After several years of struggling to find a way to collaborate with MacStories writers on Markdown text files for article drafts, I recently realized that a solid solution has been around for a long time – private repositories on GitHub. While primarily designed for programmers, GitHub’s system based on branches, commits, and diffs can work...
Indie Games, Vol. 3
Previously: Indie Games Vol.1, Indie Games Vol.2 Basket Fall Developed by Kumobius (the same team behind the excellent Duet), Basket Fall is described as a surreal dunking simulator in which you have to drop the ball and sink a shot. Indeed, in Basket Fall all you have to do is tap the screen to...
Q&A
Question: I have downloaded loads of apps over time. In the past I would religiously go into iTunes on my Mac and update them, and delete any that I had removed it from my device. Inevitably however, I lost track and ended up with loads of apps that I had forgotten to delete. The other...
Tips
If you’re on the iOS 9.3 beta and use a hardware keyboard with your iPad, you’ll be happy to know that Apple has added support for navigation in the Spotlight search page. After hitting CMD+Space to enter Spotlight, start typing, then navigate with the arrow keys (Up/Down) to select results, which will be highlighted...
Facebook to Shut Down Parse→
Mike Isaac and Quentin Hardy, reporting for The New York Times:
Facebook acquired Parse, a toolkit and support system for mobile developers, in 2013. At the time, the social network’s ambitions were high: Parse would be Facebook’s way into one day harnessing developers to become a true cloud business, competing alongside the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
Those ambitions, it seems, have fallen back to earth. On Thursday, Facebook said it plans to shut down Parse, the services platform for which it paid upwards of a reported $85 million.
And from the announcement on the Parse blog:
We understand that this won’t be an easy transition, and we’re working hard to make this process as easy as possible. We are committed to maintaining the backend service during the sunset period, and are providing several tools to help migrate applications to other services.
Parse provided a series of online backend tools for app developers, and this will certainly be a hassle for those who implemented Parse services in their iOS apps. Not to mention apps that were built on top of Parse and then abandoned – while those apps may still be working on modern versions of iOS thanks to backwards API compatibility, they will stop working once Parse – the online component – shuts down for good.
Below, I’ve compiled a list of some reactions from the developer community to the Parse announcement. See also: Connected #13 from November 2014 on App Store preservation.
Connected: Explosion of Glue and Colors→
This week, the Connected crew talk about Myke’s new security system, Podcasts.app on the Apple TV, iPhone 5se rumors, Garageband and Crashlands.
On this week’s Connected, we tried to convince Stephen to play Crashlands. I don’t think we succeeded. You can listen here.
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Fiery Feeds Adds Support for Read-Later Services
I’ve talked about Fiery Feeds in my review of 2Do and in previous emails to Club MacStories members – it’s an RSS reader developed by Lukas Burgstaller that works with a lot of RSS services and that strives to become the most powerful option for RSS power users on iOS. I’d like to quickly point out the 1.6 update that was released this week as it inches closer to that vision with new integrations.
Deliveries 7.0→
Terrific update to one of my most used apps for iPhone and iPad: Deliveries by Junecloud. As someone who’s buying more and more from Amazon every year – all our 2015 Christmas gifts came from Amazon, for instance – Deliveries has turned into an essential utility to keep track of multiple orders at once without visiting the Amazon website (which is ugly and slow).
Today’s major update has brought full iOS 9 support (3D Touch, Spotlight, multitasking, Safari View Controller, etc.), better iCloud sync, improved clipboard detection and, my favorite, the ability to select any text, tap the ‘Share’ button of the copy & paste menu, and feed text to the Deliveries extension, which will parse order numbers automatically. This app is so good, I wish I could buy it multiple times.
See also: Deliveries 2.0 for Mac, released today on the Mac App Store.
Office for iOS Gets New Storage Integrations
For nearly two months now, I’ve been using Microsoft’s Office apps for my accounting and other MacStories projects; I’ve also begun moving my cloud file management to Box. Hence, I’m glad that Microsoft has started expanding Office’s file management abilities on iOS, adding the option to import (and sync) files directly from Box in addition to Dropbox.
Microsoft’s Kirk Koenigsbauer, writing on the Office blog:
Starting today, in addition to Dropbox, we’re offering all CSPP partners the opportunity to tightly integrate with Office for iOS. This integration lets users designate these partner cloud services as “places” in Office, just as they can with Microsoft OneDrive and Dropbox. Users can now browse for PowerPoint, Word and Excel files on their favorite cloud service right from within an Office app. They can open, edit or create in these apps with confidence that their files will be updated right in the cloud. Users can also open Office files from their cloud storage app in Office, then save any changes directly back to the cloud. We’ll follow with other mobile platforms later this year.
Here’s how it works: in Office for iOS, switch to the ‘Open’ section, then tap ‘Add a Place’ and pick Box from the list of available services. This will create a custom Box (or Dropbox) file browser in the app, allowing you to pick any file, edit it, and keep it in the ‘Recent’ view for easier access.
The key advantage of this native integration over opening a file with the iOS document picker is that, once added, a Box or Dropbox file will continuously sync changes between Office and the cloud, making your edits available anywhere.
As I discussed with Fraser on Canvas, while Microsoft is one of the companies that properly support document providers on iOS with open mode for files, document providers can still be finicky at a system level (for example, an “opened” file may stop communicating with the originating app occasionally), and they’re slower for browsing files. The custom integration is still superior, even if it requires you to authenticate again. From my first tests today, native Box support in Word already seems more stable than the old method based on “opening” files from the Box document provider.
The other big news from the Office team today is that real-time collaboration for Office Online is now also available for documents stored in external services. This means that you will be able to co-author documents with other people even if you keep your Office files in Dropbox or Box. At this point, and given Google’s shortsighted approach to iOS and collaboration in their apps, I have to ask: how long until Office gets real-time collaboration with external services on mobile too?