There's no such thing as the perfect app

When you pick up your phone, what’s the first thing you do? Chances are you’re tapping on your favorite mobile app. And, according to the data, you’re not alone. Research shows that people in the US spend an average of three hours a day on a smartphone or tablet and 87% of that time is spent using apps. So, why do we spend such a huge chunk of time using apps? It’s simple: apps are what make our smartphones feel “smart.” 

Whether it’s through killer design or essential utility, apps turn our phones into our second brain. That’s time well spent. What you might not realize is that the best mobile apps are always changing. Developers comb through data on how we use their apps to uncover ways to improve them. So, that app you check hourly should never be 100% perfect by design — because, like you, it’s always evolving. “Finished” shouldn’t be a concept that app developers embrace. 

As people’s wants and needs change, products must change, too. App developers, like the ones on AOL’s Alpha team, need to embrace this. Getting an app out into the wild quickly is the Alpha team’s ideal scenario. Opening the door for feedback helps the team dive back into the development cycle to make enhancements users want. Alpha’s agile approach to apps is pretty unique. Research shows that over 50% of app developers take six months or more to design and release an app. The Alpha team sets their goal at just six short weeks. 

In the case of photo and video filter app Vivv, where the Alpha development team started wasn’t where they ended up — driven entirely by how people decided to use the app. “We launched Vivv specifically as a video application,” Drew Lesicko, GM of Alpha, explains. “No one in the market was doing color isolation for video, just images. Our hypothesis was that video was the big differentiator for the app, though we felt still images remained a key feature.”

 

But shortly after Vivv’s launch, Drew and his team were surprised by what the data told them. App users were using the photo features of the app far more than the video features. So Vivv’s developers pivoted. “More than 85% of content created in the app was still images,” Drew says. “So we immediately changed the app to default into still image mode, and updated the app to focus on pics over videos.” 

That simple yet critical data-driven change helped Vivv earn recognition as one of the Apple App Store’s “Best New Apps.” We all get smarter with age. Why shouldn’t we expect our apps to do the same?

How simple, internet-connected lightbulbs can 'go nuclear' and risk a city

Here's one reason to avoid the so-called Internet of Things: Everyday items like lightbulbs become easy targets for hackers once they're connected to a network, meaning your mood lighting can quickly turn into a serious liability.Say you've purchased a Philips Hue system, which allows you to control the intensity and color of your lightbulbs via an app. You're sitting on the couch reading a book when suddenly a little drone flies next to your window. The lights go out and your app won't respond. You're stuck in the dark.

Best-case scenario, you're the only one in the area with smart lightbulbs. But if we're talking about a possible future a few years from now, your entire block — or neighborhood or city, even — might be vulnerable, and hackers could make the whole area go dark by accessing just your lightbulbs to begin with.

Scary, right?

A video from earlier this year demonstrating how such an attack is possible is getting new attention thanks to a research paper publicized on Thursday. You can watch it above — essentially, it shows a drone flying up to a building and taking control of smart lightbulbs, which ends up looking like this:

The paper, "IoT Goes Nuclear: Creating a ZigBee Chain Reaction," concerns a vulnerability that allows bad actors to breach one internet-connected device, like a Philips Hue lightbulb, and gain access to neighboring ones.

This game about voting is 2016’s Oregon Trail

You’re not going to die of dysentery, but it might just find a way to kill your vote.

The New York Times has a modern-day Oregon Trail parody for you to play that explores the“heroic” journey Americans will make on November 8th to their polling place. Part of the publication’s series of “Op-Docs” — opinionated documentaries — covering the 2016 election, The Voter Suppression Trail is the final installment of the series.

You have three options: you can be a white programmer from California; a Latina nurse from Texas; or a black salesman from Wisconsin. The challenges you face are very different depending on your character, and reflect the unique difficulties voters face based on their race and location.

“Some paths will be more intrepid than others, particularly for blacks, Latinos and pretty much anyone who brings the kind of diversity to our polling places that they have historically lacked,” the site reads, referring to the real world voter experience. “Thanks to laws passed by Republicans to fight the nonexistent threat of voter fraud, the perils will be great. Long lines and voter ID laws, not to mention pro-Trump election observers, will try to keep these voters from the polls.”


The Times’ game is a cute, friendly way to deliver information about polling places, which is otherwise known as a “newsgame.” Newsgames aim to teach or inform players through play, rather than traditional print or video. The genre has been thoroughly explored by authors such as Ian Bogost, Simon Ferrari, and Bobby Schweizer, who penned Newsgames: Journalism at Play, together.

If you like The Voter Suppression Trail, the guys who made it — Chris Baker, Brian Moore and Mike Lacher — have a whole mess of satirical political games at GOP Arcade.

