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Twitch Announces SDK For Mobile Games

Twitch

Twitch

Video game live streaming service Twitch has announced a mobile SDK, which will allow developers of smartphone and tablet games to add gameplay recording and broadcasting functionalities to their games, taking advantage of many of the features that Twitch supports on the web and home consoles. As reported by Polygon, the mobile SDK hasn’t been released yet, and Twitch’s official press release doesn’t clarify whether or not it’ll be available for both leading mobile platforms, iOS and Android.

Twitch, which passed 45 million unique monthly viewers at the end of 2013 and 10 million installs for its official mobile app, is seeking to expand on as many platforms as possible, building a platform that lets players easily record and broadcast gameplay, while allowing viewers to watch streams and chat through various community features. Launched in June 2011 as a subsidiary of Justin.tv, Twitch now comes pre-installed on Sony’s PlayStation 4; on March 11, a Twitch app will officially launch on Microsoft’s Xbox One with more functionalities than the PlayStation’s counterpart such as video archiving, a split layout for streaming and text chats, and media achievements for spectating games.

According to details shared by Twitch so far, the initial version of the mobile SDK will more closely resemble the experience offered on PC and Xbox One: besides the ability to record gameplay video and audio, Twitch will allow players to capture video from the front-facing camera, capture audio from an internal or external microphone, and archive videos for immediate streaming on Twitch. The SDK will come with settings to control brodcast quality, and there will be chat integration and discovery features to browse and follow live streams from other gamers.

“Facilitating the ability to ‘broadcast anywhere’ by bringing live streaming functionality to mobile has the potential to convert millions of Twitch’s passive viewers into active broadcasters,” said Michael Pachter, video game analyst, Wedbush Securities. “Now that Twitch has cornered the PC and console markets with turnkey broadcast integrations, given the proliferation of gaming due to the massive penetration of mobile devices, they are in a unique position to change the game once again.

The addition of mobile games is interesting for Twitch: the service isn’t available on the 3DS and PS Vita portable consoles, and Twitch has typically been associated with longer, more articulated gameplay experiences granted by dedicated home consoles and PCs. While new console-quality games can be found on Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store and ports of older console games are common at this point, it’ll be interesting to see if developers of mobile games that are usually played in short bursts of time will consider adding Twitch streaming functionalities to their games.

On mobile devices, Twitch will also have to take into account technical aspects such as cellular and WiFi streaming, battery life, and hardware fragmentation. On iOS, Apple has traditionally been against solutions to record videos of the device’s screen, although it’s possible that, by leveraging streaming rather than local video archiving, Twitch has figured out ways to enable this sort of functionality.

Details on release date and platform availability of the Twitch mobile SDK aren’t available at this point. You can read Twitch’s press release here, and wait for updates on the Twitch developer website.

CloudyTabs Puts iCloud Tabs In Your Mac’s Menu Bar

CloudyTabs

CloudyTabs

Since I switched to Safari as my primary browser, I’ve been enjoying the convenience of iCloud Tabs, which allow me to easily find webpages that I have open on my devices and re-open them anywhere, at any time. iCloud Tabs have been reliable and fast in my experience, and I cannot imagine going back to a browser that doesn’t have this sort of functionality.

The problem with iCloud Tabs is that they’re limited to Safari, so if you’re using Chrome or Firefox on OS X, you can’t access the tabs that you have open on your iPhone or iPad. For this reason, Josh Parnham has devised a simple and clever solution: CloudyTabs is a menu bar app that lists iCloud Tabs open on all your devices. CloudyTabs reads data from the .plist file that stores iCloud Tabs data on OS X, which is why the app isn’t available on the App Store and has been released on GitHub.

Once installed, CloudyTabs will need a few seconds to find open tabs and after that it’ll present a dropdown menu listing devices and webpages open on each one of them. You can CMD-click tabs to open them in the background in your default browser, and there’s a handy shortcut to open all tabs from a specific device at once. You can also type the first few letters of a tab’s title to select it.

If you don’t use Safari on OS X and wish there was a way to open iCloud Tabs without copying and pasting URLs, CloudyTabs gets the job done quite elegantly, and it’s free. You can download it here.

Command-C Browser Actions

Command-C

Command-C

When I’m writing on my iPad at home, there’s a chance I have my MacBook on my desk with either iTunes open (to check for app updates or playing music from iTunes Match/Radio) or MailMate running (because I’ve been having issues with Mail on the beta of iOS 7.1). It’s not uncommon for me to use a dual-monitor setup when writing, relying on my MacBook for Google searches and other reference material – effectively, I use it as a secondary display to my iPad when I’m working on articles that require a fair amount of research.

Since the release of Command-C, I’ve been using Danilo Torrisi’s utility to quickly beam text and URLs across all my devices, using Launch Center Pro actions to speed up the process. Command-C has excellent support for URL schemes – a boon to iPad users who fiddle with automation tricks to save time when working on iOS. I recently realized, however, that most of the content I share with Command-C is made of URLs from Safari, therefore I asked myself whether I could put together a solution to send URLs with one click from Safari without using an external app or keyboard shortcut. It was pretty clear from the beginning that I would end up with a bookmarklet, but I have to thank Danilo for providing the necessary guidance I needed to achieve the kind of workflow I wanted.

