If Instagram/FB comes up with something like “snapchat stories” then i think SNAP will be in real trouble as that’s my favorite feature, esp featured snap where kids get their news!

— Jim Cramer (@jimcramer) November 18, 2017

Just one problem: Instagram unveiled stories in August of last year. Facebook has also introduced the feature into its messenger app, and its main homepage. Cramer is spot-on in his prediction, except that Snapchat is already feeling the consequences, very publicly, of Facebook’s outstandingly successful copy/paste job.

As you’d expect, Twitter users did not ignore Cramer’s gaffe:

They already have that. It’s killing Snapchat.

— Ryan engee (@RyanBallengee) November 18, 2017

Hahaha it’s bafflingly hilarious because this tweet was intended to make him sound current and aware.

— Marco Marandiz (@allthingsmarco) November 19, 2017

You must be a real social media expert

— Jimmy Fink (@Jimmy_Fink) November 18, 2017

Some users wondered if Cramer was playing a cruel joke.

are you trolling us?

— rob proesmans (@robproesmans) November 18, 2017

There were also some well-placed GIFs.

pic.twitter.com/1f1UsjnVF6

— Amarilys (@ammahottie) November 18, 2017

pic.twitter.com/R5XnRsbDcf

— Caffeinated Techie (@Ciscoandchai) November 18, 2017

The baffling mistake was most likely the result of a mistake in scheduling, from years earlier, but it’s still absolutely hilarious. Keep tweeting Jim.

The post Jim Cramer’s Tweet of 2017: “Facebook should try stories” appeared first on The App Store Chronicle.

His latest project, Hoodmaps.com, has me stumped. It falls between those two categories, and which way it goes is anyone’s guess.

The idea is cool: crowdsourced, (almost) un-censored neighborhood maps. When you visit a new city, you want to know where to stay, where to visit, and where to work. The contributors to Hoodmaps have you covered.

In many cities, especially my current home-town (Chicago), you also need to know where not to go. Where you will get mugged, robbed, or worse. Hoodmaps has you covered there too.

This is a map of my neighborhood.

@levelsio Nailed my neighborhood in Chicago pic.twitter.com/q1nwOHqssH

— Michael Sitver ?? (@msitver) July 16, 2017

It tells you (in a wonderfully candid way) not to go to Washington Park, which is something that Google and Apple maps could never (but absolutely should) say.

Also highlighted are the main attractions of the area, the university and the museums, and the generally ugly student apartments above. Hoodmaps, and its contributors, do a good job of boiling down a neighborhood. That is why I think this product has potential to be the travel guide of the future. If I could get a complete picture of a city with a few swipes of a map, I would use Hoodmaps wherever I went.

The challenge is, Hoodmaps has a long way to go. Community-driven products thrive on scale, and data, and as a young product it hasn’t yet benefited from a massive number of contributors. My neighborhood in DC, where I’m spending the summer, is entirely empty of captioning. Many other areas of the city are too.

Right now, Hoodmaps gives you the “god view” of a neighborhood. It hasn’t mastered the details. It may tell you “neighborhood of hipsters”, but it won’t show you where to get coffee, or where to take a date.  The way data is displayed (the shading, the captions) could also use refining. (Side note: There’s actually a lot of fascinating history behind why maps display data as they do)

Still, Hoodmaps can be a winner. Watching Pieter Levels transform his most successful project to-date, Nomadlist, from a spreadsheet to a fully functioning search engine and community has given me confidence in his skill for iteration and community building.

If the interface becomes a bit clearer and every city develops a community of passionate contributors to fill in the blanks on the map, Hoodmaps could find its way into my daily toolkit. I look forward to seeing it develop further, but you should give it a try today (and maybe share some knowledge on your city).

Check out your city on Hoodmaps and tweet me what you think.

The post Meet Hoodmaps: The Unfiltered Map of Your City appeared first on The App Store Chronicle.

Part

of this is simply an engagement trick. The new logo draws the eye in with its use of color and white space, giving Tinder a second-look from users who forgot it long ago. This is a solution to what some app-store developers are calling “the folder of death”, the folder where users put dating apps to forget about them.

This redesign is also a symbol of Tinder’s recent pivot, from passionate short-term flings (represented by the starkly contrasting, passionate red and white of the old logo), towards more traditional, subtle dating.

Tinder recently unveiled a new service called “Tinder Gold” that will allow paying users to see every user that has swiped right on them (thus eliminating the need to swipe altogether), which is rolling out in the United States within a few weeks.

