Stephen is away on an important mission. He left Myke and Federico behind to discuss the financial decline of Fitbit, and what’s missing from iOS 10.3. Myke also has some follow up about sleeping and lightbulbs, and Federico has been observing people.
A fun episode of Connected this week, with an interesting discussion of modern trends in iOS usage. You can listen here.
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Good analysis by Ben Bajarin, who sums up various discussions I’ve read in my Twitter timeline lately about the quality of Apple’s services and the company’s approach to not collecting lots of data:
However, getting useful and good behavioral data is essential for Apple to make better products and services and, more importantly, compete with those services down the road. I’d almost prefer that, instead of Apple’s stance being not only to collect as little data as necessary and also to universally anonymize that data, they would simply say, “Trust us with your data. We will keep it safe and secure and we will deliver you superior products and services because of it.” I could also be satisfied with a hybrid approach where, for the most security conscious customers, Apple gives them the option to keep the existing privacy protocol as well as their differential privacy techniques, but also allow others to opt-in to giving them more data so that things like Siri, News, Apple Music, etc., benefit from that data and thus, deliver those customers a much more personalized and useful service. With some of the recent changes in iOS 10.3, I feel they are getting closer to exactly this scenario.
Ben refers to iOS 10.3’s upcoming iCloud data sharing option – a new (opt-in) setting to share iCloud-related data with Apple.
This is a complex problem: it’s still too early to understand the impact of Differential Privacy, and I don’t think Apple’s services are inherently terrible; but I also agree with the premise that by not collecting data, other companies may capitalize on Apple’s users in the future thanks to smarter services. I’d love to get more details on what Apple is working on for iCloud analytics.
With the start of the new year, I found myself traveling across Italy and abroad within the span of a couple of weeks. Doing so – especially in Spain – made me appreciate how many tourist and travel-related tasks I can now delegate to an iPhone, whether that’s loading directions to places in Maps,...
I love it when two of my favorite apps come together with integrations that speed up and simplify my workflow. Last week, Scanbot – my go-to scanner app for iOS – rolled out a new Todoist integration that lets you scan and save a document as a task.
The feature is explained here, and it’s quite ingenious: tasks are saved with the name of a scanned document, which is also added as an inline attachment inside a task. You can add due dates and times directly from Scanbot, and you can even pick an existing project for automatic upload, which means that as soon as a document is scanned in the app, it’ll be automatically uploaded as a task to a Todoist project.
As I wrote two years ago, I was hoping Scanbot would consider integration with Todoist, and I’m glad it’s out now.
Charles Joseph, developer of Picky, on the enhancements coming to the MediaPlayer framework in iOS 10.3:
I was genuinely surprised and elated to find that yesterday’s iOS 10.3 beta finally adds what looks like proper queuing functionality to MPMusicPlayerController and I excitedly tweeted about it. Scott Edwards asked if I could “explain why that’s important to a non programmer”, so I’m going to try to do that here.
Alternatives to Apple’s Music app (like Picky) need to be able to access and play the user’s iTunes library, unless they’re part of a streaming service (like Spotify) or providing their own syncing and library management and companion apps (quite the tall order). While developers can build incredibly advanced playback functionality with tools like AVFoundation, that’s only possible for an increasingly smaller subset of users’ libraries: only locally downloaded, non-DRMed content — nothing stored in the cloud and nothing downloaded from Apple Music. People are storing more and more of their music in the cloud and expect third-party apps to be able to keep up.
It sounds like Apple is listening to feedback from developers of third-party music players. The changes documented in the iOS 10.3 beta so far don’t address all the concerns Allen Pike covered last year, but it’s a good first step. I’m curious to see how apps will take advantage of the improved API.
Question: I need a workflow to publish meeting notes that I’ve recorded in Apple’s Notes app as a Google document, placing the document in a specific shared folder on Google Drive. (Michael Welsh, @michaelwelsh)
There is no easy way to automate Notes and Google Docs with Workflow alone, but we can implement the Zapier...
Question: Can you recommend a shopping list app? I intend to share a shopping list (not limited to groceries alone) with my family members too. (Anonymous)
If you’re looking for a dedicated shopping list app, I know AnyList is a solid solution for iOS and the web, with good sharing options and an elegant...
I’ve talked before about how I like to be woken up in the morning by my girlfriend with a good cup of espresso. We’re on two slightly different schedules: I usually go to sleep a couple of hours after her, and she tends to wake up considerably earlier than I do. And because she...
Federico and Myke talk about what they’re excited for in 2017.
On the latest episode of Remaster, we also talked about the updated Pokémon Bank online service and considered what might be announced at videogame conferences this year. You can listen here.
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