You may remember back in September when Google launched a new app called Field Trip for Android devices. The location-based discovery app is now available on iOS devices (iPhone and iPod Touch only). From the looks of it, there doesn’t appear to be any new features that have launched, but iOS will now be able to have their own little virtual tour guide in their pocket.
As with the Android version, the Field Trip app for iOS is free to download, and it works as a virtual tour guide of sorts, automatically providing you with information of a particular point of interest that you come across. It can be great if you’re traveling and doing a little bit of sightseeing in a historical city.
The information that the app provides ranges from historical facts about a location to reviews of nearby restaurants. And similar to Google Now, Field Trip relies on your location to give you the most relevant and useful information. Essentially, you could think of that app as a sort of extension of Google Now, only it feeds you information automatically instead of having to ask for it first.
It’s not unusual for Google to wait a few months before releasing an app on iOS. Obviously, Android is Google’s baby, so the company usually releases new apps on their own platform before bringing them over to Android, contrary to what most app developers have been doing. Either way, Field Trip is now available on both platforms and is ready for your traveling needs.
There currently aren’t many alternatives to Apple’s Mail application for the iPad as the only mail application worth its salt would have to be Google’s Gmail application, although that app’s experience is far from perfect. But a new application called Incredimail might finally give the iPad a mail application that might offer a redesign of your inbox that might be worth your time.
Incredimail adopts a Flipboard style interface for your email as you flip through your messages instead of being met with a list of messages that are only seen as words. The application is being called a “unified messaging application” as it not only delivers your email in a beautiful interface, but it also integrates with social network platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn as well as photo networks like Picasa Web, Flickr and Instagram.
Incredimail’s promotion video suggests this application could be used for iPad users who can be considered to be in their Golden Years, and we could definitely see older people getting more out of this app as reading incoming email and social network notifications could be much easier if the entire screen of the iPad was being used.
3D printing company Shapeways had a banner 2012 — it locked up a $6.2 million Series B last year in a round led by Lux Capital, and established a full-blown factory in Long Island City. And it’s hoping to make the process of designing and printing physical knickknacks even easier this year.
The plan? To inspire developers to create a slew of new design apps that hook into Shapeways’ printing and shipping workflow. To that end, the company officially released a new dev portal and REST-based API to developers and 3D-printing buffs earlier today.
For the uninitiated, Shapeways is essentially the cross between a 3D printing firm and a consumer-facing marketplace. Artists and designers who upload the digital blueprints for their wares to Shapeways can simply have them printed and shipped to them for their personal enjoyment, but they’re also able to set up shop and list the finished product(s) alongside a slew of others in hopes of making a sale.
The new API features some much-needed modifications like finer-grain controls when uploading models and the ability to generate real-time prices for models regardless of the materials and finishes desired, but the release speaks to a greater focus on apps as a means of creation.
“Apps are now a first-class entity on Shapeways,” said representative Elisa Richardson, who also noted that the company has plans to better showcase those apps going forward.
While the new API was only formally released this morning, Shapeways teamed up with a handful of developers during a private beta period to get a feel for what was possible using the API. The early results are rather nifty — a web app called MixeeMe allows users to design tiny Mii-esque avatars that can be printed and shipped, while TinkerCad acts as a full in-browser object-design tool that hooks into the API to pass along completed designs for printing.
With the API (and the apps that will eventually tap into it) Shapeways is clearly pushing to bring 3D printing to the mainstream. Part of its approach is to play up its consumer-facing side — Richardson also noted that the team is dedicated to showcasing the company’s “marketplace and manufacturing platform” with this launch. Not a bad move, especially considering that Shapeways has been treating some of its sellers rather well.
Shapeways notes on its official blog that the platform’s 8,000 shop owners made “nearly $500,000 in profits” last year, and CEO Peter Weijmarshausen told Forbes recently that he expects to see the first Shapeways millionaire some time next year. That said, Shapeways isn’t without competition — players like Cubify have marketplaces of their own (though arguably Cubify’s main focus is on selling its own 3D printers), and upstarts like Azavy are gearing up to throw hats into the 3D-printing ring.