Now, we wait for the cheesy designer blog post that follows every  major corporate redesign, so we can hear about the 100 different logo options they looked at before deciding to literally just flip two colors and call it a day.

I like this new logo. I swiped right.

(Some Relevent Tinder Reading –>)

The post Tinder’s New Logo: What It Means (2017) appeared first on The App Store Chronicle.

Commaful’s video-creation tool

We’ve all seen them: those short Facebook videos with text-overlays that gets millions and millions of views. They’re optimized for Facebook’s algorithm, and they go crazy viral. And they look super-simple to create.

They’re short, with standard text-overlays, stock audio, and pre-made gifs and clips. Companies like Futurism build their entire social presence around them.

Yet, most of these companies are using old, expensive, slow tools to make these videos. I know for a fact that Futurism builds videos for its millions of followers using Apple’s Final Cut Pro X.

It looks like that’s about to change though, thanks to a tool I discovered by chance in an Uber to YCombinator’s Startup School. It’s called Commaful, and it bring the time it takes to produce viral Facebook videos from hours to 7-10 minutes, and the cost down to zero.
When I met Commaful’s founder, Sydney, in that Uber, I was skeptical. If such an easy solution existed, wouldn’t big media companies be using it already? So I devised a little test. I asked “What could I create with no training and 7 minutes of production time?”

I started the clock, and got to work.

With limited time to decide on a design, or choose images, I decided to make a little advertisement for Unsplash.com, my favorite site for getting free stock photos.

I dove into the tool, and created a 33-second video in 7 minutes. I did it all from a web browser on a not-very-powerful Chromebook. No fancy software, no professional training, and no hours of production time necessary. All it took was one tool, some typing, and some clicking (to choose photos and move to the next slide).

Commaful’s video-creation tool is simple to a fault. The text is automatically laid-out onto each “slide” or scene of your video. There are no font-size or font-color options for now (according to the company, these options are available to influencers on a case-by-case-basis, and will be available site-wide early next year).

Choosing a background from Commaful’s sizeable collection of free gifs and images takes one click. Uploading your own is also super-simple. Creating, deleting, and re-ordering slides is effortless as well.

The most advanced feature in the entire site is its export options. With three clicks I downloaded a facebook-optimized, auto-paced video of my 7-minute creation. Commaful also offers an instagram-optimized version of your video which can be created with the same three clicks.

Commaful also hosts an interactive version of your video which you can share to Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr with just a few clicks.

Professional marketers and content creators might need to work with the company to publish unbranded videos right now, but silent caption videos are on the rise all over the web, and Commaful might just be the tool that makes producing one accessible to all.

The post Rejoice! Make Facebook caption videos In 10 minutes or less (with one free tool) appeared first on The App Store Chronicle.

When you have to ask “Why is my website so slow?” or “Why is my website down?” or “Should I update to the latest version of WordPress?”, that’s time away from things that actually matter to you and your business/blog.

For years now I’ve hosted several sites (including this one on their Tiny plan) on Flywheel. It’s 2016 and the time has come for me to give my honest review of their hosting. Here we go…

Interface and Tools

The Backup screen for The App Store Chronicle on Flywheel.

When  you host a site with Flywheel, you sacrifice a bit of control. Unlike many hosts, there is no SSH access or CPanel interface available. Certain settings cannot be changed. What you get in return for this sacrifice is a beautiful, simple interface for doing the important little tasks you might need to do when managing your website.

Updates and backups are conducted automatically. Thirty days of backups are stored right in Flywheel’s dashboard. Restoring a backup from yesterday, a month ago, or a year ago takes only one or two clicks. The interfaces for advanced tasks like editing the database, flushing the cache, or updating DNS are much cleaner and more refined than in any other host I’ve used (although Digitalocean’s tools are well-designed, if not WP-specific).

As a result of being an agency-focused host, Flywheel’s dashboard is also quite intuitive for managing a number of sites in one place. With just a click or two you can clone your site, or turn it into a template, a “blueprint” in their terminology.

For agencies/creatives who don’t want to pay for hosting the site while they’re building it, Flywheel offers a feature called “Demo Sites” which allows you to host a site with them for free while you design it. Your site will be password-protected, and it will auto-delete in two weeks unless you extend or activate it, but either action only takes a few more clicks. Cool, huh?

