John Voorhees

5648 posts on MacStories since November 2015

John is MacStories' Managing Editor, has been writing about Apple and apps since joining the team in 2015, and today, runs the site alongside Federico. John also co-hosts four MacStories podcasts: AppStories, which covers the world of apps, MacStories Unwind, which explores the fun differences between American and Italian culture and recommends media to listeners, Ruminate, a show about the weird web and unusual snacks, and NPC: Next Portable Console, a show about the games we take with us.

Microsoft Brings Another Keyboard to iOS

Microsoft is on a roll with iOS keyboards. Just over two weeks ago, Microsoft’s Garage project released Hub, which has tight integrations with Office 365. Today, Microsoft Garage released another keyboard called Word Flow, which is based on the Windows Phone keyboard from Windows Phone 8.1. According to The Verge, Microsoft had promised a public beta period for Word Flow, but skipped that step.

There are multiple options for interacting with Word Flow. Once installed, you can use it in one-handed mode where the keyboard can be displayed in an arc on the left or right side of the keyboard area. Alternatively, you can use a traditional keyboard layout.

In either case, Word Flow accepts both swiping and tapping input and has a strong predictive algorithm that anticipates the words you intend to type. In my limited tests, the one-handed mode was helpful for typing on my iPhone 6s Plus one handed and the predictive input was solid, though it didn’t seem to recognize its own name, failing to capitalize ‘flow’ in the screenshots above. Of course, for the predictive feature to work, you need to grant Word Flow full access to your keyboard input, which not everyone will be comfortable doing.

Word Flow also lets you set backgrounds behind your keyboard, including ones that are built into the app or your own photos. Personally, I think the backgrounds are ugly and distracting, but fortunately you can use Word Flow without a background.

Microsoft Word Flow is available on the App Store for free.

Update: Microsoft Word Flow is a US English keyboard and is only available in the US App Store.


SongShift Eases the Transition From Spotify to Apple Music

When Apple Music debuted last summer I switched to it from Spotify. I wasn’t on Spotify all that long, but I did have a few playlists I wanted to take with me, including a big one with all the songs I had favorited. At the time, I found a script that logged into both services, tried to match the songs, and replicate the playlists on Apple Music. It worked reasonably well, but not great. SongShift automates that process. In my tests, SongShift did a solid job matching songs between Spotify and Apple Music, but because it is an import utility and not a sync service, it is a little cumbersome to use as a way to keep up with playlists you follow on Spotify that are frequently updated.

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Apple Posts Videos Celebrating Earth Day

Apple has posted two videos celebrating Earth Day. Both clips are light-hearted and fun, while also serving as reminders of some of the recently-highlighted steps Apple has taken to increase its use of renewable energy and recycle old hardware.

The first video, which was posted last night, is called iMessage - Renewable Energy and explains that every day, tens of billions of iMessages pass through Apple’s data centers, which are powered by renewable energy. The video, which is set to The Lumineers song Ophelia, concludes that by sending all those messages via iMessage, you are “showing some love for the Earth.”

Apple posted a second video this morning called Siri and Liam – Earth Day. Siri asks Liam, the iPhone disassembly robot, what he’s doing for Earth Day. Liam shrugs (yes, Liam can shrug) and when it becomes clear he’s going to disassemble Siri’s iPhone, she suggests they get an organic smoothy instead. The clip closes to Pieces by Tanlines (total dad joke) and Liam disassembling the iPhone.



Stanford’s iOS 9 Class Has Started on iTunes U

Stanford University has published an iOS programming course (CS193P) on iTunes U annually since the very first iPhone SDK was released. Back then, the course was taught by Apple engineers, which was unheard of at the time, and a perhaps a sign of greater openness to come. There are still a lot of good basic lessons on Objective-C, model-view-controller patterns, and other fundamentals in that first lecture series, even though Cocoa Touch APIs have changed substantially over the years. But, perhaps my favorite lecture from that first class is a short talk Loren Brichter gave on the development of Tweetie, his Twitter client that was the first app to feature pull-to-refresh and was eventually purchased by Twitter.

