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App Camp for Girls Quiz Compendium→

Jean MacDonald:

Today we released our very first App Camp app! The Quiz Compendium includes 15 personality quizzes created by camper project teams. You’ll learn so many things about yourself, such as what your superpower is, where you should go on vacation, and even what your breakfast choices say about your personality.

App Camp 4 Girls is an outstanding initiative. Their mission is important, and I was happy to see that Apple recognized them in the list of STEM organizations for this year’s WWDC.

App Camp 4 Girls now has an app on the Store, and it’s only $0.99. Learn more about App Camp 4 Girls here, then go buy the app, play around with it, and support this great cause.

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Apple Partners with IBM & Japan Post to Deliver iPads to Elderly in Japan→

Apple just announced an interesting new partnership with IBM and Japan Post, with a goal of delivering 4 to 5 million iPads to the elderly in Japan by 2020. As part of the initiative, IBM will deliver custom apps that help connect those who receive the iPads to “services, healthcare, community and their families”.

“This initiative has potential for global impact, as many countries face the challenge of supporting an aging population, and we are honored to be involved in supporting Japan’s senior citizens and helping enrich their lives,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “iPad is incredibly intuitive, easy to use and has accessibility features built in, making it a perfect device for any generation to be connected and engaged.”

The initiative, which will begin to roll out in the second-half of this year, is an extension of Japan Post’s national ‘Watch Over’ service:

For a nominal monthly fee, mail carriers check in on elderly customers and assure families about the well-being of their relatives. That service can now be extended and enhanced with iPad, complementing the in-person monitoring.

IBM’s A Smarter Planet website has also posted a short blog post from Masaaki Tanaka, one of the original designers tasked with working on the project:

A tiny team at IBM Japan got the whole thing going. My first market research subjects were my mother and my mother-in-law. My mom lives nearby, so I would pop over every couple of weeks to get her reactions to design ideas. Mom is comfortable using an iPad, so she represented our more sophisticated users. My mother-in-law was less experienced with mobile technology, so she stood in for our novices. She now has an iPad and takes it everywhere.

It’s unclear whether IBM’s custom apps will be released on the App Store for anyone to download, but one would hope so. 4-5 million iPads is a great start, but it’s only a drop in the ocean to the millions already out there in the world.

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The Return of a Macintosh Shareware Classic→

In the heady days of Macintosh shareware gaming, Ray Dunakin was a star. His 1990 world-hopping adventure title Ray’s Maze puzzled and delighted Mac gamers the world over, despite it having been made with an early black-and-white Mac program called World Builder, and his later games Another Fine Mess, A Mess O’ Trouble, and Twisted! only added to his reputation. But fate conspired to force the games into oblivion as Apple moved the Mac into OS X and then over to Intel processors.

Until now. Marc Khadpe is Ray’s biggest fan. He’s been the proprietor of the Ray’s Maze Page since he created it in 1996. And he’s spent the past decade, on and off, rewriting the World Builder engine for OS X.

Over at US Gamer, Richard Moss tells the story of Ray Dunakin’s games, icons of Macintosh gaming in the early ’90s recently re-released with OS X compatibility on the Mac App Store.

Make sure to check out the original and restored games here, and if you’re into classic Macintosh gaming grab A Mess O’ Trouble from the Mac App Store at $4.99.

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Connected: Artisanal Emoji→

This week, they boys break down Apple’s Q2 results and walk with Myke as he spends a day with Apple Watch.

On this week’s Connected, I also share some thoughts on the iPad’s declining sales and its perception in the tech industry. You can listen to the episode here.

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StretchLink Unshortens and Cleans URLs from Your Menu Bar→

Brett Terpstra, writing about StretchLink 1.0:

It’s an easy-to-use tool for expanding shortened links, fixing redirects, and cleaning out referrer junk from Google Analytics and others. StretchLink runs in the OS X menu bar. You can click the icon to open the main panel from which it can expand and clean links on demand with a single click. Even better, it can be set to silently watch your clipboard. You can turn this on with a switch from the main panel, or just right click the menu bar icon to toggle it.

