Posts in iOS

Sunrise Becomes Part of Outlook for iOS

Big news from Microsoft today: Sunrise, the calendar platform they acquired earlier this year, will merge with the Outlook mobile app, providing the calendar backend for the app.

From the Microsoft blog:

The Sunrise team is now officially a part of the broader Outlook product team, bringing a fresh approach to calendaring and combining it with Microsoft’s deep expertise in both email and calendar. Better Outlook calendaring gives you more ability to manage your personal and professional life from a single, powerful app. Over the coming months, you’ll see richer calendar experiences come to Outlook from Sunrise—including Interesting Calendars and connections to your favorite apps and services. You will also see improvements to Outlook’s ability to create meetings while on the go and handle meetings across time zones. All of this means Outlook will eventually replace the current Sunrise app.

And here’s from the Sunrise blog:

All the features you love in Sunrise are coming to Outlook soon
We are currently working on integrating all the extra features that made Sunrise so delightful to use in Outlook for iOS and Android. Expect features like Interesting Calendars, Connected Apps and our 3-day view to show up before the end of the year.

Until then, the Sunrise app will stay on the App Store, though it won’t likely receive any updates.

After the acquisition news in February, I wrote:

It seems fair to assume that Microsoft will add more cloud integrations from their own ecosystem (OneNote, Exchange, perhaps Skype?), but I’m curious to see if and how Sunrise will work with Outlook, which comes with an embedded Calendar view.

Microsoft’s answer eight months later is that they want to build an all-in-one email and calendar app that also supports connections to external apps and services. For context, Sunrise currently works with data from Todoist, Evernote, Songkick, Asana, and more. In theory, all these integrations could also be coming to Outlook, which would make it the most “open” calendar and email client on the App Store in terms of third-party (cloud) integrations.

I have mixed feelings about the all-in-one approach, at least for now. Today’s update to Outlook for iOS (which I have been using as my go-to client for the past month) brings a cleaner look and native Watch app, but the Sunrise integration is half-baked and there’s a lot of work to do. The Calendar view of Outlook has been refreshed with a more polished UI and a new monthly view, but none of the features that made Sunrise great – event icons, integrations, the keyboard, and the fantastic date picker – are available yet. Basically, Microsoft has announced their intention to bring Sunrise to Outlook, without any deep Sunrise integration in the actual app yet.

When the transition from Sunrise to Outlook is complete, will it be too much for a single app? Are we really going to get the real Sunrise alongside our email, or a watered-down version lacking the many small touches which made Sunrise an elegant and powerful standalone calendar app? On the other hand, if anyone can make email smarter thanks to integrations and fresh ideas, that’s the Sunrise team. I want to be optimistic.

Also, don’t forget about Wunderlist, which Microsoft also acquired this year. Currently, support for “tasks” in Outlook is marked as planned in the app’s community section where users can vote and suggest new features. I wonder what’s going to happen there.

Tweeting Multiple Pictures from iOS’ Photos App with Linky

Ever since Twitter rolled out the ability to include multiple pictures in a tweet, I’ve been annoyed by the lack of such option in iOS’ tweet sheet. There are times when I’d rather not open my Twitter client to tweet some pictures or screenshots – maybe I don’t want to get distracted by news happening on Twitter, or maybe I just want to share from the Photos app without seeing mentions that I want to reply to.

Twitter’s (or Apple’s?) decision not to support the feature with the native iOS extension is baffling, but, thankfully, the latest update to Linky for iPhone and iPad offers an elegant (and obvious) solution to the problem.

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Watch Keypad Lets You Call Any Number from Your Apple Watch

Developed by Rob De Ruiter, Watch Keypad is a useful app for watchOS 2 that lets you call or text any number from your Apple Watch.

I know what you’re thinking – nobody really has to remember phone numbers in the age of cloud-synced contacts and address books. Thinking back to a decade ago, it’s odd to consider how many phone numbers I used to remember – dozens of them for close friends and family members – and compare that to today, as I barely know my own number. Still, there are times when I need to call a number that is not in my contacts list (and that I can’t tap directly in a webpage or in Maps). For those occasions, having the ability to do so from the Watch – which may be best when doing something else, such as cooking or chores – is a good option.

