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Can Evernote make a comeback?
Evernote used to be the king of note-taking apps. “As a company, we had invented the personal productivity category,” Ian Small, CEO of Evernote told Engadget. It partnered with Moleskine to produce paper notebooks which, through a combination of stickers and scanning, could be easily tagged and ported into Evernote.
Twitter will reportedly nix the 140-character limit with a new product
Do you find yourself needing more than 140 characters to get your point across on Twitter? Well, you might soon have an option that allows you to be a bit more verbose. Re/code reports that the social network is prepping "a new product" that will allow users to compose and share longer tweets. Details are scarce right now, but Re/code's sources indicate that the new feature/app/etc. will enable Twitter users to post long-form musings. What's more, the company is looking into other ways of relaxing that character count by not counting links and usernames in the tally. These developments would follow recent Twitter tweaks like the "retweet with comment" feature and dropping the 140-character limit on DMs. As is the case with any rumor like this, we may never see the changes make it to the company's apps or the web, but if it does, you can expect a few more words in your timeline.
Recommended Reading: Star Wars visuals and Square's data gold mine
Recommended Reading highlights the best long-form writing on technology and more in print and on the web. Some weeks, you'll also find short reviews of books that we think are worth your time. We hope you enjoy the read. The Man Who Literally Built Star Wars by Jeremy Singer, Esquire Pocket Esquire sits down with Star Wars set decorator Roger Christian to find out what it was like to literally build the visuals for George Lucas. During the course of the chat, we discover that the interior of the Millennium Falcon was constructed from scrap airplane metal, the challenge of the garbage compactor, the inspiration for Hans Solo's blaster and the creation of the first lightsaber.
Behind-the-scenes 'Final Hours of Titanfall' app now available
The Final Hours of Titanfall, an in-depth look at the development of Respawn Entertainment's first game, is now available to download on iPad, Windows Surface as well as PC and Mac via Origin for $1.99. Versions of the app are also planned for Android and iPhone, and both a text-only version for Kindle as well as an audiobook version are being considered. Created over a four-year span by Geoff Keighley, the app is a 25,000-word deep-dive on Titanfall's development and the legal issues that Respawn co-founders Jason West and Vince Zampella settled with Activision in May 2012 pryor to West's departure from the developer in March 2013. Keighley conducted interviews with over 80 people to chronicle Respawn's beginnings, which cover the "toxic mix of office politics and creative struggles the build the next great videogame franchise." It also features concept art and videos from the early days of the game's development. This isn't Keighley's first foray into longform app development, as the behind-the-scenes "Final Hours" series includes an episodic webseries on Square Enix's Tomb Raider reboot, an app for Portal 2 and one detailing the creation of Mass Effect 3. [Image: EA Games]
Recommended Reading: the legacy of Myst, the fall of BlackBerry and more
Recommended Reading highlights the best long-form writing on technology in print and on the web. Some weeks, you'll also find short reviews of books dealing with the subject of technology that we think are worth your time. We hope you enjoy the read. Lost to the Ages by Emily Yoshida, Grantland Twenty years after its release, Emily Yoshida looks back at the legacy of the landmark game Myst, which has sold some 6 million copies and spawned sequels and countless ports to various platforms over the years. That includes a firsthand account of the making of the game from co-creators Rand and Robyn Miller, who discuss whether they were trying to make "Art with a capital A," and what they'd still like to see more of from video games today.
Google Search now offers in-depth articles feature to satisfy the researcher in you
According to Google, ninety percent of its queries are for quick hits -- sometimes you just want an answer to your question, get out and go on with life. But ten percent of its searches are from people who are digging deep and getting the real dirt of the situation. For that tenth of the search population, Google Search has introduced a new Knowledge Graph Box that features in-depth articles. These will typically offer the reader a lot more insight into particular topics, and will often feature longform content -- including posts from lesser-known publications. The update is rolling out to English users today, though there is no word on when we can expect to see it for other languages.
