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Remember StumbleUpon? Well, it's going away June 30th
According to co-founder Garrett Camp, StumbleUpon has delivered nearly 60 billion "stumbles" to more than 40 million people over the past 16 years. The web discovery service — surprisingly still active — was always a unique way to find web content that was off the beaten path. Now Camp says that all StumbleUpon accounts will be moving to Mix, a newer web discovery service that the co-founder created in 2015 with his company, Expa.
Daily App: 5by picks the best videos based on your personality
Finding compelling videos on sites like YouTube can be a lesson in patience as you slog through video after video of mindless soliloquies, cats on pianos or music videos featuring stills of photos in an endless progression. If you want to avoid this mundane content and find videos more suited for your interests, then you should check out 5by. The video curation service builds a profile based on your interests and sends you videos that you would enjoy. It launched as a web-only service last year and rolled out an iOS app earlier this year. The app launches with a series of categories based on the time of day, your possible mood and common activities, like lying in bed. Tapping on a category such as "Insomniacs" brings you to a sub-category screen that breaks down the videos into distinct groups like "Extreme Sports," "True Story" and others. Tapping on a sub-category will start playing a video curated from services like YouTube or Vimeo. If you don't like the selection, you can swipe to move to the next clip in the queue. Before you advance ahead, remember to "dislike" the video, so 5by will remember this preference when choosing videos in the future. While watching a video, you can comment on it, like it on Facebook or react using one of three emojis. These emojis let other 5by users know whether you laughed at a video, hated a video or loved the video. You also can share the clip via email, messaging, or social networks like Facebook and Twitter. There's even an option to copy the URL of the video to the clipboard. The strong point of 5by is its ability to pull down videos based on the profile questions you answer when you first run the app and your interactions with the videos while you watch them. The app is owned by StumbleUpon, which acquired 5by in September of 2013. 5by's curation worked moderately well for me, with most videos providing entertainment in the categories that I selected in my profile. There were a handful of clunkers that I tagged with the dislike emoji, so I am hoping those videos will disappear from my stream. Just like any curation service, it gets better the more you use it, so you will want to respond to as many videos as possible to get the best possible experience. 5by is perfect for those free moments when you want some entertainment and don't want to play Flappy Bird. Open 5by and let the app serve up a new video that you might enjoy. 5by for the iPhone and iPad is available for free from the iOS App Store.
DevJuice: Spellchecking short strings
A few years ago, xkcd created a crowd-sourced color survey to collected real-world hue descriptions. You'll find the hilarious results here. I've been working on updating my UIColor utilities as part of building a color-sampling app. Stumbling across this survey, I decided to add the xkcd colors to my repository, along with code that matched colors to their nearest xkcd equivalents. What I found is that as delightful as the sourced color descriptions are, that they were rather full of misspellings, for example "urple." So I put together a simple NSString category to find misspellings and "creatively" described colors. I found this approach to be useful enough that I decided to share it on a DevJuice. Normally, you use text checkers to find misspellings in text view and fields, and to present those items to the user. But you're certainly not limited to that scenario. This simple string category lets you test whether a misspelled word was found, enabling me to automate my inspection. I loaded up the xkcd names as an array and searched them to find any potential errors. Out of nearly a thousand color names, it quickly flagged about two dozen issues -- saving a huge amount of detail checking. This doesn't of course, guarantee the correctness of my results. I know I left in a few amusing misspellings: "Blurple," for example, plus if any misspellings ended up as a legal English word, they will not have been flagged. What's more, I had to bowdlerize some entries. Apple does not have any "offensive language" tester that I could find. (Know of one? Please ping me about it!) So I had to update those items by hand. In any case, I hope you'll find this useful. Happy coding!
TUAW's Daily iPad app: StumbleUpon
If you're familiar with StumbleUpon, the iPad app will be a very comfortable experience. Instead of browsing "stumbled" sites in a browser with a toolbar, the StumbleUpon app allows you to visit sites shared by others (within a couple dozen categories like "tech" or "babes") from your iPad, complete with sharing tools and the ubiquitous "Like" or "Don't Like" buttons for each page you visit. The StumbleUpon app is nicely designed for the iPad, with all the features you could access in your browser, somewhat more conveniently arranged around the main window where you'll be viewing shared web content. There's not much more to this app, except that I wish StumbleUpon had taken the opportunity to leverage the touchscreen on the iPad. It is handy to have Stumble, Like, share, forward/back buttons around your viewing area, but there's no real innovation in the app. There are glimmers of hope, as the Home screen actually has a swipe-able list of your interests (which you can edit). But it would have been nice to see this put into my history, so I could easily see previous "liked" content. Or perhaps a grid of suggestions grouped by interest, so I'm not passing through a bunch of "comedy movie" stumbles before getting to a "tech" page. Still, your profile screen offers a list of your likes, and how many people you are following and how many are following you. This is well-presented, as is the Home screen and your main browsing screen. Newcomers to StumbleUpon will find it quite easy to get started. While you cannot skip questions about your age and gender, finding others on StumbleUpon is really easy thanks to the app having access to your iPad's address book. Don't worry, this is only to match up email addresses to those already registered with StumbleUpon, and you don't have to choose anyone. Still, I found it was helpful to add a few people so I can see what they are sharing. StumbleUpon is, after all, a crowdsourced service, so the more the merrier. If anything, the StumbleUpon app suffers from a lack of coherent user interfaces. Still, the basic functionality of finding "cool stuff" by hitting that Stumble button is well-suited to the iPad. You're not going to see Flash content, but in the time I spent using the app I never saw any! If you're prone to clicking that Stumble button in your browser, or if you've never used StumbleUpon before, the iPad app is a great place to go. Within minutes you'll be up and finding all kinds of crazy things.
