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An In-Depth Look at Apple’s Approach to Accessibility→

Mashable published a profile of Jordyn Castor, a 22-year-old Apple engineer on its accessibility design and quality team. Castor, who has been blind since birth, joined Apple full-time last year after interning there in college. As she explains to Mashable:

“I realized then I could code on the computer to have it fulfill the tasks I wanted it to,” says Castor, whose current work focuses on enhancing features like VoiceOver for blind Apple users. “I came to realize that with my knowledge of computers and technology, I could help change the world for people with disabilities.

In addition to speaking with Castor, Mashable interviewed Sarah Herrlinger, senior manager for global accessibility policy and initiatives, who explained Apple’s approach to accessibility:

a notable part of the company’s steps toward accessibility is its dedication to making inclusivity features standard, not specialized. This allows those features to be dually accessible — both for getting the tech to more users, as well as keeping down costs.

Mashable’s piece is a must-read for Jordyn Castro’s inspiring personal story and its insight into the unique way Apple approaches accessibility. Instead of treating accessibility as a special, add-on feature that is purchased separately, it’s built into the operating system itself. That, combined with the work Apple has done to make accessibility features easy for developers to adopt, reveals a pragmatic approach designed to encourage broad-based adoption, making Apple’s accessibility innovations available to as many people who need them as possible.

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Apple Introduces Searchable WWDC 2016 Transcripts→

A few years ago, Matt Thompson of NSHipster.com created ASCIIwwdc, fully-searchable transcripts of WWDC sessions going back to 2010. ASCIIwwdc is still creating transcripts of WWDC sessions, but a couple of years ago Apple began offering its own searchable WWDC transcripts.

Apple's searchable WWDC transcripts let you jump to any point in a video where a search term is mentioned.

Apple’s searchable WWDC transcripts let you jump to any point in a video where a search term is mentioned.

Yesterday, Apple introduced the its latest set of transcripts for the 2016 WWDC sessions. You can read the transcripts as single documents, search across all videos going back as far as 2012, or search within individual videos, which is a great way to find every mention of a topic that cuts across multiple videos. As you read a transcript, you can click on phrases to jump directly to the corresponding point in the related video, which makes navigating hours of video simple and fast. Transcripts of the 2016 WWDC sessions and for prior years are available on Apple’s developer website.

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iOS Developer Academy to Open in Naples, Italy in October 2016→

The first European iOS app development center, previously announced by Apple in January, will officially open in October 2016. The center, now called iOS Developer Academy, will be hosted at the Università di Napoli Federico II:

The Università di Napoli Federico II (Naples, Italy) today announced it will host Europe’s first ever iOS Developer Academy in a new partnership with Apple that will see hundreds of students given the practical skills and training on developing apps for the world’s most innovative and vibrant app ecosystem. The iOS Developer Academy will officially open in October 2016 with more than 200 students taking part in the first year and more to follow in the years ahead.

Students will take part in a nine month curriculum designed and supported by Apple, with a dedicated facility at the new Campus in San Giovanni a Teduccio. The facility includes labs and access to the latest Apple hardware and software.

Great news for the Italian iOS developer community. More details are available at the official website here.

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Apple Release macOS Sierra Beta→

According to the Wall Street Journal (subscription required), in addition to the release of the iOS 10 public beta, Apple released the public beta of macOS Sierra today. As with the iOS 10 beta, it is not advisable to install the Sierra beta on your primary Mac’s drive. Of course, if you decide to download Sierra beta anyway, be sure to back up your data. You can sign up to get access to the Sierra beta at beta.apple.com.

Among other things, Sierra adds Siri to the Mac, Apple Pay on certain websites accessed with Safari, enhancements to Photos, a Universal Clipboard that works between iOS devices and Macs, and Auto Unlock of your Mac with your Apple Watch instead of a password, which requires you also run the iOS 10 and watchOS 3 betas. For more coverage of what’s new in macOS Sierra check out our WWDC coverage.