Earlier this week it was reported that Netflix has no plans to develop a BlackBerry 10 app. While that specific nugget of news wasn’t surprising, we began to wonder what other popular apps may or may not be coming to BB10. More »
One of our favorite apps for iOS of 2012, Fantastical, received quite a substantial update today. The app now comes with support for time zones, multiple alerts for events, event invites, as well as a slew of small user interface tweaks that make navigation a lot easier and quicker. Flexibits, the developing team behind the new app, announced version 1.1 earlier this morning.
Users are now able to move events or duplicate them with a tap and hold, as well as going to a specific date on the calendar. Other UI tweaks include the dimming of events after they’ve passed (similar to how events are dimmed in Google Calendar), and copied text containing event info can now automatically be made into an event.
There are also more options that were added to settings, including a setting to highlight weekends, to show empty days on the DayTicker, and to display the number of today’s remaining events or date on the app icon badge. Plus, the developers introduced “state restoration” for iOS 6 users, which will save important information if you were in the middle of adding an event and forgot to return, and then eventually forced-closed the app.
Fantastical is priced at $3.99 and is based on the Mac version of the calendar app that’s been out for a while. $3.99 certainly isn’t a cheap price for an iOS app, especially for a calendar, but it comes with some great features that make it a much better alternative to the default calendar in iOS, thanks to gestures and a good-looking interface.
There’s one thing every comic fan has been yelling about for years: Why isn’t there a subscription service that lets you pay for an all-you-can-eat monthly dose of comics? Marvel just did it. Marvel Unlimited, formerly MDCU, is on iPads and iPhones now. More »
“I have a tip that can take five strokes off anyone’s golf game: It’s called an eraser,” Arnold Palmer once remarked. Yes, Even brave enough to wear ridiculous clothes and hack a small white ball around a manicured lawn, golf is a difficult and sometimes humiliating, sport.
Luckily for golfers, John McGuire feels your pain and is on a mission to make the game just a little less painful for anyone daring (and ignorant) enough to pick up a club. His new company, Active Mind Technology, wants to give the golfing masses access to the same tools traditionally reserved for the pros by leveraging the same wearable sensor-based technologies found in health-tracking devices like Fitbit, Basis and Jawbone’s Up.
And who better to assist in that endeavor than the mastermind behind the design of products like Jambox, Jawbone and Jawbone Up? Joining McGuire and his team of twenty is Yves Behar, the design and branding guru (and Chief Creative Officer of Jawbone) known for helping to design the products mentioned above as well as those for PUMA, General Electric, Samsung, Prada and more.
While Behar hasn’t assumed a title in the company, McGuire tells us that he has not only led the design of the UI, UX, branding and packaging of Active Mind’s newest product, he’s also and investor and “thankfully, even acts like a founder,” he says.
This week, McGuire, Behar and team officially unveiled Game Golf, a wearable product that employs a combination of sensors, GPS and NFC technologies to provide golfers with a stream of data and feedback to help them improve their scores.
Essentially, the device, which includes transmitter tags that are inserted into clubs and a receiver that can be attached to your belt, track every shot a user takes during a round, as well as distance, club selection and so on. And, a la health and fitness trackers, Game Golf compiles this data and syncs it with the cloud, allowing users to then access their performance data via its mobile app on their mobile devices and personal computers.
Golfers can then share highlights of their round and their overall progress with friends by way of their social network(s) of choice, and see the percentage of shots that they hit in the fairway, greens in regulation, and putting performance. Backing its software, the team has designed Game Golf’s battery to accomodate two full rounds of data tracking before requiring a charge.
Though that all equates to a good start, one feature that’s conspicuously absent is that the device is not able to measure the velocity of one’s swing (or its relative accuracy). his could deter some early adopters, it’s not a flat-out deal breaker; however, adding this capability down the road could become a significant selling point for those sitting on the fence.
