Ryann Pierce. She loved the idea and wanted to team up on the project. Our collaboration drove fnd to what it is today.” Read more

ustwo Announces Monument Valley Release Date, Posts “Behind the Scenes” Video

Monument Valley, the highly-anticipated game by London-based development studio ustwo, is launching on April 3 at $3.99 for iPad and iPhone, the company confirmed today.

Monument Valley, originally teased in November 2013, is a mobile-only puzzle game influenced by the drawings of Dutch artist M.C. Escher: with a mix of impossible perspectives and its own set of physics, in Monument Valley players will have to guide main character Ida through a series of stages that challenge the rules of geometry and spatiality and that are beautifully realized and animated.

Monument Valley, which was originally meant to be an iPad-only game, has been designed to let any kind of player finish the game; according to ustwo, each level is intended to be a work of art that can be hung on a wall (the game will feature a special screenshot button to capture completed levels as images). Monument Valley, which has been in development for over 10 months, is ustwo’s next major game to land on the App Store – the company’s previous hit, Whale Trail, generated over 5 million downloads to date.

In an interview with TechCrunch, ustwo’s Ken Wong shared some of the details behind the design and development of Monument Valley, citing Valve’s Portal and Brian Eno’s music as sources of inspiration for the game. Created specifically for mobile devices, Monument Valley will only run in portrait mode due to the verticality of its structures. In February, ustwo’s Ken Wong wrote that his hope for Monument Valley “is that it might contribute to the argument that the medium of entertainment we call video games is in fact art”.

Ahead of the game’s public launch next week, ustwo has published a Behind the Scenes video, embedded above. You can check out more Monument Valley teasers at the game’s official website.

Facebook’s “Tweaks” For iOS Developers→

Today, Facebook spent $2 billion and open-sourced a library for iOS developers.

Tweaks, available on GitHub, provides an interface for developers to make minor adjustments and tweak parameters of an app directly inside the app, in a few seconds. Those changes can be the color of a button or the speed of an animation, and Facebook says that Tweaks helped them build Paper, the highly praised alternative Facebook app.

Here’s TechCrunch’s Greg Kumparak on Tweaks:

For developers, it means being able to fine-tune applications faster and with less code. As an added bonus, it lets any of their designers who might not love to code help figure out the best settings without having to pop into the source or pester the dev team for a million new builds.

And Facebook, on the project’s page:

Occasionally, it’s perfect the first try. Sometimes, the idea doesn’t work at all. But often, it just needs a few minor adjustments. That last case is where Tweaks fits in. Tweaks makes those small adjustments easy: with no code changes and no computer, you can try out different options and decide which works best.

Some of the most useful parameters to adjust are animation timings, velocity thresholds, colors, and physics constants. At Facebook, we also use tweaks to temporarily disable new features during development. That way, the designers and engineers involved can enable it on just their devices, without getting in the way of others testing the app.

Tweaks looks like a handy solution for developers, designers, and, to an extent, even testers of apps. It’s available here.

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