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Apple Releases iOS 10 Public Beta→

Joanna Stern reports for the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) that Apple has released the public beta of iOS 10. Apple released a beta version of iOS 10 to developers at WWDC on June 13, 2016. At the time, Apple promised a public beta of iOS 10 would be released in July. A second beta was issued to developers just this past Tuesday. Today, Apple made good on it’s WWDC promise by releasing a public beta of iOS 10 that is available for anyone to download.

However, just because you can download the iOS 10 beta doesn’t mean you should, especially on your primary device. The consensus among people who have tried the first two developer betas seems to be that it is more stable than most early iOS betas, but it still has many bugs and there is no guaranty that your third-party apps will work properly. Nor is it easy to roll back to iOS 9.3 if you have second thoughts after installing iOS 10.

With iOS 10, Apple has made significant changes to notifications and Today widgets, redesigned the Music app, added features to Photos and Messages, and much more. For a complete run-down of what’s new in iOS 10, check out Alex Guyot’s coverage for MacStories during WWDC.

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Continuous – C# and F# IDE for iPad→

Frank A. Krueger (maker of Calca, a longtime favorite of mine) has launched Continuous, a new programming app for iOS.

He writes:

Continuous gives you the power of a traditional desktop .NET IDE - full C# 6 and F# 4 language support with semantic highlighting and code completion - while also featuring live code execution so you don’t have to wait around for code to compile and run. Continuous works completely offline so you get super fast compiles and your code is secure.

I like the approach he took to “doing work on the iPad” as a software developer:

I love the iPad but was still stuck having to lug around my laptop if I ever wanted to do “real work”. Real work, in my world, means programming. There are indeed other IDEs for the iPad: there is the powerful Pythonista app and the brilliant Codea app. But neither of those apps was able to help me in my job: writing iOS apps in C# and F#. I couldn’t use my favorite languages on my favorite device and that unfortunately relegated my iPad to a play thing.

I don’t know C# and F#, but Continuous looks impressive and exactly like the kind of app we should see on the iPad more often. It even has full framework support for native iOS libraries such as UIKit, Foundation, and CoreImage. Reasonably priced at $9.99 on the App Store, too, with an iPhone version available.

Between Continuous, Pythonista (which recently received a brand new version 3.0), and the upcoming Swift Playgrounds, the iPad as a programming environment is growing up.

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Apple, Client-Side Applications and Being “Good at Web Services”→

Bryan Irace writes:

Apple now claims that being a services company is important to them. If they’re able to address the latency and reliability issues that their services have historically been plagued with, they may have succeeded at exactly what they set out to improve. But I still personally won’t consider them a good services company until they take tangible steps towards making their APIs far more open than they have been to date. These types of companies understand that they alone cannot build all of the interactions their users would find useful (nor would targeted, limited partnerships suffice). They earn the adoration of their developer community by empowering them to create the next big app or feature, standing on the shoulders of giants rather than sitting in their pocket.

I completely agree with Bryan. iOS devices have become more powerful and capable in recent years as Apple has opened up the platform with extension support, custom keyboards, widgets, new developer APIs and more. In that same way, Apple’s services from Apple Music to Apple’s Notes app, could be improved through new APIs that go beyond client-side features. Imagine being able to connect something like IFTTT to Notes.app and creating a recipe to automatically append any links you favorite in Pocket to a note in Notes.app.

I think it will happen, but it could be a long wait. We’ve seen through the introduction of various extension points in iOS that Apple is extremely cautious about relinquishing control. It just won’t happen overnight, it’ll be a gradual expansion in carefully considered and controlled stages. As Bryan points out, CloudKit web services (which can be openly communicated with over HTTP) may be an early reason for optimism.

Closed systems have enabled Apple (and members of their developer programs) to deliver many of the user experiences we know and love, but past performance does not equal future success. While embracing interoperability might require a philosophical shift away from what has worked to date, I worry that the alternative is Apple continuing to stretch themselves thinner and thinner as software continues to eat the world and hardware continues to become smaller, cheaper, and more ubiquitous.

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Connected, Episode 98: My Brain Is Cruising eBay at Night→

This week, Federico was late to the show so Stephen got to talk about Hackintoshes before the new beta of iOS 10 dropped and rocked the Europeans to their core.

You don’t want to miss the first half of the show on Connected this week. You can listen here.

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