TechCrunch
Apple Launches iOS 7 Tech Talks For Developers In SF, NYC, Tokyo, Shanghai, Berlin And London
Apple has just announced a series of Tech Talks for developers building apps for iOS 7. This is a relatively common occurrence as Apple likes to get evangelists out to talk to developers and help them on a more personal basis than just WWDC.
The talks are important because Apple sold out its main developer conference extremely quickly this year, leaving many developers in the lurch. Now they’ll be able to get lab time and talk time with Apple engineers in order to hopefully get the most out of iOS 7.
The talks will be held in San Francisco, NYC, Tokyo, Shanghai, Berlin and London and — for the first time — are split between ‘App Developer’ days and ‘Game Developer’ days. Typically the subject matter had been interleaved in one rolling session. Now, Apple is splitting it out.
This actually makes a lot of sense because the technologies used in games and apps do differ quite a bit. A regular app developer might never have to tap into Game Center, Sprite Kit or OpenGL ES technologies, where a game developer is steeped in those frameworks.
Note that you cannot choose to attend both the app day and game day programs, you must pick one or the other to attend in each city. There will be videos of the event presentations posted shortly after the last event on December 18th, so even if developers don’t get in, they’ll be able to see the program. These events typically hold around 400 attendees per session.
You can apply if you’re over 13 today or earlier, and attendees are randomly selected from qualified applicants. So this isn’t a time-sensitive draft like the WWDC ticket fiasco, where they sold out in around 90 seconds. Apply and you have a chance to go.
If you’re a developer looking to go, you can see the full schedule of talks for each day and apply here.
Google+ May Finally Matter Thanks To YouTube Comments
You didn’t really need a Google+ account until now. You might have one whether you wanted it or not. But YouTube’s new commenting system requires a presence on Google+. And there’s no real alternative to YouTube for video. Google+ may have mattered before in theory, but now it matters in practice.
Google+ is really a social identity data layer designed to help Google personalize all your products and improve ad targeting. The more it knows about you, the better it is at giving you a good experience and making money. Long-term, social is not an option for the search giant. It’s a necessity.
Before Google+, Google knew who you emailed and maybe Gchatted with. Depending on whether you browsed while signed in to a Google account, it would know what you searched for and mapped. If you were on Android or used its other products, it might have known a bit more. But it didn’t know or had to guess about your age, education and work history, interests, and social graph.
So Google+ launched in 2011 under the guise of a social network. That’s a convenient way for a company to get you to volunteer a ton of information about yourself. Personalize a profile with biographical info, add friends and colleagues, follow brands, and +1 and comment on your feed.
Sounds great, seven years late. Facebook and Twitter handled much of this and had already built strong network effects. You could go elsewhere for social networking, so didn’t you need a Google+ account yet and Google wasn’t getting the juicy data it wanted.
Google began requiring a Google+ account to sign up for Gmail at the start of 2012. Many would argue that Gmail is the best email provider, but there are alternatives. And if you did end up with a Google+ account (though not yet required for Gmail users), there wasn’t anywhere it was mandatory to use. Even passively, though, having a G+ account lets Google start tying usage data from across its products to your identity.
Google went a step further pushing G+ when it unified Google Talk (Gchat) with Google+ Messenger into Hangouts which requires a Google+ account. Still, there’s plenty of other messaging options like SMS, Facebook, and WhatsApp.
But if you want to watch home-made cat videos, or music videos, or viral videos, you’re going to YouTube. It dominates the space. Sorry, Vimeo and Dailymotion. And if you want to comment on a YouTube video, Google announced yesterday you’ll soon need a G+ account.
The whole YouTube (and Blogger) commenting system will shift to be powered exclusively by Google+. All comments must be tied to an account.
Helping Users…
For users, this change will likely be wonderful. First, it should banish some of the trolls spewing racism, sexism and homophobia. The anonymity of a one-off YouTube account created a safe haven for filth. People will still be able to create a pseudonymous G+ account and comment from that, but having to switch back and forth between that and their real accounts could be enough to silence some of the slurs. A more compassionate Internet, ahoy!
