Colorbay is a new way of looking at photo-sharing platforms

Colorbay is a beautiful iOS app that lets you browse images from popular photo-sharing sites like Instagram, 500px, and Flickr. If you are a longtime user of these services, Colorbay is also a time capsule that lets you rediscover old favorites. For example, Instagram only shows the last 300 photos you’ve liked because the service wants to make sure it “runs smoothly as the app becomes available to a growing number of people.”

That might seem like a lot, but over the past three years, I’ve liked way more than 300 photos on Instagram, including pics of my friends’ children as they grow up and images from design-related accounts that I save for inspiration.

I have even more old favorites on Flickr because I joined in 2004 and was an avid user. Back before Facebook became widespread, Flickr was my favorite site because there tons of very active groups for things ranging from Japanese Rement miniatures to vintage clothing.

But I’ve stopped visiting Flickr as often as I used to, partly because most of the people I met on the site have migrated to other social networks. I also disliked last year’s major redesign and Flickr’s Favorites page was never easy to navigate in the first place.

end on Pinterest or Evernote to catalog most of my favorite images, but Colorbay’s “My Likes” stream is a welcome trip down memory lane. I found photos I haven’t looked at in almost five years, but still enjoy. It’s also a fun way to browse my own old snapshots.

Colorbay, which is also available for iPads, displays photos in a mosaic-style stream that automatically plays unless you pause it. It currently allows you to browse your timelines and popular photos from 500px, Flickr, Instagram, Pixter, and App.net. Colorbay’s cool “Throwback” feature automatically delivers a random mix of photos from all services, while “Lomography” delivers film (or film-like) photos with that tag. You can also search your own tags.

Even if you don’t like to wallow in nostalgia as much as I do, Colorbay is also a fantastic photo discovery tool and a great piece of eye candy.

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/07/colorbay-is-a-new-way-of-looking-at-instagram-flickr-and-other-photo-sharing-platforms

Android and iOS users spend 32%...

Android and iOS users in the US spend an average of 2 hours and 42 minutes every day using apps on smartphones and tablets (up just four minutes compared to last year). Of that, 86 percent (or 2 hours and 19 minutes) is spent inside apps, while the remaining 14 percent (or 22 minutes, down 6 percentage points compared to last year) is spent on the mobile Web using a browser. These latest figures come from mobile firm Flurry, which provides analytics and ad tools that developers integrate into their apps. The company collected data between January 2014 and March 2014 and concluded that “apps, which were considered a mere fad a few years ago, are completely dominating mobile” while the browser “has become a single application swimming in a sea of apps.”

Here are the results in graph form:

Just like last year, games took first place with 32 percent of time spent. Social and messaging applications increased their share from 24 percent to 28 percent, entertainment and utility applications maintained their positions at 8 percent each, while productivity apps saw their share double from 2 percent to 4 percent.

It’s worth underlining that Facebook’s share dipped a bit from 18 percent to 17 percent. Nevertheless, Facebook still has the lion’s share of time spent in the US, and was able to maintain its position with the help of Instagram. Flurry argues that position will become even more cemented, if not increased, once the acquisition of WhatsApp closes.

This year, Flurry broke out YouTube separately, which shows us it owns a whopping 50 percent of the entertainment category. We’ll be watching closely to see if it manages to grow its 4 percent share of time spent.

“It is still too early to predict the trajectory apps will take in 2014,” Flurry admits. “But one thing is clear – apps have won and the mobile browser is taking a back seat.” Unless this trend reverses, we can expect many more acquisitions from tech companies the size of Facebook and Google.

Source: http://tnw.to/q3Jet

The history of flat design

It seems as though any time you hear about Web design these days, you can’t help but come across the term “flat design.” While the flat Web design trend has been emerging in recent years, it seemed to have exploded in popularity thanks to large companies and organizations changing their design aesthetic to that of flat design. But where did flat design come from? And why are we seeing it on the Web? As with anything in design, knowing where a style or technique came from and the history behind it can help you make more educated decisions when it comes to the use of the design aesthetic.

Let’s walk through what flat design is, its influences from previous design periods, and how flat design became so popular today.

What exactly is “flat design?”

For those of you who haven’t heard of the term, “flat design” is mainly the term given to the style of design in which elements lose any type of stylistic characters that make them appear as though they lift off the page.

In laymen’s terms, this means removing stylistic characters such as drop shadows, gradients, textures, and any other type of design that is meant to make the element feel three-dimensional.

Designers today have seem to gravitate toward flat design because it feels crisp and modern, and allows them to focus on what is the most important: the content and the message.

By removing design styles that can easily date their design (or that could quickly cause their design to become outdated), they are “future-proofing” their designs so that they become relevant for longer periods of time. Not to mention, flat design seems to make things more efficient and cuts out the “fluff.”

It isn’t quite fair to have a discussion of what flat design is without discussing the opposite of flat design. The term often given for the opposite of flat design is“rich design,” which is best described as adding design ornaments such as bevels, reflections, drop shadows, and gradients. These things are often used to make elements feel more tactile and usable to users who are navigating the website or using an application.

It is important to note that rich design isn’t Skeuomorphism. Skeuomorphism is the act of making things resemble their physical counterparts to deliberately make them look familiar.

Where did flat design come from originally?

Most anything we see on the Web or digital world today has origins from its print and art ancestries. While it is difficult to determine the exact start of flat design today or where its origins started, there are a few periods of design and art in which flat design takes inspiration from.

Swiss Style of Design

The Swiss style (sometimes called the International Typographic Style) of design is the main period of design that come to mind and deserves attention for any discussion on the history of flat design. The Swiss design style was the dominant design style throughout the 1940’s and 1950’s from which it originated in Switzerland.

Swiss design mainly focused on the use of grids, sans-serif typography, and clean hierarchy of content and layout. During the 40’s and 50’s, Swiss design often included a combination of a very large photograph with simple and minimal typography.

With typography being a major element in Swiss design, the beloved Helvetica typeface was also created in Switzerland in 1957, and was heavily used on just about everything during the time.

Just like how flat Web design today was around for a while before Microsoft and Apple made it popular, the Swiss style of design can be traced as far back as the 1920’s in Germany, but it was the Swiss who made it explode in popularity and earned the namesake (for the Art History buffs, the Bauhaus school in Germanyfocused on architecture and typography, and the typography has similarities to Swiss design but where practicing this design style before the Swiss took claim).

Minimalist Design

Another heavy influence of today’s flat Web design can be found in the history of Minimalism. The term “minimalism” is sometimes used interchangeably with today’s flat design, but minimalism was popular way before the Web was even a thought. Minimalism has its history in architecture, visual art, and design.

Minimalism has an extensive history and covers various mediums, but where flat design takes its influence from is mainly the design and visual art expressions of minimalism. Minimalism is well known for the act of removing everything in a piece, leaving just the necessary and needed elements. Geometric shapes, few elements, bright colors, and clean lines dominate most minimalism style design.

Probably one of the most popular art pieces from the Minimalism period is Yves Klein’s The Blue Epoch (seen below).

It’s safe to say that a mixture of Swiss Design and Minimalism heavily influenced what we see today in the digital world and have named “flat design.”

Emergence of flat design in the digital world

History repeats itself, and the same holds true with the current flat design trend. As we seen above, flat design can be traced back all the way to the 1920’s and have influenced our current adaptation of flat design.

While many designers have worked their way to flat design when creating websites and other design pieces, it is safe to say that the likes of Microsoft and Apple made flat design pretty popular over the last several years.

Microsoft and Metro Design

Microsoft’s dabbing in flat design started before the current “Metro” design aesthetic was dubbed Metro. In trying to compete with Apple’s extremely popular iPod, Microsoft released the Zune media player in late 2006.

With Zune came a unique design style that focused on large, lower-case menu typography and background imagery (imagery was displayed based on the song or content loaded). The Zune desktop software that came paired with the Zune also followed the same design style, creating a fully integrated experience.

The design of the Zune operating system on Zune devices was drastically different than most of Microsoft’s other software availabilities at the time (namely Windows). When Microsoft released Windows Phone 7 in October 2010, it took what the company learned from the design of Zune and applied it plus more to the look and feel of the Windows Phone 7: large, bright, grid-like shapes, simple sans-serif typography and flat icons dominated the style on the Windows Phone 7.

This design would soon be called “Metro” design by its creator, Microsoft.

The design became so popular that Microsoft kept with the Metro design style and introduced it in its Windows 8 operating system, keeping with a strict grid of blocks of content, sharp edges, bright colors, sans-serif typography, and background images. This same design style is still used by Microsoft in nearly all of its software and devices such as the Xbox 360 and its current website (though the Metro name has technically been discontinued).

Apple Shakes Skeuomorphism

While Microsoft was working on its flat design style, Apple had something else up its sleeve. Apple started hinting at moving away from its use of Skeuomorphism, and then completely abandoned the perfected Skeuomorphism in favor of a more flat design with the release of iOS 7 in the summer of 2013.

Since Apple has a pretty strong following with a rather large group of early adaptors of new devices and technology, the design of iOS 7 seemed to have made flat design even more popular than it was before practically overnight.

Apple’s design aesthetic often heavily influences design of websites and apps because most designers feel that the design is appealing and modern. Thus, when Apple switched to a more flat design style, Skeuomorphism seemed to become almost instantly outdated and sites and apps that used the design style quickly found that they needed a redesign.

This is most evident in the different apps that have been updated to work well with iOS 7 — they all follow the flat design aesthetic that users of iOS 7 have become accustomed to throughout the OS.

Responsive Design

It is important to note too one of the reasons flat design has become so popular in recent years as well is the development of responsive design. As more devices are connecting to the Web, with various screen sizes and browser constraints, designers are finding that their tried-and-true design styles that relied heavily on textures, drop shadows, and fixed imagery don’t translate as well when you have to shrink those designs into smaller and smaller viewports.

Flat design allows for Web design to become more efficient. Without extra design elements in the way, websites can load much faster and are easier to resize and form around the content it holds.

This also goes hand in hand with our screens becoming more high-def and the need to display crisper imagery. It is much easier to display crisp boxes and typography than it is to make several different images to accommodate all the various devices and features out there.

The future of flat design

While no one has a crystal ball, it is safe to say that flat design will eventually run its course and will be replaced with something even more new and exciting, just like various other design styles did before it (take Skeuomorphism for example).

There are obvious flaws to flat design in the digital world (such as removing the visual clues that is needed to determine if something is clickable or not), but as designers experiment, test, and learn, flat design will evolve and eventually a new style will emerge that will leave flat design in its dust.

One clue that we may have to what the future holds for flat design (or even after) is the current design work of Google (mainly in their mobile apps). While Google’s applications are showing signs of flat design, it does not seem to be removing elements such as drop shadows; it also still uses gradients in subtle ways. The company seems to be taking the best of flat and rich designs and integrating both in a way that just works. Maybe Google have figured out something we haven’t?

While flat design seems new and exciting, and is a fastly growing trend, it isn’t nothing new in the course of design history. With influences from Swiss design and Minimalism, flat design is just a reincarnation of its print ancestry in our digital lives.

Source: http://tnw.to/h4hcx

Adobe Bets on an iPad Pen and Ruler

“When people hear that Adobe is getting into hardware, for many the first reaction is ‘why?’,” explained Michael Gough, Adobe’s vice president of experience design, at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. “But, this really is within our wheelhouse. We’ve always built creative tools and these products are really just another example of that. This isn’t just another stylus.”

Adobe’s pen currently wears the codename Mighty, while the ruler is going by the name Napoleon—because “it’s a short ruler,” Gough said.

The two products, which Gough demoed at SXSW, as you can see in the video above, are built with clean lines and shod in aluminum and white plastic. They look not mistakenly like something Apple would design.

The two devices work in tandem with an iPad drawing app that Adobe is also developing, one that enables the hardware to mimic an architects ruler and wide array of drafting templates—the greenish, flat pieces of plastic you’ve seen if you’ve been down the art aisle in any office supply store.

With a click of the lone button on the ruler, circles, squares, triangles, arcs and other shapes found in drafting templates appear onscreen for the pen to trace—just as architects, designers and engineers have done repeatedly for decades with a paper and pencil in the analog world. The ruler and pen, which features a pressure sensitive tip, also make drawing a straight line easy—something that can be difficult with a tablet stylus.

And while Mighty and Napoleon are built with the needs of architects and designers in mind, Gough said that Adobe’s first hardware wouldn’t have a steep learning curve—something Adobe software is known for.

“This is an opportunity for Adobe to make creativity accessible to everyone, because anyone who can use a pen and a ruler will be able to use this as soon as they pick it up,” he said. “That’s a sweeping, beautiful mission, but it’s also good business sense. We want everyone to be a potential Adobe customer—not just creative professionals.”

Source: http://on.wsj.com/Pyaq9q

Digital consumers raise new expectations

The consumer retail experience is being disrupted thanks to the growth of technology and social media. These have changed the way consumers look for product information, find reviews, and shop for their clothes, gadgets, amenities, and food, all from their phone, tablet, or laptop. It is the omnichannel era, and the consumer is driving changes across the entire retail industry. Join retail leaders at  Omnichannel 2014 to learn how to better connect with the new consumer from the retailers and suppliers who are successfully doing it today.