StretchLink 1.0 is priced at $1.99, with a free trial available on the website. An introductory sale of $0.99 (50% off) starts now and goes through the end of May. StretchLink didn’t get a beta round, but it’s been tested on a variety of my own machines. If you do run into issues, don’t hesitate to contact me. A Mac App Store release is planned for the near future, if all goes well.

As a shell script nerd who loves automation and clean URLS, I had, of course, written my own shell script to expand and clean URLs. I installed StretchLink last night, and I am sure that I will never use my script again. That’s how much better Brett’s app is.

My biggest criteria (after, of course, that it actually works) is how fast would it work. So I did what any self-respecting geek would do: I wrote a shell script to test how fast it would expand a given URL. The result was that StretchLink expanded it in less than 1 second. 1

You can download StretchLink here.

P.S. If you’re looking for something similar on iOS, checkout Clean Links.

  1. If you want more details about how I tested this, I posted my script as a gist. Because of course I did.  ↩
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Apple to Reject Watch Apps ‘Whose Primary Function Is Telling Time’→

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Apple updated their App Store Review Guidelines to state that Watch apps built primarily to tell time will be rejected.

In the past few weeks, I’ve heard about a few timezone apps primarily designed to show world clocks that were rejected for unknown reasons, with developers annoyed about the lack of official guidelines. Today’s change is better than approving and then rejecting an app, I guess, but maybe Apple could have shared this piece of information sooner. I don’t know if those timezone apps ended up being approved or not, and there could be other developers with a different experience from the ones I talked to.

From Apple’s standpoint, however, I can see why it makes sense to avoid confusion with apps that replicate a watch face UI – at least initially. It’s not too dissimilar from Apple’s stance on third-party apps that replicated native functionalities with the original iPhone App Store.

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Watch Faces and Complications→

With the Apple Watch now in the hands of customers, some smart people have started commenting on the device and sharing their first impressions.

A recurring theme in my RSS feeds today has been the wish for third-party additions to complications and watch faces.

Jason Snell writes:

The third-party story is going to be huge as time goes on. Current third-party apps are okay, but they’re incredibly limited. With some of Apple’s built-in apps, you can get a better sense of what might be possible on this device. But I have to admit, I’m most excited by the idea of third-party watch faces or, at the very least, third-party complications for existing watch faces. I’m not convinced that developers will make pretty watch faces—I’ve seen all the awful third-party Pebble faces—but I do want more variety in my watch faces. I’d be fine if Apple took a strong hand with faces and only approved a very small number that passed a very high bar. But I’d be okay if Apple kept tight control of the faces… if developers could provide data from their apps as complications on existing faces. I’d love to plug in my Weather Underground temperature, for instance—today Apple’s standard temperature widget was a full ten degrees off of the actual temperature in my town.

Casey Liss shared similar thoughts:

Like third-party watch faces, I think third-party complications could take a turn toward awful. However, with a light hand and an eye toward brevity, allowing third parties to create their own complications could make an already impressive information appliance even more useful.

And here’s Abdel Ibrahim:

I still believe that apps on Apple Watch are mostly meant to be repositories. The idea of pressing in the Digital Crown and tapping a tiny icon to get to the home screen and launch an app still makes little sense to me. As of right now, the future of the Watch seems to me to be in meaningful Glances, Notifiations, Faces, and Complications (provided Apple allows the latter two). In some cases, like with Uber for example, I can see the need for launching an app. But in most cases, I still don’t see why I should bother.

Between WatchKit and the lack of personalization in some areas of the software, initial limitations of the Watch are creating a whole crop of low-hanging fruit for the next few years.

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Featured on Tim Cook’s Keynote→

Frederic Filloux on the story of Replay and how it got featured at Apple’s iPad Air 2 keynote last year:

In September 2014, while at the Stupeflix Paris office, Nicolas Steegmann got a call from Apple in Cupertino. Once the caller identified herself, Nicolas knew something up. The contact came after Stupeflix presentations to Apple’s team in Paris. In rather elliptic terms, Steegman’s interlocutor said it would be great if two members of the company, a developer and a designer, could be in Cupertino the next day. ‘They will have to stay at least two weeks’, she said. 48 hours later, the team was on Apple’s campus. They quickly found themselves in a windowless room and given a straightforward brief: Devise the coolest possible demo for your app. No more details, no promises whatsoever.

You can watch the original demo from October 2014 below.

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