Watch Keypad launches fast and shows a keypad with numbers and buttons to delete and call. Upon each press, the app will play a sound and a subtle vibration to communicate input (sort of like PCalc does). Spinning the Digital Crown upwards will reveal a different set of keys (such as asterisk and clear), as well as a different button to send a text with the built-in Messages app. The app’s primary functionality – phone calls for typed numbers – is handled by the iPhone, which will initiate a call with the native Phone app and display the special green status bar when a call is happening. A list of recent calls is also available in the Watch Keypad app itself, both on the Apple Watch and iPhone.

Watch Keypad fixes a very specific omission – the lack of a keypad in Apple’s Phone app for Apple Watch. De Ruiter’s solution works well, and it’s only $0.99 on the App Store.

Screenshot Markup and Loupes with PointOut for iOS

As I shared on Twitter last month and in the first issue of MacStories Weekly for Club MacStories members, I found myself having to call out areas of apps and system features in screenshots for my iOS 9 review.

What I wanted to achieve had long been possible with desktop apps such as Acorn and Napkin, but I had a surprisingly hard time finding apps which could add loupes on top of screenshots on iOS. I ended up using OmniGraffle with this workflow, but the process required too many taps. While I appreciate OmniGraffle’s powerful set of features, I don’t need all of them and I’d rather have a dedicated utility for this type of image markup.

Created by indie developer Demarca Marek Moi, PointOut is a free app for iPhone and iPad that supports multiple types of image annotations and canvas layouts. You can add pointers, borders, split the canvas in multiple sections (each zoomed on a specific image detail), and tweak colors and thickness for every element. It’s a powerful image annotation app with more options and controls than the simple (but also excellent) Pinpoint. But, I’m primarily interested in PointOut’s diagram-like loupe, added in the latest update and which matches exactly what I need for my iOS screenshots.

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Live GIF Lets You Generate Animated GIFs From the iPhone 6s’ Live Photos

Live Photos are one of the best features of the iPhone 6s. While not revolutionary from a technical perspective (they’re video files associated with an image), the simple and natural implementation of Live Photos is breeding a new type of medium – the moving photo that comes alive under your touch. Harry Potter-esque in their effect and delightfully blended with 3D Touch, I genuinely believe that Live Photos make for one of the best demos of a new iPhone in years.

There’s one caveat with sharing Live Photos, though: at least for now, unless you’re sharing with someone who has an iPhone or unless the app you’re using is able to convert Live Photos on the fly, there isn’t a way to export Live Photos to GIF or movie formats from Apple’s Photos and share the result with the world. This is what Live GIF, a new $1.99 app released today by Priime, wants to offer a solution for.

Live GIF launches to a screen that automatically filters your photo library to only show Live Photos in a grid. You can press firmly on a Live Photo to peek at the video, or you can tap on one to start the conversion process, which typically lasts a couple of seconds. When done, the app will show an animated GIF (without audio, of course) with two buttons to share as GIF or share as video. In both cases, you’ll be shown the system share sheet so you can send the converted file to any app or extension you want. Keep in mind that GIFs are saved with looping, while videos are saved without looping and include audio.

And that’s all Live GIF does. In my tests, the app never failed to generate GIFs and videos for my Live Photos, which I was able to share via iMessage, Slack, and upload elsewhere with other apps. Live GIF provides an important missing functionality for iOS 9.0 and the current version of Live Photos – and it can be especially useful if you’re planning to share Live Photos on the web or with friends who don’t have iPhones.

Live GIF is available at $1.99 on the App Store.

Tweetbot 4 Adds 3D Touch Support on iPhone 6s

Released earlier this month, Tweetbot 4 marked an important comeback for Tapbots. After years of stagnation, the iPad app received a fantastic update with a new design and column view, while the iPhone app continued refining the foundation of Tweetbot 3 with power user features and various visual tweaks.

Among changes, however, Tweetbot 4 didn’t launch with 3D Touch integration on the iPhone 6s – a choice motivated by developed Paul Haddad with an understandable desire to test the new input method on an actual device first. Today, Tapbots has released Tweetbot 4.0.1, which brings support for 3D Touch in the form of Home screen shortcuts and peek & pop gestures inside the app.

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Fantastical 2.5 Brings watchOS 2 Complication, iPad Multitasking on iOS 9

Despite my appreciation for Apple’s updates to the Calendar app on iOS 9, I still find Flexibits’ Fantastical to be the more powerful, flexible Calendar and Reminders client we deserve. Fantastical is an app which I’ve loved covering over the years because of Flexibits’ unwavering commitment to quality. Today’s 2.5 update continues to confirm the indie studio’s penchant for new versions that truly take advantage of what iOS has to offer.

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