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Apple Holiday Ad 2016: Frankie’s Holiday→

Apple holiday ads have become a tradition and some of the best spots each year. Who can forget the Emmy-award-winning ‘Misunderstood’ from 2013, featuring what appeared to be a sulking teenager who was really making a movie about his family’s Christmas gathering? This year, Apple has released ‘Frankie’s Holiday’ featuring Brad Garrett, one of the stars on the hit TV show ‘Everybody Loves Raymond.’

Garrett who is over 6’8” plays Frankenstein, not a character that jumps to mind when you think about Christmas. The spot opens with Frankenstein recording a music box playing a holiday tune using Apple’s Voice Memos app. Frankenstein leaves his mountain home for the town in the valley below. As he leaves, he picks up a package that he takes with him.

A large group is gathered in the town square around a Christmas tree. They are startled to see Frankenstein who walks to the base of the tree, opens up the package he brought along with him, and removes Christmas lights that he screws into his neck. As the bulbs light up, Frankenstein plays the music he recorded on his iPhone, ‘There’s No Place Like Home for the Holidays, and begins to sing. One of the bulbs goes out and it seems like Frankenstein is going to give up on his performance when a little girl helps him by fixing the misbehaving light and joining Frankenstein and the rest of the crowd in singing the song.

Frankie’s Holiday starts out unsettling and confusing because of the unusual choice of a lead character, but when the scene switches to the town square the ad quickly becomes funny, concluding with a heart-warming message of acceptance and inclusion and the message “Open your hearts to everyone.’

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Apple Will Replace iPhone 6s Batteries in Phones That Unexpectedly Shut Down→

Apple has determined that a ‘very small number of iPhone 6s devices may unexpectedly shut down.’ The problem affects a limited range of serial numbers manufactured between September and October, 2015. If you’ve experienced unexpected shutdowns, contact an Apple Store, authorized service provider, or technical support. If your iPhone qualifies Apple will replace the battery free of charge. If, however, your iPhone needs other repairs that would impair the replacement of the battery, like a cracked screen, those repairs must be completed for the standard applicable fees before the battery is replaced. In addition, if you paid to have your battery replaced before the replacement program began, you can request a refund from Apple.

This is the second repair program announced in the recent past. Less than a week ago, Apple instituted an iPhone 6 Plus repair program for phones that lose touch sensitivity. That program carries a $149 repair fee because Apple says the problem is caused, at least in part, by dropping the phone repeatedly on a hard surface.

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‘Designed by Apple in California’ Brought to Life→

Stephen Hackett of 512 Pixels has created a beautiful video dubbed “Designed by Apple in California” Book: With Acutal Products, showcasing a wide variety of the hardware in Apple’s new book, Designed by Apple in California. Hackett, who owns an extensive collection of Apple hardware, filmed the gear side-by-side with the photographs in Apple’s book, bringing it to life in a way that the photos alone cannot.

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AppleScript, the Perfect Adjunct to iTunes→

Kirk McElhearn, writing for Macworld on automation in iTunes following Sal Soghoian’s departure from Apple:

No application can do everything its users need, and none should offer everything they want. For this reason, AppleScript has long been the perfect adjunct to iTunes, which is already feature-rich (some say “bloated,” but I disagree), and doesn’t need more options and tools. Many of these AppleScripts are designed to tag files, edit their metadata to correct errors, improve consistency, and ensure that users can find the files they want, and help them efficiently use smart playlists.

It’s not clear whether the termination of Mr. Soghoian means the demise of AppleScript altogether, and particularly in iTunes, but many developers, iTunes users, and others are concerned by this decision.

You see, it’s all about freedom. Freedom to do things we want that Apple doesn’t think we need to be able to do. Freedom to explore. Freedom to discover new ways to link applications, to interact with files, to create our own solutions. We can’t expect apps to cater to all our whims, and tools like AppleScript and Automator allow us to go a step further and discover ways to do things that Apple never even considered.

Losing AppleScript and automation features altogether would be a horrific loss for the Mac. However, I don’t think that’s going to be the case. Like Jason Snell, I believe today’s Apple finds this stuff uninteresting and “vintage”; rather than removing it, I feel like they’ll stop pretending they care about it, just as they did for Dashboard. Which isn’t an ideal scenario either, but between two poisons, it’s the one I’d pick.

See also: Dr. Drang back in 2013, ‘When and why I automate’.

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Apple Releases ‘Bulbs’ Video→

Apple posted a video on YouTube promoting the new Touch Bar MacBook Pros. The video cuts frenetically between a long line of Edison bulbs exploding down a darkened street and into the countryside, and scenes of human inventions from the discovery of fire to a robot walking down a street. The spot concludes with ‘Ideas push the world forward,’ echoing the line ‘They push the human race forward’ from Apple’s famous 1997 ‘Crazy Ones’ ad.

The ad then cuts to the line ‘Introducing a tool for all the ideas to come.’ A MacBook Pro comes into view with an Edison bulb on the screen. A hand scrubs back and forth across a slider on the Touch Bar making the video of the exploding bulb fast forward and rewind. The video does a nice job demonstrating the marquee feature of the new MacBook Pros, but an even better job, through its use of pacing, music, and editing, of giving a sense of the speed at which technology advances in what feels like an oblique response to critics of the changes made to Apple’s laptop line.