So while Flywheel lacks some of the most advanced features of hosts like Digitalocean and Godaddy, it makes up for it in intuitive, beautiful admin areas that make common (and even advanced) tasks painless.

Interface Score: (4/5)

Performance/ Reliability:

Flywheel’s speed and performance numbers aren’t record-breaking, but they’re very good. In a testament to the reliability of their underlying technology, I can’t recall the last time my Flywheel site crashed or went offline. It may have happened at some point, but I don’t remember the instance.

This contrasts sharply with my experience with discount hosts like Hostgator and Godaddy which seemed to crash weekly when I was a customer (although these issues seem to have been mitigated in newer WordPress hosts like Google Cloud Platform, Digital Ocean, and Amazon Web Services).

Thanks to the infrastructure that Flywheel hosts on, even when my site has gone super-viral and seen 100-1000+ concurrent visitors, my site has stayed  up and speedy (on a $15/month plan). That’s really impressive.

(For the record, we’ve worked hard to cut down our speed/server-impact so we can handle big traffic sikes. Many of our static assets are served via Cloudflare’s free CDN, and we cache and minify our JS/HTML and optimize our images to reduce file size. Also worth noting that all of this is free to do, and some of it, like the caching, is built right into flywheel sites automatically)

Performance/Reliability Score: (5/5)

Support:

Flywheel’s support is probably its biggest selling point. A lot of this stems from that Flywheel is a “managed” hosting provider. They specialize in WordPress, so they know it inside and out.

They monitor sites for malware and security issues, automatically (and safely) upgrade my site to the latest version, and back up the site on a daily basis. Having been hacked before, this is a real comfort to me. I feel good that if something fishy/nasty targets me, my site, one of my longest-term projects, is safe. They’ll also handle complex tasks like migration from an old host for you (for free).

When an issue came up that requires support, Flywheel’s support team usually did a very good job of helping me work through the issue. When you call or email many hosts (looking at you Godaddy), you wait on hold to speak to a call center in India. If you’re lucky, those hosts might patch you through to a call center somewhere in Nevada with a contract worker who may be able to answer your question.

The time Flywheel’s CEO answered my support email

When I have a question or an issue in Flywheel, I can usually send out an email and get a solution in under an hour (or much less if I call). Their support team is well-trained and US-based, and often employees from throughout the company will help with support tasks. I’ve even had support emails answered by their CEO (see above).

They also have an extensive support help center, with articles on everything from setting up DNS, to restoring backups, to WordPress best-practices.

The only problem is that their support is not 24/7. They only offer support during regular business hours. If there’s an emergency (i.e your site is down), you can email their emergency email address and wake up an employee to answer your question, but if you have any non-urgent questions over the weekend, you’ll have to wait until Monday to get answers.

Support score: (4/5)

Pricing:

Flywheel is far from the cheapest WordPress host on the market. Their “Tiny” plan starts at $15 a month. Their souped-up “Professional” plan is $75 a month. Hosting on Google’s cloud platform will cost you around $5 a month, and hosting on Digitalocean will cost you $10. With that said, Flywheel’s price are very competitive for what they offer.

WP Engine, one of the most well-known players in the “managed” WordPress industry, charges $99 a month for its own version of the $75 “Professional” plan, with near identical features. The “Tiny” plan is the most affordable “managed” plan I’ve seen. Flywheel will also never throttle you, charge you extra, or chastize you if you run over your limits. At worst, they’ll ask (not force, from what I can tell) you to upgrade to a larger plan the next month.

Flywheel also has a few features that they charge extra for. Until recently, they used to charge $10 per month for SSL/HTTPS support, which I counted seriously against them (because Google recently prioritized HTTPS for search).

As of the week I’m writing this, SSL support is included for free (and it’s super-easy to enable). Adding Multi-site support and Flywheel’s speedy CDN to your site will cost you $10 a piece, but most webmasters won’t need those add-ons. There are free, excellent alternatives to those features (i.e Cloudflare’s free CDN) that do many of the same things just as well.

Support score: (4/5)

Conclusion:

If you can’t tell, I’m very happy to host with Flywheel. I don’t use them to host all of my sites, because they’re a bit pricey for some purposes, but they are the most supportive, speedy, and reliable host I’ve encountered… and it keeps getting better. When I first became a customer, many of the features in their platform didn’t exist. If you’re looking for a speedy WordPress host that you don’t have to think about, Flywheel is a good choice.

