Good follow-up by Joe Steel (who’s been covering and critiquing the Apple TV for a while) to last year’s tvOS wishes, which were already spot-on.
I found his assessment of the Siri Remote sadly relatable:
This remote was an abomination that should have never made it out of the design lab it was drafted in. It was conjured up by designers from another world who only had TV remote controls described to them using words in their native tongue. I want something that can be held comfortably, doesn’t shatter, and has asymmetry that you can feel to know what you are holding, and what you are pushing, without looking at the tiny monolith. I wanted it in 2015, and I still want it.
Whatever touch surface they include should be fine-tuned to work with a human thumb instead of whatever capuchin monkey the remote’s original designers were imagining.
Justin O’Beirne is back with another in-depth analysis of Google Maps and Apple Maps, with a focus on how Google has taken a different approach over the past year:
Shortly after I published my Cartography Comparison last June, I noticed Google updating some of the areas we had focused on:
Coincidence or not, it was interesting. And it made me wonder what else would change, if we kept watching. Would Google keep adding detail? And would Apple, like Google, also start making changes?
So I wrote a script that takes monthly screenshots of Google and Apple Maps.1 And thirteen months later, we now have a year’s worth of images.
The screenshot comparisons in his post perfectly demonstrate Google’s iteration and Apple’s relative stagnation.
Speaking from personal experience, Google Maps has considerably improved in my area in the past year, while Apple Maps has remained essentially the same. Which isn’t to say that Apple Maps is bad – Google simply has an edge over local business information and they’re evolving at a faster pace than Apple. To me, Apple Maps looks and feels nicer; Google Maps seems smarter and it has modern features I’d like Apple to add.
I wonder what Apple has in store for WWDC and if they should consider separating Maps from their monolithic software release cycle in the summer.
(See also: O’Beirne in May and June 2016.)
The most common questions from Club MacStories members involve some kind of file conversion. Whether it’s about converting PDFs to images (by far, the most frequent request we receive for this column) or exporting documents to formats that aren’t natively supported on iOS, I’ve read dozens of emails about converting files with Workflow over...
On this week’s Canvas, we welcome special guest Merlin Mann to discuss opportunities for improvements that may – or may not – arrive in iOS 11. I had a lot of fun doing this. You can listen here.
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In my iOS 11 wish list for iPad and concept video, I focused on system-wide drag & drop – a feature that could reshape how iPad users move documents and data between apps. Readdle, makers of the popular Spark and PDF Expert, aren’t waiting for Apple to add a native drag & drop framework to iOS, though. Today, in addition to the release of Documents 6, the company is updating most of their iPad apps with a custom drag & drop feature that simplifies the transfer of documents between two apps in Split View. I’ve been testing this functionality for the past week, and, even if it’s not system-wide iOS drag & drop, it’s been enough to pull me back into Spark and PDF Expert – at least for now.
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Stephen has launched a membership, Apple wants people to switch from Android and future hardware is starting to leak. Then, a roundup of the services we use to keep our companies running smoothly.
A fun episode of Connected this week with an interesting look at the web services we use for work at the end. You can listen here.
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On this week’s episode of AppStories, we interviewed Brian Mueller, the creator of the CARROT series of apps, about how he got started, the origins of CARROT, a corgi with a top hat and monocle, and his new CARROT game, Artificial Superintelligence.
You can listen to the episode below.
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- Setapp – An app for every job, already on you Mac.
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Federico and John interview Brian Mueller, the creator of the CARROT series of apps, about how he got started, the origins of CARROT, a corgi with a top hat and monocle, and his new CARROT game, Artificial Superintelligence.
Read more
Federico has published his iOS 11 wish list, and the group goes deep on what Apple should do with the iPad’s software. Stephen manages to sneak in a confession.
On this week’s Connected, we discuss my iOS 11 wish list and concept video and we consider where Apple could take the iPad next. You can listen here.
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- Squarespace: Make your next move. Enter offer code WORLD at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase.
- PDFpen 9, from Smile: Everything you need for more powerful PDF editing.
John