Myke has caused a chain-reaction of purchases, Stephen talks about the PowerPC transition and Federico tries some apps.
On this week’s Connected, Myke makes some great points about the iPad’s sales compared to the Mac, and I explain why I’ve been using Twitterrific and Apple News. You can listen here.
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Reuters’ Julia Love has published a look into the design process behind Apple’s Campus 2, based on interviews with a number of current and former workers on the massive architectural project.
Unsurprisingly, Love discovered that Apple’s attention to detail on the campus mirrors its attention to detail on consumer products.
Apple’s in-house construction team enforced many rules: No vents or pipes could be reflected in the glass. Guidelines for the special wood used frequently throughout the building ran to some 30 pages.
Tolerances, the distance materials may deviate from desired measurements, were a particular focus. On many projects, the standard is 1/8 of an inch at best; Apple often demanded far less, even for hidden surfaces.
Based on outside evidence, the completion of Campus 2 seems to be drawing near, so we can expect to hear more details about the project – and hopefully receive inside glimpses from Apple itself – over the next few months.
After years of being accused of apathy toward the harassment and abuse that takes place on its platform, Twitter has so far marked 2017 with a stronger commitment to creating a safer environment for everyone.
Last week, Twitter announced a change to the way abusive tweets could be reported. Previously, if a user had blocked you, it would be impossible to report that user’s tweets as abusive or harmful, but that’s no longer the case.
Today Twitter introduced three more changes:
Stopping the creation of new abusive accounts:
We’re taking steps to identify people who have been permanently suspended and stop them from creating new accounts. This focuses more effectively on some of the most prevalent and damaging forms of behavior, particularly accounts that are created only to abuse and harass others.Introducing safer search results:
We’re also working on ‘safe search’ which removes Tweets that contain potentially sensitive content and Tweets from blocked and muted accounts from search results. While this type of content will be discoverable if you want to find it, it won’t clutter search results any longer. Learn more in our help center.Collapsing potentially abusive or low-quality Tweets:
Our team has also been working on identifying and collapsing potentially abusive and low-quality replies so the most relevant conversations are brought forward. These Tweet replies will still be accessible to those who seek them out. You can expect to see this change rolling out in the coming weeks.
These changes follow a series of tweets at the end of last month by Twitter’s VP of Engineering, Ed Ho, who claimed the company is committed to “moving with more urgency than ever” to make Twitter a safer place. Ho tweeted again as today’s changes were announced and reinforced that these actions represent just the beginning, and more changes would be made to the service in the coming days.
I would love to see iOS 11 bringing subtle touch down animations to standard system elements, such as navbar buttons, table view cells etc. By doing it to the default components, third party apps would be affected by it as well. This would make for a consistent and more compelling experience when touching iOS. And that sense of stiffness would be replaced with a much more fluid experience.
I like this idea. Apple Music’s new play button has a great touch-down state – I wish more parts of iOS followed the same approach.
A few months ago, I decided to remove Google AMP support from MacStories due to the obfuscation of our permalinks by the AMP plugin. There was a good discussion about publishers’ AMP concerns, including a story on The New York Times.
Today, Google has announced that they’re introducing a new feature that makes it easier to see a publisher’s full URL and copy it. Here’s Alex Fischer, writing on the Google Developers Blog:
Today, we’re adding a feature to the AMP integration in Google Search that allows users to access, copy, and share the canonical URL of an AMP document. But before diving deeper into the news, let’s take a step back to elaborate more on URLs in the AMP world and how they relate to the speed benefits of AMP.
And:
In addition to the above, many users have requested a way to access, copy, and share the canonical URL of a document. Today, we’re adding support for this functionality in form of an anchor button in the AMP Viewer header on Google Search. This feature allows users to use their browser’s native share functionality by long-tapping on the link that is displayed.
Google is also hoping that browsers will add support for a new Web Share API (which sounds nice as long as it can only be manually activated by the user; I can imagine websites abusing programmatic activation of the system share sheet).
I’m still not going to re-enable AMP in the short term, but I’m glad to see Google is listening to publishers and iterating quickly.
This week Fraser and Federico change gears and focus on Read Later services.
A different episode of Canvas this week – we talked about the best apps and services to save articles for later, including Apple’s own Reading List and some alternative power-user methods. You can listen here.
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Andrew Cunningham, writing for Ars Technica on a new warning that appears when running old 32-bit apps on the first beta of iOS 10.3:
Beta builds of iOS 10.3, the first of which was issued last week, generate warning messages when you try to run older 32-bit apps. The message, originally discovered by PSPDFKit CEO and app developer Peter Steinberger, warns that the apps “will not work with future versions of iOS” and that the app must be updated by its developer in order to continue running. The apps still run in iOS 10.3, but it seems likely that iOS 11 will drop support for them entirely.
Though the error message doesn’t explicitly mention the app’s 32-bit or 64-bit support, it’s definitely only older 32-bit apps that trigger the warning. Similar messages that did explicitly mention 64-bit support were present in the betas of iOS 10.0, but they were removed in the final release of the software. Apple has required 64-bit support for all new app submissions since February of 2015 and all app update submissions since June 2015, so any apps that are still throwing this error haven’t been touched by their developer in at least a year and a half (developers could add 64-bit support as early as 2013, but most of them opted not to until it became a requirement).
Note how, unlike the warning that was reinstated with iOS 10.1, this alert clearly states that “this app will not work with future versions of iOS” as opposed to “may slow down your iPhone”.
In my review of iOS 10, I had a couple of paragraphs on the warning that iOS displayed when launching a 32-bit app for the first time. The warning didn’t make it to the final version of iOS 10, so I didn’t cover it. I did, however, note that iOS 10 was accelerating the transition to 64-bit across the board.
Requiring apps to be compiled for 64-bit is going to introduce problems for software that is no longer maintained (especially classic iOS games), but Apple is moving toward cleaning up the App Store’s back catalog anyway. Enforcing the 64-bit requirement in iOS 11 wouldn’t be a complete surprise.
Chrome for iOS was historically kept separate from Google’s open-source Chromium project. Chrome uses a rendering engine called Blink on every platform except iOS where it must run WebKit. That made incorporating Chrome for iOS into Chromium complicated, but today Google announced that Chrome for iOS has rejoined Chromium and been added to the open-source repository. Now,
developers can compile the iOS version of Chromium like they can for other versions of Chromium. Development speed is also faster now that all of the tests for Chrome for iOS are available to the entire Chromium community and automatically run any time that code is checked in.
Stephen is away on an important mission. He left Myke and Federico behind to discuss the financial decline of Fitbit, and what’s missing from iOS 10.3. Myke also has some follow up about sleeping and lightbulbs, and Federico has been observing people.
A fun episode of Connected this week, with an interesting discussion of modern trends in iOS usage. You can listen here.
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