Posts in Linked

Gboard Adds 3D Touch Cursor Movement, Contacts Integration→

Google released a nice update to their iOS keyboard, Gboard, earlier today.

Cursor control can now be activated with 3D Touch, which is consistent with the behavior of Apple’s keyboard. Gboard can’t move the cursor freely on the screen like the system keyboard, though, which makes it more limited when it comes to swiping across multiple lines of text. Also, Google didn’t implement haptic feedback when switching between contextual keyboard menus (such as holding down on the dash key), which is another detail that I appreciate in Apple’s keyboard on the iPhone 7.

Similarly, Gboard now features Contacts integration to look up a person’s contact card directly from the keyboard – but it’s not as tightly integrated as QuickType suggestions in iOS 10. However, I prefer the presentation of contact cards in Gboard and I think Google’s is a sweet solution as well.

Gboard is shaping up nicely, but I continue to wish Google paid more attention to the iPad layout and built true multilingual support for international users.

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Apple and Homebuilders Work to Spread HomeKit Adoption→

Apple has begun working with large US-based home builders, like Lennar and KB Home, to incorporate HomeKit-enabled systems into newly-constructed homes. HomeKit was introduced with iOS 8. Makers of home automation equipment were initially slow to adopt HomeKit, but it has begun to gain momentum in recent months.

With device manufacturers embracing HomeKit in greater numbers, Bloomberg reports that Apple has turned to large homebuilders to help get those devices into homes. One drag on home automation adoption is cost. As Bloomberg points out, a touchscreen deadbolt lock costs $200 compared to $32 for a traditional lock. Another issue is incorporating smart devices into older homes that were not designed with them in mind. To address both problems, Apple is focusing on new homes:

’We want to bring home automation to the mainstream,’ said Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of product marketing. ‘The best place to start is at the beginning, when a house is just being created.’

By focusing on new construction, the cost of smart devices can be rolled into a homeowner’s mortgage at the time of purchase, making the cost easier to rationalize. New construction also has the advantage that it is easier to design devices into a home when it is built than to retro-fit existing homes.

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Connected, Episode 113: Here is Smart Phone→

This week, Myke goes to the Apple Store, the group reads Pixel reviews and Federico brings back Weekly Picks.

A fun episode of Connected this week, with a brief discussion of Google’s new Pixel phone and the return of weekly app picks. You can listen here.

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Kickstarting Season 3 of Welcome to Macintosh→

Mark Bramhill, the creator of Welcome to Macintosh: a Tiny Show About a Big Fruit Company, has launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund Season 3 of his highly-regarded podcast about Apple and the community that surrounds it. Bramhill’s show seemingly came out of nowhere in early 2015. In a sea of Apple-themed podcasts, Welcome Macintosh set itself apart by being short and tightly edited. Each episode of seasons one and two focused on a single story or theme from Apple history like skeuomorphism and the time Song a Day Mann made Steve Jobs dance onto stage at the antenna-gate Apple event.

Bramhill previews some of what he has planned if the Kickstarter succeeds:

In one episode, I pitch an emoji for adoption in the international Unicode standard, following it all the way from a concept through the bureaucracy of the emoji-industrial complex. In another, I trace the surprisingly dramatic past of an app that was on the forefront of the MP3 revolution. And there are a whole bunch of others. Beginning next summer: eight brand new episodes for Season 3.

The kind of show that Bramhill produces is time consuming, hard work, and it takes money. So for Season 3, Bramhill has launched a Kickstarter. He is trying to raise $10,000 to cover everything from file hosting, to travel expenses. The campaign is off to a good start and includes some nice perks for backers like vinyl stickers and t-shirts. Mark is a natural storyteller. Check out the past episodes of Welcome to Macintosh and the short episodes he will be releasing during the Kickstarter campaign. I bet if you do, you’ll find yourself on his Kickstarter page backing Season 3.

