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Umano Introduces Car Mode, Auto-Generated Playlists and My Activity
We are thrilled to reveal the newest features we’ve added to make Umano the ultimate news service for everyone.
We want you to start your busy days off on the right foot, with the right tools. Unlike streaming radio apps and podcasts, Umano enhances your news experience by exposing you to exceptional hand-selected content, including educational pieces and insightful news, that you may not have time to find yourself. With the new ‘My Activity’ feature, you can easily track what categories you listen to most, and which publishers supply your favorite content on the app.
Commuting can be a stressful and frustrating part of your day, whether you travel to work by car, rail, bus or on foot. That’s why our team is committed to providing a service to our commuters that makes the everyday commute not just endurable, but enjoyable. Umano learns what you like and can deliver engaging articles just for you. If you don’t have time to sift through all of our content and decide which articles you want to hear most, Umano’s ‘Auto-Generate Playlist’ feature will automatically create a personalized playlist for you based on your interests and desired play length. We’ve also implemented a Car Mode feature, complete with bigger buttons and swiping gestures to make it easier to navigate the app while driving.
With the same beautiful user interface and top-notch content, Umano provides these new features on both iOS and Android devices. We’ve also developed some new Android-specific features to improve the Umano experience, including: landscape mode making the app operational in the rotated view; improved rich notifications; better memory management; more visible sharing options; and we’ve fixed the duplicate notifications bug.
You can discover all of these new features on iOS and Android today!
Download:
iOS: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/umano/id564125545?ls=1&mt=8
Android: http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sothree.umano
Posted by Avalon Radys, Operations Manager at Umano
Umano 2.0 Launch
Today marks the official release of Umano 2.0, a streamlined redesign of the application that revolutionizes how we engage with top-notch news and journalism around the world. The Umano team has been hard at work implementing new features that enhance the user experience through search functionality, personalization of news interests and a captivating new user interface.
The clean and elegant design of Umano’s interface showcases a new navigation system that allows you to move freely through a sub-menu of categories, search the entire library of audio articles and browse topics, publishers and your own historical activity. The personalization feature is designed to automatically generate your key interests based on previous listening activity, while also allowing you to modify your preferences manually with the personalization toolbar.
Umano 2.0 is engineered to provide you with the most compelling and intuitive platform to discover and share interesting content. We made everything more accessible, from the sharing functions to the profiles of the readers you hear everyday. And now you can easily view source articles and post to your favorite social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. We also updated the jingle that plays before each article :) (Thanks David!)
At Umano we value open dialogue with our users, so your feedback is much appreciated. We hope you all enjoy the latest version of Umano! Happy listening!
You can get Umano 2.0 here:
iOS: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/umano/id564125545?ls=1&mt=8
Android: http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sothree.umano
Posted by Avalon Radys, Operations Manager at Umano
One Million Articles Listened
Today, we crossed a major milestone - one million articles listened on Umano. This means that our users have spent almost 10 person-years in our application, listening to thoughtful content!
When we started the company four months ago, we wanted to build a product that would change people’s lives for the better. However, we never anticipated that we could get to where we are today so fast. We have many people to thank here, but at the center of attention it’s you, our users, who have used Umano every day and told us how much they love us.
Your positive feedback and endless excitement about our service is what drives us forward and motivates us to build the most amazing product we could build.
We are very thrilled about this immense milestone, but we are even more excited about what’s yet to come!
Thank you!
The Umano Team.
A Warm Welcome to Umano on Android
Today, we are happy to announce that Umano is finally available on Android. We support all Android versions from 2.2 and up, which covers over 95% of Android phones in the wild.
This is the first version of the app, so please stay with us while we iron out all the little issues that still exist. Developing for Android was an interesting adventure, especially when you are an audio app, since not all streaming formats work well on the platforms that we support.
The app is not yet on par with its iOS cousin, but we are working hard to add all the outstanding features such as playlisting and downloading for offline listening. Don’t worry, you will not have to wait long until these features are available.
Moreover, we try really hard to take advantage of all the cool features in the newest version of the Android platform. Here is a quick highlight reel of what you can expect:
- Rich-notifications on Jelly Bean devices
- Lock screen media controls on Honeycomb devices and up
- Native Google+ integration
- Adaptive bit-rate through HTTP Live Streaming v3 on Honeycomb devices
As ex-Googlers we love Android, and we will keep making sure that our Android users will get that latest platform hotness as soon as possible.
Finally, if you see any issues with the app, please let us know at support@umanoapp.com.
Happy Umanoing!
Happy New Year from the Umano Team
2012 has been an awesome year for us. We started with a simple idea to deliver news to people on the go and shared it with a few of our friends. Now we’re pushing unique and thoughtful content to people all over the world.
We’re really excited about what’s to come for 2013. We’re going to continue to improve the core experience for you, make it even easier to stay informed and introduce a whole layer of personalization that has never been done before. Also, to all our beloved Android users, we’re proud to announce that Umano will be available for you in January!
As we sign off on 2012, the whole team wanted to thank you for the feedback and support you’ve sent in, everyday we work our tail off to give you an app worth putting on your phone. Finally, we’d like to wish a Happy New Year and send a huge thanks to our advisors, fellow entrepreneurs, friends and family for helping us along the way and always encouraging us to push forward.
