This week Federico and Myke do their best to cram in as much E3 news as possible. They discuss some of their favourite game announcements from the show and their overall impressions of each company’s offerings.
In our special Directional episode for E3 2014, we try to mention all the games that caught our interest and we consider some of the general themes and trends of the show. Get the episode here, and don’t miss the show notes.
Fantastic article by John Gruber on Apple’s WWDC and the state of the company. I particularly enjoyed his thoughts on Tim Cook’s Apple:
The same maestro who was able to coordinate the procurement, assembly, production, and shipment of 76 million all-new iPhones and iPads in one quarter has brought those operational instincts and unquenchable thirst for efficiency to coordinating a Cupertino that can produce major new releases of both iOS and OS X, with new features requiring cooperation and openness, in one year. They’re doing more not by changing their thousand-no’s-for-every-yes ratio, but by upping their capacity.
This week Stephen leaves Federico and Myke to celebrate The Prompt’s first anniversary on their own. However, they have the help of David Smith to discuss the App Store after WWDC—as well as a whole host of follow-up and fun.
For The Prompt’s first birthday, we invited the good Underscore and discussed his wishes for a better App Store after Apple’s announcements at WWDC.
You can get the episode here, and I would like to thank everyone for listening in the past year. Here’s to many more episodes.
Scott Hurff put together a good overview of the changes in the Messages app for iOS 8, nicely illustrated with animated GIFs. He concludes that Messages for iOS 8 shows Apple has considered the ways their customers use the app and iterated accordingly:
Apple’s iMessage announcements can teach us a lot about the value of knowing our customers. It’s not enough to build products based on rumor, anecdote or speculation. We have to know exactly how and why our customers do what they do, and in what context they’ll be using our products.
Messages was especially lacking in terms of attachments and group conversations, and I’m glad to see that fixed.
I was initially surprised to see voice messages getting such a prominent spot in the app but, considering how popular audio snippets are among WhatsApp users, I think the addition makes a lot of sense.
Mattt Thompson:
The announcements from iOS 8 & OS X Yosemite alone would have made 2014 a bellwether year for the Apple platform, with Extensions, Continuity, SpriteKit enhancements, SceneKit for iOS, Metal, Game HealthKit, HomeKit, Local Authentication, and a brand new Photos framework. Not to mention the dramatic improvements to Xcode & Interface Builder, a revamped iTunes Connect, TestFlight, Crash Reports, and CloudKit. And oh yeah—Swift.
The kicker? Apple has graciously relaxed its NDA for new technologies, meaning that we don’t have to wait to talk about all of the shiny new toys we have to play with.
This week, we’ll take a look beneath the headline features, and share some of the more obscure APIs that everyone should know about.
If you’re a developer, this is an excellent look at some of the “obscure” APIs that Apple is including with iOS 8 but that they didn’t mention publicly last week. I’m particularly interested in the possibility to share tasks between apps and the fact that GPS metadata can be easily excluded from images (I use an app for that). The improvements to M7-powered data are also impressive.
Fraser Speirs, writing at Macworld, has an overview of why iOS 8 will bring important improvements for education:
Overall, I’m delighted that iOS has come out of a slightly awkward stage in its development. iOS 6 and iOS 7 really didn’t move the platform forward in substantial ways that had obvious impact on users. iOS 8 promises to take the experience of the serious iOS user to a whole new level. I can’t wait to see what developers do with it.
For context, Speirs implemented the first whole-school, one-to-one iPad program – also featured by Apple.
If you’re looking for a more technical overview of extensions in iOS 8, Andrew Cunningham has a great one at Ars Technica:
A simple way to summarize all of this: Apple doesn’t want one app to be able to get into another app’s sandbox. Extensions are like little sandboxes-within-sandboxes that facilitate communication between different apps while never sharing all of their containing app’s data directly with the host app.
It’s good to know that Apple is making iOS more flexible and powerful while keeping an underlying model designed for security, performance, and user control.
One of the questions I’ve received over the past few days is whether enabling a lot of extensions in iOS 8 could cause issues similar to the ones found in, for instance, Safari for OS X with multiple browser extensions installed. Based on what Apple has shown, the answer shoule be “no”: the technology is different, extensions will run in separate sandboxes, many of them will be user-triggered, and iOS will check memory usage and stop them if necessary (as Andrew notes, older devices will likely suffer for this).
It’ll be interesting to see how developers will take advantage of extensions this Fall.
Since my review of Editorial 1.1, I’ve been keeping an eye on the workflow directory and I’ve come across some great UI workflows worth linking to.
Editorial users are coming up with amazing ideas to enhance the app, and I can’t wait to see what Ole does with extensions on iOS 8.
As detailed by Apple in a technical document, OS X Yosemite will add JavaScript support for scripting and automation:
The JavaScript OSA component implements JavaScript for Automation. The component can be used from Script Editor, the global Script Menu, in the Run JavaScript Automator Action, applets/droplets, the osascript command-line tool, the NSUserScriptTask API, and everywhere else other OSA components, such as AppleScript, can be used. This includes Mail Rules, Folder Actions, Address Book Plugins, Calendar Alarms, and Message Triggers.
From the developer session video’s description:
With OS X Yosemite, application scripting support has been added to another popular language, JavaScript. JavaScript for Automation (JXA) extends the standard JavaScript environment provided by the JavaScriptCore framework with support for querying and controlling all of the scriptable applications running in OS X. JXA scripts are supported at all layers of the system and can be invoked from the command-line, from the system-wide Script Menu, and can even be distributed as code-signed applications.
This is an interesting change for automation on OS X going forward, and JavaScript will be available alongside AppleScript in the Script Editor. You can watch the session video “JavaScript for Automation” here or in Apple’s WWDC app.
