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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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The WSJ Interviews Original iPhone Engineer→

The WSJ’s Daisuke Wakabayashi interviewed Greg Christie, one of the original iPhone engineers, about the creation of the device that launched seven years ago.

In late 2004, Mr. Christie was working on software for Apple’s Macintosh computers when Scott Forstall, a senior member of the company’s software team, walked into his office, closed the door and asked if he wanted to work on a secret project, codenamed “purple.” The team would develop a phone with an integrated music player, operated by a touch screen.

There are some new anecdotes to me in the interview, as well as a photo of a system Apple created to test the iPhone software in 2006 (it’s big and clunky as you imagine). You can read the interview here.

See also: Andy Grignon’s story.

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The Making Of Tengami→

Pocket Gamer’s Lee Bradley posted an interview with Nyamyam, the studio behind the recently released Tengami for iOS, a puzzle/exploration game built as a Japanese pop-up book.

Our goal was never to be the next big indie hit. People look at like Fez and Braid, games that made millions. But that was never our goal. We just wanted to make a game that we love. Something that was very unique and original, something that nobody else has done before.

I didn’t like some of the choices in Tengami 1.0 (puzzles seemed arbitrary; character movement was slow), but I loved the atmosphere and visual representation of different types of folding paper. Tengami was just updated to version 1.1, which introduces an alternative character control, and I’m going to give it another try.

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Twitterrific Goes Freemium

With the latest 5.7 update released today, Twitterrific for iOS, The Iconfactory’s popular Twitter client, has gone freemium: the app is now free to download with In-App Purchases to unlock more features and remove ads from the app. For those who have been around to witness Twitterrific’s evolution through the years, this move actually marks the return of The Iconfactory’s client to a freemium business model with ads.

From the company’s official blog post:

Twitterrific has been available in the App Store since day one and we’ve experimented with different revenue models in the past, including the one we’re returning to today. Our hope is that this helps get Twitterrific into more people’s hands than ever before so they can enjoy the simple beauty of reading and posting tweets once again. The update also includes some improvements including upping the number of tweets the timeline can hold to 500, something users have been requesting more and more.

The Iconfactory’s Gedeon Maheux published his thoughts on the new strategy in a separate blog post:

There are lots of risks with moving to this type of revenue model, but version 4 of Twitterrific was by far our most successful and that version was supported by ad revenue from The Deck. No doubt levels of support will increase dramatically for us but that’s part of the trade-off of having successful, thriving software. I’m also personally curious to see if moving to the free model and increasing the app’s downloads by at least 1 or 2 orders of magnitude will improve Twitterrific’s search results in the App Store.

For existing customers who bought Twitterrific 5.0 when it launched in December 2012, all features will be automatically unlocked by default. Twitterrific’s renewed freemium approach comes at an interesting time: Apple is testing a feature to enable customers to find more specific, relevant apps in search results (whose ranking is affected by the number of downloads, which a freemium strategy can facilitate), and Twitter is still enforcing a token limit on third-party clients. While news of third-party Twitter apps exceeding their token limits aren’t new on other platforms, popular clients for iOS such as Tweetbot and Twitterrific have so far managed to always accommodate new users without issues.

It’ll be interesting to see how going freemium will affect Twitterrific’s popularity and relevance in search results; in the past months, the app received several enhancements such as live streaming and background refresh. Features that are now part of the In-App Purchase include tweet translation, Today view, and push notifications, which are automatically unlocked using iOS 7’s receipt validation for existing customers.

Twitterrific 5.7 is available on the App Store.

Multiple Attachments Lets You Attach Multiple Files To Email Messages On iOS

One of iOS’ biggest shortcomings is the inability to attach multiple files to an email message. Caused by Apple’s resistance to bringing a visible filesystem to iOS or building inter-app communication features to access files outside of an app’s own sandbox, the problem is epitomized by antiquated limitations such as the Open In menu and the aforementioned lack of multiple attachments in Mail. Interestingly, these two limitations are exactly what Multiple Attachments, developed by Jan Mazurczak, uses to send email messages containing attachments that aren’t just photos or videos.

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Apple Testing Related Search Suggestions On The App Store

As first noted by developer Olga Osadcha, Apple is testing a related search suggestion feature on the App Store, which started rolling out earlier today for iPhone users on iOS 7.

