On this week’s episode of AppStories, we dig into some of our favorite iOS app debuts and updates highlighting iOS 12 features.
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Steven Levy spent more than a year talking to past and present Apple executives and employees about the company’s former headquarters at One Infinite Loop in Cupertino, California. As Levy describes it:
Infinite Loop was the place where Apple’s leaders and engineers pulled off a historic turnaround, and it will always be the source of stories and legends—many of them untold. Until now.
It’s hard to pick among the anecdotes in Levy’s history, but one of my favorites is this from Phil Schiller because it captures the tough choice that had to be made when Steve Jobs returned to Apple and his empathy for customers:
Schiller: We’re like, “Steve! Newton customers are picketing! What do you want to do? They’re angry.” And Steve said, “They have every right to be angry. They love Newton. It’s a great product, and we have to kill it, and that’s not fun, so we have to get them coffee and doughnuts and send it down to them and tell them we love them and we’re sorry and we support them.”
There are fascinating details about Apple’s history in Levy’s piece that you won’t find anywhere else, and he’s done an excellent job weaving them into a cohesive, chronological narrative that shouldn’t be missed.
Extensive, nicely formatted guide for the new Shortcuts app, published directly by Apple today.
If you’re absolutely new to the Shortcuts app and never played with Workflow before, this is where I’d start. The guide goes into great detail about what shortcuts are, how you can organize them, and what types of input are supported in Shortcuts. There’s also an Advanced section where – and I never thought I’d see this – Apple explains x-callback-url and web APIs. Some of these sections have been adapted from the old Workflow documentation, but it’s a fantastic resource regardless. And once you’re done reading through Apple’s materials, I’ll be waiting here.
After the keynote Wednesday, Chief Design Officer Jony Ive was interviewed by The Washington Post about the Apple Watch Series 4. Ive told the Post:
“Every bone in my body tells me this is very significant”
What seems to have Ive most excited about the new Watch is its increasing independence from the iPhone:
“The clues for the future are when you can have a high degree of confidence that you personally are connected to the Net — not your phone, you,” said Ive.
The addition of a cellular radio to the Series 3 made a big difference in freeing the Watch from the iPhone. This year, I expect the difference will be felt more on the software side as developers implement apps that take advantage of the new watchOS 5 APIs.
Despite the Series 3’s cellular radio, I almost always took my iPhone with me for runs because I wanted to listen to podcasts. More than anything else, the ability to listen to my favorite shows untethered has the potential to free me from my iPhone.
Google launched Inbox in 2014 as a place to experiment with new email features, some of which made their way into the company’s Gmail app eventually. Although it served as a sandbox for trying new features like email snoozing, Smart Replies, and Nudges, Inbox was not updated nearly as frequently as Gmail. So, it wasn’t surprising to hear from Google yesterday that it plans to end support for Inbox at the end of March 2019.
If you are an Inbox user and want to move your email accounts to Gmail, Google has created a transition guide.
The Verge has a story today by Micah Singleton in which he wonders whether Apple still cares about Beats, the company it acquired in 2014. As Singleton notes, no new products have been released under the Beats brand in 2018, and The Verge’s sources say we shouldn’t expect that to change at Apple’s keynote tomorrow.
Nonetheless, Beats continues to have marketing successes, like recently becoming the official headphones of the NBA and USA Basketball. However, the dearth of new products coupled with competition from Apple’s wireless AirPods and rumored premium over-the-ear headphones puts Beats in a tight spot, which Singleton argues is a mistake:
Apple has its eyes set on the high-end audio market to compete against the likes of Audio-Technica, Bose, and a rapidly improving headphone ecosystem. But neglecting the team that has been able to sell slightly above-average headphones at a breakneck pace for nearly a decade doesn’t seem like a smart business move for either party. If you are the official headphone company for United States Basketball, it seems wise to continue releasing new headphones. And if you are Apple — and your history with headphones and speakers has precisely one win, despite many attempts — you should lean on the company you own that hasn’t missed yet.
Beats jump-started Apple’s music streaming efforts, but other than adding the W1 chip to its wireless headphones in late 2016 and 2017, there have been few signs of Apple’s plans for Beats. I hope Singleton is wrong about Apple neglecting Beats because it would be a shame to squander the company’s valuable brand, though I suspect he may not be.
TechCrunch has confirmed that Apple is expanding how its September 12th keynote can be consumed. In years past, Apple keynotes were limited to streaming in Safari and the Apple Events app. This past summer, Apple expanded browser-based streaming to include Firefox and Chrome.
Yesterday, Apple began offering reminders of its event via Twitter, which the company has done in the past. As Sarah Perez of TechCrunch notes, however, the wording for tomorrow’s event was a little different:
Instead of saying “follow” the event on Twitter, the tweet says “…watch the #AppleEvent live on Twitter.” (Emphasis ours).
Watch implies a live stream, and the tweet itself featured an animated GIF as another hint.
That wording kicked off speculation that Twitter would stream the keynote, which TechCrunch and other media outlets have since confirmed.
Apple will hold its special event at the Steve Jobs Theater tomorrow at 10 a.m. PDT. Besides the Apple Events app and Twitter livestream, the event will be available on apple.com.
You can follow all of our Apple event coverage through our September 12, 2018 hub, or subscribe to the dedicated September 12, 2018 RSS feed.
Last fall, Apple launched the free Heart Study app in partnership with Stanford University. The study, which was closed to new participants in August and has begun to end for some early participants, was available to US residents over 22 years old with an Apple Watch Series 1 and newer. The app used the Apple Watch to monitor the user’s heart rate for atrial fibrillation, a leading cause of stroke.
Over the course of the Stanford study, stories have surfaced of instances where it discovered dangerous Afib conditions that were undiagnosed before. One such recent story comes from ZDNet writer Jason Perlow. A self-described Apple critic, Perlow purchased a refurbished Series 2 Nike+ Apple Watch earlier this year to test it.
Skeptical about whether the device would be something he would use much, Perlow nonetheless signed up for the Heart Study. Within a few days, Perlow received a notification asking him to contact a doctor at Stanford. The Heart Study app had detected signs of previously-undiagnosed atrial fibrillation. Perlow had the condition treated by a team of heart specialists, but as he concludes:
I owe my life to my Apple Watch. Because it started this whole machine rolling. And I was very lucky to have my Afib caught during the last three months of public enrollment in the Heart Study, which ended in early August.
I participated in the Heart Study too. Like Perlow, I forgot about it for long stretches. I’m fortunate that I didn’t receive the sort of alert Perlow did, but in September, Stanford sent me a notification that my participation in the study was ending. It turns out that over the course of 188 days, Stanford collected 1,743 heart measurements from me. Multiply that by the thousands of people in the study, and the potential the Apple Watch has for medical research is remarkable, while at the same time helping individuals like Perlow one at a time.
On this week’s episode of AppStories, we explore Twitter clients, other specialized Twitter apps, and how we use them.
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