Apple’s Emoji Search Is Bad →

Linked By Federico Viticci

Emojipedia’s Jeremy Burge, following a series of tests with emoji search, a built-in macOS feature that still isn’t available on iOS:

Prior to macOS Sierra’s release in September 2016, emoji search for Mac was the opposite: general terms wouldn’t return any results - but if you knew the emoji name you could get it to appear 100% of the time. This is no longer the case.

I do wonder if an internal effort to make these types of search and prediction tools better in the longer term is making them worse for users in the short term.

It’s not just that it’s bad because the results are somewhat lackluster. It’s bad in the sense that typing Apple’s exact description for an emoji sometimes doesn’t bring up the character it belongs to. If someone is in charge of this feature for the Mac, I hope they can take a serious look at whatever is going on.

Permalink

Illustration in the iOS 11 App Store →

Linked By Federico Viticci

Khoi Vinh, writing about one of my favorite aspects of the iOS 11 App Store:

Apple’s dramatically redesigned App Store got a decent amount of attention when it debuted last year with iOS 11, but its unique success as a hybrid of product design and editorial design has gone little noticed since. That’s a shame, because it’s a huge breakthrough.

I myself paid it scant attention until one day this past winter when I realized that the company was commissioning original illustration to accompany its new format. If you check the App Store front page a few times a week, you’ll see a quietly remarkable display of unique art alongside unique stories about apps, games and “content” (movies, TV shows, comics, etc.). To be clear: this isn’t work lifted from the marketing materials created by app publishers. It’s drawings, paintings, photographs, collages and/or animations that have been created expressly for the App Store.

We don’t see this particular flavor of artistic ambition from many companies today, especially tech companies. The predominant mode of product design almost exclusively favors templates and automation, what can be done without human intervention. The very idea of asking living, breathing art directors who need to be paid real salaries to hire living, breathing illustrators who also need to be paid a living wage in order to create so-called works of art that have no demonstrably reproducible effect on actual profits is outlandish, absurd even. The mere suggestion would get you laughed off of most design teams in Silicon Valley. Design in this century has little use for anything that can’t be quantified.

I haven’t seen a lot of praise for the artistic side of the App Store’s Today page. I think it’s remarkable that Apple is commissioning these illustrations and making them instrumental in highlighting apps and developer stories. Don’t miss Vinh’s roundup of his favorites.

Permalink

The Apple Watch Has Found a Surprisingly Useful Home With Everyone That Works on Their Feet →

Linked By Federico Viticci

Speaking of the Apple Watch becoming an essential everyday device, Mike Murphy published a fascinating story at Quartz:

You might’ve noticed that the person who took your order at the bar, brought you the shoes you wanted to try on, or perhaps even patted you down at the airport security line, is sporting an Apple Watch, which starts at $329 for the newest Series 3 watch. And there’s a pretty simple explanation: Many service-industry jobs where employees have to be on their feet all day don’t allow workers to check their phones while they’re on the clock. But that rule doesn’t necessarily apply to a piece of unobtrusive jewelry that happens to let you text your friends and check the weather.

Quartz spoke with airline attendants, bartenders, waiters, baristas, shop owners, and (very politely) TSA employees who all said the same thing: The Apple Watch keeps them in touch when they can’t be on their phones at work. Apple has increasingly been pushing the watch as a health device, and seems to have moved away from marketing it as one that offers more basic utility, as Apple continues do with the iPhone. But given that roughly 23% of the US labor force works in wholesale or retail operations, perhaps it’s a market Apple should reconsider.

While I obviously hope Apple continues to improve the Watch as a health and fitness accessory, I would love to see new ways to triage and customize notifications too – especially when it comes to more granular controls for Do Not Disturb and notification mirroring on the iPhone. I have my fingers crossed for improvements in iOS 12.

Permalink

Second Life: Rethinking Myself Through Exercise, Mindfulness, and Gratitude

By Federico Viticci

“There’s something in your latest scan that we need to double check.”

Here’s what I’ve learned about cancer as a survivor: even once you’re past it, and despite doctors’ reassurances that you should go back to your normal life, it never truly leaves you. It clings to the back of your mind and sits there, quietly. If you’re lucky, it doesn’t consume you, but it makes you more aware of your existence. The thought of it is like a fresh scar – a constant reminder of what happened. And even a simple sentence spoken with purposeful vagueness such as “We need to double check something” can cause that dreadful background presence to put your life on hold again.