The new menu, a scrollable bar with suggestions for searches related to the current search, allows users to discover more apps in search by tapping on suggestions, receiving a fresh set of results. Multiple suggestions can be selected in a single session: searching for “indie games”, for instance, displays suggestions for “action games”, which include “action RPG” into their own suggestions. The new suggestion bar doesn’t alter the way search results are displayed – Apple is still using a cards layout on the iPhone – and, for now, the feature doesn’t appear to be available on the App Store for iPad and desktop computers.

The new related search suggestions mark one of Apple’s first attempts to augment App Store search results with visual semantics for apps. In testing the feature, I was able to get suggestions for specific sub-categories such as “business news” and “video game news”, “writing” and “story ideas”, or “healthy cooking” and “food recipes”; each set of related searches included new results that were more specific and relevant to the suggested search. A suggested search can branch out to more sub-suggestions (that was the case with the aforementioned games example), but I also noticed related searches that had no additional searches inside them. Aside from the additional bar for suggestions, results were displayed as normal cards with no additional changes.

It’s unclear whether this new feature could be based on Apple’s curation efforts with custom sections, keywords chosen by developers for their apps, popular searches on the App Store, or a combination of all these existing pieces of metadata. Over the past few years, Apple has built a large catalogue of curated sections (called Collections), which, however, don’t appear to be the primary source of search suggestions. Related searches ranged from generic terms and phrases like “writing” and “news” to mixes of company and product names such as “word excel” and “game loft”, suggesting that Apple may indeed still be testing and tweaking the feature before a wider rollout.

With over a million apps on the App Store, search has often been mentioned as one of the areas where Apple could make significant improvements to enable customers to discover relevant apps more easily. Two years ago, Apple acquired App Store search engine Chomp in a move that was believed to bring new user features for App Store search and recommendations, which, however, didn’t materialize with iOS 6 and iOS 7.

While the company introduced a feature to discover apps popular nearby last year, the new search suggestions could provide a general layer of filtering that is independent from geographical location. At this point, it’s not clear whether Apple may be optimizing search suggestions based on user taste and purchase history – first tests suggest that related searches are simply based on app category rather than user personalization; right now, it’s hard to tell whether some search suggestions may have been manually curated by Apple or not.

In the past year, App Store optimization (or “ASO”) has become a common practice for third-party developers willing to ensure their apps would rank highly in Apple’s search algorithm – which the company also tweaked multiple times. With more specific searches directly suggested to users when searching, Apple could alleviate the problem of good results being buried below worse results with higher ASO values, giving users more relevant and specific apps in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

Apple Adds NPR News Channel To iTunes Radio

Apple’s iTunes Radio has gained a news channel today with the addition of NPR, as first reported by re/code and confirmed on NPR’s All Tech Considered blog.

Digital streams of Morning Edition, All Things Considered and hourly newscasts will be available on a new 24-hour streaming NPR channel on iTunes Radio.

“What you hear today is just the start of what’s to come,” said Zach Brand, NPR’s vice president of digital media. Later this spring, the channel will expand to include streams of our member stations from across the country.

iTunes Radio, launched alongside iOS 7 in September, allows users to listen to free, ad-supported streams of songs that are automatically suggested by the service or collected in stations curated by music experts and artists. The new channel, available for streaming on iTunes Radio for iOS 7 devices and computers running iTunes, marks an important milestone for Apple in diversifying the offer of its iTunes Radio service, thus far focused on promoting music content with direct integration with the iTunes Store for purchases – iTunes Radio is built into Apple’s Music and iTunes apps, which have buttons to quickly purchase a song from a stream.

NPR will offer both pre-programmed and live shows; at the moment, it’s displayed as a station in iTunes Radio next to music stations created by customers or curated by Apple. Since the launch in September, Apple has been trying various experiments with iTunes Radio for music content: the company regularly hosts “First Play” stations with previews of upcoming albums from popular artists, and it recently launched a special station with audio streams of iTunes Festival at SXSW.

Apple is believed to be considering a dedicated app for iTunes Radio in a future version of iOS, which could give the company more flexibility for separating user-made stations and curated sections, or music content from news, interviews, and other audio content. Currently, the entire iTunes Radio service lives in a dedicated page of the existing Music app for iOS.

Apple’s expansion of iTunes Radio could also be particularly interesting for CarPlay, the company’s initiative to bring iOS apps and services to car infotainment systems with a dedicated interface and iPhone integration. In initial demos, Apple showed how CarPlay could stream songs off iTunes Radio through an iPhone, but news channels and other audio content could easily fit into the same vision with the unified iTunes Radio service.

NPR’s new iTunes Radio channel is available here.