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Canvas, Episode 9: Presenting with iOS→

This week Fraser flies the show solo to talk about his experience in creating, delivering and sharing presentations with iOS.

Fraser and I couldn’t record Canvas together this week, so we thought we’d spice things up a little with a solo show where Fraser talks about presentations on iOS. Presenting is a topic of which I’m not an expert anyway, while Fraser is quite proficient in it, so it made sense to do it this way.

You can listen here.

Travelling with such light and simple devices is a dream come true for many road warriors, but can iOS truly deliver the power required to be an end-to-end presentation platform?

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“Bots Won’t Replace Apps”→

I’ve been struggling to put into words the inanity I’ve seen in the first “bot” implementations launched on Facebook.

Dan Grover has done an excellent job with his story about modern conversational UIs, WeChat (he’s a product manager there), and the shortcomings of current mobile OSes.

I loved this bit:

This notion of a bot handling the above sorts of tasks is a curious kind of skeumorphism. In the same way that a contact book app (before the flat UI fashion began) may have presented contacts as little cards with drop shadows and ring holes to suggest a Rolodex, conversational UI, too, has applied an analog metaphor to a digital task and brought along details that, in this form, no longer serve any purpose. Things like the small pleasantries in the above exchange like “please” and “thank you”, to asking for various pizza-related choices sequentially and separately (rather than all at once). These vestiges of human conversation no longer provide utility (if anything, they impede the task). I am no more really holding a conversation than my contact book app really is a l’il Rolodex. At the end, a single call to some ordering interface will be made.

Great comparison.

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OmniFocus for iOS Adds Deep Automation Features→

Derek Reiff, writing on The Omni Blog:

Recently customers have been wanting to take advantage of automation apps like Workflow, Drafts, Pythonista, and others to quickly add new actions or projects or switch to different views inside OmniFocus.

With 2.14, OmniFocus now includes best-of-class support for callback URLs. At its simplest, this means that you can create a workflow that adds more than one item to OmniFocus. But we didn’t just add support for two-way communication between OmniFocus and other apps, we added support for automating a whole lot more of the powerful capabilities of OmniFocus.

Ken goes into the nitty gritty in a detailed Discourse post. But aside from doing the usual name and note additions, you can add estimates, attachments, dates, repetition rules, flags, and even set a project to Parallel.

While I won’t be switching away from 2Do, I’ve tried the beta of OmniFocus 2.14 and the new automation features on iOS are impressive. I think a lot of people are going to reconsider OmniFocus and take advantage of callbacks for app integrations.

The examples posted by Ken Case on the forums should give you an idea of the improved capabilities. It’s no surprise that The Omni Group continues to redefine what making pro apps on iOS means.

It’s also great to see TaskPaper being used as a structured text communication format – I’d like to see more developers follow this route.

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Dropbox Project Infinite→

Interesting announcement from Dropbox today – a way to download files on-demand when using the desktop client:

With Project Infinite, we’re addressing a major issue our users have asked us to solve. The amount of information being created and shared has exploded, but most people still work on devices with limited storage capacity. While teams can store terabyte upon terabyte in the cloud, most individuals’ laptops can only store a small fraction of that. Getting secure access to all the team’s data usually means jumping over to a web browser, a clunky user experience at best.

Project Infinite will enable users to seamlessly and securely access all their Dropbox files from the desktop, regardless of how much space they have available on their hard drives. Everything in the company’s Dropbox that you’re given access to, whether it’s stored locally or in the cloud, will show up in Dropbox on your desktop. If it’s synced locally, you’ll see the familiar green checkmark, while everything else will have a new cloud icon.

In a way, this makes the desktop app more similar to the mobile clients – everything is always in Dropbox, and it’s downloaded locally only when you need it. Smart move.

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Canvas, Episode 8: Apple Mail→

You might think of Apple Mail as being a slightly weak client but, as we shall see, it’s more powerful than you think. We tackle some of the special smart mailboxes that exist in Apple Mail, look at notifications and composing mail.

On the latest episode of Canvas, we covered the email client that millions of users deal with on a daily basis: Apple Mail. We have an episode coming about third-party email options, but, in the meantime, there’s quite a bit to discover in Mail, too. You can listen here.

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All New watchOS Apps to Be Native Starting June 1→

During the weekend, Apple announced that, starting June 1, all new watchOS app submissions will have to be native – written with the watchOS 2 SDK.

This, of course, doesn’t enforce existing watchOS 1.0 apps (built with the first SDK) to be updated for watchOS 2, so it’ll be interesting to see how Apple will handle developers who launched a watchOS app last year, saw a muted response, and then ignored watchOS 2 due to a lack of incentives.

In my experience, the performance of watchOS 2 apps has only been marginally better than old watchOS 1.0 ones, and I haven’t heard of developers rushing to support watchOS 2 as a must-rewrite-everything effort. If I had to speculate, perhaps new iPhone apps for iOS 10 or later could only support watchOS 3 – but, again, that wouldn’t solve the issue for watchOS 1.0 apps currently on the App Store. Quite a curious conundrum.

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On the 9.7” iPad Pro’s Color Gamut→

I’ve been waiting for someone to explain the practical benefits of the new Retina display in the 9.7-inch iPad Pro. Craig Hockenberry has done the hard work and wrote about it with clear examples to understand the differences:

After using this iPad for a couple of weeks, I’ve realized it’s like the advances of Retina in an important way: I never want to use a lesser display again. And as with higher density, I think it’s obvious that Apple will eventually update all its products to use this improved screen technology. I can’t wait!

It also wouldn’t surprise me to see these wider color gamuts coming to the cameras in our devices. All iOS devices currently create images in the sRGB gamut, while professional gear can produce images in ProPhoto or AdobeRGB. High dynamic range (HDR) photos need a wider range of color, too.

He’s also writing a book about color management for developers. It sounds like this is going to be an important area for iOS developers to learn going forward.

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Stanford’s iOS 9 Class Has Started on iTunes U→

Stanford University has published an iOS programming course (CS193P) on iTunes U annually since the very first iPhone SDK was released. Back then, the course was taught by Apple engineers, which was unheard of at the time, and a perhaps a sign of greater openness to come. There are still a lot of good basic lessons on Objective-C, model-view-controller patterns, and other fundamentals in that first lecture series, even though Cocoa Touch APIs have changed substantially over the years. But, perhaps my favorite lecture from that first class is a short talk Loren Brichter gave on the development of Tweetie, his Twitter client that was the first app to feature pull-to-refresh and was eventually purchased by Twitter.

Now, seven years later, Stanford has begun posting lectures for Developing iOS 9 Apps with Swift. It helps to have some basic object oriented programming experience before taking on this class, but don’t let that discourage you. When I started teaching myself programming I watched that first lecture series over and over, stopping to research things I didn’t understand as I went. And even if you’re not interested in learning to program for iOS, go back and watch Loren Brichter’s talk, it’s a fascinating time capsule of how far iOS has come and the clever tricks programmers used in 2009 to get around the technical limitations of early iPhones.

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