Posts in iOS

Wikipedia for iOS Gets ‘Textshot’ Support with Visual Fact Sharing

The practice of sharing ‘textshots’ – screenshots of text, as they’re often referred to – has taken off among certain tech niches for two reasons. First, turning text into a static image is a primitive but effective workaround to circumvent Twitter’s 140-character limitations. But more importantly, humans have a natural tendency for convenience and visual feedback, and these two aspects are combined in the art of well crafted textshots: they save you a click, and they make shared passages of text more visually appealing. There are several reasons as to why textshots are working well for some Twitter users, but the underlying idea is extremely simple: images can add flair to a tweet in a way that plain text can’t.

Wikipedia is hoping that this concept will also apply to their app, which, following a rollout on Android, is getting the ability to share facts as ‘cards’ on iOS today. I tried a pre-release version of the app, and, while far from Instapaper’s surprisingly advanced textshot implementation, the Wikimedia Foundation has put some nice touches in this feature.

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iOS 8.3 Released

Apple released iOS 8.3 earlier today, bringing a variety of bug fixes (with some of the most detailed release notes I’ve ever seen in an iOS update), new diverse emoji with skin tones, and various improvements to Siri and CarPlay. Josh Centers has a good overview of the changes at TidBITS.

I haven’t had much time to check out iOS 8.3 (I installed the developer beta on a loaned iPhone 6 Plus earlier this week), but, so far, everything seems a bit faster and generally fine on my iPad Air 2 (which I’ve been using all day for work).

I like the new emoji keyboard because it makes it easy to find different categories with a new scrollable UI (reminiscent of the excellent Emoji++, which I’ve uninstalled to take Apple’s new keyboard for a spin). The new emoji keyboard is especially nice on the iPad, with big previews and category icons at the bottom. Third-party keyboards seem to be faster when switching between them (but they’re still not as responsive or integrated as Apple’s native ones) and I’ve noticed no rotation problems on the 6 Plus so far.

iOS 8.3 appears to be the equivalent of iOS 7.1 last year – dozens of important fixes, nicely wrapping up most of the work on iOS 8 before WWDC.

Scanbot Adds Slack, Wunderlist Integration

I’ve recently accepted the fact that I’m never happy with my paperless setup, and this freed me from the burden of feeling bad whenever I’m trying different apps to scan documents and archive them online. One of the apps I’m trying alongside Evernote Scannable is Scanbot, which has received some interesting updates over the past few months (such as themes and smart naming features). Today, Scanbot was updated with Slack and Wunderlist support, and I’m a fan of these integrations.

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1Password 5.3 Improves iOS 8 Extension

With version 5.3 of 1Password for iOS, the team at AgileBits has shipped considerable improvements to the app’s action extension, launched alongside iOS 8 back in September. In the updated app, the extension is now almost on par with the browser extension found in 1Password for desktop computers, which means I’ll no longer wish for the “real” 1Password extension whenever I’m logging into websites or setting up new logins on my iPhone and iPad.

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Facebook Messenger’s “Optimized” Approach and App Discovery

Over at Fast Company, Sarah Kessler has a good summary of Facebook’s Messenger announcements from today’s F8 developer conference:

Facebook wants to turn its Messenger app into more than just a messaging app. At its F8 conference in San Francisco Wednesday, the company announced details on its much-rumored plans to integrate Messenger with purchases made on other sites, and to allow third-party developers to build apps that work within it.

Messenger users will soon be able to select from a list of services inside of the app. At launch, most of these apps help users create new content, like singing telegram app Ditty, GIF app Giphy, and voice app FlipLip Voice Changer. There’s also a fun special effects app available from J.J. Abrams and an ESPN app that provides users with sports GIFs. Facebook says 40 apps will be available today or in the days to come.

I was curious about Facebook’s plans for Messenger Platform, and the addition of an API immediately caught my interest. I tweeted:

After reading more about how Messenger Platform works with third-party apps, though, I realized that my tweets from earlier today don’t exactly apply to what Facebook is doing.

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After Six Months of Rejections, Launcher Returns to the App Store

When Greg Gardner, an independent developer based in San Francisco, released Launcher for iOS last year, he didn’t think his handy utility would make headlines around tech blogs and push other developers to approach widgets for iOS 8 differently. And yet, after months of not being available on the App Store despite being originally approved in September 2014, Launcher is about to be covered (and used as an example) by the press again. Launcher has been re-approved by Apple, and it’s coming back to the App Store today with the same feature set from six months ago.

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