Now, seven years later, Stanford has begun posting lectures for Developing iOS 9 Apps with Swift. It helps to have some basic object oriented programming experience before taking on this class, but don’t let that discourage you. When I started teaching myself programming I watched that first lecture series over and over, stopping to research things I didn’t understand as I went. And even if you’re not interested in learning to program for iOS, go back and watch Loren Brichter’s talk, it’s a fascinating time capsule of how far iOS has come and the clever tricks programmers used in 2009 to get around the technical limitations of early iPhones.

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Fall Developer Conference Organizers Offer Discounts

There is no doubt that San Francisco is an expensive place to visit for a week, which puts WWDC out of reach financially for some developers. Fortunately, there are a lot of other Mac and iOS conferences held throughout the year that cost less and provide an opportunity to learn and meet fellow developers. To highlight their events, a group of Fall conference organizers have gotten together to offer a discount on admission to their events:

For the next 24 hours the following iOS / Mac community conferences are offering a 10% discount on the price of admission:

  • 360|iDev | August 21–24 | Denver, Colorado
  • try! Swift NYC | September 1–2 | New York, New York
  • Indie DevStock | September 16–17 | Nashville, Tennessee
  • Release Notes | September 27–29 | Indianapolis, Indiana
  • CocoaLove | October 14–16 | Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
  • Úll | November 1–2 | Killarney, Ireland

Use the coupon code “COMMUNITY” before April 20th at 9am Pacific Time time to receive the discount.

I attended the inaugural Úll and Release Notes conferences and highly recommend both.

The cost of admission to any of these conferences is already less than a ticket to WWDC, but if you want to save an extra 10%, act fast because the offer is good for only 24 hours.

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App: The Human Story Team Shoots for June Premiere and Launches Quantify

Last week, Story & Pixel announced that it is pushing to release the upcoming documentary App: The Human Story in early June, just before WWDC. I remember being at The Talk Show live recording at WWDC in 2014 when Jake Schumacher and Jedidiah Hurt, the team behind Story & Pixel, captured some of their first footage for the film. That was followed by a successful Kickstarter later that summer, and a whole lot of work since then. This past Fall, Story & Pixel debuted fifteen minutes of opening footage for App at XOXO Fest in Portland.

During production of App, the Story & Pixel team needed a discrete way to timestamp footage while they were filming as a sort of bookmarking system that would allow them to quickly jump to certain footage during the editing process. They tried things like taking notes, but found that it disrupted interviews. To solve the problem, Story & Pixel, working with developer Ryan Newsome, created an iPhone app with four large buttons that can be discretely tapped while filming to create up to four different types of bookmarks. The bookmarks can be exported into Adobe Premiere Pro (subscription required) when you’re ready to edit your footage.1

Quantify

Quantify

The app, called Quantify, launched last week and is free with a choose-your-own-price subscription model. Subscribing adds the ability to export to Adobe Premiere Pro and premium support.

App has been in production for almost two years now and it’s great to see that Story & Pixel are in the final home stretch. Judging from the footage that has been previewed so far, I think we are in for a real treat.


  1. One thing that immediately occurred to me when playing around with Quantify is that something like this would be handy for podcasters who want to mark portions of audio that need editing, contain information that should be added to show notes, or where a chapter marker could be added. 

Apple Announces WWDC 2016 via Siri



Apple has announced (or inadvertently leaked) the official dates for WWDC 2016. This year’s WWDC will start in San Francisco on June 13th and runs through June 17th. Unlike past years, Apple appears to have announced the dates today via Siri. 9to5Mac discovered that if you ask Siri when WWDC will be held, you get the response “The World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) will be held June 13 through June 17 in San Francisco. I’m so excited!” Just this morning, Siri’s response to the same question was that WWDC had not been announced yet.

We expect that ticketing and other details will be announced soon.


New Promo Video for Apple Music Starring Taylor Swift

Apple just posted a new video on the YouTube Beats 1 channel promoting its Apple Music streaming service. The video, called Taylor Mic Drop, features Taylor Swift who picks a ‘Getting Ready to Go Out’ playlist from Apple Music. When she sees The Middle by Jimmy Eat World, she plays it, dancing and lip syncing along to the music. The video is fun and does a nice job of highlighting what Apple Music calls Activity Playlists.

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