This Week's Sponsor:

Kolide

Ensure that if a device isn’t secure it can’t access your apps.  It’s Device Trust for Okta.

Search results for "twitter api"

Macminicolo: Mac mini Hosting and El Capitan [Sponsor]

The Mac mini continues to prove itself as a very reliable and capable server. Macminicolo has been hosting Mac minis for nearly eleven years and they’d love for you to give it a try. The El Capitan Promo offers a colocation package with all you’ll need for just $10/month. While supplies last, they also have rental options as well.

Putting your Mac mini in a data center brings all sorts of benefits. The high-end facility will give your machine security, speed and safety. Since you’re the only one with access to the machine, you can set it up with any services you’d like to use. Here are 50 ideas to get you started.

On top of all that, Macminicolo has good personal support. They’re a part of the Mac community. Send an email, get a personal response right back. You can also get them on Twitter (@Macminicolo) or iMessage (sales@macminicolo.net).

My thanks to Macminicolo for sponsoring MacStories this week. (Side note: MacStories runs on a Mac mini from Macminicolo, and we love it.)

Apple Working on Universal Search API for Apple TV→

John Paczkowski, writing for BuzzFeed:

In a recent interview with BuzzFeed News, Apple CEO Tim Cook said universal search in Apple TV is not something that the company plans to reserve for key content partners. “At launch we’ll have iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, Showtime, and HBO — so we’ll have five major inputs into universal search initially,” Cook said. “But we’re also opening an API, so that others can join in.”

And Apple’s confident that they will do just that. “I think that many, many people will want to be in that search,” Cook said. “And that’s great for users. Think about your experience today. Even if you’re fortunate enough to have the content you want to watch in an app, you sometimes don’t remember exactly where that show is, so you’re going to Netflix or Hulu or Showtime. You shouldn’t have to do that. It should be very simple.”

It does sound like the technology behind iOS 9 search will be reused to plug into apps on the new Apple TV. Smart move.

Permalink

Twitterrific Adds Facial Detection→

With an update released last night, Twitterrific has gained a new facial recognition feature that properly frames people’s faces in timeline photos. The Iconfactory’s Gedeon Maheux writes:

By far the coolest of these improvements is the use of Apple’s facial recognition APIs to improve image previews. What does that mean exactly? It means that as Twitterrific displays media thumbnails in the timeline (pictures, videos, etc), the app tries to detect faces and frame the thumbnail so faces are always showing. In short, if Twitterrific sees a face in a tweet, it tries to make sure you see it too!

The effect when scanning through your list of tweets in the timeline can be dramatic. Previously Twitterrific always framed thumbnails on the center of images, but many times people’s faces aren’t in the middle, especially on portrait shots. Check out these before and after comparison screen shots to see the difference facial framing makes in the timeline.

This is a great example of how an iOS API seemingly unrelated to Twitter clients can dramatically improve the experience of an app. Very clever.

Permalink

OS X El Capitan Overview

OS X El Capitan

OS X El Capitan

This morning at Apple’s WWDC 2015 keynote event, SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi took the stage to announce OS X El Capitan. The next major version of Apple’s Mac operating system, El Capitan has two major areas of focus: Experience and Performance.

Experience

The improved experience in OS X El Capitan revolves around three main categories: Spotlight search, built-in apps, and window management.

Improved Spotlight search

Improved Spotlight search

Spotlight search has greatly improved search functionality, making the feature smarter and more powerful by building in natural language processing and integrating it with more services. Now you can perform searches with phrases such as “big sur sunset,” and Spotlight will surface videos from the web that show the sunset in Big Sur. Spotlight has also gained some other nice touches such as the ability to resize or move the spotlight window around on your screen and integration with weather, stocks, sports, transit, and the aforementioned web video.

Read more

What Twitter Can Be→

Chris Sacca’s essay on what Twitter can become is worth a read if you’re interested in the future of the company. The piece contains several interesting ideas for enhancements to Twitter’s curation, discovery, and timeline design – this bit on Nuzzel in particular:

A third way to organize content from Twitter is to highlighting what the Tweets are linking to. If you’ve used Nuzzel (disclosure: one of our portfolio companies) you know exactly what I mean and how simple yet magical that experience can be. If you haven’t used it, try it. Nuzzel makes Twitter better.

Want to know what are the most popular articles linked to on Twitter? That should be a channel. What are the most popular sites linked among the people we follow or people that our friends follow? Great channel. Which books are people Tweeting about? Channel. Which videos are garnering the most attention? Channel. Any particular .gifs blowing up? Channel.

I use Nuzzel every day, and I love it. As I argued last year, I’m a fan of Twitter’s experiments with the timeline on iOS, but I also believe they should experiment more and break free of old ideas about Twitter. I disagree with some of Sacca’s proposals, but the entire piece is spot-on.

Permalink

Twitterrific for Apple Watch→

I’m a big fan of The Iconfactory’s continued development of Twitterrific in spite of the restrictions on third-party clients imposed by Twitter. I’m happy to see that Twitterrific is already available on Apple Watch with version 5.11 (released last night), which uses notifications and Glances to offer an overview of recent Twitter changes in your account.

Twitterrific’s glance gives you a fun, visual digest of the total number of favorites, retweets and new followers you’ve received over the past 24 hours. Think of it as a lightweight version of the Today View from the iOS app. It also displays the number of unread tweets currently waiting for you the next time you launch the iOS app. Note that Twitterrific’s push notifications (available as a one-time in-app purchase) are needed to take full advantage of the app’s features on Apple Watch.

The Twitterrific watch app displays a list of your most recent 25 replies, mentions, direct messages, favs, RT’s and new followers right on your wrist. This helps you focus on the part of Twitter that’s most important to you and frees you from information overload common when viewing your entire timeline. Simply tap any item in the list to view its details and respond in a number of ways. Favorite a reply or mention, give a new friend a follow back and even reply to mentions and direct messages using Apple Watch’s dictation feature. It’s just that simple.

I look forward to trying Twitterrific once I get my Watch. Also in this update, you can now see fave and RT counts for selected tweets. These counts are one of my favorite features in Twitter for iOS, and while Twitterrific can’t fetch them for all tweets and update them in real time (due to API restrictions), they managed to find a good compromise that helps add context to tweets. Well done.

Permalink

Twitterrific 5.9 Brings Media Improvements

Multiple images in Twitterrific 5.9.

Multiple images in Twitterrific 5.9.

In my in-depth look at Twitter clients for iOS from December 2014, I noted Twitterrific’s fantastic support for iOS 8 extensions and thoughtful design touches, but lamented the app’s lack of integration with modern Twitter media features. In particular, Twitterrific didn’t support multiple images in tweets and animated GIFs; compared to Tweetbot, Twitterrific didn’t have inline playback for popular third-party sharing services such as Vine and Instagram either.

With today’s 5.9 update, The Iconfactory has considerably improved their client’s media preview capabilities by bringing native integration with the aforementioned services and support for Twitter’s GIFs and multiple images. Furthermore, Twitterrific has gained minor but welcome changes such as the ability to save source tweets to Pocket and show a user’s mentions by long-tapping a profile picture.

Read more