We can point to three distinctive disruptions that are all having a major impact on how retailers and suppliers can and should connect with their customers.

1. Shoppers expect the same experience with your brand

When shoppers walk into The Gap or Best Buy, they want to see the same brand, look, and colors on Gap.com and BestBuy.com as well as on mobile sites or apps. Consumers expect a more detailed level of product information on the website than they find in the store.

This means retailers and consumers need to focus on providing as much product information as possible. They need to make content marketing efforts more about being helpful than touting specs and features. And they need to make sure they’re listening to customer feedback and testimonials and responding whenever possible.

2. Social media makes sharing of experiences easy

Thanks to smartphones and social media, everyone’s a critic, journalist, and publisher. If you go into a restaurant and have a good or bad experience with the staff or food, you can take a photo and share it and a review with your friends on Twitter and Facebook.

Nowadays, people are sharing their experiences, good or bad, about restaurants, stores, products, websites, and even government agencies and highway traffic. Many of their friends will then help spread the word by sharing those messages. So if something bad happens at your store or with your product, you’d better count on it appearing on social media.

The moral is: Customer service and quality need to be top-notch. That may only earn you a few kudos on social media, but a failure to provide those will absolutely be called out and magnified.

3. Shoppers can use mobile devices to check availability and pricing

Apps like Barcode Scanner, RedLaser, and Shop Savvy enable people to use their smartphone to scan a product barcodes, QR codes, or other systems to check the price and local availability of a particular product. Bookstore visitors can even use Amazon’s smartphone app to scan a book and order it via the website (with free shipping for those with Amazon Prime). This practice is known as “showrooming,” and some stores are embracing it while others fear it.

Some stores are using proprietary barcodes that standard devices can’t scan. As a result, many retailers are missing out on further opportunities to use this functionality as a way to improve shoppers’ experience, to give them something they can’t get at their competitors.

Stores like Burberry and Sephora are providing upscale and personalized shopping experiences. Lowe’s holds educational sessions both for adults and kids. They’re providing a valuable service or experience the other stores can’t. As a result, they don’t worry about showrooming.

New technology has changed shoppers’ expectations for the things they buy. Retailers who want to survive these disruptions need to embrace and use this new technology, rather than run from it and wait for it to go away. It’s not going anywhere, and it’s only going to get bigger.

Source: http://venturebeat.com/2014/03/14/digital-consumers-raise-new-expectations

Apple CarPlay hands-on

Apple's in-car infotainment system has been a long time coming. After it was announced at the company's annual WWDC conference in June last year, "iOS in the Car" flew under the radar, only to undergo a rebrand and launch publicly yesterday under a new moniker: CarPlay. Sharing part of its name with the company's AirPlay media-streaming protocol, CarPlay combines all of the iPhone's most important features and mirrors them inside the car, allowing car owners to call, text, navigate and listen to music (and more) using touch- or Siri-based voice inputs. The new in-car interface is compatible with new Ferrari, Mercedes and Volvo models unveiled at the Geneva Auto Show, and it's there that we got the chance to test Apple's automotive assistant inside a suitably equipped Ferrari FF coupe. Will CarPlay force you to buy an iPhone to go with your car (or vice versa)? Not really -- the Ferrari we tried actually deployed Apple's dash system alongside its own, while Mercedes-Benz and Volvo (two of Apple's other partners) have said they'll continue todevelop Android and MirrorLink solutions for their new models. Compatible with the iPhone 5 and up, CarPlay is "loaded" into the Ferrari's built-in navigation system by way of a Lightning adapter located underneath the armrest. Wireless connections are coming, at least from Volvo, but our test was limited to traditional cables. Once it's connected, Ferrari will continue to utilize its own infotainment system, but users can load CarPlay by hitting a dedicated dashboard button, allowing all touch and voice inputs to be diverted to your iPhone. This loads the CarPlay dashboard, which features a familiar array of icons and services you'll recognize from your iPhone. From here, it's a case of using the touchscreen or calling upon Siri to load each of the services -- the latter of which can be summoned with the Siri Eyes Free button located on the reverse of the steering wheel.

The first thing we noticed is how speedy everything is. Apps load quickly, and Siri's contextual algorithms hastily recognized our voice commands and responded appropriately. Apple has also implemented safety features to ensure services do not draw your attention away from the road and push forward its "hands-free" theme. For example, when we sent or received a message from a contact, Siri would only read the message back to us and we never once got the chance to see its contents. An Apple representative was able to talk us through each CarPlay feature, so do make sure you check out our in-depth hands-on video above to get a better idea of what Apple and its car maker buddies are aiming for.

Source: http://engt.co/1gOId5x

Smartwatch Apple or Google needs to make

Why can't great smartwatches look like normal watches? Smartwatches, for the most part, can be divided into two categories: vague approximations of the future like the Pebble, Gear, and Gear Fit, or conventionally styled watches from companies like Citizen and Cookoo that offer far less functionality. While it's true the Pebble Steel is making inroads in the aesthetic department, its blocky construction and oversized buttons aren't likely to appeal to the masses.

Gábor Balogh is a freelance designer from Hungary who, like many of us, wants an attractive, watch-like watch that just happens to be smart. The difference between Balogh and the rest of us is he went ahead and designed an interface he believes could enable regular watch designs to include a full bevy of smart features.

After posting his concept for a smartwatch on Behance, Balogh took some time to talk through his interface ideas withThe Verge. The actual watch pictured in the mockups is almost incidental, as the concept simply takes the Swedish watchmaker Triwa's Havana timepiece (with the company's permission) and replaces its face with a circular display. This proposal is about interface paradigms, not product design. "In this concept the UI does not have a predefined style," says Balogh, "but it would match the housing. Only the navigational patterns have to be taken into consideration."

Although the interface itself will be down to watch and phone companies to decide, Balogh offers up some simple but polished ideas that go very well with Triwa's design. Pairing your smartphone to its watch will make the appropriate app icons appear on the display, with notifications, maps, and music information streamed from the device itself. When you don't want it to be a smartwatch, it mostly looks and behaves like a regular watch.

"I LIKE PRODUCTS WITH DISCREET TECHNOLOGY."

"I like products with discreet technology," explains Balogh, "when they serve me, my real needs, and make my life easier rather than simply changing my days." He calls out the Nest thermostat and Apple's Airport Express as prime examples of technology being applied discretely without obscuring functionality. "They're just ticking away in the background, making your life easier."

