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Microsoft Acquires SwiftKey→

No productivity app seems to be safe with Microsoft. Following a Financial Times report from yesterday, the company has confirmed they have acquired SwiftKey, makers of the popular keyboard and predictive text engine for iOS and Android:

This acquisition is a great example of Microsoft’s commitment to bringing its software and services to all platforms. We’ll continue to develop SwiftKey’s market-leading keyboard apps for Android and iOS as well as explore scenarios for the integration of the core technology across the breadth of our product and services portfolio. Moreover, SwiftKey’s predictive technology aligns with Microsoft’s investments and ambition to develop intelligent systems that can work more on the user’s behalf and under their control.

In the coming months, we’ll have more to share about how we’ll integrate SwiftKey technology with our Guinness World Record Word Flow technology for Windows. In the interim, I’m extremely excited about the technology, talent and market position SwiftKey brings to us with this acquisition, and about how this further demonstrates Microsoft’s desire to bring key apps and technologies to platforms from Windows to Android to iOS.

SwiftKey is one of the most popular third-party keyboards on both mobile OSes; on iOS, it’s often relied upon by users who want a multilingual typing experience in a single keyboard. I’m interested to see how SwiftKey as a keyboard will continue on iOS – custom keyboards haven’t received much attention in the past two years, and they’re severely limited in how much they can integrate with the rest of the system.

Above all, SwiftKey is good tech for Microsoft. The acquisition gives them access to a large database of typing habits and patterns spanning 100 languages, and it’ll likely help them build text features on desktop and mobile. Long term, it’s hard to predict how Microsoft’s string of mobile app acquisitions will play out, but, right now, it’s clear that Microsoft is buying the best apps around.

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Activist Engineering→

Matthew Bischoff:

You’ve been there. You’re sitting in a meeting and your boss, a product manager, or an executive is talking about Q2 goals. They’re laying out a roadmap of the features that are going to be “coming down the pike”. All of a sudden you see it. An innocuous bullet that makes your blood boil: “Auto-invite friends”, “Re-engagement notifications”, or “Disable ATS”.

The particular feature isn’t important. What matters is that you’re the engineer that’s noticed this capital-B Bad Idea. You know why it’s a problem. This time it’s not just the technical debt or the time it’d take to implement. This idea is bad because it trades a worse product for a better “business”: revenue, eyeballs, impressions, you know the drill.

You have a choice in this moment.

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The Futility of Pleasing All Users→

Khoi Vinh made an interesting point in his consideration of a recent update to 1Password:

At this stage, having gone through at least six major revisions, the utility must accommodate many different usage styles—people who want strict separation among their vaults, people who want to see across all their vaults, and more. As with any software, as the number of use cases grows, it becomes harder and harder to reconcile them with a single coherent interface. That’s the unfortunate truth of creating great experiences; not all of your users are going to be happy all of the time.

I think there’s a middle ground here, though it isn’t often appreciated: settings.

As time goes on, I realize that apps that let me configure their behavior exactly like I want – 2Do, Fiery Feeds, and even the just-released Airmail – are what I prefer. An abundance of settings isn’t necessarily the best way to build an app (in some instances, it could be seen as a cop out from a developer who doesn’t know how to pick which features to ship, or as a case of feature creep), but after transitioning from OS X to iOS as my main computing platform, I tend to choose productivity apps that can scale, accomodating the needs of many users as possible.

Some people don’t like that, and there’s certainly a place for “opinionated” software that doesn’t overwhelm the user with dozens of settings, but it’s a trend I’ve noticed in the apps I’ve ended up using the most on iOS.

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Twitterrific Adds Redesigned Today View, watchOS 2 App, Refined Profile Pages→

Solid update to the Twitter client by The Iconfactory: version 5.14 of Twitterrific brings a redesigned and customizable Today screen to view an activity summary for the selected account (with a counter for quoted tweets, too), better support for 3D Touch to peek at events in the timeline, a watchOS 2 app, and the ability to preview recently shared media in profile pages.

I don’t use Twitterrific as my main client – I prefer Tweetbot – but choosing between the two is largely a matter of minor preferences at this point (one of mine: Tweetbot lets me see people who retweeted and faved one of my tweets from the tweet detail view). It’s great to see that The Iconfactory is getting rid of many of the old annoyances of Twitterrific: DMs are now excluded from the unified timeline (I criticized this here), the tab bar supports 5 buttons on iPad, where you can also choose to show it at the bottom in portrait (previously, the feature was iPhone-only). Great changes.