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Apple Creates Special Swift Playgrounds Challenge for the ‘Hour of Code’→

Apple has participated in Code.org’s Hour of Code challenge for the past three years. Apple announced today that it will participate again this year with a series of workshops for kids from December 5 - 11, 2016, which coincides with Computer Science Education Week.

Angela Ahrendts, Apple’s senior vice president of Retail had this to say:

Hour of Code embodies our vision for Apple stores as a place for the community to gather, learn and be entertained…. We’re proud to introduce the Swift Playgrounds app into the workshops and honored to again work side-by-side with Code.org on this incredibly important initiative. Hour of Code is one of the absolute highlights of the year for both our teams and the families that visit our stores.

In addition to using Swift Playgrounds in the workshops for the first time, Apple is adding a new Hour of Code challenge to Swift Playgrounds called ‘Putting it Together.’ Apple’s press release explains that:

A new Hour of Code challenge in Swift Playgrounds makes it easy for anyone to set up their own one-hour coding event, and for those continuing to build their coding skills on iPad, Swift Playgrounds adds a new Learn to Code 3 set of lessons and a companion Teacher Guide.

Signup for the workshops is not yet live, but should be available here soon.

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Google Play Newsstand Redesigned→

Google has been on a tear with new and updated iOS apps. The latest is a redesign of Google Play Newsstand, a free app for browsing news outlets and magazines similar to Apple News.

Blending a variety of national and local news with article recommendations based on your personal interests using machine learning, Newsstand creates a media-rich ‘For You’ page divided into two sections. The ‘Briefing’ includes a handful of what Google deems the most important and relevant stories to you. Below the Briefing is ‘Highlights,’ a longer list of articles culled from you favorite sources and topics. Each article in Highlights helpfully explains why it was suggested.

Tapping the three dot menu button below any article lets you hide stories from its source, have fewer articles of that type suggested (I took advantage of this immediately with CNN’s report on a Parmesan cheese recall), or jump directly to the source or topic of the article. I’ve found the last two options a great way to quickly build a database of topics and sources that I want to follow.

Newsstand is built on an AMP foundation:

We have improved our support for multimedia content building on the AMP support we launched earlier this year. Scroll through your feed, and you will see autoplay videos, easy podcast controls, and high-resolution, full-bleed images. Every story and topic in Newsstand now comes to life in a more engaging, beautiful presentation.

I’m not a fan of autoplay anything, but Newstand’s articles look terrific and load fast.

Finally, Google also touts Newsstand’s new web app as a way to access news wherever you are. It’s broad claim that needs to be qualified. The unstated assumption seems to be that the web app is for desktop use only because it doesn’t work on iOS even if you use Google’s Chrome browser. Moreover, on macOS, Newsstand doesn’t work with Safari, instead directing you to download Chrome.

Newsstand's web app does not work on Safari for iOS or macOS.

Newsstand’s web app does not work on Safari for iOS or macOS.

In some ways Google Play Newsstand feels like a modern implementation of Google Reader, which was shuttered in 2013 around the same time that Newsstand was introduced. I wonder how much better my recommendations would be if Newsstand had the benefit of all the years I used Google Reader. Maybe it does have access to that data, but using Newsstand feels too much like starting over for that to be the case. In any event, Google Play Newsstand is a worthy competitor to Apple News. Perhaps 2017 will see competition among news services similar to what we’ve seen with photo services this year.

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Sal Soghoian Leaves Apple→

Sad news for the Mac automation community: Sal Soghoian, Product Manager of Automation Technologies since 1997, has left Apple. Details from Soghoian himself:

Q. I hear you no longer work for Apple; is that true?

A. Correct. I joined Apple in January of 1997, almost twenty years ago, because of my profound belief that “the power of the computer should reside in the hands of the one using it.” That credo remains my truth to this day. Recently, I was informed that my position as Product Manager of Automation Technologies was eliminated for business reasons. Consequently, I am no longer employed by Apple Inc. But, I still believe my credo to be as true today as ever.

Soghoian’s work on AppleScript and other macOS automation, scripting, and accessibility technologies has always been inspiring – we wouldn’t have apps like Workflow today hadn’t Soghoian pushed the boundaries of user automation at Apple.

I don’t know what this means for automation on macOS going forward, but it doesn’t feel like a good sign to me. I love his determination, though:

Q. Are you still upbeat about the future of user automation?

A. Absolutely. The need for user automation is a constant. I’ve seen the benefits and power of individuals being able to automate critical and repetitive tasks. Solution apps are great, emojis are fun, but there’s nothing like really great automation tools. I have faith in this community, and that makes me optimistic about what we can do together.

More than ever before, I’m going to keep an eye on Soghoian’s website and future projects.

See also: the transcript of Soghoian’s WWDC 2016 session on using macOS dictation to perform specific actions (unfortunately, Apple’s session video URL doesn’t seem to be working anymore).

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Connected, Episode 117: A Friend of Your Uncle of Your Cousin→

This week, Stephen and Federico talk about Apple’s new book, the Touch Bar’s potential and Snapchat possibly paving the way for future Apple glasses.

On this week’s Connected, we also discussed rumors for upcoming iPad hardware refreshes and what Apple may be doing in AR. You can listen here.

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