Last year, we rethought our entire media setup around Plex, a Synology NAS, and an Nvidia Shield Pro set-top box. It sounds complex, but it’s actually quite simple: the Synology acts as storage for Plex Media Server, which runs on the Shield as its Tegra chip is fast enough to handle video transcoding and...
Connected , Episode 179: The Tiny Head Pandemic→
The boys are joined by Emojipedia founder Jeremy Burge to talk about a rash of App Store rejections regarding the use of emoji. After that, discussion turns to HomePod reviews and the possibilities of watchOS 5.
Another fun episode of Connected this week, with a great discussion about a recent emoji controversy with the Master of emoji himself, Jeremy Burge. You can listen here.
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Slack Overhauls Emoji Support Across Platforms→
In other emoji-related news, Slack today announced that they’re going to support new emojis (including those from Emoji 5.0 released in 2017) across multiple platforms. If you use Slack on a regular basis, you know that the company has been notoriously slow over the past couple of years in adopting the latest emojis despite having launched features based entirely on them.
As noted by Jeremy Burge at Emojipedia, however, better emojis on Slack have brought a deeper change for Slack users on non-Apple platforms:
Users of iOS or macOS will see the least change to design in this release, as Slack previously defaulted to using Apple designs on all platforms.
Apple’s emoji designs remain the set displayed when accessing Slack on any Apple platform.
Those using on Windows, Android, or any non-Apple platform will see a consistent set between: but it’s not what you might expect. Google’s emoji designs are being used for all non-Apple platforms now as shown by this alert:
And:
While Apple’s emoji font is entirely owned and copyrighted by Apple, Google’s emoji font (named Noto Color Emoji) is provided with an open source license which allows other projects to use this within the terms set out in the SIL Open Font License. Given this, it’s possible that Slack believes it is on firmer ground to be using Noto Color Emoji rather than embedding Apple emoji images on competing platforms.
Jason Snell argues that this move will lead to a different emoji experience for Slack users who access the service from non-Apple platforms:
The result is emoji fragmentation, where different users of Slack will see different versions of the same general concept. Also, users like my friend Erika might prefer one set of emoji designs to another, but they no longer have a choice in the matter.
That’s the bad news. The good news, at least, is that Slack is rolling out support for new emojis, including gender splits and skin tones, that it previously didn’t.
I wonder if Apple’s apparent push toward locking their emoji designs to the iOS ecosystem may have played a role in Slack’s decision to implement an open-source emoji set instead (see also: WhatsApp). Still, I’m happy that I can share all modern emojis on Slack; I’ll have to rethink some of my typical emoji reactions now.
iOS 11’s Effect on Our iOS Habits
John
AppStories Episode 41 - iOS 11’s Effect on Our iOS Habits
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Nearly five months into iOS 11, Federico and John take a look at how iOS 11 has changed not only the way they work, but also how it has impacted their use of lifestyle, health and fitness, media consumption, and other types of apps.
Lire RSS Client Adds Deeper iOS 11 Drag and Drop Support
At the end of last year in my annual Must-Have Apps roundup, I covered lire, an RSS client for iPhone and iPad that, despite having been around for several years, had flown under my radar until its iOS 11 update.
I wrote:
I settled on lire, an RSS reader that’s been around for years and that never grabbed my attention before. lire has been fully redesigned for iOS 11, taking advantage of Apple’s large title design style to neatly indicate different folders and sections. In addition to a clean design that feels good on the iPhone X and iPad Pro, lire has two peculiarities: it supports all the most popular RSS services (including Inoreader) and it comes with its own text extraction tool to load the full text of truncated stories. The full-text option can be enabled on a per-site basis, and it works well in combination with caching for read articles. lire looks native to iOS in a way that the official apps by Inoreader, NewsBlur, and Feedly don’t, and it’s actively supported by its developer with frequent updates.
I’ve been using lire in combination with Inoreader since November; four months later, I still haven’t found any other RSS reader that mixes iOS 11’s aesthetic with support for all the most popular RSS services. Unlike other apps, lire looks native to iOS 11 and it lets you choose the sync service you prefer. Plus, the ability to load specific websites in full-text mode and a pure black theme make lire a fantastic reading experience on the iPhone X as well.
With today’s 3.0.32 update, developer Kunal Sood has brought deep integration with iOS 11’s drag and drop to lire, shipping one of the best implementations of the feature on both the iPhone and iPad. Which isn’t surprising considering that lire’s drag and drop enhancements have been directly inspired by Bear – already a terrific example of what developers can build with drag and drop in iOS 11.
Collecting Games I Want to Play in Airtable
We live in an amazing age of digital distribution with access to hundreds of interesting new songs, games, movies, TV shows, eBooks, apps, and articles released on a weekly basis. As I argued on Remaster, my videogame podcast on Relay FM, a few months ago, I wish I had the time to check out...
Letterboxd
Whether you consider yourself a movie expert or someone who wants to discover and watch more movies, there’s a good chance you’ll be intrigued by Letterboxd and its passionate community of movie aficionados. The service, which has been around for several years and also includes two types of premium subscription, lets you create lists...
Apple Q1 2018 Results: $88.3 Billion Revenue, 77.3 Million iPhones, 13.2 Million iPads Sold
Apple has just published its financial results for Q1 2018. The company posted revenue of $88.3 billion. Apple sold 13.2 million iPads, 77.3 million iPhones, and 5.1 million Macs during the quarter.
“We’re thrilled to report the biggest quarter in Apple’s history, with broad-based growth that included the highest revenue ever from a new iPhone lineup. iPhone X surpassed our expectations and has been our top-selling iPhone every week since it shipped in November,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We’ve also achieved a significant milestone with our active installed base of devices reaching 1.3 billion in January. That’s an increase of 30 percent in just two years, which is a testament to the popularity of our products and the loyalty and satisfaction of our customers.”
Connected, Episode 178: The Tiny Heads Trend→
It’s January, so it’s time to spin up the iPhone rumor machine, but first Stephen and Federico consider what a “Snow Leopard” iOS release could look like. Lastly, one of them has switched to DuckDuckGo.
On this week’s episode of Connected, we talk about recent rumors of iOS 12 and I explain why I’ve been using DuckDuckGo as my search engine for the past couple of weeks. You can listen here.
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