In an attempt to avoid obfuscation, Balogh's concept doesn't utilize a touchscreen or voice control. Instead, the interface uses the buttons and bezel found on most watches. The bezel is key to this interface. It can rotate to, for example, scroll through a long message or switch functions in an app, or be clicked to make a selection. The rotation element doesn't necessarily need to be physical — Balogh says he could imagine a more classical watch going with a physical dial, or a sporty design opting for an iPod-esque click wheel.

Using the bezel for controlling apps and other smartphone-related tasks frees up the three side-mounted buttons to control "native" functions like time, date, and alarms, as well as switching between modes. This clear separation of native and app functions should make the interface easily accessible to users familiar with how a regular watch works, while the lack of a touchscreen will stop the display from picking up smudges and grime from your fingers, and also stop your fingers from obscuring the display. "The size of the watch is a very limiting factor, so we don't have to make it very smart. I see the watch as a piece of jewelry, and wanted to add an interface that would be familiar on a classic watch."

Of course, Balogh is a designer, not an engineer, and there are technological issues that will need to be overcome before we can hope to wear something like his concept on our wrists. Circular screens, although not impossible, are a rarity, and squeezing a battery and the necessary circuitry into the tiny space that usually contains mechanical watchworks would be difficult. That said, the guts of a Pebble are actually fairly small, and larger watches may be able to contain them.

As a busy freelance designer, it's unlikely Balogh will be able to muster the time or funds to assemble a team and make his concept a reality. But as technology advances it's easy to see a future where tech giants like Samsung rein in their "futuristic" designs and attempt to take on the Breitlings and Tag Hauers of the world with something like Balogh's idea.

Hint: Use the 's' and 'd' keys to navigate

• ANALOG CLOCK AND CALL INTERFACE

  

• HEART RATE MONITOR AND MESSAGES

  

• STOPWATCH AND NAVIGATION

  

• WEATHER AND MUSIC

  

• COMPASS AND MEMOS

  

Source: http://vrge.co/1lENsu8

Apple CarPlay

Apple CarPlay Apple’s CarPlay is close to being available in the wild via partnerships with a handful of car manufacturers, and Volvo is already showing off what that will look like in practice. The car maker just posted a video to their YouTube account that provides a glimpse at how the system works.

CarPlay will work with a variety of different kinds of infotainment systems, including those with touchscreens, as displayed in the video, and those that use physical controls. Volvo’s integration also allows them to control features and services using steering wheel-mounted controls, and the first vehicle to sport the interface will be the XC90 SCUV, which is coming to market later this year.

Volvo offers up some interesting technical tidbits about how CarPlay works, too. The connection works via H.264 video streaming, that then gathers touch input from the console screen and relays it back to the connected device. The name ‘CarPlay’ is evocative of Apple’s AirPlay, and it sounds like the tech is similar in some ways between the two.

One final detail shared by Volvo in its press release: while currently CarPlay requires a physical Lightning cable connection, Volvo says Wi-Fi connectivity is coming in the “near future.” That could potentially open up access to devices like the iPhone 4S, which is still on sale but which uses a 30-pin connector, but Apple’s CarPlay site clearly states iPhone 5 and newer required for use, so it’s more likely this will just provide another connectivity option for owners of those devices.

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/03/volvo-shows-apple-carplay-in-new-video-says-wi-fi-connectivity-is-coming-soon

RobinHood is about to let anyone buy and sell stocks for free instead of having to pay E*Trade or Scottrade $7 per transaction. Today RobinHood begins inviting the 160,000 people who’ve signed up to download its glossy new app where you can efficiently track and trade stocks. “It’s by far the most beautiful brokerage app, though that’s not saying much” co-founder Vlad Tenev jokes. But while RobinHood makes Wall Street look stylish in your pocket, what’s special is what it does, and does for free. That’s letting you trade stocks with zero commission. You might assume it would cost RobinHood money to execute trades, but in fact it can make money by moving yours around. We’ve just been conditioned to assume its something you have to pay for after decades of investors handing Scottrade, E*Trade and other brokerages $7 to $10 for each buy or sell.

Those who want their trading for free can sign up for RobinHood and expect an invitation email over the next few weeks to months. Since you’re trusting it with your savings, RobinHood wants to onboard people with extreme care rather than as fast as possible. But soon it expects to be holding hundreds of millions of dollars for its users so they can make instant trades from their phones.

RobinHood gave TechCrunch the first look at its new app, and its investor Google Ventures‘ attention to design is readily apparent. The whole app is themed white or black depending on if the stock market is open or closed. Meanwhile, the app’s chrome goes green or red depending on if the currently viewed stock is up or down that day. This trick tells you at a glance whether you can officially trade or not and how well you’re are doing.

Most finance apps only let you monitor stocks like Yahoo Finance or the first version of RobinHood, or charge you to trade them like those from the big retail brokerages. RobinHood co-founder Baiju Bhatt stresses that if you want to do deep financial research, you probably want to sit down at a desktop. But if you want to check your stocks whenever you have free moment and make some trades when the courage strikes you or whenever something shocks the market, RobinHood lets you do it in a few swipes. [Disclosure: I was friends with Vlad and Baiju in college.]

You can set alerts in case your stocks move a certain percentage, or place limit orders that are executed if the price hits a certain point. When you’re ready to make a live trade, just select how many shares of a stock you want to buy or sell. RobinHood previews how much that will cost or earn you, and you swipe to confirm the trade (which triggers some delightful animations and buzzes). And because security may be the biggest threat to RobinHood, it even lets you set up a special pin code that’s required to open the app.

RobinHood says it will never charge for trading. Right now, it’s supported by over $3 million in funding from Google Ventures, Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Rothenberg Ventures and some angels. But it plans to quickly become self-sustained by charging other developers for API access, letting users trade on margin (money they’re owed but don’t own yet) for a fee, and through payment for order flow where stock exchanges pay the startup to bring its trading volume to their marketplaces.

For now, though, RobinHood could democratize stock trading. If you were a fat cat trading in the hundreds of thousands or millions, those little $10 fees didn’t mean much. But if you’re not rich and still want to invest, those commissions could add up to eat away at what you earn through smart trading. By replacing brick-and-mortar store fronts and legions of salespeople with an app and a lean engineering team, RobinHood can pass the savings on to its users.

Source:  http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/27/trade-stocks-free-robinhood

'Details Matter, It's Worth Waiting to Get It Right'

Today marks what would have been Steve Jobs' 59th birthday, and Apple fans around the world are once again remembering the Apple co-founder and CEO more than two years after his death. Apple CEO Tim Cook is unsurprisingly one of those remembering Jobs today, and Cook has acknowledged the day in a pair of Tweets honoring Jobs and vowing to continue "the work he loved so much".