After successful Antares launch, NASA wants Orbital ATK to launch on ULA’s rocket again

NASA has asked commercial partner Orbital ATK to set aside its Antares rocket for the company’s next mission to the International Space Station and instead fly cargo on an Atlas V rocket — the premier vehicle of the United Launch Alliance. The move is aimed at getting more cargo to the ISS in early 2017, since the Atlas V has a greater lift capability than the Antares.

THE ANTARES RETURNED TO FLIGHT JUST LAST MONTH

It’s an ironic decision since the Antaressuccessfully returned to flight just last month. The rocket had been grounded for the past two years, after a previous version of the vehicle exploded in a spectacular fireball during a launch in October 2014. The accident prompted Orbital ATK to do an intense refurbishment of the Antares, and the updated rocket performed a flawless first launch from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia three weeks ago.

The rocket will be sidelined only temporarily, however. Orbital ATK will launch its Cygnus cargo capsule on top of an Atlas V rocket this spring from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The company’s remaining four cargo missions in 2017 and 2018 will be done with the Antares in Virginia. "With five Antares launches from October 2016 through 2018, together with the Atlas V rocket, this plan represents the company’s commitment to establishing schedules that are realistic and achievable," Orbital ATK said in a statement.

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that NASA was interested in the Atlas V, and the agency confirmed the switch today to The Verge. "We mutually agreed with Orbital ATK to use an Atlas V for the company's seventh contracted cargo resupply mission to the space station in the spring," NASA told The Verge in a statement.

Everyday life can be annoying, but now you can share your pain in this challenge

There are many moments in my day that I would classify as deeply annoying and utterly inconsequential. Such as: the subway not taking my card swipe the first, second, or fifth time. Stepping out for five minutes and missing the UPS guy. HBO Go buffering during crucial scenes in Game of Thrones.We all have snapshots of irritation over stupid things, and my god it feels good to share them. Misery loves company and so on. It’s this line of thinking that inspired Parallel Studio’s The Unsatisfying Challenge — a prompt for anyone to share their own bitter disappointments.

Over the summer, Parallel Studio created a video illustrating “the frustrating, annoying, disappointing little things of everyday life, that are so painful to live or even to watch.” The group had so many ideas after they finished, designer Thibault de Fournas told me, that they decided to push the prompt out to others.“I hope we [will] discover a lot of unsatisfying situations we didn’t think [of],” de Fournas says. “We are also hoping that some people will present really weird and twisted things.

“[Everyday frustrations are] something that everybody [has experienced].”The call closes on November 15th, and Parallel will add Vimeo submissions to the challenge’s channel. Anyone can make a submission, though you should read the guidelines on the website. De Fournas doesn’t think they’ll pick a winner — “people will decide which one is their [personal favorite],” he says. Instead, Parallel will likely publish a best of compilation.

Microsoft’s IFTTT alternative is now open to everyone

Microsoft Flow, the company’s own take on IFTTT, is officially available to the general public after being released in beta back in April. The tool lets you connect cloud services like Slack, G Suite, Twitter, Office 365, and Dynamics 365 to create action “Flows” for the workplace.

A Flow is an action that takes place after something else happens — like having a photo uploaded to Dropbox after emailing it to yourself. Unlike IFTTT, which lets you link two single actions with each other, Microsoft’s version can perform multiple actions in a single Flow. For example, you can choose to have a tweet containing a certain keyword trigger both a push notification and an email simultaneously instead of creating two separate recipes.

Compared to IFTTT, Flow is compatible with fewer third-party apps (58 supported apps to IFTTT’s 366). This makes sense, though, given that Flow is designed to be used at an enterprise level while IFTTT targets Internet of Things users.

Microsoft Flow is available for free and starts at $5 per user monthly if you want to run Flows more often (the free version limits you to 750 runs per month). It’s being released alongsidePowerApps, a business app building tool for non-coders. You can sign up for Flow with any email — no association with Office required.Flow’s public release also lets system administrators control which apps and services can be used within the company, and which teams or geographic regions specific Flows can be targeted to. Like IFTTT’s Do suite of apps, Flow’s mobile app lets you make buttons that can trigger actions on the go, such as emailing a colleague if you’re running behind to a meeting.

Slack shows it’s worried about Microsoft Teams with a full-page newspaper ad

Microsoft is just minutes away from unveiling its Slack competitor, Microsoft Teams, at an event in New York City today. The software giant is expected to position its Teams software with tight integration into Microsoft Office, Skype, and the company's Office 365 services, and as a direct competitor to Slack. Microsoft hasn't even officially unveiled its Teams service, but that's not stopping Slack from getting some words out before the software maker's event.

In a full back page ad in the New York Times, Slack welcomes Microsoft's competition into the messaging market with some "friendly advice." In a long note, that's also published on Slack's blog, the company warns Microsoft that it's not the features that matter, it's the craftsmanship and human aspects of the software. "We've spent tens of thousands of hours talking to customers and adapting Slack to find the grooves that match all those human quirks," says the Slack team. "The internal transparency and sense of shared purpose that Slack-using teams discover is not an accident. Tiny details make big differences."