We recently got a few questions about TaskPaper automation in OmniFocus for iOS, which I wanted to address as they’re quite similar: Question: On a recent episode of Canvas, Frasier mentioned using Workflow to create an OmniFocus project for reading a book (with tasks on a weekly basis to read a chapter). Any chance you...
NASA and Apple Music Team Up For Visions in Harmony
In 2011 NASA launched the Juno spacecraft, which is expected to reach Jupiter’s orbit on July 4th. To commemorate the event, which will be the closest look we have ever had of Jupiter, Apple and NASA debuted a short film called Visions in Harmony. The film, which is about nine minutes long, features interviews Scott Bolton, the principal investigator for the Juno project, and musical artists Corinne Bailey Rae, Quin, and Daye Jack. The soundtrack for the film is Juno, a composition by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
Apple has created a special ‘Destination: Jupiter’ section of Apple Music that features the free film and eight exclusive tracks from the artists that appear in Visions in Harmony and other artists. A note on the page from NASA and Apple encourages everyone to check back for further updates as Juno approaches Jupiter.
Facebook Shutters Paper→
The Verge reports that Facebook is removing Paper, its design-forward alternative Facebook client, from the App Store today.
Paper was notable for the novel animations it used to guide you through the app — tap on a link and it would unfold like a letter; pull down on the story and it would fold back up, returning you to the feed.
Paper was one of the first products launched by Facebook from Creative Labs an experimental design and development group within Facebook that hired numerous high-profile designers around 2011, including Mike Matas. Matas’ early career highlights include stints at Delicious Monster and Apple where he had a hand in several of the interface elements of the original iPhone, iPad and OS X. He left Apple to found Push Pop Press with the goal of reimagining digital books. Push Pop Press had one product, an interactive version of Al Gore’s book Our Choice.
In August, 2011, Facebook acquired Push Pop Press. The animations and other design elements of Facebook’s Paper, which debuted in early 2014, were heavily influenced by Matas’ and Push Pop’s work on Our Choice and critically acclaimed at the time for their innovations, but the app never caught on with Facebook users. Facebook closed the Creative Labs group last December and Matas left Facebook earlier this year, so the shuttering of Paper is not surprising.
Facebook users who previously downloaded Paper can continue to use it until July 29, 2016, after which Facebook has said the app will no longer work.
Qwiki and Wonder: No-Nonsense Wikipedia Research
There was a time, before Twitter implemented restrictive API limitations, when Twitter clients were a playground where app developers tried new ideas. It felt like there was a new Twitter client released every week. Today, that role seems to have been taken over by Wikipedia apps.
There are a lot of good Wikipedia apps. Some, like Wikipedia’s own client that I reviewed earlier this year, are designed to optimize the reading and browsing experience, while others, like Curiosity, focus on location-based discovery. Those are great approaches to Wikipedia, but often I use Wikipedia for quick research and just want to get in and out of Wikipedia quickly without being distracted from writing. For those times, I’ve found two apps I like – Qwiki, a menu bar app for the Mac, and Wonder, an iOS app. Both apps are fast, no-frills utilities that help you find and browse what you need, copy a link, and share it quickly.
Jumping in with Both Feet
The tagline for my MacStories Weekly column, Ongoing Development, is: Trying new things, seeing what works, and discarding what doesn’t. The description captures Ongoing Development well and I like that it’s short, but if I were to add anything to it, I’d expand the middle bit to ‘seeing what works and where it leads’...
Amazon Kindle Devices and Apps Add Page Flip Navigation→
Amazon has introduced the digital equivalent of saving your place in a book as you flip to another page. The feature, called ‘Page Flip,’ lets you pin the current page in the corner of the screen while you scroll through an eBook. While you browse through a compatible book in the Kindle iOS app or on Android devices, Fire tablets, and Kindle devices, a small thumbnail of the page where you started is displayed in the corner of the screen. To return to where you started, you simply tap the thumbnail.
Amazon has posted a video to YouTube that does a good job comparing the feature to doing the same thing in a paper book:
Twitter Launches Dashboard App for Small Businesses
Last week saw Twitter introduce Engage, a business-oriented analytics app for iOS. Twitter continued the roll-out of new features and products today with Twitter Dashboard, a free iOS account management app (US only) aimed at businesses that can also be accessed on the web. Dashboard, is designed to address the needs of small business in particular. According to The Twitter Small Business Blog,
Dashboard offers a single destination to get things done. It gives business owners a clear picture of what’s being said about their businesses, lets them schedule Tweets, and offers insights about their Tweet performance.
Dashboard will be familiar to anyone who has used the official Twitter client, with some interesting differences. The ‘Home’ tab defaults to a view called ‘About You’ instead of your timeline. ‘About You’ includes things like mentions, replies, tweets that use of your account name, and tweets with any other keywords that you add because you want to surface them in Dashboard. A second tab within the ‘Home’ view takes you to your timeline.
Dashboard also includes two unique tabs called ’Analytics’ and ‘Create.’ ‘Analytics’ includes some of the same information provided by Engage, but presented in a more summary fashion than in Engage. ‘Create’ serves the same purpose as a service like Buffer, allowing you to schedule tweets and save multiple drafts.
If you have used Twitter account management tools in the past, you’ll find that there is nothing revolutionary about the tools included in Dashboard. The benefit, however, is having these tools all in one place with a design that focuses on what people are saying about your business, which should make it easier for business owners to monitor what people are saying about their businesses on Twitter and also promote their businesses with Twitter.
Apple’s iOS Icon Templates Are a Little Off→
Update 2016-06-28: The iOS icon templates provided by Apple as part of the iOS Human Interface Guidelines section of its developer website have been updated to the correct shape.
Last week Apple posted templates for iOS icons on its developer website. Designer Michael Flarup noticed something was a little off about the templates. It turns out that the templates aren’t the ‘squircle’ icon shape that is created when developers submit an app to the App Store. Instead, the templates are rounded rectangles. The difference is small, but as Flarup explains with a neat GIF that highlights the difference between the two shapes:
using the wrong canvas can have consequences for your design. Apple will crop your icon in the squircle shape, so you’d better not try to do anything precise in the templates they provide.
Fortunately, Flarup and others have created their own squircle templates that are linked in his article.
Twitter Adds Stickers→
Virtual stickers are all the rage on social networks and in messaging apps. Just two weeks ago, Apple jumped on the sticker bandwagon at WWDC with the upcoming version of the Messages app that will ship with iOS 10. This is not something particularly new (remember Gowalla?), but the pace of adoption seems to have accelerated in the past year with the growing popularity of apps like Snapchat and Facebook Messenger.
Now Twitter is going all-in with hundreds of custom stickers and rotating seasonal sticker packs you can use to decorate photos. As reported by the The Verge this morning, Twitter will be rolling out stickers to all users in its official app over the next few weeks.
Twitter has its own special take on stickers. From within the official Twitter client, you will be able to
search them like hashtags. Tap on a sticker inside a tweet and you’ll be taken to a new timeline that shows you how it’s being used around the world.
It appears that stickers will be available through Twitter’s official client only, which undoubtedly will be viewed by some people as yet another advantage of third-party Twitter clients, but I can’t help but wonder if sticker-mania will have a net negative impact on third-party clients like Tweetbot and Twitterrific.