Mobile First →

Linked By Federico Viticci

Second, a smartphone knows much more than a PC did. There’s an old computer science saying that a computer should never ask you a question that it should be able to work out the answer to; a smartphone can work out much more. It can see who your friends are, where you spend your time, what photos you’ve taken, whether you’re walking or running and what your credit card is. The sensors, APIs and data that are available (with permission - mostly) to a service you want to use on a smartphone are vastly greater than for a website isolated within a web browser on a PC. Each of those sensors and APIs creates a new business, or many new businesses, that could not exist on a PC.

Benedict Evans has an interesting take on the growing divergence between the modern mobile landscape and the PC environment.

The quote above struck a chord with me as it’s something I notice on a weekly basis when I sit down to record podcasts at my Mac. After working on the iPad and relying on the iPhone 6 Plus as a companion device, the amount of information and workflows that I can’t have on OS X is striking. Beyond entire apps such as Health, Workflow, and Editorial or utilities like the Meet keyboard and Siri, the fact that a mobile OS does everything for me at this point makes the PC obsolete and a legacy model for what I need (with the exception of podcast recording over Skype, but I bet that will be solved on iOS eventually).

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Facebook Instant Karma →

Linked By Federico Viticci

MG Siegler on Instant Articles, Facebook’s initiative for native articles that was rolled out yesterday:

So rather than wait around for the web browsers to catch up, Facebook is taking action. And, by the way, they’re hardly the first to do this. Isn’t Facebook Instant essentially the same thing Flipboard and others have been doing for years? Yes, yes it is.

And again, it’s the right thing to do from a user experience perspective. Who wants to wait longer to load what they’re looking for, be it a game or an article? No one. While they’ll never admit it, even those with fears that this will lead to an end of the “open web” don’t want to wait.

As I tweeted, Instant Articles are so fast and smooth, comparing them to in-app web views isn’t even funny. There’s no contest – Facebook is offering a superior reading experience that, if you’re used to tapping links, waiting, and then reading, is just impressive and obvious (for the vast majority of news websites).

As a publisher, Instant Articles concern me: what if there’s an audience on Facebook that expects articles to be that fast and rich? What if, years down the road, each major social broadcasting service will offer a way to bundle together assets and text to produce native articles that are faster than web views? Will I still own 100% of my content? What happens to the open web and RSS feeds?

I guess there’s only one way to find out.

(I plan to experiment with Instant Articles as soon as possible.)

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Connected: All Fancy And 2.0 →

Linked By Federico Viticci

This week, the guys talk about the state of the Mac App Store and share their hopes and dreams for iOS 9.

On this week’s Connected, we talked about the Mac App Store following Sam Soffes’ experience with Redacted, and we used my iOS 9 wish list as a jumping point for what we’d like to see in the next version of iOS. You can listen here.

Inclusive Toolkit: Tools for iOS & OS X App Accessibility →

Linked By Federico Viticci

Sally Shepard has launched a Kickstarter campaign for the Inclusive Toolkit, a set of tools to help developers make iOS & OS X apps inclusive and accessible.

From the project’s page:

The common difficulties around implementing inclusive concepts in apps are a lack of resources, knowledge and empathy. All of Apple’s products have features that enable inclusivity, and they make a huge difference to people’s lives. Anyone developing for their platforms has access to the APIs to make their app equally accessible.

So how can we fix this?

From a user point of view, I want the Inclusive Toolkit to help solve two problems: unusable elements and poor experiences. And from a developer/designer/QA point of view, I want it to speed up development and testing time, as well as build empathy. It’s great if you work in a company that already has specific resources and knowledge about accessibility—but for many developers, that isn’t the case. I want to provide ways of making it part of the development process instead of something tacked on at the end.

Make sure to check out Sally’s ideas for the Inclusive Toolkit, such as ‘Visual Voiceover’ and ways to simulate impairments in the app testing process. Too many developers still ignore inclusive design and features in their apps, and anything that could help them simplify implementing these frameworks is, I believe, welcome and necessary.

