This Week's Sponsor:

SoundSource

New Year, New Audio Setup: SoundSource 6 from Rogue Amoeba

Posts in Linked

Apple’s App Store Cleanup Now Underway→

Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch, on Apple’s previously announced App Store cleanup:

Earlier this year, Apple promised it would clean up its iOS App Store by removing outdated, abandoned apps, including those that no longer meet current guidelines or don’t function as intended. That great App Store purge now appears to be underway, according to new data from app intelligence firm Sensor Tower. The company found that app removals increased by 238 percent in October 2016, with mobile games seeing the most deletions.

And:

That seems to have changed in October, when 47,300 apps were removed from the App Store, Sensor Tower discovered.

And while it’s true that Apple does delete apps on a regular basis, this figure is around 3.4 times higher than the monthly average of 14,000 for the months of January through September. (See chart below).

I long wondered if Apple would provide alternative ways for developers to preserve their old games for posterity. The answer, sadly, is much simpler: if you don’t update your app, it’ll be removed. I’m afraid we’re going to lose some historic App Store titles because of this, but I also see why it’s good for the average customer and the right thing to do at this point.

Permalink

Twitter Announces New Steps to Combat Abuse→

Twitter announced steps it has taken to curb abuse on its service. The first is an extension of the mute feature. The ability to mute an account has been available for a long time, but Twitter is adding the ability to mute keywords, phrases, and conversations in notifications. The feature will begin rolling out world-wide to all users ‘in the coming days.’

With respect to reporting abuse, Twitter says:

Our hateful conduct policy prohibits specific conduct that targets people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease. Today we’re giving you a more direct way to report this type of conduct for yourself, or for others, whenever you see it happening. This will improve our ability to process these reports, which helps reduce the burden on the person experiencing the abuse, and helps to strengthen a culture of collective support on Twitter.

Finally on enforcement, Twitter reports that it has retrained its support teams, is instituting refresher training, and has introduced new internal tools and systems for combating abuse.

Permalink

Dissecting the Most Profitable iMessage Apps→

Ariel Michaeli, writing on the appFigures blog:

When it comes to making money, users seem to be fine with paid apps. Unlike the iOS App Store, on the iMessage App Store only 7% of top grossing apps are free(mium). That’s just 13 apps!!!

The remaining 93% of apps (187, to be precise) cost between $0.99 and $4.99, with the majority (61%) having a price of $0.99 and 36% having a price of $1.99. The remaining 4 apps split between the other price tiers.

Monetizing upfront is great for developers because it’s simple and easy to implement, but it’s also a sign of a store that isn’t mature. If the iMessage App Store matures similarly to the iOS App Store—which is likely considering it’s the same audience and device—we’ll see a strong shift towards freemium. For now, developers should make the most out of it.

Speaking from personal experience, the iMessage App Store’s top charts are a constant source of discovery for new paid sticker packs from indie artists. These first numbers from September seem to be holding up so far.

Permalink

Take the Touch Bar For a Spin on Any Mac→

Daniel Jalkut’s Red Sweater Software released a free Touch Bar simulator for the Mac. The app, Touché, generates a floating Touch Bar simulator on your Mac’s screen. Touché requires macOS 10.12.1 or later, but there’s a catch. Not all builds of 10.12.1 support the Touch Bar. If you download Touché and it tells you you need a more current version of Sierra, click the ‘More Info’ button to get a link to a version of macOS that works with Touché.

Although clicking a simulated Touch Bar is not the same experience as the real thing, I found it interesting to see what tools were available in Apple’s built-in apps like Pages, Numbers, and GarageBand and imagine what using the Touch Bar is like.

Touché is available from Red Sweater’s website as a free download.

Permalink

Phil Schiller Explains Apple’s Motivation Behind the Touch Bar→

The first reviews of the MacBook Pros with Touch Bars have begun to hit the web. In connection with his review of the new laptops on Backchannel, Steven Levy spoke to Phil Schiller, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, about the motivation behind the Touch Bar and recent criticisms leveled against Apple’s new MacBook Pros.

Levy raised the perennial question of why Apple didn’t just make a touchscreen MacBook Pro. In response, Schiller told Levy it’s not possible to design for a pointing device like a touchpad or mouse and a touchscreen without designing to the lowest common denominator:

“Our instincts were that it didn’t [make sense to do a touchscreen], but, what the heck, we could be wrong—so our teams worked on that for a number of times over the years,” says Schiller. “We’ve absolutely come away with the belief that it isn’t the right thing to do. Our instincts were correct.”

Schiller also bristled at the suggestion by Levy that the Touch Bar represents what Levy characterized as the ‘overall annexation of the Macintosh platform’ by iOS. Schiller responded that the Touch Bar:

“…is pure Mac,” he said. “The thought and vision from the very beginning was not at all, ‘How do we put iOS in the Mac?’ It was entirely, ‘How to you use the [iOS] technology to make a better Mac experience?’”

