We have received some great feedback from those who have been testing it over the last several months, and we are excited to officially release it to everyone.

To celebrate the launch, we are giving away some awesome Apple prizes, including iPads, Apple TVs and a MacBook Air!  Visit us on Facebook and Twitter to enter for a chance to win.

Be sure to check out Face Fun on the App Store and let the laughs begin!

]]> http://taptivate.com/blog/introducing-face-fun-for-iphone/feed 0 http://taptivate.com/blog/introducing-face-fun-for-iphone http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/taptivate/~3/LEu-aEx1py4/codebooth-takes-3rd-at-codebits http://taptivate.com/blog/codebooth-takes-3rd-at-codebits#comments Wed, 28 Dec 2011 07:44:50 +0000 Charles Eidschun http://taptivate.com/blog/?p=189393866 Congratulations to Bruno de Carvalho (@brunodecarvalho) and his teammates Fred Oliveira (@f) and Fábio Batista (@fbatista) for their recent 3rd place finish at Codebits.

Codebits is Portugal’s Yahoo hack day. It’s the largest programming event in Portugal, bringing together programmers, security experts, designers, hackers and all sorts of people interested in the software world overall. Its most known feature is the 48 hour coding competition.

“Codebooth is a project for Codebits, a 48h coding competition. We built a smart photo booth that recognizes faces, emotions, clothes and gender. We also added a bit of natural language processing too so that it took voice commands and could respond to input like “show me all the happy people dressed in white” or “give me all the people dressed in orange”.”

It was the 3rd most voted project by the audience, in the 48 hour coding competition.

This is their 90 second video demo of what they built:

Get It Now!

We’re continuing our tradition of substantial and timely updates with Friends 1.7, which should be available in the coming weeks. I can’t say much about what’s new, but let’s just say that Instagram fans should get excited.

• Search for your friends on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
• Huge photo improvements! You can now post photos directly to Facebook.
• Comment on any Facebook photo.
• Awesome new way to view your contacts.
• Retweet any post!
• View photos from picplz.com in-line.
• Fixed an issue with Instapaper login.
• Timestamps on every post.
• Major speed and stability enhancements.

We also have a pretty big surprise in store for the release, so be sure to stay tuned! Grab a copy of Friends today, if you haven’t already.

• Twitteriffic
• Osfoora
• Twittelator
• Weet
• TweetDeck
• Echofon
• Seesmic
• Friends
• TweetList
• Hibari

“More specifically, developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no.”.

If you are not familiar with Twitter for iPhone’s origin, it all started when a company called atebits (led by an amazing developer named Loren Brichter), created Tweetie. It was the leading Twitter client, by far, and had a number of tremendously inspiring touches to it. It was so awesome, in fact, that hundreds of thousands of people paid for it not once, but twice. I gladly did, I found it the fastest, smoothest, and best way to use Twitter. So did Twitter Inc., it seems, because they acquired Tweetie and Loren’s talents in April 2010.

Many developers thought this sounded the death knell for Twitter apps, considering the best client was now a free app with no ads or limitations. However, Friends has done great since launch, but we recognise it’s not a traditional Twitter client. The scariest part of the acquisition was that many developers thought, in time, the app would get access to API features other clients wouldn’t. Facebook’s app does, so why wouldn’t Twitter’s? I don’t believe this has happened yet, but never say never.

Something dramatically changed in Twitter 3.3, and I don’t just mean with the trending topics bar. It just doesn’t feel like Loren is at the helm anymore, or worse, corporate policies and deadlines are resulting in standards dropping. We should all remember that Twitter isn’t the startup that it once was, it’s a for-profit corporation with 300 employee’s to pay and many millions in venture capital backing it.

One of the most under-rated features of Tweetie was that it never crashed, literally never. Upon updating to Twitter 3.3, the app crashed on launch every time. I first put this down to my iPhone and installed a fresh copy, yet it was still crashing every time. I eventually came back to the app about an hour later, and it worked fine.

As for the new trending topics bar, regardless of whether it is showing ads or not, it seems to be very poorly implemented. It randomly appears and disappears, doesn’t animate, and worse, covers tweets. Loren’s programming talents are well known within the community, and I struggle to accept that he wrote this buggy piece of code. I hear an update has been submitted that fixes a lot of the behaviour with the bar, but I think we’ll have to live with it in some form from now on.

I’m sad to see the direction Twitter Inc. is taking, and feel their attempts at monetization are going to alienate the influential part of their user base who advocated it when it originally launched. Don’t mistake me for wanting Twitter to never make money, in fact, I am ready to hand over money to them right now. I would gladly pay a monthly subscription just to use the service. Alas, I fear there just isn’t enough people that would, and promoted partners will continue paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for tweets that I will simple try to ignore. What’s the next step for Twitter and monetization? I don’t know, I just hope they are smart enough to leave the Twitter API alone. ¡Viva la Tweetie!

Buy Now

In case you haven’t heard about Friends, it is the best way to use Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn on your iPhone or iPod touch. Comment, Like, read your news feed, flick through photo albums, post on your friends’ walls and much more. So, what’s new in 1.5?

• A brand new home screen! Keep up to date with all your friends and view your Facebook and Twitter notifications right in the main menu. Believe me, this changes how you use Friends. You will never miss a comment, post, mention, tag or photo again!
• You can now manually link a social profile to a contact! As good as our automatic contact syncing is, there are a few contacts that just cannot be matched together! Try this out by viewing a contact, then tapping the little person icon in the toolbar.
• Don’t like sorting your contacts by last name? Sort them by first name! Head on over into the settings and switch to your hearts desire.
• Friends is now much faster and smoother to use. We will admit the first version of Friends was a little laggy in certain places (Posts, ahem), 1.5 makes this a thing of the past!
• Navigate with ease! Try out the new mode switcher by tapping on the white arrow in the navigation bar. A little tip for you: If you want to view your address book groups every time you tap Contacts, just select Groups in the switcher! Friends remembers your last choice.
• Not a fan of Instapaper? You can now send links to Read It Later.

We really hope you enjoy using Friends 1.5, be sure to let us know what you think by leaving a review on the App Store. Grab Friends now, if you haven’t already!

We thought for a long time on how to fix the problem, and ultimately it was your suggestions that shaped the way we decided to go. One kajillion revisions later, I think we have nailed it. We have come up with an awesome new layout that feels relevant, simple and just plain useful. Going back to the drawing board and reflecting on your previous decisions is a powerful tool I think a lot of developers are too stubborn to use.

Facebook and Twitter users will especially love this new look, as you can see at a glance all of the latest notifications involving your friends. Simple click the arrow and you’re taken to the relevant post, nifty!

Hold on, you say! How do I access all of those handy options that were on the home screen previously? Never fear, we have got you covered. Our resident design guru, Marcelo, had a moment of pure genius (one of many) and came up with a solution.

It’s really simple to use, you tap the arrow in the navigation bar and choose an option. You can easily jump to viewing all of your friends photos or videos at the tap of a finger, or switch from network to network. Because this feature is super useful, we have also added it to Contacts, you can now quickly switch between groups, calls and all of your social networks.

The new home screen is just one of the new features in a Friends update coming soon. We can’t go into much detail on the others yet, but we can say the app feels much faster and smoother. This will be a free update for existing users, so if you haven’t already, grab your copy of Friends today!