This week Fraser is joined by writer David Chartier to explore some of the stranger things you can do with iOS.
I couldn’t join Fraser for Canvas last week, but he and David did a fantastic job covering different use cases for iOS devices. You can listen here.
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Just back from E3 2016, Shahid shares his personal history with E3, and gives the lowdown on what was announced this year.
Shahid did an amazing job telling his E3 stories in the latest episode of Remaster. You can listen here.
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Alongside some welcome improvements to their desktop client, Dropbox announced today they’re adding a document scanning feature to their iOS app:
With document scanning, you can now use the Dropbox mobile app to capture and organize scans from whiteboards, receipts, and sketches, so your ideas are right at your fingertips. Dropbox Business users can even search inside the scans.
The feature is detailed here, and it looks like it’s been integrated with the ‘+’ button to behave as any other file you’d manually import into Dropbox.
I don’t think of Dropbox as an app on my phone – it’s my online filesystem, which is why right now I’m struggling to imagine using it to scan documents. Essentially, I keep Dropbox on my iOS devices for two reasons: to share files with others and to grant other apps access to Dropbox. I don’t spend a lot of time in the Dropbox app itself.
However, it appears that Dropbox has done a nice job in streamlining the functionality as much as possible, and I like how they’re moving more and more features to Business-only users, so I’m going to give this a try.
With post-WWDC flu raging throughout Europe, most of the Connected crew talks about the winners and losers of WWDC including watchOS, macOS Sierra and the iPad.
I couldn’t join Myke and Stephen for Connected yesterday – I’m still recovering – but they had a fun episode about post-WWDC thoughts. You can listen here.
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Andy Greenberg, writing for Wired, has a good explanation of differential privacy:
Differential privacy, translated from Apple-speak, is the statistical science of trying to learn as much as possible about a group while learning as little as possible about any individual in it. With differential privacy, Apple can collect and store its users’ data in a format that lets it glean useful notions about what people do, say, like and want. But it can’t extract anything about a single, specific one of those people that might represent a privacy violation. And neither, in theory, could hackers or intelligence agencies.
And:
Differential privacy, Roth explains, seeks to mathematically prove that a certain form of data analysis can’t reveal anything about an individual—that the output of an algorithm remains identical with and without the input containing any given person’s private data. “You might do something more clever than the people before to anonymize your data set, but someone more clever than you might come around tomorrow and de-anonymize it,” says Roth. “Differential privacy, because it has a provable guarantee, breaks that loop. It’s future proof.”
Chance Miller, writing for 9to5Mac:
Following the release of the first developer beta of iOS 10 earlier this week, Apple today has update TestFlight with support for the latest iOS version. As announced on the company’s developer website, developers are now able to build apps for iOS 10, watchOS 3, and the latest version of tvOS.
Being able to push betas of apps with iOS 10 features means that developers will be able to perfect the implementation of things like SiriKit and the new notification and widget features on iOS.
I remember struggling last year to try beta apps updated for iOS 9 ahead of the public release. It’s good to see Apple is doing better this year and letting developers push betas built against the new SDKs right out of the gate. This is the way it should be.
Conrad Stoll:
The significance of complications being the best way to launch apps is why swiping between watch faces is so valuable. It allows users to literally switch their context on the Apple Watch. One day this could presumably happen automatically, but at least it only takes one swipe to switch from your primary daily watch face to one with the type of information you want to have at a glance in another context.
[…]
I love using the Stopwatch and Timer apps while I’m cooking or brewing coffee, but I don’t want their complications visible during the rest of the day. The ability to swipe left and bring up an entire watch face devoted to them and any other complications relevant to cooking is a game changer for me.
Prescient realization by Stoll about the implications of the new Apple Watch swipe-to-change-face feature. While Apple emphasized the Dock during the keynote as the new best way to switch between apps, maybe that crown will really go to Complications on various watch faces.
Well this is an odd one. Yesterday after the 2016 Apple Design Awards, Apple handed out to attendees a physical comic book titled “App Review Guidelines: The Comic Book”. The comic is 36 pages long, and presumably is being used to try to drum up interest in reading through Apple’s freshly rewritten App Store Review guidelines.
The comic book is available in PDF form here, and reportedly will be followed up by a motion comic book coming later. The motion comic will be available through the Madefire Comics & Motion Books app.
Apple is certainly starting to get creative in its efforts to get developers to read through the review guidelines before submitting apps. When you’re reviewing over 100,000 apps per week, I guess you do what you can to try to stop time-consuming, guideline-breaking apps before they even get started.
You can follow @MacStoriesNet on Twitter or our WWDC 2016 news hub for updates.
Announced this morning on WebKit.org, the new version of Safari shipping with macOS Sierra this Fall is going to disable legacy plug-ins such as Flash, Java, Silverlight, and QuickTime by default.
From the WebKit blog post:
The WebKit project in particular emphasizes security, performance, and battery life when evaluating and implementing web standards. These standards now include most of the functionality needed to support rich media and interactive experiences that used to require legacy plug-ins like Adobe Flash. When Safari 10 ships this fall, by default, Safari will behave as though common legacy plug-ins on users’ Macs are not installed.
