For me, coffee at Starbucks is secondary to the great music you discover courtesy of your twenty-something barista’s Spotify DJ skills. The good news is you can now easily save those Spotify playlists for listening later through an update to the Starbucks iPhone app today.
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As we reported last week, Philips is readying new HomeKit enabled smart home accessories, including new lights with better color reproduction and a HomeKit-compatible bridge box, for early October launch. However, it seems that some of the new products have appeared on sites like Amazon and Best Buy a bit prematurely, as Philips is yet to officially acknowledge the new devices.
This is not a complete list of what Philips has in the wings, more should surface soon …
SoundHound, a popular sound recognition app for detecting and searching for songs and other audio clips, today gets an update that brings integration with the just launched Apple Music streaming service.
With the updated SoundHound app landing today, users will now get an “Apple Music Listen Now” link to listen to a song on the streaming service (when available) through the home screen, song pages, and throughout the app.
Other competitive apps, such as Shazam, have already updated with similar functionality. The apps previously only linked users to purchase songs through iTunes and other services, but also promote competitive streaming services for listening such as Spotify and Rdio. For SoundHound, users will find an Apple Music streaming link next to songs through various features, including: music identification, personalized History, Top Charts, or Music Maps.
Interestingly, SoundHound will also be promoting Apple Music’s Beats 1 live radio station:
SoundHound is also showcasing Apple Music’s new global radio streaming station Beats 1. Users will see a “Beats 1 Radio” row within song pages, enabling easy, one-tap access to listen to the streaming radio broadcast, which features various artists hosting programs and full-time DJs, led by ex-BBC host Zane Lowe.
You can grab SoundHound on the App Store now.
Runtastic, the popular iOS app that has long been among the top 10 fitness & health apps on the App Store, is looking forward to Apple’s new HealthKit platform and planning to support it in a future update. Like the other companies we spoke with earlier this week including Strava, RunKeeper, iHealth, and Withings, Runtastic is embracing HealthKit and thinks it will ultimately make its iOS app better for users. We spoke with the company’s CEO and Head of iOS development to get their thoughts on HealthKit…
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Whenever Apple introduces a new feature baked into iOS that was previously a domain ruled by third-party apps like its new HealthKit platform and Health app in iOS 8, questions inevitably come up about how it will impact other developers and competing platforms. That’s why we were interested in finding out how some of the top fitness and health app developers and accessory makers are reacting to Apple’s HealthKit announcement.
We reached out to some of the big names in the health and fitness app world, as well as companies like Withings and iHealth that sell iOS-connected health and medical accessories such as blood pressure monitors through Apple stores. Not only did all of the companies we spoke with— RunKeeper, Withings, Strava, and iHealth— confirm they are already planning integration with their ecosystems, they also talked about how having one central location for users to manage health and fitness data will indeed be a good thing for the business.
RunKeeper CEO Jason Jacobs told me he’s excited that Apple is bringing “some of the other key players in the ecosystem (doctors, EMRs, etc) into the discussion” and confirmed both his RunKeeper and Breeze app will soon support Healthkit. Others are also excited for integration with the medical industry that currently uses a highly fragmented record keeping system for health data.
Here’s what they had to say:
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Waze, the navigation app maker that Google picked up last year, announced today that its updating its mobile apps with calendar integration. With the updated app, iOS and Android users will now see “events with location info will automatically appear” in the navigation list within Waze. That means any events in your calendar that have location info associated with them will be viewable from within Waze.
The company notes that only two upcoming events from your Calendar will be displayed in the navigation list. Users that want to disable the Calendar integration can do so from the iOS Settings app.
The updated app isn’t yet live on the App Store but should be rolling out any minute.
We’ve seen lots of iOS 7 concepts popping up lately thanks to all the rumors that Jony Ive’s new role on the software side of things could mean major changes for the next major iOS update. Many of the concepts borrow from features already available to jailbreak users, and there seems to be a big focus on widgets and lock screen enhancements. We’re not too sure that iOS 7 will get the full Ive treatment like some are expecting, but this latest iOS concept from designer F. Bianco certainly gives us a taste of the possibilities. Rather than just focusing on one area of iOS, Bianco presents a number of concepts for widgets, app switching, media controls, and much more. Go past the break for screenshots:
Apple’s CEO Tim Cook hinted this past week during his interview at D10 that we could expect closer ties with Facebook and to “stay tuned” when asked about Twitter-like integration in iOS. Now, according to a report from TechCrunch, the much-anticipated integration of Facebook will happen in “the latest version of iOS.” There are not many details provided by the report, but it did note Apple is still trying to decide “exactly how sharing will work” and that things could change before iOS 6 is unveiled:
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