While remembering Jobs' legacy, Cook may also be indirectly addressing Apple's lack of significant announcements so far in 2014, reminding his followers of Jobs' philosophy on making sure all details are taken care of.

Cook has promised that Apple is working on "some really great stuff" in new product categories, with a smart watch and new television-related products topping the list of rumors. With Apple rarely being a company to rush to market, Cook may be quietly asking for patience as the company continues work on its upcoming products and services.

Coincidentally, today also marks the 14th birthday of MacRumors. Founded in February 2000 before the introduction of the iPad, iPhone, and even the iPod and OS X, the site has grown enormously and fostered the creation of our sister sites TouchArcade andAppShopper. As always, we are grateful to our readers, contributors, sponsors, and all those for whom MacRumors is an online home or a regular stop.

Source: http://www.macrumors.com/2014/02/24/cook-honors-jobs-59th-birthday/

Fitness Tracking Comes To Your Ankle

Fitness Tracking on Your Ankle Flyfit isn't all that different from other pedometer-based fitness trackers –– except you put it on your ankle instead of your wrist.

That's useful for swimmers and cyclists, who didn't get any joy out of the Fitbit, Nike Fuel Band or Jawbone Up. But Flyfit can measure pedal and leg stroke movements.

Flyfit, a Kickstarter project, has been in development since 2012. Like most fitness trackers, it will still record other aspects of your daily activity — your steps, your sleep cycle. It will also connect with your phone via Bluetooth, allowing the device to track pace, speed and your GPS position, all in real time.

The device includes a waterproof, USB-chargeable battery and five different band colors. The battery can last a week in low-power mode. The app, still in development, will be available for both iOS and Android.

Source: http://mashable.com/2014/02/20/flyfit-fitness-tracker/

Mobile payments are finally everywhere you want to be...

NFC was supposed to be the future.

My next phone was going to include the technology, which would let me pay at any cash register by waving my phone instead of swiping my credit card. NFC would also let me touch phones with a friend to share a picture, tap my phone to a speaker to play music, and even unlock my phone with a ring or clip. NFC would someday even replace bar codes,according to Osama Bedier, the one-time head of Google Wallet and unofficial torchbearer of the NFC movement. Google’s contactless payments system was bound to take over the world. Until Google gave up on it.

Carriers blocked the company from deploying Wallet on phones, and retailers outside Mountain View didn’t feel much urgency to upgrade their cash registers with NFC capability. Eventually, Google transformed Wallet into a straightforward PayPal competitor. The best hopes for NFC payment adoption in the US lie with several programs created by carriers (Isis) and credit card companies (MasterCard MasterPass), which only work with a few banks and at select retailers. An NFC payments solution — in the US, at least — is effectively stuck in a stalemate. But a new startup called Loop thinks it has the answer: a wireless payments technology that does what NFC promised to do, all without forcing carriers or retailers to change anything.

Loop comes in two flavors, for now: a $39 key fob and a $99 Mophie-esque ChargeCase. Both devices hold virtual versions of your credit and debit cards, and work at over 90 percent of the country’s credit card machines without retailers having to change anything, according to Loop. The Fob and ChargeCase work only with the iPhone, for now, but they will be compatible with Android in April. In 2015, Loop expects its technology to be built into a variety of phones from its OEM partners.

It’s the NFC dream all over again, except this time it might actually come true.

Magnetic attraction

Loop co-founder George Wallner founded Hypercom in the late ‘70s. You probably haven’t heard of it, but Hypercom built the technology behind many of the credit card readers still used in grocery stores, coffee shops, and other retailers today. After making his millions and eventually selling to Verifone, the biggest player in the space, Wallner retired to his yacht. "I was not paying much attention to the payments industry," he says, at least until about a year and a half ago. A friend mentioned that NFC was being pushed as a new medium to transmit credit card information.

"I was surprised that NFC, which is a good technology, was being used in such a simple way," Wallner says. "The best way to do it is to work with the equipment [retailers] have today — not just something in between." Wallner, an engineer by trade, prototyped a new technology that would transmit magnetic-stripe credit card data, but do it wirelessly. It would effectively have the same impact and feature set as NFC payments, but would work at over 90 percent of credit card machines in the US. Wallner was about to come out of retirement.

He founded Loop with Will Graylin, an entrepreneur whosold a mobile payments company of his own to Verifone, and Damien Balsan, the former head of NFC business development at Nokia. Loop’s first products are the Loop Fob and the Loop ChargeCase. The Fob is essentially a Square-esque credit card reader, and the ChargeCase is a battery pack / case combination with small credit card reader dongle. The Fob connects to your phone via headphone jack, while the ChargeCase connects via Bluetooth. Both devices interface with the PIN-protectedLoopWallet app, which lets you scan in your cards; Loop stores your card data in an encrypted form on your phone, and inside a secure element on the Fob and ChargeCase.

You’ll need to be within a few inches of the actual reader head inside a credit card terminal for it to work, but Loop’s range is good enough that you don’t need to hit it on the nose. From there, pressing a button on the side transmits the magnetic signal for your most recently used card just as if you’d swiped it. If you’re using the ChargeCase, you can tap a card’s icon inside the LoopWallet app to transmit its signal. I tried both the Fob and ChargeCase at coffee shops, taxis, restaurants, and grocery stores, and every time, cashiers were skeptical and wanted to call their manager. Only when I was persistent ("Look, just press the button, trust me") would they do so. And to their surprise, Loop almost always worked on the first try.

The point of sale

I’m happy with Loop’s reliability, but less so with its initial product designs. The Loop Fob is a bit chunky, and only holds one card at a time. (Coin solved this problem with an onboard screen and card-switching button, but it remains to be seen how well it actually works in practice.) I ended up carrying around both the Fob and my wallet just in case, which defeats the purpose of the Fob. Perhaps if it were much smaller, like a Mobil Speedpass, I’d bring it with me everywhere.

TAPPING ON MY PHONE TO PAY FOR SOMETHING FEELS TRULY FUTURISTIC

The Loop ChargeCase is a more logical form factor that provides both backup power and payment capabilities. The ChargeCase is essentially a cheaper-feeling Mophie: it can be activated either with a quick button press on its side, or using the Loop Wallet app. Inside the app, you can flip through all the cards you’ve scanned in, then tap one to transmit its magnetic signal to a credit card reader. Tapping on my phone to pay for something feels truly futuristic, like the Google Wallet promotional videos of yore. This was the promise of Google Wallet, but it’s Loop that delivers. And Loop says it’s already working on a new version of the ChargeCase with a removable Loop card you can hand to waiters and bartenders.