Happy New Year from all of us at Umano. May 2013 bring you all the luck and joy in the world!
Next Umano Update Preview
These past few weeks have been crazy. Being featured on the App Store helped us share Umano with news lovers all over the world. We’ve put a lot of work to make knowledge consumption an integral part of everyone’s lifestyle and are always pushing to improve that core experience for our users. We’re excited to give you a sneak peek about how we’re doing that in the next version, based on the feedback we got from our users.
Alternative Login Methods
So it appears, people aren’t as comfortable connecting their Facebook to third-party providers as we thought. While we still think it is a good idea to login with Facebook, so you can see what’s popular amongst your friends, the next version provides an alternative sign in option by creating an Umano account.
Easily Browse by Publishers
We also know that our users love the content we’re serving up and are asking for more. In the near future we will be pushing more content in existing categories and introducing new ones. Until then, because we have tons of timeless content already on there we’re allowing you to easily browse old favorites by a particular publisher.
The next version comes with a ton of other improvements to sharing, playback and performance. This version is anticipated to hit the App Store in early January. Look out for it and continue sending feedback, we love hearing from you.
You can find us on twitter @umanoapp.
Umano Team
The Next Generation Of News Radio
Today more than ever, people are able to easily communicate their thoughts to friends, to communities and to the world. Information can be found in blogs, websites, e-mails, tweets, and status updates just to name a few. There is also no shortage of tools connecting us to this information, whether it is a newspaper, a computer, a smartphone, or a radio.
The radio that many see as a traditional medium is still popular for news, traffic and weather. While radio was the first medium for broadcast journalism, its appeal has diminished with the arrival of the Internet. News reported on the radio simply cuts to the facts without providing much insight. Whereas on the Internet, thoughtful, well-written journalism is being produced every day. Great journalists work hard to provide a compelling story that strikes emotion; a feeling rarely evoked by the radio.
What we need today is a platform that allows thoughtful journalism to be consumed as easily as listening to the radio. This is precisely what Umano has set out to build. Umano takes insightful content found online and has professional voice actors tell the story. The amalgamation of high-quality journalism and convenient delivery is what makes Umano different from traditional radio, podcasts and other audio news applications like NPR.
Today, our vision begins with a carefully designed iOS app that provides a simple experience of enjoying high-quality content with high-quality voices (www.getumano.com). Tomorrow, we want to be a ubiquitous platform that can be accessed from anywhere. Join us in our journey to change the world, and let us know how we’re doing, as we’d love to hear from you (@umanoapp).
Writing a simple deployment script for your EC2 servers
If your backend is running on the Amazon Web Services EC2 stack, you always have to deal with deploying the latest version of your code to all of your instances. The archaic way of doing this is SSH’ing into every instance, manually pulling the latest production code from your codebase, and restarting all the servers. While this solution works OK if you only have one instance, it becomes unscalable very quickly as your infrastructure complexity increases. An advanced way of handling the same task is by using various configuration management tools such as Chef and Capistrano. However, the learning curve and the setup cost of these frameworks is quite high, which makes them less attractive for scrappy start-ups.
In this post, we will discuss a simple way of deploying code, which lies in between the two aforementioned methods in terms of complexity. To give you a quick sneak peak, using this method you will be able to update all (or a subset) of your EC2 instances by running a simple bash script:
./deploy.sh [instance_type]
Let’s make a few assumptions to simplify things for the sake of this post:
- Each instance has a tag named Type, which indicates the type of the instance. This allows the script to only update instances of specific type and vary deployment steps for different instance types.
- Your code is contained in a GIT repository, which has already been cloned at least once in the same directory on all of your instances (say /var/www/your_project), and authenticated via a private key located on each instance (i.e any further pulls don’t require user input).
- The EC2 instances are running Ubuntu, and your servers are configured using upstart. All the server names are prefixed with your_project.
- EC2 Command Line Tools are already setup on your workstation.
Now, here is the script:
Keep in mind that the script is just an example and it has some caveats as discussed below. Feel free to use it in your production environment, but at your own risk. As always, let us know if you have any comments or notice any bugs via @umanoapp.
Caveats:
- If you are running a single instance of each type without a load balancer, your service will experience downtime. One way to avoid this is by cloning a new version of the repository into a separate directory at each deployment, then switching a “live” symlink to the new code, and restarting the servers. More on this in a separate blog post.
- A deployment script should typically do more than just updating the code and restarting the servers. You should consider running pre-production tests, performing any necessary post-deployment diagnostics, updating the database, etc.
- Learning how to use frameworks such as Chef is a good investment, so as your infrastructure becomes more and more complicated, we strongly encourage to look into those options as well.
Simplifying your EC2 SSH connections
If you have to deal a lot with Amazon Web Services like we do, you know that SSH’ing into EC2 instances can sometimes be a pain. Each instance is addressable by a public hostname (ec2-x-x-x-x.compute-1.amazonaws.com), which, unless the instance has an Elastic IP assigned, changes randomly after each instance reboot.
Wouldn’t it be easier if you could SSH into an instance by simply using the instance name, which you assign in the EC2 Management Console?
Yes, it would be, which is why we wrote the simple script below. To run the script, make sure that you have EC2 Command Line Tools installed and configured.
Sample usage:
./ec2ssh.sh my_instance_name
Script:
