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Dropbox Is Shutting Down Carousel and Mailbox→

Unsurprising news from the Dropbox blog this morning: the company is shutting down Mailbox and Carousel, its dedicated email and photo management apps:

Building new products is about learning as much as it’s about making. It’s also about tough choices. Over the past few months, we’ve increased our team’s focus on collaboration and simplifying the way people work together. In light of that, we’ve made the difficult decision to shut down Carousel and Mailbox.

The Carousel and Mailbox teams have built products that are loved by many people and their work will continue to have an impact. We’ll be taking key features from Carousel back to the place where your photos live—in the Dropbox app. We’ll also be using what we’ve learned from Mailbox to build new ways to communicate and collaborate on Dropbox (you can see early signs of this focus with Paper).

As for transitions:

We’re committed to making the transitions from these products as painless as possible. We’ve posted more information on the Carousel blog and the Mailbox blog, and we’ll be communicating details directly to users of both apps in the coming days. Mailbox will be shut down on February 26th, 2016, and Carousel will be shut down on March 31st, 2016.

I say “unsurprising” for two reasons. I first heard of key members leaving the Mailbox team months ago, and my understanding was that the product was already done at that point. But even without this tidbit of information, it was easy to guess what would happen – both apps had languished on the App Store without major updates, showing no signs of adopting new iOS features or new features at all.

As I wrote when Dropbox announced Paper:

I don’t want to see Dropbox losing focus in trying to understand what’s next for them with too many experiments and semi-abandoned initiatives. I’ll be keeping an eye on this.

Dropbox officially discontinuing two abandoned products can be interpreted as a willingness to regroup and focus. On the other hand, saying that Carousel had a future ahead just a few months ago and then discontinuing it today doesn’t help the company’s case for yet another app on top of Dropbox.

I’m a big Dropbox user – I store and share files with it every day – but I can see how other companies are implementing core Dropbox features faster than Dropbox can understand its place in 2015. However, as someone who doesn’t use iCloud Drive because I don’t trust it for work files, I genuinely hope Dropbox continues to exist for many years to come. Features like sharing, versions, easy restore of deleted files, clear app integrations, and its overall simplicity are still unmatched by Apple and others.

As for photos and email: Outlook for iOS is great, and you’d be better served by iCloud Photo Library or Google Photos anyway.

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Introducing the Relay FM Membership→

Big news from Relay FM today: you can now directly support your favorite shows (including the ones which I co-host, Connected and Virtual) with memberships.

From the beginning, Relay FM has been a community for podcasters, listeners and follow-uppers to share their common interests and passions. Now, with a Relay FM membership, you can directly support the hosts of your favorite shows.

There are two monthly tiers and an annual plan, and initial perks include bonus episodes of every show during Relay’s anniversary week in August, a monthly newsletter, and 15% off anything in the Relay store.

As someone who partially makes a living off memberships, I obviously think this model can work well for podcasts as well – I could argue that podcasts are even more personal than blogs, forming a stronger relationship between listeners and podcast creators.

Myke and Stephen have been working tirelessly to launch memberships, which make perfect sense as an addition to the Relay community. To become a member today, you can pick your favorite shows here.

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IBM Swift Sandbox→

Hi, I’m John Petitto, one of IBM’s Swift developers located at IBM’s Mobile Innovation Lab in Austin. We love Swift here and thought you would too so we are making our IBM Swift Sandbox available to developers on developerWorks.

The IBM Swift Sandbox is an interactive website that lets you write Swift code and execute it in a server environment – on top of Linux! Each sandbox runs on IBM Cloud in a Docker container. In addition, both the latest versions of Swift and its standard library are available for you to use.

Neat idea by IBM to write and execute Swift code in any desktop web browser. Too bad the web app is barely usable in iOS Safari because of text selection issues. I’d love to have something like this as a native iOS app eventually (if Apple allows it; but if they allow Pythonista, why not a Swift interpreter now that the language is open source?).

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Craig Federighi Talks Open Source Swift→

Writing for Ars Technica, Andrew Cunningham interviewed Craig Federighi on Swift going open source and how Apple is approaching open development:

The Swift team will be developing completely in the open on GitHub,” Federighi told Ars. “As they’re working day-to-day and making modifications to the language, including their work on Swift 3.0, all of that is going to be happening out in the open on GitHub.”

So instead of getting a big Swift 3.0 info dump at WWDC 2016 in the summer and then digging into the Xcode betas and adapting, developers can already find an “evolution document” on the Swift site that maps out where the language is headed in its next major version.