Loop worked at most credit card machines I tried aside from subway-ticketing machines, gas pumps, and ATMs that require you to fully stick in a card for a scan to take place. Loop has hacked its own way to working at these kinds of terminals — it involves sticking another card into the reader slot, and then pressing a Loop device against it — but it’s not worth the trouble. Loop also didn’t work at Duane Reade, a popular chain of drugstores in New York, but Loop says this is only because Duane Reade hasn’t upgraded the software in its credit card readers. At Walgreen’s and Staples, the credit card readers accepted debit card transmissions via Loop, but not credit card transmissions. They require a software upgrade too, it seems. But despite the hiccups, Loop worked in far more places than any mobile payments app or hardware I’ve ever tried. The company solved a big piece of the payments puzzle — but in doing so, revealed another enormous obstacle blocking the path of any mobile payments startup.

In your pocket

Loop’s biggest problem is that it’s a waste of time. It feels magical to use, but isn’t worth the additional 10 or 15 seconds it takes to explain to each and every cashier. At a bar or restaurant, handing over my phone or Fob while yelling instructions over the chatter of other patrons was both awkward and impractical. And even if a friendly cashier doesn’t ask any questions before trying out Loop, they almost always ask questions afterwards. I felt like I was not only wasting my time, but the time of the people in line behind me, like the main character in that one VISA commercial.

Hardware ubiquity, as it turns out, is only half of NFC’s problem. The other half is that it requires cashiers to trust you aren’t trying to hack them by touching your gadget to their credit card reader. Even if Loop works at every register, it doesn’t compute for every cashier. Acceptance may come in time as more cashiers learn about Loop, but I have a feeling that true ubiquity would only come from corporate executives formally deploying new systems asStarbucks and Whole Foods have done with Square readers. Or perhaps even from Isis.

EVEN IF LOOP WORKS AT EVERY REGISTER, IT DOESN’T COMPUTE FOR EVERY CASHIER

Loop and others say they add value by offering retailers digital rewards and custom payment app experiences, but these perks are separate pieces of the payments puzzle that should come once mobile wallets are ubiquitous. Loop also offers the ability to take pictures of your ID and loyalty cards for storage inside the Loop Wallet app, but until I start sprouting gray hairs, no bouncer is going to accept a photo of a photo ID. So I’m stuck with two or three cards in my wallet, which is really no less convenient than carrying five or six cards.

Wallner does say that Loop’s hardware is more secure than a credit card since it can’t be skimmed, providing one more reason to use it. I haven’t been able to personally verify the truthfulness of this statement, but in a world where credit card companies are liable for all fraudulent purchases, Loop’s security isn’t a killer feature.

Source: http://vrge.co/1nNBPOr

Dear Car Makers: Please Hire People Like This

How touch screen controls in cars should work The interfaces in modern cars are, with rare exception, awful.

It’s almost absurd, really. The car is one of the most expensive things that people buy for themselves. It’s massive. It’s got a power supply that lasts for days… and yet, it’s one of the least “smart” devices in our lives. A three-year old tablet headed for the recycling bin puts the stock interface in most cars to shame.

The operating systems are slow, and often bug-riddled. If there’s a touchscreen, it’s almost certainly a crappy, low-res screen using yesteryear’s touch technology.

Worst of all, they’re dangerous. Over the last few years, touchscreens have become fairly standard in many new, mid-range lines. Which is great! The problem? Manufacturers didn’t really go about it right. Rather than seizing the opportunity to design something entirely new around touch, they just took all of the physical, oh-so-pressable buttons they once splayed across the dash and crammed them onto a touchscreen. Haptics? Sensible, spatial design? Whatever, we’ve got a touchscreen! Shiny!

As a result, actions that once required but a pinch of muscle memory (like, say, changing the station) now require you to take your eyes off the road entirely, lest you blindly jam your finger into the wrong button in that flat sea of glass.

Voice control is a strong contender here — perhaps more so than in any other space, really. But that’s yet another place where cars are lagging. As Google’s voice recognition approaches an almost terrifyingly accurate level, I’m still finding myself angrily shouting at my 2014 model car while it fails to figure out which of six possible commands I’m saying.

Thankfully, both Apple and Google have realized the massive space to be won here, and are actively working to take the manufacturers and their terrible design work out of the mix. It won’t happen overnight — but in just a few years, interacting with our cars should be a whole lot less awful.

In the meantime, let us all drool over this just-posted concept video by Matthaeus Krenn, whose LinkedIn profile lists his last job as being a product designer at Cue — the team behind the titular Cue personal assistant app that was acquired by Apple back in October.

Is it perfect? No. Amongst other things, it requires users to learn and memorize how to control an interface, rather than working in a way that they can discover naturally. Is three fingers A/C control or audio source control?

But we need more of this. We need more smart people thinking about how we interact with our cars, especially as touchscreens become more and more common. When we’re steering what is essentially a 2-ton metal missile down the street, skipping to the next song shouldn’t be a dangerous decision.

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/18/dear-car-makers-please-hire-people-like-this

DevArt: Google's ambitious project to program a new generation of artists

DevArt - Art Made with Code[metaslider id="156"]The exhibition is called Digital Revolution, and from July 3rd to September 14th it will explore the impact of technology on art over the past 40 years. It will feature artists, designers, musicians, architects, and developers to reveal the artistry that's all around us, from the films that we watch to the games that we play. DevArt, its final act, will showcase three large-scale, “magical” works of art from established artists, and one that's yet to be announced. That’s where you come in.

At the core of DevArt is a new website and competition from Google that hopes to inspire coders to get creative, and offers them the platform on which to do so. The winner of the eight-week competition will have the opportunity to exhibit their artwork in the DevArt area at the Barbican. In addition to the main prize, one project will be highlighted on the site’s front page each week — it’s a massive opportunity for some serious exposure.

"ART ISN'T JUST THE OUTPUT BUT THE ENTIRE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS."

The winning piece will be exhibited alongside artworks from three of the biggest names in digital art, and all of them will be developing their work in public through the DevArt site. “What we're trying to show,” explains Google Creative Lab’s Emma Turpin, “is that art isn't just the output, but the entire development process.” Anyone visiting DevArt will be able to follow the projects, look through each artist's code, and see that code slowly refined and developed into the final exhibit.

Zach Lieberman is one of the artists that will be developing his idea for DevArt. He’s been working in the field for over a decade, regularly creating new artworks, and he also co-authored openFrameworks, an open-source tool kit that helps others to code creatively. His work uses technology to create unexpected experiences, often incorporating gesture, sound, and more than a little showmanship.