Spark 2 Hands-On: Email for Teams with App Integrations

By Federico Viticci

I’ve made no secret of my complicated relationship with email over the years.

While I’m always trying to optimize my email setup and finding new ways to spend as little time managing email as possible (for instance, I let SaneBox categorize emails on my behalf), my underlying problem lies in the scarcity of desktop-class email clients for iOS with specific features I’m looking for. As I shared in an episode of AppStories, these include: modern email options such as snoozing, read receipts, or “send later”; the ability to customize the app’s sidebar with mailboxes and saved searches; and app integrations to save messages into other iOS apps either as links or PDFs.

I’ve tried dozens of different email apps for the iPhone and iPad over the years. Some of them stuck for several months on my Home screen, like Airmail; some turned out to be ill-fated experiments; others were stuck in the old mindset of offering a “light” companion version on iOS and a “real” counterpart for the Mac.

Spark, developed by Readdle, has been at the forefront of innovation in email clients since its iPhone debut three years ago. In my original review, I noted how, despite several limitations (such as the lack of iPad and Mac versions) and an unclear business model, Spark was a new kind of email experience that felt refreshingly powerful, especially when compared to Apple’s stale Mail app. Spark gained a host of welcome enhancements in the past couple of years: in addition to being fully multi-platform on Apple devices, Spark is now capable of snoozing messages and sending them later; on the Mac, besides smarter search, Spark can even save messages into apps like Bear and Things.

I’ve gone back to Spark as my primary email app a handful of times over the past three years. Ultimately, I always stopped using Spark because it lacked feature parity with the Mac version (app integrations were never ported to iOS); most recently, I started using Apple Mail again because its drag and drop support in iOS 11 allowed me to “manually” integrate it with Things, Notes, and other apps.

This context is necessary to understand Spark 2, which is launching today on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and which Readdle touts as the biggest update to Spark since the original app from May 2015. Spark 2 is a peculiar upgrade: on one hand, it won’t look that different to individual users, save for a couple noteworthy exceptions; on the other, it’s a major reinvention of Spark for teams, which explains why Readdle is hedging the app’s future on collaboration and a subscription-based business model (albeit with a generous free tier). The developers at Readdle are betting heavily on a vision that sees Spark as the centerpiece of email communication for teams – a platform in its own right, with all the upsides and potential issues that it entails.

For that reason, this can’t be a full, in-depth review of Spark 2. As a team, we’ve only had access to Spark 2 for the past three weeks, and we haven’t had a chance yet to test the app during one of the busiest periods of the year such as WWDC. I’m going to need more time for a full verdict and to understand how the MacStories team can be set up as a Spark organization. However, I believe that Spark 2 is the closest I’ve ever been to finding my ideal email client, and I want to explain why.

AppStories - Ep. 56 - 32 minutes

Controlling The Time Spent on Your iPhone

Federico

John

AppStories Episode 56 - Controlling The Time Spent on Your iPhone

0:00
32:26

↓

AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

Federico and John talk about managing time spent on smartphones, including what manufacturers like Apple and Google are doing to address the issue, what users can do, and how they deal with being on their iPhones too much.

Connected, Episode 193: They Belong to the World Now →

Linked By Federico Viticci

The future of third-party Twitter apps looks grim, but is it the end of the road? What makes an upgrade worthy of a price tag? Do class action lawsuits even matter? Should you use AirPods on planes? Does anyone like show descriptions written as hypothetical questions?

On this week’s episode of Connected, we talk about changes coming to third-party Twitter clients, the economics of the App Store when it comes to selling new versions of apps as separate purchases, and why you really shouldn’t use AirPods on planes. You can listen here.

iOS System Apps Wish List

Federico

John

AppStories Episode 55 - iOS System Apps Wish List

0:00
31:29

↓

AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

Federico and John discuss their wishes for Apple’s iOS system apps.

AppStories - Ep. 54 - 28 minutes

Pick 2: GoodNotes and Working Copy

Federico

John

AppStories Episode 54 - Pick 2: GoodNotes and Working Copy

0:00
28:19

↓

AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

Federico and John pick two apps they use regularly to discuss. In this installment of Pick 2, John covers GoodNotes and how he uses it for planning and editing, and Federico explains how he and the MacStories team use Working Copy to collaborate on articles.