I look forward to trying the Touch Bar. With it only available on one line of laptops, it remains to be seen how widely it will be supported by third-party developers, but what I’ve seen planned for Adobe’s products, Sketch, 1Password, and other apps makes me optimistic.

There’s a fine line between whether bringing iOS technology to the Mac is in the service of creating a better Mac experience or amounts, as Levy characterizes it, to ‘the annexation of the Mac platform,’ but just as certain iOS gestures made sense to bring to the touchpad, the Touch Bar feels like a natural way to migrate Mac app toolbars to the keyboard and enhance the manipulation of linear content like audio and video.

Permalink

Google Play Music Gets Smart→

Google is revamping Google Play Music with intelligence that it says will deliver the right music at the right time using machine learning. According to a post by Elias Roman, Lead Product Manager for Google Play Music, Google’s streaming music service will go beyond just figuring out what you like from the music you listen to. The update will also take into account context – things like your location, what you’re doing, and even the weather.

As Roman describes it:

To provide even richer music recommendations based on Google’s understanding of your world, we’ve plugged into the contextual tools that power Google products. When you opt in, we’ll deliver personalized music based on where you are and why you are listening — relaxing at home, powering through at work, commuting, flying, exploring new cities, heading out on the town, and everything in between. Your workout music is front and center as you walk into the gym, a sunset soundtrack appears just as the sky goes pink, and tunes for focusing turn up at the library.

In addition, Google has redesigned the Google Play Music home screen to emphasize your favorite music by putting it right at the top of the screen and adjusting what’s shown based on your context. The service will also automatically create an offline playlist of recently played songs for subscribers to listen to when they have no data connection.

It’s not surprising to see Google take Google Play Music in this direction. One of Google’s biggest competitive advantages is the data it knows about you from its many products. This sort of assistive technology is already baked into products like Google Photos and it seems natural to bring the same smarts to Google Play Music too.

Google Play Music will begin its world-wide roll-out to sixty-two countries this week on iOS, Android, and the web.

Permalink

Canvas, Episode 23: Workflow - Variables and Built-in Actions→

This week Fraser and Federico continue the Workflow series with a look at how to use Variables and Workflow’s built-in actions.

On the second episode of Canvas’ Workflow series, we cover one of the key features of the app, variables, which are key to building workflows. In the second half of the show, we talk about Workflow’s built-in actions and some of its system integrations.

If you haven’t listened to the first episode of the series yet, you’ll want to go back and start from there.

  1. Workflow - The Basics
  2. Workflow - Variables and Built-in Actions

Sponsored by:

  • Sanebox: Clean up your inbox in minutes. Sign up for a two-week free trial and a $20 credit.
Permalink

Apple Releases iBooks StoryTime for Apple TV→

iBooks StoryTime, an Apple TV-only app, was released with no announcement by Apple today. Apple explains in the release notes that:

With Read-Aloud narration and beautiful illustrations, every handpicked title in the app transforms Apple TV into an engaging place for young readers to enjoy the stories they love.

iBooks StoryTime comes with a free Dora the Explorer book.

iBooks StoryTime comes with a free Dora the Explorer book.

The app, which comes with a free Dora the Explorer book, is designed for young children. Additional books can be purchased from the Featured Books section of the app. The number of books available is modest, but high-quality with a nice mix of classic children’s books and familiar modern characters.

iBooks StoryTime offers several classics, including Dr. Seuss favorites.

iBooks StoryTime offers several classics, including Dr. Seuss favorites.

The read-aloud feature can be turned on or off. When the feature is on, the book is read by a narrator while the words in the book are highlighted in sync with the narrator’s voice. In read-aloud mode the pages are turned automatically. Pages can also be turned by swiping on the Siri Remote when the read-aloud feature is turned off.

iBooks StoryTime (currently US-only) is a free download on the Apple TV App Store.

Permalink

51 New Emojis Proposed for 2017→

The Unicode Consortium proposed 51 new emojis for inclusion in Unicode 10. According to Emojipedia.org:

New emojis include a giraffe, pretzel, vampire, bearded man, soda/milkshake, breastfeeding, a “shhh” face, pie, starry-eyed face, woman in hijab and zebra.

Image courtesy of emojipedia.org.

Image courtesy of emojipedia.org.

The proposal also includes broccoli, a coconut, a sandwich, two kinds of dinosaurs, yoga, rock climbing, socks, and an orange heart. The final decision on which emojis will be included in Unicode 10 will be made in mid-2017.

For the complete list of proposed emojis and more images, check out Jeremy Burge’s post on Emojipedia.

Permalink