Flywheel is not for everyone, but would I recommend it? Hell yeah.

Total score: A – (Very Good)

Plans:

• $15 Tiny Plan
• $30 Personal Plan
• $75 Professional Plan
• Custom plans (based on what you need)

The post Hosting WordPress Sites with Flywheel – The Honest Review appeared first on The App Store Chronicle.

Many computer whizzes out there would tell you to grab a can of compressed air, and a Pentalobe P5 screwdriver and clean out your Macbook yourself. There are plenty of tutorials for cleaning your macbook on the web, and that is an option, but it’s not your best option.

The materials (compressed air air, special screwdriver, etc.) cost you money. If you mess up, you could break your fan (or worse) and void your warranty. Compressed air isn’t near 100% effective.

The Secret to Cleaning your Macbook

Here’s my little secret to free, safe, effective Macbook cleanings: The Genius bar. Most Mac owners know of it, but they don’t realize the free services that geniuses will perform.

You don’t need to be under warranty or Applecare. Just show up to your local Apple genius bar, make an appointment, and ask your genius to “clean the dust out of the inside of my mac”.

There are a few key benefits to cleaning your laptop this way:

• First of all, if they break anything, they’ll replace it. Computer fans are fragile, but when Apple works on your computer, they take full responsibility for all damages.
• Second of all, it’s free. You can bring Apple any mac, regardless of age (Ok, Maybe not this one), and they will clean it for you.
• They’ll also do a better job than you will, because Apple technicians are equipped with special computer vacuums which clean out dust more effectively than your standard canned-air.
• It’s fast too! The entire process takes no more than 10-15 minutes.

So what are you waiting for? It’s fast, it’s free, and it will make your computer work so much better. Bring in your Macbook today.

The post The Secret To Fixing Your Hot, Slow Macbook Pro (For Free) appeared first on The App Store Chronicle.

Luckily, there’s an easy fix for both. Here’s how to fix Safari’s January 2016 bug.

On a Mac (OSX)

1. Open a fresh Safari window. Do not touch it. The error will activate as soon as you touch the search bar (for reasons you’ll see.
2. In the top menu, go to Safari>Preferences. A preferences window will open up.
3. Go to the “Search” tab in the preferences window (signified by a magnifying glass and the words “Search).
4. Deselect “Include Search Engine Selections” and “Include Safari Selections”. (If you’ve never really used a Mac, this means Click the blue checkboxes. If you do it correctly, they’ll turn whitish).
5. Close Safari.
6. Congrats. Safari should now work on your Mac. (Now check out Morning Short, a daily curated short story (no browser required!). It’s the best way to start your morning and read more fiction.)

On an iPad, iPhone, or iPod (iOS)

1. Go to your “Settings” app, scroll down to the settings for system apps, and select “Safari”.
2. Tap on the toggle-button for “Safari Suggestions” to turn it off. The box should turn from white to green.
3. Safari should now work on your iOS device.
4. (Go check out Morning Short, a daily curated short story (no browser required!). It’s the best way to start your morning and read more fiction).

Here’s to hoping Apple can fix this bug quickly, so we can get our search suggestions back – Michael

The post Guide: Here’s how to fix Safari (OSX + IOS) In January 2016 appeared first on The App Store Chronicle.

A 2D version of the Virtual Reality experience

You’re sitting in someone’s living room. It’s mid afternoon, and you’re having tea, chatting with a woman who looks vaguely familiar. You look around, and observe an ornate rug, and the leather couch you’re sitting on.

Suddenly, you hear a rattling noise. You turn to find that the teacups on the table in front of you are shaking, as are the walls, and the chandelier above your head. The creepy, famous actress in front of you says ominously “They’re here”. And the world goes black.

Virtual Reality horror films are here, and they are much creepier and more immersive than anything you’ve ever seen. They’re more real. They’re more detailed. They’re more immersive than anything ever previously produced.

Today my C1-Glass Virtual Reality glasses arrived, and I decided to test them out on Lionsgate’s “Insidious VR”, a virtual reality experience based on the “Insidious” movie franchise.

It was absolutely terrifying. I let several friends test it out as well, and it scared the pants off of them. Each one literally jumped in the air after certain scares.

The experience starts in an eery living room, with Elise Rainier sitting across from you, in three dimensions. As if you were in the room, you can look around, from floor to ceiling, as you listen to her talk.