And, unfortunately for those looking for instant gratification, Game Golf isn’t yet available in stores. Instead, the company has launched a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo through which it hopes to raise $125,000 in an effort to finance its product development and distribution. In spite of (or perhaps because of) the fact that it will cost a hefty $249 when it does become publicly available in stores, McGuire tells us that Game Golf has become the fastest money-raising campaign in Indiegogo’s history, raising $63K in 12 hours.
Now, two days removed from launch, the campaign has raised over $108,000. At this rate, it should meet its goal within a week, which the founder takes as a promising sign of the potential demand for its golf tracker.
Based on its initial concept and after recruiting well-known pro golfers like Lee Westwood and Graeme McDowell to help with early testing (and invest), Active Mind was able to raise seed financing from a bevy of reputable investors, including Chamath Palihapitiya, Jerry Yang (of AME Cloud Ventures), Morado Venture Partners, Crosslink Capital and Ed Colligan (the Former CEO of Palm) — to name a few.
“Game Golf gives everyone access to crucial data that can dramatically improve your golf game and handicap,” McDowell says of its appeal to golfers. “[It’s] intuitive, doesn’t disrupt your game and is essential for any golfer looking to understand their game better and knock down their handicap.”
With its Indiegogo campaign acting as a proof of concept, the startup is currently in the process of raising what McGuire tells us will be a $4 million series A round. If Game Golf is able to sustain this early demand, it will eventually look to expand into other sports, like board and motor sports and soccer, for example.
While the near-term plan involves serious iterating around Game Golf, McGuire said that the platform is being architected in such a way that it will be able to eventually help users measure activity — and provide a gamification and social layer — across multiple sports.
As to Game Golf, the founder said that users can expect to see its public launch sometime this summer.
Box has done a pretty decent job at bringing novel features to its apps on the various platforms they are present in, and today it’s turn for a couple of Microsoft’s properties to get some fresh tidbits from the cloud storage service. For starters, both of Box’s Windows Phone and Windows 8 applications will now have the ability to see easily preview files (Box says more than 75 types) — a feature that’s been available on Android since late last year, and one that’ll surely come in handy to Redmond’s user base. Additionally, Box also announced a few platform-specific goodies, with the Windows 8 app seeing the addition of a new navigation bar for quick access to docs, while the Windows Phone equivalent nabbed a revamped wide cycle tile which allows for updates to be viewed via its own Live Tile (so long as it’s the largest size). These changes are live now, so check’ em out and give ’em a whirl the next time you open your Box app.
Path, the social networking app that does a little bit of everything, has added some new features in its latest update. Path 3.0 now does private messaging (one-to-one or group), has something called ‘Stickers’ which are like Emojis on steroids and is opening up a new shop for you to buy stuff from. Basically, more of a little of everything. More »
Twitter has updated its mobile app for both iOS and Android with a few improvements, as well as some subtractions. The company improved the app’s search results, where Twitterers will see more topic and user suggestions for search queries, which are based on what’s happening in real time. Twitter also removed support for several video sharing services on the mobile app.
Specifically, the video services getting the ax are Mobypicture, Vodpod, and Posterous, but Twitpic will remain, leaving it as the only video sharing service with Twitter support. As for other changes, users will also see suggestions pop up when adding a hashtag or username as they compose a new Tweet, a feature that Tweetbot users have been enjoying for a while. However, this feature is only available on the iOS version of the app for now.
Top Tweets are also getting more attention in search results, and even older Top Tweets will show up now. For example, Twitter says that if you search for “election,” the search results may highlight Tweets from several months ago. There’s a new conversational view that shows all of the replies associated to any tweet.
And as always, the update comes with a slew of bugfixes and general performance enhancements. Plus, there’s added support for traditional Chinese, which most likely won’t affect most users, but it’s always a good thing when services add support for more languages. Both the iOS and Android versions are available now for download.
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