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Sunrise Launches ‘Meet’, a Custom Keyboard to Schedule Meetings

By Federico Viticci

Sunrise’s Meet in Messages, Safari, and the Sunrise app.

When I first tried Meet, Sunrise’s latest addition to their popular calendar app, I didn’t think it made much sense as a custom keyboard. Now, a few months later, Meet has become my favorite way to check on my availability from any app and create one-to-one meetings. With Meet, the Sunrise team has created one of the most innovative mobile calendar features I’ve seen in years.

Horizon 3: Calendar + Weather

By Federico Viticci

Originally released in early 2013, Horizon was a calendar app developed by Kyle Rosenbluth that integrated local weather forecasts with your calendar, giving you a more contextual representation of events that contained location information. Today, Horizon 3 has been released on the App Store with a brand new design, support for natural language searches, and a timeline view that still displays your upcoming events alongside weather conditions and locations.

Pedometer++ Hits One Million Downloads →

Linked By Federico Viticci

David Smith, on his app Pedometer++ hitting one million downloads on the App Store:

Pedometer++ has become one of the most important apps in my portfolio and probably the app I’m now most widely known for.

It also carries with it an attribute that I’ve never experienced with any of my other projects—a sense of doing genuine good. I have had countless reports of how it has help people get healthier, recover from injury or lose weight. These are the stories that really impact me as a developer. The thought that something I made in my basement can have extended and improved people’s lives is truly remarkable.

David’s commitment to the app through the years is equally remarkable. Pedometer++ is one of the apps that is helping me live a healthier lifestyle, and it improved so much since the original version (which we first covered here).

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NYT Now: Your Guide to the News [Sponsor]

By Federico Viticci

Never know what news is the most important to read about? Do you spend too much time searching your social media accounts looking for reliable news? Head to the App Store and download NYT Now for free.

NYT Now is the fastest way to get caught up with the news, with headlines and story summaries that get readers caught up quickly. Designed for iPhone and on-the-go consumption, NYT Now offers a selection of the best articles from The New York Times, as well as stories from around the web curated and hand-picked by a team of NYT editors. NYT Now even includes a daily Morning Briefing, designed to prepare you for the day ahead.

The New York Times released version 2.0 of NYT Now today, which I’ve personally been testing for the past week and find excellent. The biggest news is that the app is now completely free with no need to pay a subscription and no cap on the number of articles you can read – it’s free and unlimited.

The app itself has received a refreshed user interface, with cards that indicate what an article is about and a sharing menu that supports iOS 8 extensions and even the ability to share articles with image previews on Twitter (see example). I find the app to offer a great mix of NYT content and editorial picks from the web: I’ve been discovering and saving articles through NYT Now, and I appreciate the variety and balance of topics and authors presented in the app on a daily basis.

Head to the App Store and download NYT Now or visit nytnow.com to learn more. Remember, it’s now completely free to download and use.

Our thanks to The New York Times for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Apple’s Spotlight Location Icons →

Linked By Federico Viticci

Fascinating look by Rusty Mitchell (via Sebastiaan de With) at Apple’s location icons, used in Spotlight for iOS 8:

In our iOS 8 UI Kit for Illustrator post, I mentioned becoming obsessed with finding all of Apple’s new Spotlight Location icons. I was excited to discover these icons because they are the first large-scale generalized set of pictograms created by Apple, and I was curious to see the depth of the set and how harmonious it is when viewed together. To date I’ve been able to locate 96 of these icons, but there are a few that I have seen in Maps that I haven’t been able to trigger in Spotlight. I’m sure there are still others that I have yet to find at all. In this post, I want to take a moment to highlight a little about the icons and then — since you can only search Spotlight for nearby locations — give some instructions on how to create a GPX file and use Xcode’s handy Simulate Location feature to search for location types that may not be available near you.

As Sebastiaan also notes, I’d love an in-depth look at Apple’s landmark icons used in Maps but absent from Spotlight results (here’s the Colosseum in Rome and Duomo in Milan, as shown in Apple Maps).

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