The bookmarklet is part made for myself, part proof of concept (as always) for others to iterate upon. It doesn’t only send URLs from Safari on another device with Command-C – it sends the webpage you’re currently viewing in Safari to another app on another device with Command-C.

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2014’s Battle For Dashboard Supremacy→

Carmakers have spent years and millions of dollars creating ever-more-advanced infotainment systems and, tragically, none holds a candle to the appeal of any current mobile operating systems. To most consumers, it seems blatantly obvious that the phone should simply handle all the heavy lifting. In 2014 that finally begins to become a reality across the industry, but the issue isn’t as simple as it seems.

This week’s announcement of Apple CarPlay is a good opportunity to learn more about the status of infotainment systems and how consumer electronics companies have been working with auto makers to achieve technical and safety-related standards.

Tim Stevens has an excellent overview at CNET covering CarPlay, MirrorLink, Ford’s AppLink, and Google’s Open Automotive Alliance. When thinking about SDKs for developers to build apps for the car, it’s important to remember that there are safety implications, design challenges, and regulations to consider – which may be why Apple’s initial announcement only includes a few third-party partners.

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CarPlay Demo In A Ferrari FF→

Matt Brian of Engadget spoke with an Apple representative at the International Motor Show in Geneva about CarPlay, and he recorded a video of a CarPlay demo in a Ferrari FF coupe.

The video is interesting for several reasons. First, as with Volvo, CarPlay is (unsurprisingly) a feature of the onboard system, as Ferrari is keeping its existing infotainment system and letting drivers with an iPhone access CarPlay separately. There’s an “Apple CarPlay” physical button to load the Apple UI, which, when in the foreground, takes over other physical buttons’ functions – for instance, pressing the “Navi” button when in CarPlay mode will go directly to Apple Maps. The screen appears to be a resistive touch screen: there are no multitouch gestures or swipes in the demo, and horizontal/vertical navigation is always done with software arrows rather than regular scrolling; it’s not clear whether scrolling will be possible on other screens or if it’s a design decision by Apple.

Update: A demo by Volvo shows various instances of scrolling, which suggests Ferrari chose a different implementation of CarPlay navigation for their demo.

The demo shows Apple’s reliance on Siri, which speaks texts and other information (preventing the driver from being distracted by the screen), and it demonstrates how CarPlay looks into email, messages, and calendar appointments for addresses to use in Maps destinations.

Brian also asked about third-party app support: apps that will receive CarPlay integration through the App Store will be automatically transferred from an iPhone to CarPlay and show up on the CarPlay UI, although Apple hasn’t confirmed whether there will be an SDK for developers just yet.

There’s a lot of early details and information to be seen in Brian’s video, which you can watch here.

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Norman Foster On The Design Of Apple’s Spaceship Campus→

Architectural Record (via MacRumors) has published an interview with architect Norman Foster, which includes two questions about Apple’s future spaceship campus:

So what made the form of a ring the logical choice for this building?

It’s interesting how it evolved. First of all, there was a smaller site. Then, as the project developed, and the Hewlett-Packard site became available, the scale of the project changed.

Meanwhile, the reference point for Steve [Jobs] was always the large space on the Stanford campus—the Main Quad—which Steve knew intimately. Also, he would reminisce about the time when he was young, and California was still the fruit bowl of the United States. It was still orchards.

Demolition of existing structures at the location of future Apple Campus 2 is well underway after the company received final approval from the Cupertino City Council in November.

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xsuc.es for Mobile Safari→

Joseph Schmitt, writing in response to Greg Pierce’s hack to simulate x-callback-url support in Chrome:

Wouldn’t it be great if Safari supported Chrome’s back button behavior? It sure would. However, Apple’s laissez faire attitude towards inter-app communication keeps me from holding my breath on this front. Therefore, I was truly excited when I saw this post by the father of x-callback-url himself, Greg Pierce, wherein he launches a simple HTML page in Safari and uses JavaScript to add x-success links to the page on his own. Woah, awesome!

However, Greg’s technique depends on loading a full-screen iframe on the page and overlaying a back button on top to trigger the x-success url. That gets the job done, but I really prefer how Chrome handles this: make the last page jump to the previous app. I brainstormed for a bit and figured I could probably replicate Chrome’s behavior’s using Greg’s idea, and I was right: xsuc.es was born.

To build actions with xsuc.es, see the URL parameters in Joseph’s blog post. The format is easy to understand if you’re already familiar with URL schemes; here’s a demo action to launch a Google search in Safari based on xsuc.es from Launch Center Pro.

xsuc.es is a nicer hack that takes over Safari’s Back button to go back to a previous app like Chrome does, albeit without the app’s name visible alongside the button. You can, however, tap & hold the back button to see the app you’re going back to. It would be nice to mix a success URL scheme with the address of the webpage you’re currently viewing, although I believe that’s beyond the limit of how much it’s possible to work around Safari’s JavaScript.

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