Lieberman’s piece for DevArt is tentatively titled Play the world. It will allow visitors to play on a keyboard that samples sounds, in real-time, from hundreds of radio stations around the world. Play a "middle C" on the keyboard, for example, and it may pick up a matching note from a sports radio show in Nigeria, or a bossa nova station in Brazil. The keyboard is surrounded by a circle of speakers, and the sounds will be "geographically oriented" depending on where in the world they've come from. Like most of Lieberman's art, what's going on behind the scenes is highly complex — scanning hundreds of the world's radio stations while simultaneously analyzing pitch is no easy feat — but to the person playing that keyboard, it should feel effortless.

Taking a different approach are Varvara Guljajeva and Mar Carnet, better known as Vavara + Mar. They’ve covered a vast range of topics with their work, but the results are always clever, playful, and leave a lasting impression. In 2012 they turned a São Paulo skyscraper into a giant metronome that beat to the "rhythm of the city" based on social media activity. Their DevArt piece takes the now-everyday occurrence of speech recognition and injects a healthy dose of whimsy.

Titled Wishing Wall, it attempts to reimagine how we share our wishes with the world. Visitors will be invited to tell their wish to the wall, where the words will transform before them into a butterfly. These butterflies will be generated by analyzing speech and determining the sentiments behind the words used, and the result will be a giant wall of wishes represented by butterflies that visitors can then interact with.

The final commissioned piece will come from Karsten Schmidt, whose name will be familiar to many Londoners. His malleable, open source digital identity for the Decode exhibition at the city’s V&A museum captured the public imagination, and his new work will expand on the co-authorship ideas he first introduced years ago.

Co(de)factory (another tentative title) will play out like a performance, and, much like the DevArt competition itself, it gives the public a starring role. Schmidt has created a set of 3D-modeling tools and will invite the public to contribute a small section to a larger work either online or using computers in the DevArt area. When completed, these works will be printed live at the exhibition using a UV 3D printer, an almost theatrical machine that appears to "grow" objects from a photosensitive liquid using UV light. At least one of these collaborative artworks will be printed every day and exhibited in the space, and over 70 will be printed over the duration of the exhibition.

Taken at face value, the three projects couldn’t be more different, but all will be created much in the same way any piece of software is. The message is simple: all you need is an idea, and the ability to code it, and you can create amazing things. Anyone can sign up for the DevArt competition and start coding, regardless of experience; it even connects up with the popular software development site GitHub, so would-be art superstars just need to link up a GitHub project and updates will be pulled into their DevArt page automatically. Through the competition and exhibition, Google and the Barbican hope to encourage creative coding, but more importantly, they’re looking to show that code can be, and often is, art.

TECHNOLOGY IS EVERYWHERE, AND THE PEOPLE THAT CREATE IT AND CREATE WITH IT ARE, AND ALWAYS HAVE BEEN, ARTISTS

The Barbican has successfully showcased digital and interactive art for years, notably with2012's massively popular Rain Room, but Digital Revolution is more than that. It’s a dizzyingly ambitious show that will feature historic pieces like vintage arcade cabinets alongside contemporary work from the special effects teams behind Gravity and Inception; video games from small indies and larger developers like Harmonix, the team behind Rock Band and Dance Central; a multitude of audio exhibits from artists like Philip Glass; and what sounds like a rather special collaboration between Will.i.am and audio artist Yuri Suzuki, who’s currently crowdfunding a synthesizer that can turn anything into a musical instrument.

Through Digital Revolution, and perhaps no more so than with DevArt, the Barbican wants to tell the world that technology is everywhere, and the people that create it and create with it are, and always have been, artists. Digital art is art.

So what’s in it for Google? DevArt is the brainchild of Google Creative Lab, a free-thinking arm of the company that showcases why, before the data collection, and before the privacy scares, so many of us fell in love with the company. It’s an in-house design agency, a brand consultancy dedicated to just one company. It employs top-tier designers, developers, and technologists who are encouraged to create, innovate, and experiment for the good of Google. It was instrumental in the redesign of most of Google’s services that saw aesthetics and usability as equally important qualities, and it’s also quite unique in its willingness to work with other companies to show what’s possible with Google services. As you’d expect, DevArt showcases more than a few of these services, with all of the exhibits tapping into a couple of Google properties like its Cloud Platform or Maps API.

"DEVELOPERS AND CODERS ARE THE NEW CREATIVES."

Discussing DevArt with Conrad Bodman, guest curator at the Barbican, and Steve Vranakis, executive creative director at Creative Lab London, it’s clear that they’re far more enthusiastic about the exhibition than the opportunity to promote Google services. Both firmly believe in the idea developers and coders are "the new creatives," and technology is the canvas for that creativity. "What we really wanted to show," says Vranakis, "is that if you give the platform and the opportunity for coders to express themselves creatively they could make something incredible."

As Bodman talks through his plans for Digital Revolution, Vranakis’ face lights up in excitement over the who’s who of artists being name-dropped. Usman Haque, whose company Umbrellium creates massive, interactive urban installations is also involved, and he’s apparently working on a giant interactive exhibit involving lasers that everyone is looking forward to. They’re looking to transfer that excitement to a new generation that has yet to discover digital art, and coding in general.

The timing, in the UK at least, couldn’t be better. As the exhibition ends and begins to move its way across the world, computer programming will, for the first time, be taught to all children in England from elementary school through to high school. The children that come flocking to Digital Revolution this summer might be wowed by the lights and interactive elements, but what they take away to their new programming classes could be far more important. "If a 10-year-old girl [visits DevArt]" says Turpin, "we want her to understand that coding can make butterflies fly and land on her hand, and show her the magic behind what they see. And that magic’s code."

Source: http://vrge.co/1lApPnD

Pacemaker and Spotify cue up the iPad's simplest DJ app

Jonas Norberg built two great products that nobody used. The first was the award-winning Pacemaker, a wonderfully nerdy beatmaking gadget that cost $850. The second was a tablet app for DJing, but Norberg chose the wrong partner to launch with — the BlackBerry Playbook. After being booted out of his own company and then buying it back, Norberg is trying once again to make a dent in the world — but this time, he picked a better partner: Spotify. Pacemaker for iPad, a new DJ app, launches today with exclusive access to Spotify's massive streaming music library, and the ability to play two Spotify songs simultaneously for the first time.

