Posts in Linked

iOS 8 Lock Screen and App Shortcuts Based on Location→

Juli Clover, writing for MacRumors:

One new feature sees the iPhone displaying apps on the lock screen based on location. For example, MacRumors readers have seen relevant app icons pop up while at or near brick and mortar locations like Starbucks and the Apple Store. While at a Starbucks, for example, the Starbucks app icon is displayed in the lower left corner of the iPhone’s lock screen, which allows a Starbucks Passbook card to be easily accessed.

I haven’t seen this feature mentioned anywhere on Apple’s website, but I’ve read tweets from other users noting the same behavior for banks and other local points of interest and stores.

It’s interesting to think about this in combination with Near Me, an App Store section that was launched with iOS 7 to highlight relevant apps for your current location. Personally, I’ve never relied on Near Me because its recommendations were slim (I only get a single app for my town), but the idea of proactively injecting shortcuts in the Lock screen for apps based on location intrigues me.

I’d be curious to know if this feature will only work with apps that are already installed (thus simply launching them) or if it will also act as an extension for Near Me, allowing you to quickly discover relevant apps from the Lock screen.

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Peer-to-Peer AirPlay in iOS 8→

From Apple’s Enterprise webpage for iOS 8:

With iOS 8, you can wirelessly connect iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch to Apple TV without first connecting to the organization’s network. Which means you can present or share your work even if you’re offline or the organization has a complex network.

AirPlay with no network connection will make it easier to beam presentations (and games) wirelessly to an Apple TV when you can’t connect to the Internet. Apple allowed Bluetooth-based setups for Apple TVs last year, and it’s good to see them extending AirPlay’s capabilities to make it more ubiquitous.

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Vying for the Hearts of Developers→

[…] the mobile revolution is over, and the war is now between Apple and the Google / Samsung alliance for the hearts of developers.

That’s why Apple spent fully one-third of its presentation today on new developer features, including an entirely new programming language called Swift. That’s why iOS is opening up in entirely new ways, including previously-forbidden things like letting apps talk to each other and even share interface elements with the system. That’s why Apple is building out the foundations of both health-tracking and home-monitoring platforms that big companies like Nike and Honeywell can tap into alongside smaller players like the smart lock maker August and speaker company iHome. And that’s why Apple is adding all sorts of little features to its systems that only power users really want, like widgets in the notification shade and replacement software keyboards. Make the developers happy, and they’ll stick around to write great apps that rely on the iPhone as the center of the universe.

It’s been less than 24 hours since Apple’s WWDC 2014 keynote, but already there have been a wave of opinion pieces, criticisms, compliments and everything in between. But so far, my favorite article has come from Vox’s Nilay Patel (just ignore Vox’s weird, almost click-bait headline). Like every opinion, not everyone will agree with it, but Patel makes some strong arguments about how Apple has now laid a really solid foundation for its immediate future. Apple wants to sell consumers on their ecosystem and in order to make that appealing to consumers, Apple is making their platform as attractive as possible for developers and other third parties such as those which provide health-tracking and home-automation products.

If Apple succeeds at attracting the very best developers and third party products to the Apple ecosystem it will make it that much more appealing for new consumers to buy in (and as Tim Cook jokingly said, have “a better life”) and that much harder for existing customers to leave the ecosystem. As someone who has invested in the Apple ecosystem in recent years, yesterday’s announcements were very encouraging and restored my confidence that this ecosystem will continue to grow in convenience, utility and value. I for one can’t wait to see what the developers bring us later this fall with the public release of iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite.

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Part of Speech Highlighting in Editorial→

Editorial developer Ole Zorn has created a workflow showing how the new Editorial can tag parts of speech in text to highlight lexical classes like nouns, verbs, adjectives, and more.

The linguistictagger module is a new Python addition in Editorial 1.1 and it’s reminiscent of the part of speech highlighting found in apps like Phraseology and Writer Pro. In Editorial, you won’t get any editing features, but the basic syntax highlighting will still come in handy to understand how you write when reading a document in the Syntax preview.

Also from Zorn, check out two UI workflows to display a sidebar for Wikipedia and a Markdown preview while writing in the text editor.

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Directional: Extra Special Q&A→

This week Federico and Myke take questions from the audience. They discuss a whole range of topics including their favourite games of all time, what they perceive as the future trends in gaming and they also come up with Pokemon characters for each other.

A fun episode, with lots of questions answered. Get it here.

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Full Video of Jimmy Iovine and Eddy Cue at Code Conference→

A few hours after announcing their $3 billion deal, Apple SVP Eddy Cue and Beats co-founder Jimmy Iovine came to the Code Conference to talk about what brought them together, and what they want to do next.

Re/code has posted the full video of the interview with Jimmy Iovine and Eddy Cue, recorded shortly after news of the Beats deal broke. We had a recap of the event, but I highly recommend watching the video as much of the nuance is lost in the transition to plain text.

The video is yet another confirmation of Jimmy Iovine’s vision and, as Marco says, charisma. Iovine knows music and he values music culture, which is reflected in Beats.

See also: this profile of Iovine by Ben Sisario for The New York Times.

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The Sweet Setup’s Rundown Of Photo Stream Alternatives→

Bradley Chambers, writing at The Sweet Setup:

When it comes to syncing data across our devices, we’ve largely “arrived.” If you predominately use all Apple or Google apps and services, then most of your data and documents are synced through those first-party services. And if you use 3rd-party apps and services (such as the aforementioned ComiXology, Kindle, Audible, et al.), many of them provide their own syncing with apps available on all our devices.

One of the last major hurdles for syncing across all our devices and computers is with photos and home movies.

I was surprised by Bradley’s pick, but, with that pricing, it is indeed a good deal.

I’ve personally been using the free trial of Picturelife for a few months now, and I think I’m going to upgrade to Premium for the summer. I like the Picturelife apps and especially the Map view they have on the web to visualize photos by location. The company is focused on making a great product and I hope they will stick around in the future.

The question, of course, is iOS 8. Right now, I’m using a complex workflow to organize my photos in Dropbox and mirror them to Picturelife. I would love to see new iCloud photo announcements next week.

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Tokens 1.2→

From the Tokens blog:

With Tokens 1.2 we’re introducing Campaigns. As well as the convenient URLs we’ve always had for sharing and tracking individual promo codes, you can now add multiple codes to a campaign and use a single URL to share them. When a user clicks redeem on a campaign page we vend them an individual token, prioritising ones that are closer to their expiration date, and use cookies to prevent refreshing from using up more codes.

Originally launched in 2012, Tokens lets developers generate promo codes from iTunes Connect easily, without logging into the website using a browser. The app can keep track of codes that have been redeemed by users, and, personally, I’m always happy to come across Tokens links as they instantly open iTunes’ redeem page and I don’t have to copy & paste anything.

The new Campaigns feature sounds interesting and easier for developers to keep track of, and I like the idea of Passbook support for WWDC. With the update, Tokens is also getting a new pricing model and different limitations in the trial version. You can read the details here.

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