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Buying a New iPad or iPhone? Have an Apple Specialist Walk You Through the Latest Features over the Internet.

Apple’s 375 Apple Retail Stores have drawn 3 million customers so far during this past fiscal year, serving upwards of 50,000 people at Genius Bars everyday around the world according to The Loop. Apple’s Retail Stores, which accounted for 14 billion in sales the last fiscal quarter, are Apple’s nexus to the consumer. Every store gives customers the opportunity to interact with Apple’s products, talk with (in my experience pleasant) Specialists who can answer questions, and get support for their products at the Genius Bar at the back of the store. While Apple Support already extends beyond the store by phone and through company’s website via online experts, FAQs, documents, tutorials, and e-mail (just to name a few), getting hands-on with a product before it’s purchased is more challenging. While Apple’s product pages — well designed and often showcasing the product’s features through slides, animated images, and galleries — give customers a sense of what they’re buying, there’s nothing like actually seeing how a real person is using the product (and you wonder why there are so many homemade reviews on YouTube).

Apple’s Specialists are now online and ready to answer a customer’s pending questions about their next iPhone or iPad, at least in a few countries as of this morning. According to The Next Web and Pocket-lint, online shoppers who browse Apple’s Online Store in Brazil, Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom now have access to a personalized shopping experience for the iPad and iPhone. The new online service is expected to roll out to more countries soon.

Visit the iPad or iPhone pages on the Apple Online Store, then click the Ask Now button to see your options for contacting a trained Apple Specialist.

For customers shopping for an iPad or an iPhone who might not have an Apple Retail Store nearby or who don’t have the time to stop by a store, an online Apple Specialist can show you how the product works in real time via screen sharing. You’ll be able to ask Specialists questions in a chat panel, then get a demonstration of how a feature works via video. Apple’s goal is to help you make the right purchasing decision, then if desired, schedule an appointment to help you set up the device as you follow along with a Specialist in real time.

Always on the bleeding edge of retail, Apple continues to innovate and improve upon their shopping experience by going the extra mile and putting customers above the product. For Apple, it’s not just about making the sale, but about making connections with people and providing customers with a convenient shopping experience. If you thought Apple turned the idea of personal shopping on its head with EasyPay, delivering online screen sharing demonstrations by real people (at scale!) is equally, if not more, impressive. For an early look at the new service, visit Apple’s UK page for more information.

[Pocket-lint via The Next Web]

Tweet Marker Plus Relaunches As Watermark, Adds Support For App.net

Manton Reece’s Tweet Marker Plus, a service to index Twitter and provide filtering and search tools, has been relaunched as Watermark. As explained by Reece in a post on his personal blog, the new name wants to reflect the “gradual move away from Twitter and syncing”. Initially launched as a free service, Tweet Marker has been integrated as a syncing solution in dozens of Twitter clients such as Tweetbot and Twitterrific. The Plus version, launched in April, built on the success of Tweet Marker to offer a web interface for Twitter timelines, fully indexed by day and searchable outside of the Twitter platform. I wrote:

The most visible feature of Plus, the web timeline, is very straightforward, but I believe it’ll prove to be a worthy addition for, say, those users who rely on iOS and Mac apps at home, but who are forced to stay on Windows environments at work. Tweet Marker’s web timeline can pick up from where you last left off on another connected client, and it’s got a “scroll to marker” option to manually load your last-seen tweet. On the timeline itself you can reply, retweet, mark as favorite and check out a tweet’s unique URL, but these actions will simply forward you to a dedicated page on Twitter.com. Tweet Marker’s Plus timeline isn’t meant to be a full-featured client: rather, it is a basic way to rely on your existing sync position if nothing else is available.

With the Watermark rebranding, Reece is gradually shifting away from Twitter following the controversy that has arisen in the past months in regards to the service’s API changest and relationship with third-party developers. Keeping the same infrastructure, monthly fee, and core functionalities, Watermark is a new “client and archive tool”, independent of the free Tweet Marker sync service, which will keep working as usual with Twitter apps that support it.

Watermark’s new focus on providing a platform that goes beyond Twitter is represented in this initial version by its support for App.net, Dalton Caldwell’s rising real-time communication service that costs $50 per year. Reece writes:

As part of the relaunch it immediately gains a new feature: App.net posts. You can now add an App.net account and it will download any posts from your friends, making them available for search. Watermark is already storing tens of millions of tweets, and I’m excited to start adding App.net posts to that archive as well.

