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Apple Posts iPhone 7 Plus Portrait Mode Tips from Professional Photographers→

The iPhone 7 Plus features a dual camera system that enables a special Portrait mode in the Camera app. Apple has collected tips for using Portrait mode from professional photographers, like this tip from photographer Pei Ketron:

”Portrait mode on the new iPhone 7 Plus creates beautifully realistic background bokeh that rivals DSLRs.” When taking photos of pets and animals she advises, “give your pup some space. Portrait mode uses the telephoto lens, so a distance of about eight feet away is recommended. Have treats ready. You’ll get the best results when your subject isn’t moving.”

Under the right conditions, Portrait mode can take some wonderful photographs as these demonstrate. The rest of the photographs and tips posted by Apple are available in the Apple Newsroom.

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New Apple Ad: Romeo & Juliet→

Apple released a new ad in its ‘practically magic’ series highlighting the video recording capabilities of the iPhone 7. The ad begins with a cinematic scene of two young actors performing Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet. The camera cuts to a third person perspective to reveal that it’s not a film playing in a theater, but a school play being recorded by a dad in the audience with his iPhone 7. The ad ends with the tag line ‘your movies look like movies on iPhone 7.’

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Amazon’s New AI Tools for Developers→

Interesting announcements from Amazon at its AWS event this week: the company is rolling out a suite of artificial intelligence APIs for developers to plug their apps into. These tools are based on the AWS cloud (which a lot of your favorite apps and services already use) and they leverage the same AI and deep learning that has also powered Alexa, the software behind the Amazon Echo.

Here’s April Glaser, writing for Recode:

Drawing on the artificial intelligence that powers Amazon’s popular home assistant Alexa, the new tools will allow developers to build apps that have conversational interfaces, can turn text into speech and use computer vision that is capable of recognizing faces and objects.

Amazon’s latest push follows moves from Google and Microsoft, both of which have cloud computing platforms that already use artificial intelligence.

Google’s G Suite, for example, uses AI to power Smart Reply in Gmail, instant translation and smart scheduling functions in its calendar. Likewise, Microsoft recently announced it’s bringing artificial intelligence to its Office 365 service to add search within Word, provide productivity tracking and build maps from Excel with geographic data.

It’s increasingly starting to look like “AI as an SDK” will become a requirement for modern apps and services. Deep learning and AI aren’t limited to playing chess and recognizing cat videos anymore; developers are using this new kind of computing power for all kinds of features – see Plex, Spotify, and Todoist for two recent examples. I’ve also been hearing about iOS apps using Google’s Cloud Vision a lot more frequently over the past few months.

I think this trend will only accelerate as AI reshapes how software gets more and better work done for us. And I wonder if Apple is considering an expansion of their neural network APIs to match what others are doing – competition in this field is heating up quickly.

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Connected, Episode 119: Tiered Levels of Surprise→

This week, Stephen and Myke talk about CNN’s acquisition of Beme before answering questions about Relay FM, self employment and Casey Liss.

Myke and Stephen (for whom, by the way, I issued an official pardon) had a fun episode of Connected without me this week. You can listen here.

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Spectator, the Spectacles Video Player→

One of the coolest features of Snap’s new Spectacles sunglasses is that they take circular video. That means whichever way you turn your phone to view the captured video, there are no black bars surrounding the footage. Users have been uploading the videos to Twitter and Instagram, but the results aren’t great – the video looks like it’s been taken through the peephole in a door.

Tim Johnsen, the creator of iOS utility Opener, has come to the rescue with a solution. Johnsen’s new iOS app, Spectator, displays the video just like Snapchat does. Here’s a video Johnsen made to demonstrate:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BM1thBfgn6O/

Using Spectator is easy:

You use Spectator by copying links to Spectacles videos on Instagram or Twitter, then launching the app. It’ll prompt you to play the video you have copied shortly after launch, and keeps a list of the videos you’ve recently watched. If you’re looking for a list of videos to try out I’m curating one here. Enjoy!

I’ve tried Spectator and it works like a charm. The app has also made me want to try Spectacles more than ever before, which makes me think that this is an app Snap should have made to help spread the buzz about its new product.

Spectator is available on the App Store as a free download.

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App Review Downtime Announced→

Each year around the Christmas holiday, Apple’s App Review team takes a break from reviewing the thousands of apps that pour into the App Store on a typical day. During the break, new apps and app updates are not accepted. This year is no different. According to Apple’s Developer news site:

The busiest season on the App Store is almost here. Make sure your apps are up-to-date and ready for the winter holidays. New apps and app updates will not be accepted December 23 to 27 (Pacific Time), so any releases should be submitted, approved, and scheduled in advance. Other iTunes Connect and developer account features will remain available.

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Google Introduces Featured Photos Screensaver for macOS→

Popular Google+ photos have been available via Google’s Wallpapers app on Android and on Google Fiber and Chromecast devices, but today, Google is bringing them to macOS too. Google’s Featured Photos Screensaver rotates through a selection of high-resolution photographs that have been publicly shared on Google+ and don’t include people in them. Each photo also includes information about the photographer that took the shot and links to more of their work. If you’re a photographer and want your photos to be considered for inclusion in the app, you can learn more here.

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Panic Discontinuing Status Board→

Panic announced that it is discontinuing its Status Board app and remove it from the App Store within the next couple of weeks. Status Board was inspired by the custom webpage pictured above that Panic developed and displayed on a large display in its offices to track company statistics. Panic brought its status board to iOS in 2013 with pre-made modules and the ability to create custom widgets and display the whole thing on an iPad or TV.

Panic decided to discontinue Status Board for a few reasons:

First, we had hoped to find a sweet spot between consumer and pro users, but the market for Status Board turned out to be almost entirely pro, which limits potential sales on iOS — as we’ve learned the hard way over the past couple of years, there’s not a lot of overlap right now between “pro” and “iOS”. Second, pro users are more likely to want a larger number of integrations with new services and data sources, something that’s hard to provide with limited revenue, which left the app “close but not quite” for many users. Finally, in the pro/corporate universe, we were simply on the wrong end of the overall “want a status board” budget: companies would buy a $3,000 display for our $10 app.

I’m sad to see Status Board go. One of the first programming projects I ever created was a custom Status Board widget. I’ve used the app on and off over the years and just last weekend I was thinking I should revisit it and make myself a board for my current projects. I may still do that because despite the fact that Status Board will no longer be supported, it will remain available to anyone who previously purchased it and will continue to work until something in iOS changes that breaks it.

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Mac App Store Results Polluted with Questionable Results→

Justin Pot, writing for How-To Geek, walks through some damning examples of apps on the Mac App Store that seem designed to create the false impression that they’re apps like Microsoft Excel:

Seemingly official applications of dubious value are way to easy to accidentally find by searching. It’s understandable that Apple wants the App Store to appear full, but leaving things seemingly designed to deceive people is hardly an answer.

This is an issue I raised in June in the context of the problem of app discovery where I cited similar tests run by Ben Lovejoy of 9to5Mac on the iOS App Store. My point was that developers suffer from ineffective search results polluted with irrelevant and questionable results. But as Pot demonstrates from the reviews of the apps he uses as examples, Apple’s customers also suffer when they purchase an app thinking it’s something that it’s not.

Apple has made some progress in cleaning up search results in the iOS App Store. However, in an all too familiar trend, Pot shows that the Mac App Store lags behind its sibling store and needs attention.

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