The lights flicker, the chandelier burns out, and suddenly, you’re in a black void, surrounded by creepy ghost voice. Then, some more scares happen. I won’t spoil it any further, but it is a wild experience.

Until I tried Insidious, it never occurred to me how disruptive VR is for film. Now that I’ve seen it, I can say it will disrupt film as much as, if not more than television, color, or computers.

VR is an entirely new medium, allowing for a  new hybrid of a video game and a film, something participatory, immersive, but with a set script. It’s like sitting in on a play, but standing on the stage, being an unwitting participant to the performance.

I have a feeling it’s incredibly expensive to produce VR horror right now, but having seen it, I’m not sure I can ever watch a horror “film” again. VR is just a level above.

Until today, I thought that VR’s biggest application was in education (I mean who doesn’t want a class field trip to Mars?), but now, I’m confident that VR entertainment will be unbelievably popular, and unbelievably immersive.

The C1 Glass, a Google-Cardboard-compatible device

A Very VR Future

Imagine the movie theater, made for VR. Where you and your buddy can be the stars of your own buddy comedy. Where you can experience that war movie as if you were fighting alongside the main character. Where you can experience love, death, and imaginary worlds, in person.

VR is going to be transformative, and apps like these are probably the best example of that yet.

The most amazing thing about the Insidious trailer, and similar experiences, is that they are accessible. With a standard iOS or Android device, a pair of headphones, and a $20 pair of special glasses, you can experience a whole new world. You don’t need some $1,500 piece of hardware to enjoy V.R. I’m incredibly excited about VR. Are you? Tweet your feelings.

You can try the Insidious experience yourself with the free Insidious VR app , and the C1, or any other Google Cardboard compatible device.

The post I Scared The Pants Off My Friends With a $22 VR Device And a Horror Film appeared first on The App Store Chronicle.

Maybe one day we’ll eliminate pain, but for now, at least we can make injuries hurt less, with wearables like Cur (the subject of this article).

The CUR wearable

Cur (pronounced “cure”) is a wireless, wearable TENS (Transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation)device.

Cur’s pain relief comes from a little device built into a patch. You place the patch on what’s hurting, and it delivers targeted electrical shocks to cancel out pain signals.

TENS is far from new, but Cur’s makers claim that an array of sensors and a layer of intelligence makes the Cur more effective, and easier to use than other TENS machines (it’s definitely better looking).

What struck me the most about Cur was its size. Roughly the size of a large bandage, and wireless, Cur just looks a lot less threatening than other TENS devices. From a usability standpoint, Cur is also much faster out of the box. Within seconds, it automatically senses your pain, and implements a treatment plan. With a smartphone app, you can adjust treatment via bluetooth.

Courtesy: Cur

The Cur is pretty pricey, ringing in at $300. Besides the sticker price, you’re also going to need to pony up cash for replacements for the gel bands that hold the Cur in place (they last around two weeks a piece, according to the company).

 Still, if Cur works (which I don’t doubt it does),  this will sell well. Pain is a universal problem, and a problem that people are universally willing to spend large sums of money to solve.

I love medical wearables, and it’s exciting to see new OTC devices like this coming to market.

Still, nothing is as cool as this gadget giving sight to the blind.

The post A Wearable That Fights Pain — Intelligently appeared first on The App Store Chronicle.

You don’t need this. Nobody needs one. And yet tens of thousands of people are buying them. So-called “selfie buttons“. Teeny, tiny bluetooth buttons that allows you to take selfies (and other photos) on your smartphone from up to 60 feet away. They’re going mega-viral.

That’s why I thought you’d like to know that Groupon is offering selfie buttons for $20 off of their regular price. For the next week, the “Selfie Button” will run you just under $8 from Groupon .

The “Selfie Button” will run you just under $8 from Groupon, and has a range of around 60 feet.
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I’m not much of a selfier, but bluetooth buttons can also be really useful for other things, so I’ll definitely be placing my order this week.

You can buy one for yourself (or your selfie-loving friend) here, or you can just laugh at what we’ve become as a society, and the people who are buying this.

One of my favorite personal selfies

Checking out the Golan Heights #soldierselfie #selfie #middleeast

A photo posted by Michael Sitver (@msitver) on Jul 15, 2014 at 11:07pm PDT

People who bought this item, also bought the potty-training iPad stand.

The post You Really Don’t Need This $8 “Selfie Button” (But You’re Still Going To Buy It) appeared first on The App Store Chronicle.