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Siri and the Suspension of Disbelief→

Julian Lepinski has a thoughtful response to last week’s story by Walt Mossberg on Siri’s failures and inconsistencies. In particular, about the way Siri handles failed queries:

Apple’s high-level goal here should be to include responses that increase your faith in Siri’s ability to parse and respond to your question, even when that isn’t immediately possible. Google Search accomplishes this by explaining what they’re showing you, and asking you questions like “_Did you mean ‘when is the debate’?_” when they think you’ve made an error. Beyond increasing your trust in Siri, including questions like this in the responses would also generate a torrent of incredible data to help Apple tune the responses that Siri gives.

Apple has a bias towards failing silently when errors occur, which can be effective when the error rate is low. With Siri, however, this error rate is still quite high and the approach is far less appropriate. When Siri fails, there’s no path to success short of restarting and trying again (the brute force approach).

The comparison between conversational assistants and iOS’ original user interface feels particularly apt. It’d be helpful to know what else to try when Siri doesn’t understand a question.

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Remaster, Episode 20: The PlayStation VR Review→

The PlayStation VR is finally out. Federico, Myke, and Shahid share their views on the hardware, the experience, and the launch lineup.

Sony’s PlayStation VR platform launched earlier this week, and we’ve been playing with several launch titles for the past few days. On the latest Remaster, we discuss our impressions of the hardware, the gaming experience, and its future potential. You can listen here.

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Google Photos Adds Four New Features→

Google Photos has introduced four new features:

  • Google Photos uses faces in your most recent photos to suggest older photos with with the same person in them;
  • If you take a lot of photos of the same subject, like a child, Google Photos will create a card of the best ones from the past month;
  • Animations, which Google Photos already creates using photos, are also generated from videos now; and
  • If Google Photos detects that there are sideways photos in your collection, it will present a card with the photos that it thinks should be rotated.

This is what Google Photos does best. It finds connections and photos that would be like searching for a needle in a haystack if you did it manually with a big photo library.

Each of the new features are available on iOS, Android, and the web.

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Todoist Launches Native Amazon Echo Integration→

Since moving back to Todoist, I’ve been looking for a way to easily add tasks using the Amazon Echo, which has become a staple in our household for a variety of voice commands. Today, the Todoist team has rolled out a native Amazon Echo integration that lets you create tasks and manage your todo list just by talking to Alexa.

Nathan Ingraham, writing for Engadget:

It works much like you’d expect: you can ask Alexa to add items to the various lists that you have in your Todoist account, and you can also ask it to tell you everything that’s on your to-do list for that day. And Alexa works with Todoist’s natural language processing, so you can ask it to add things to your list “tomorrow” or “next Wednesday” and it’ll know just what you’re asking it for. It’s not clear if you’ll be able to tell Alexa to add items to specific projects or to-do lists in your account – they probably get added to whatever your default list is for you to sort out on your phone or computer.

The Todoist blog has more details on how the integration works:

Over the past months, we’ve worked closely with Amazon as part of a limited participation beta of their Alexa integration platform, and we’re thrilled to be able to share the results with you today.

And:

When dictating a task, Todoist’s smart date recognition will automatically recognize and add any due date you say. For example, saying, “Alexa, add pay the rent every first of the month to my to-do list,” will automatically add a recurring task to “Pay the rent” to your Todoist, due on the first day of every month. The task will disappear from your Alexa To-do list until the day your task is due.

Essentially, Todoist can now sync its Inbox list with the Echo’s own todo list; the Echo’s built-in shopping list also gets recreated inside Todoist as an ‘Alexa Shopping List’ project. This allows you to say “add task to my todo list” instead of using a specific Todoist terminology. There are some caveats (you can’t specify Todoist projects, for instance), but this looks like a solid first step.

I configured Todoist with my Amazon Echo earlier today, and everything was up and running in less than two minutes. The Amazon Echo’s excellent voice recognition helps Todoist understand natural language queries for due dates, and I’ve been positively impressed with the speed and consistency so far. I think I’m going to be using this very often.

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