Relying on G+ will also give YouTube signals for ranking and sorting conversations in comments. Up top above random strangers, it can show comments from people you know, who are famous, that you’ve whitelisted, or who replied to one of your G+ posts. [Disclosure: Nundu Janakiram, a YouTube product manager on comments, is a friend and former roommate, but he's had no influence or input on this article.]
…Help Google
But for Google+ itself, becoming the backbone of YouTube comments makes it mandatory for a much wider audience, and could breathe life into what many consider a ghost town.
Initially, it will drive sign-ups from a critical demographic — the youngins who spend all day on YouTube. Capturing that audience is crucial to G+’s social network avoiding a reputation of being old and boring.
With time, the integration could fill G+ with more content — something sorely lacking due to low visitation and the lack of a real write API for letting users push content there from other apps. Right now it’s mostly a stream of photos, stemming from the social network’s early support for high-resolution shots and its new native Snapseed filters.
You’ll easily be able to syndicate comments you leave on YouTube to Google+, effectively sharing the video you were talking about, too. Those comments on YouTube or shares to G+ could inspire replies you’ll come back to check, generating more engagement. Knowing who you converse with about videos will strengthen Google’s understanding of your social graph.
The move could also bring more celebrities onto Google+. Recruiting public figures has been a fertile strategy for Twitter and Facebook. Since video uploaders get comments on their own videos ranked high, you might see more celebs uploading YouTube clips from their own accounts, and commenting on those of their famous friends to get more exposure. Normal folks might gravitate to Google+ if it means getting close to the stars they love.
We can only guess how the all-seeing, all-knowing Google will use our YouTube viewing history to target ads now that its tied to our identities. If you watch a lot of videos tagged “cycling,” perhaps it might know to show you more ads for local bike shops and events. It could also use viewing data to put you in a cohort and show you ads that worked well when blasted at other people who watch the same videos.
It’s been over two years since Google launched Google+, what it internally refers to as its “social spine.” The goal always seemed to be to weave it through all of Google’s products cautiously enough and with enough added benefits to avoid epic backlash. True traction and engagement has been slow, though. YouTube holds a huge growth opportunity, yet its users are among the prickliest in the company’s ecosystem.
But by using the power of social to sanitize YouTube comments, one of the dirtiest corners of the web, Google+ may win a place in the hearts and identities of millions.
Instagram Gets A Mild iOS 7 Redesign With Edge-To-Edge Images
Instagram has been updated for Apple’s iOS 7 today with a new design that puts photos front and center. The app has not been re-written or torn down for the logic of iOS 7 so much as trimmed and tucked to fit with the aesthetic.
Instagram’s previous designs had already been winnowed a bit to make them feel more in line with the Android app, so the design didn’t have to pull a full 180. Instead, borders were removed to take the images full bleed, buttons were flattened and menu bars trimmed of borders. The new profile view shows off the app’s adherence to iOS 7′s new default white background as well.
What you won’t find here, however, is a major change that takes into account iOS 7′s new layering features or its heavy use of dynamics and physics. There is certainly lip service paid to conventions like the circular profile pictures, but this isn’t a complete turnover of thinking with iOS 7 in mind. It myst be said, however, that not every app needs to make design decisions that use every tool in the toolbox. Instagram is about the photos and the team says that the changes it made are designed to put your photos first, which makes sense.
To that end, they’ve also increased the display resolution of images and tweaked the grid to make images bigger.
“We led our redesign with a focus on clarity to keep the feel of Instagram clean, simple and grounded in the photos and videos you discover and share,” says a company blog post.
Nonetheless, it should make Instagram feel more at home on your iOS 7 device. Notably, Instagram’s very three-dimensional icon remains the same, and still sticks out amongst all of the other re-thought apps on my springboard.
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