Twitterrific 5.14 is available on the App Store.

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Apple’s ‘Shot on iPhone’ Campaign Continues→

Josh Raab, reporting for Time:

Following last year’s Shot on iPhone 6 campaign, Apple is bringing back the concept for the iPhone 6s.

The new ad campaign features 53 images from 41 amateurs and professional photographers from around the world.

While the previous campaign included a variety of photographic subjects – from landscapes to extreme close-ups – this time, Apple has put the focus on portraits, most of them photographed in subtle, everyday moments.

Some great shots in this updated campaign for the iPhone 6s. Billboards have started going up around the world today – I assume a new World Gallery webpage is launching soon, too.

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Facebook to Shut Down Parse→

Mike Isaac and Quentin Hardy, reporting for The New York Times:

Facebook acquired Parse, a toolkit and support system for mobile developers, in 2013. At the time, the social network’s ambitions were high: Parse would be Facebook’s way into one day harnessing developers to become a true cloud business, competing alongside the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

Those ambitions, it seems, have fallen back to earth. On Thursday, Facebook said it plans to shut down Parse, the services platform for which it paid upwards of a reported $85 million.

And from the announcement on the Parse blog:

We understand that this won’t be an easy transition, and we’re working hard to make this process as easy as possible. We are committed to maintaining the backend service during the sunset period, and are providing several tools to help migrate applications to other services.

Parse provided a series of online backend tools for app developers, and this will certainly be a hassle for those who implemented Parse services in their iOS apps. Not to mention apps that were built on top of Parse and then abandoned – while those apps may still be working on modern versions of iOS thanks to backwards API compatibility, they will stop working once Parse – the online component – shuts down for good.

Below, I’ve compiled a list of some reactions from the developer community to the Parse announcement. See also: Connected #13 from November 2014 on App Store preservation.

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Connected: Explosion of Glue and Colors→

This week, the Connected crew talk about Myke’s new security system, Podcasts.app on the Apple TV, iPhone 5se rumors, Garageband and Crashlands.

On this week’s Connected, we tried to convince Stephen to play Crashlands. I don’t think we succeeded. You can listen here.

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Deliveries 7.0→

Terrific update to one of my most used apps for iPhone and iPad: Deliveries by Junecloud. As someone who’s buying more and more from Amazon every year – all our 2015 Christmas gifts came from Amazon, for instance – Deliveries has turned into an essential utility to keep track of multiple orders at once without visiting the Amazon website (which is ugly and slow).

Today’s major update has brought full iOS 9 support (3D Touch, Spotlight, multitasking, Safari View Controller, etc.), better iCloud sync, improved clipboard detection and, my favorite, the ability to select any text, tap the ‘Share’ button of the copy & paste menu, and feed text to the Deliveries extension, which will parse order numbers automatically. This app is so good, I wish I could buy it multiple times.

See also: Deliveries 2.0 for Mac, released today on the Mac App Store.

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Chrome for iOS Switches to Modern Web View API→

Big news from Google’s Chrome for iOS team today: the app has moved from the legacy UIWebView API to WKWebView, promising notable speed improvements and 70% less crashing.

Here’s Andrew Cunningham, writing for Ars Technica:

Chrome’s stability on iOS should also see a big improvement. The UIWebView process in older versions needed to run within the Chrome process, so if a complex or badly behaving page made UIWebView crash, it would bring the whole Chrome browser down. With WKWebView, Google can move the process for individual pages outside of the app, better approximating the process isolation that Chrome uses on other platforms. Now when a page crashes, you’ll see the standard “Aw, Snap” Chrome error page. Google estimates that Chrome 48 will crash 70 percent less than older versions.

Apparently, Google worked with Apple to fix some of the bugs that prevented them from using WKWebView in Chrome before iOS 9. Developers have long been positive about the benefits of WKWebView (see my story on iOS web views from last year) and it’s good to see Google moving to a faster, more stable engine.

I’m curious to know if Google’s dedicated search app has been or will be upgraded to WKWebView as well. I don’t use Chrome (I like the unique perks of Safari, like Safari View Controller and the ability to access webpage selections with action extensions), but I prefer the Google app for traditional Google searches – it has a native interface for the search box with handy suggestions and links to past queries. Not to mention Google Now, which I’ve grown to like to track shipments, get weather reports, and receive time to leave notifications.

An important note for VoiceOver users: today’s update seems to break support for this key accessibility feature in the app.

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