Category: Apps

Categories
Apps Review

Peach Came From a Can

Social app Peach hit the interwebs over the weekend, harder than a late 1990s grunge-esque anthem skipping on a discman playing through a cassette tape adapter.

You could write off peach as another social networking app for tech groupies. But you’d be missing a very unique feature.

Chatbots.

(Sorta. They’re almost more like command-line keywords.)

Peach does this one little thing that I’ve never seen an app of this type do before. A series of text commands enable quick access device sensors and various other APIs. For example, `move` posts the number of footsteps the device has recorded today, `gif: keyword` returns a gif search, `here` posts your location, etc.

I’m not sure whether to call this innovative per se, chatbots have existed on IRC for decades and Slack does something similar with third party app integrations.

However, Peach is the first time I’ve seen this sort of thing implemented for purely entertainment purposes and I find it extremely interesting. Mostly likely, an early sign of things to come.

If you do check it out, add me, I’m ohryan.

Categories
Apps Web Development WordPress

TeeVee for WP: building Apple TV apps with WordPress Plugins

Imagine you create tonnes of great video content every day and publish it all through WordPress. Your viewer can watch your amazing shows everywhere…on iPhones, iPads, iMacs, but not their TVs. Wouldn’t it be great to have a branded Apple TV app so that all your viewers could watch your content in full screen glory? Well I’ve got just the WordPress plugin for you…

Behold, TeeVee for WP!

A straightforward WordPress plugin I created to allow content creators to use WordPress as a data source Apple TV apps. TeeVee for WP attaches video metadata to blog posts. The metadata is used to to generate TVML ((TVML is this cool little XML apple created for basic layout – check out Apple’s documentation for more information.)) which gets ingested by a custom/branded TvOS app.

Screenshot 2015-12-06 21.01.03

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On the xCode end you simply create a new TvOS single-view application, with an AppDelegate that looks something like this:

Modify the `TVDomain` to point the domain where TeeVee for WP is install and the rest is show business.

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The project is up on github here: https://github.com/ohryan/teevee.

Contributions would be much appreciated.

If you have any questions or suggestions hit me up on twitter at @ohryan or email me [email protected].

Categories
Apps Review

48 hours with Apple Music

I’ve been a subscriber to rdio for a couple of years, streaming music isn’t anything new to me. So I was very interested to check out Apple’s implementation.

Here’s my take after using it for the last couple of days.

The Good

Playlists:
The curated playlists are feature I didn’t expect to use much, but I’ve spent more time listening to these than anything else. Apple is doing a great job of both selecting playlists I’d be interested in based on my music preferences and selecting tracks.

The only weird thing is that the playlist seem to skew heavily towards older music. I’m not sure why this might be, I don’t typically listen to a lot of old music.

Library:
The selection of available artist and albums is comparable to rdio. I have yet to look for something I couldn’t find.

Streaming Tech:
Apple is doing a much better job of varying the stream based on available bandwidth. We have a few mobile internet dead zones near our place that always trip up rdio, Apple Music has not had any problems in these zones.

Apple Music also seems to be doing a good job of buffering. There is no delay in switching to the next track.

The Bad

Desktop Client Does Not Work: 
I can’t get Apple Music to work in iTunes, period.

App UI:
Rdio has a really great mobile app. Apple, not so much. I find it really confusing and hard to use. More on this in a future post (maybe).

Beats 1:
Beats1 plays the ultra poppy music you’d expect a beats wearing teenager to eat up. It’s not for me.

Categories
Apps

Timehop

Thanks to Timehop I’ve been reminded that I used to write good blog posts… what happened…

Categories
Apps

Mailbox.app – First Impressions

I got access to mailbox.app last night around midnight, have been using it all day.

My very brief review:

  • The ability to mark emails to “read later” seems clever and works fairly well. It’s smart enough to know if it’s 1am and you tell it to read an email tomorrow, you actually mean at the beginning of the next day. All “later” email get’s placed in a gmail label [mailbox]/later.
  • The short/long swipe interface is cute and works fairly well. But get’s tedious with multiple emails. The app needs a better way to preform actions on multiple emails at once.
  • Overall the UI is great, in general.
  • I noticed that the pending email badge count is actually the number of email threads in your inbox, instead of the number of unread messages. This is acts as a great little nudge to inbox zero.

That’s all for now.