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The Grand Unified Theory of Apple Products→

Spot-on analysis by Neil Cybart on Apple’s product lineup:

At the Apple Watch introduction keynote, Apple changed its tune when explaining its product line. Instead of positioning product categories in such a way that each product played a specific role in our lives, Apple began moving down the path of consumers picking and choosing the devices that made the most sense for them. The now classic, “product profile” slide made its debut (pictured below). All of Apple’s primary products fit on one spectrum.

The message behind the slide was simple: each distinct product category possesses a different ratio of personal technology and power. The smaller the device, the more personal the technology.

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Pedometer++ Gets Smarter Step Counting on Apple Watch and iPhone→

David Smith’s Pedometer++ is one of the apps that got me back in shape and I’ve always appreciated the thought and care that he puts into it.

Today, David released a substantial update to Pedometer++ with an entirely new logic to coalesce steps registered by the iPhone and Apple Watch:

You might be wondering why I don’t use Apple’s Health.app merging system for this. After extensive testing about how that works I determined that it doesn’t really do a good job for step data. The Apple Health algorithm works around the concept of a ‘priority’ device. This priority device’s steps are then used in all instances except where that device is completely unavailable. In which case the secondary devices data is used to fill in the gaps.

The concept of a fixed priority device doesn’t really work for step data. As you move between the various activities of your daily life, the best device for measuring your movement is constantly switching. Thus you need a data merging algorithm that can dynamically analyze your step data and determine which device’s data is best at any particular time.

That is exactly what Pedometer++ now does. It goes through your daily data and can dynamically determine which device to use for any particular point in your day. The result is a much richer and complete picture of your daily activity than you’d get from Health.

I’ve tried many pedometer apps for iPhone and Apple Watch over the past few months, and I’ve noticed annoying discrepancies between data recorded by my iPhone and steps measured by Apple Watch. David’s intelligent system to reconcile steps taken sounds like what I’m looking for. It’s been a while since I wanted to really check out a new watchOS app, too.

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Apple Open Sources Swift→

As promised earlier this year, Apple today officially open sourced Swift, its new programming language unveiled at WWDC 2014. The now open source Swift is available on Apple’s GitHub page for everyone to try:

Swift is a high performance systems programming language. It has a clean and modern syntax, and offers seamless access to existing C and Objective-C code and frameworks, and is memory safe (by default).

Although inspired by Objective-C and many other languages, Swift is not itself a C-derived language. As a complete and independent language, Swift packages core features like flow control, data structures, and functions, with high-level constructs like objects, protocols, closures, and generics. Swift embraces modules, eliminating the need for headers and the code duplication they entail.

This is big news for developers who have been looking forward to experimenting with Swift. Interestingly, Apple has also publicly posted a repository to track the ongoing evolution of Swift, which should reach version 2.2 by Spring 2016 and version 3.0 by Fall 2016.

This document describes goals for the Swift language on a per-release basis, usually listing minor releases adding to the currently shipping version and one major release out. Each release will have many smaller features or changes independent of these larger goals, and not all goals are reached for each release.

Clearly, open sourcing Swift has been a massive effort for Apple’s teams, and they’re committing to it.

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Connected: The Opposite of Perfect→

This week, Stephen and Federico talk about the Mac App Store, iCloud Photo Library and (sigh) iPhone 7 rumo(u)rs.

Some of my favorite topics on this week’s Connected: iCloud, Google’s intelligence for online services, and photo management. You can listen here.

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iCloud for iOS Onboarding→

Sebastian Kreutzberger has posted a plea for developers to consider implementing iCloud authentication in their apps in lieu of traditional emails and passwords. The idea is that iCloud is inherently secure and anonymized, making for a superior solution to login information reused across multiple services.

The “magic” of iCloud authentication lays in its invisibility to the user.

With iCloud an app does not need to ask the user for an email address or a password to be able to uniquely identify who is running the app (and to later spam the user in marketing campaigns).

With the built-in, invisible iCloud authentication every app (developer) automatically can get a secure, globally unique representation of the currently logged-in iCloud user from iOS itself which it then can use to replace email and password as identifiers.

I don’t know if iCloud authentication would work for every web service with an iOS app, but I certainly am annoyed by having to create online accounts for almost every app I try these days. I have relied on iCloud signup for a couple of apps so far, and the experience has been really nice. I would like to see it used more.

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