Pacemaker is a free app entering a crowded market of premium DJ apps like Djay and Traktor. Most of these apps use clever touch interfaces and a laundry list of features to appease both pros and amateurs, but Pacemaker takes a different approach. "We want to do for music what FiftyThree did for drawing on the iPad," Norberg says. What he means is that anyone can pick up Pacemaker and use it, without having any prior DJ skills, and without needing to own a giant library of hot tracks to mix. If you plug in your Spotify credentials (or sign up for a free trial inside the app), you're instantly granted access to Spotify's 20 million-track library of songs.

I was nervous when Norberg handed over his iPad and asked me to play it, having no prior experience, but after a few minutes of tapping around I felt pretty comfortable scratching, adding loops, and setting cues in my mix. Pacemaker’s unique radial interface finds an excellent balance between simplicity and feature bloat, offering up to eight effects like Bass and Treble, as well as a few beat pads for looping and beat-skipping. Each of these effects and adjustments are operated the exact same way — using the spin of your finger on a circle, just like with the original Pacemaker gadget. Its color palette is friendly and inviting, while its Sync button made sure my tracks never stuttered when I switched between them. The app even manages a few power-user features of its own, like a memory that records cue points you’ve set up in your most-used tracks.

As I played around with the app, I quickly realized that it wasn’t really competing with the likes of Traktor and Djay, the two industry leaders for tablet DJ software. Pacemaker was instead offering up a new kind of DJing experience that most people could have fun with without getting tripped up in settings menus and synthesizers. Traktor and Djay offer an outstanding array of features, but to an amateur like myself, they can be stifling and sometimes overwhelming. Half the battle is also amassing a big library of great tracks — another problem that Pacemaker solves with its Spotify partnership.

PACEMAKER FOR IPAD SCREENSHOTS

Pacemaker worked directly with Spotify on its integration, which includes a number of tweaks to make playback and streaming as smooth as possible. Perhaps most importantly, Spotify allows Pacemaker to stream two tracks simultaneously — a first for Spotify. In my tests, songs loaded from Spotify as quickly as they did from local storage, and were just as responsive. You can’t, however, record mixes that include Spotify tracks for licensing reasons. This is pretty much what I would expect, but it’s a shame that Pacemaker didn’t work out some way to save your Spotify mixes — perhaps by requiring an internet connection for you to play them.

"DEMOCRATIZING DJING WAS SOMETHING WE’VE ALWAYS BEEN STRIVING FOR."

The app is reminiscent of iPhone mixer Figure in its approachability, and with the addition of Spotify integration and no price tag, Pacemaker is an easy recommendation to anyone interested in DJing. Pacemaker, like FiftyThree’s Paper, offers a set of effects to start you off, but also offers an array of upgrades in a "try before you buy" store that’s a near carbon copy of FiftyThree’s. But as with Paper, you can do a whole lot without buying any of the extra effects the app offers for $1.99 each, like Reverb, Roll, Echo, Loop, and Hi-Lo, and Beatskip. I wasn’t entirely sure what all of these effects did to my music, but they were all fun to play with — and thanks to the app’s consistent interface, it was easy to mess around with any of them and feel cool doing it. "Democratizing DJing was something we’ve always been striving for," says Norberg. "We have a free app that’s really easy to get into — and now the final barrier is removed by having Spotify integration."

Source: http://vrge.co/1fJ3vSS 

'Hello Ruby' Teaches 4- to 7-Year-Olds How to Code

The Kickstarter-funded book, which aims to teach programming principles to children, reached its $10,000 funding goal within hours of its launch, and 24 hours later had amassed $100,000 in donations. The project hit the $200,000 benchmark Jan. 28, with 24 days to go in the campaign. "This is a book to get kids excited about technology and affect the way they perceive technology as they grow up," she says.

The world of programming, Liukas tells Mashable, is perceived as cold, logical and machine-based. But Liukas feels quite differently. She sees in the coding world a universe of creativity and playfulness beyond ones and zeroes.

http://mashable.com/2014/01/28/hello-ruby-coding-book/#:eyJzIjoidCIsImkiOiJfY28xbmQybjNnN2QzMXluNXZncDNwMl8ifQ

Paper from Facebook...

Paper radically re-imagines what Facebook is on a mobile device as a fluid river of cards featuring news articles, photos, status updates, and more, with no ads to sully the experience (yet). It's being released next week on February 3rd, just one day before Facebook's 10-year anniversary, and there's a reason for that: Paper is the opening sentence in Facebook's next 10-year plan. A beautiful app designed from the ground-up with the iPhone in mind, Paper owes its design lineage to a number of other apps. Paper presents the standard Facebook feed in the fluid, elegant style of Flipboard. It makes writing posts as easy as using Medium or Svbtle. Loren Brichter--designer of the original Twitter app, and the popular iPhone game Letterpress-- worked with Facebook to make the interface 99% invisible as possible, with news stories presented in Twitter-like cards, wide photos that pan as you tilt your phone, and UI elements that simply fade away when they aren't in use.

Although Paper isn't out yet, early previews are ecstatic. It's the first app out of Facebook's newly formed Creative Labs division, which is described as a way to allow teams within Facebook build standalone mobile experiences with the same dexterity as start-ups.

http://www.fastcodesign.com/3025755/paper-the-opening-sentence-in-facebooks-next-10-year-plan

more human, way to manage your network of contacts

The contacts app that ships with iOS is a pretty straightforward affair that doesn’t offer much more than the handwritten address books we used to keep next to our landline phones. Humin is a new app that will be launching in beta this week that aims to be a smarter way for iPhone users to manage their contacts. Humin’s name doesn’t echo the word ‘human’ for nothing – co-founder and CEO Ankur Jain wants his startup’s product to understand relationships the way that you do. We don’t think of our network of contacts as an alphabetical list of names, our brains organise our contacts in more complex ways, but ways that make sense to us – where we met people, where they work, what they look like, who they know, and the like. Humin wants to tap into that subconscious human logic without you having to do anything differently.

http://tnw.to/stDX

HTML5 Vs. Native debate obscures the real challenges of mobility

The vitriol spews on a daily basis. HTML5 or native apps? Each side is well armed with arguments and data to prove their points. This fight, destined to go on for a long while, masks some of the real problems that enterprises are facing when it comes to mobile applications. Do you have the right backend architecture for a mobile world? The right business analytics? Enterprises, brands and developers need to put their houses well in order before even beginning to answer what type of code an app will be built in.  

http://readwr.it/q0zV

Smart Tennis Sensor

Sony showed off a prototype tennis racket sensor at CES 2014 that promised to track useful data about your technique and transmit it to your smartphone. That prototype has turned into reality faster than we thought it might — the final product now has a name, a price, and a release date for Japan...  

http://vrge.co/1iefefI