StumbleUpon iPad app user interface updated with 'swipe to stumble'
StumbleUpon has updated its iPad app with a new interface intended to make stumbling and commenting on webpages easier than before. A new "swipe to stumble" gesture streamlines the process of finding new sites, commenting on them, and sharing them with other StumbleUpon users. The updated app is available in the App Store now. StumbleUpon cautions that the current app will not upgrade to the new version automatically, so users should download the new version if they want to take advantage of the new features. Check out a video overview of the StumbleUpon iPad app's features below.
StumbleUpon launches App Discovery on Android, trips over clumsy interface
StumbleUpon's been serving up crowdsourced, personalized website recommendations since the turn of the century with the simple idea that like-minded surfers will enjoy the same stuff, and if that sounds like a fantastic formula for recommending apps, then you're in a spot of luck. StumbleUpon's bringing App recommendations to Android today as part of an update to its app, and we have to say, the program's got some potential if it catches on. As with all crowdsourced software, StumbleUpon's not terribly good at its job right off the bat and a moderately unresponsive UI (with tiny touchscreen buttons) doesn't really help, but the app presently pulls from a set of existing Android app databases that give it a nice head start. After you log in with your StumbleUpon ID, it asks you if it can (a la AppBrain) take a look at the existing apps on your phone, after which point it displays likely correlations one by one (complete with descriptions, screenshots and Android Market star ratings) for you to vote up or down. We got quite a few flashlights, soundboards and fart machines, mind you, but most everything we saw had plenty of ratings and at least four stars, and a good number of our favorites (and some probable soon-to-be-favorites) popped up as well, and voting up and down app concepts is an amusing diversion in and of itself. Sadly, it doesn't use your existing StumbleUpon topic preferences to recommend apps, but it will hopefully align them to your tastes soon, assuming that enough folks can look past the iffy UI long enough to help their fellows and give the free app a go. PR after the break. Update: It's on the Android Market right now -- find it at our source link, or use the handy-dandy QR code at right. %Gallery-106706%
Stumbi: StumbleUpon for Safari
Being a Firefox user (I know, I know, and it crashes on me all the time, but still I run back to it ashamedly), I had no idea that there was a gap in the functionality of StumbleUpon (a handy little link-finding and sharing browser plugin) for Safari users -- it only works with IE and Firefox. But Eli K tipped us off that he's trying to bridge that gap with Stumbi, a StumbleUpon plugin for Safari.It's the very definition of no-frills: it just creates a menu option for StumbleUpon that will let you access the most basic of functions from the Safari browser. And unfortunately, it's not exactly completely easy to get working -- you've got to make sure to install SIMBL (which, helpfully, comes with the binary download), and then the binary also requires a reasonable $2 purchase after 100 stumbles (or, for the more technically inclined, you can download the source and do it all by yourself for free).But if you just can't live without StumbleUpon, and can't bring yourself to use Firefox to do it, this might be just what you're looking for.Thanks, Eli!
A fun way to stumble upon games online
StumbleUpon is a brilliant service that helps you find interesting websites online with the help of other people. Taking the form of a free Firefox plugin, it feels like a kind of web-wide Digg, where you vote on websites that you like which pushes up that link's popularity and increases the likelihood that another user will visit that page after clicking a Stumble! link in a toolbar. Read more about how it works here.Like Digg, StumbleUpon has a healthy contingent of users that play and read about games (incidentally, I stumbled upon StumbleUpon when I was glancing at Joystiq's traffic referral links), so the suggestions in the video games category are generally excellent. You can try out a demo of the gaming section by clicking the link tagged "online games" which will provide you with an endless stream of direct links to flash games that can literally take up your whole day. If you're looking for a more passive experience, the toolbar also allows you to browse randomly through video game links in categories such as news, video, photos and even Wikipedia pages. One moment you can be reading about the history of gamepads, the next you can be watching the latest footage from Crysis. Random selection at its best.