While still heavily Twitter-based from an interface standpoint, the new Watermark sports an App.net option in the section on the right, where users can browse “all tweets”, favorites, and load past tweets by day with a calendar menu.

Clicking on App.net Posts in Watermark will open a web based timeline; right now, there are no further options available for App.net posts (the service only downloads posts from friends and adds them to the search archive) as App.net doesn’t even have an official search functionality yet. Manton says there’s still “plenty to improve” for App.net support, and that he’s also evaluating timeline position sync for App.net accounts – indeed one of the hallmark features of Tweet Marker.

Tweet Marker Plus was one of my favorite services to provide the kind of Twitter functionalities that Twitter the company always ignored: powerful search and filtering tools, collections, and additional browsing options. Like Cue, Tweet Marker Plus has proven to be a worthy addition to my workflow to retrieve tweets and leverage the information shared on the platform every day. As Twitter becomes more hostile towards third-party developers and apps that take data out of Twitter, it’s great to see Tweet Marker Plus expanding to new platforms. I find App.net very promising in its intent to sell an API as a product to its users, and Watermark can build on the success of Tweet Marker Plus to perfectly integrate with the service, free of the restrictions and “requirements” of Twitter.

Watermark is $5 per month.

Droplr, Mac App Store, and Sandboxing→

Droplr, Mac App Store, and Sandboxing

The developers of Droplr, a sharing utility for OS X, have announced that in order to release version 3.0 of their app on the Mac App Store, they will have to tweak the app’s “upload from Finder” functionality to comply with Apple’s rules.

The primary difference will be in the use of the global hotkey (opt+d by default) to share the currently selected item(s) in the Finder. The standalone version will continue to work as it always has, simply select something in the Finder, use the key combination, and that item will be uploaded to Droplr. For the Mac App Store version, when the key combination is triggered with the Finder active, instead of uploading the currently selected items, it will present you with an “open file” dialog where you’ll need to navigate to the item(s) you’d like to share and select them. We don’t believe this provides the best experience, but we do believe it’s an acceptable tradeoff to be able to remain in the Mac App Store, especially given many of our users don’t use the key combination as a primary method of sharing with Droplr.

This update from the Droplr team is particularly interesting as, back in May, speculation arose as to whether Apple would start rejecting any app with “global hotkey functionality” on June 1, when the company began enforcing its new Sandboxing policies for Mac App Store apps. As it turned out, the rumor didn’t specify which kind of apps would fall under Apple’s ban, but several third-party developers confirmed their applications carrying similar functionality went through Apple’s approval process.

However, it appears the “issue” with Droplr 3.0 and the Mac App Store is simply related to standard Sandboxing practices, not strictly hotkeys. It is safe to assume that, per Apple’s Sandboxing implementation, an app like Droplr can’t benefit from unrestricted access to the Finder to automatically upload a file in the background. Several developers I have contacted about this issue confirmed that it’s not a surprise Apple is requiring an Open dialog to access a file outside of the Sandbox, and that this would have been true even if Droplr wasn’t combining the feature with a global hotkey. So while a calendar app can show itself with a hotkey, or a todo app can display a systemwide quick-entry panel, Sandboxing requires an app that accesses files directly (like Droplr does) to go through an Open dialog.

Read Droplr’s blog post here, and our report from May on Mac App Store apps and global hotkey functionality here.

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Save Safari Tabs As A List in OmniFocus→

Save Safari Tabs As A List in OmniFocus

This is a nice tip to save the tabs of the frontmost Safari window as a list in OmniFocus (via Shawn Blanc). Through AppleScript, tabs are saved as webpage titles and URLs in a note in the OmniFocus inbox; the note is named with the “URL List from Safari Tabs” + timestamp format.

Using OmniFocus’ AppleScript Dictionary, you could modify the script to assign a specific context to the task for easy retrieval of your tab lists with Perspectives or OmniFocus’ own URLs. For the latter option, you can use Launch Center on iOS to quickly jump to OmniFocus projects and contexts; also keep in mind that any OmniFocus item (a task, a project, a context) has a unique ID that you can get using the “Copy as Link” option from the app’s contextual menu.

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Plain Text, Macros, Markdown, and Nebulous Notes

Nebulous Notes

Nebulous Notes

If there’s a category of iOS apps I’m always interested in checking out, that would be text editors. I write for a living, and while a better app won’t make me a better writer, a text editor that works for me can make me type and research more efficiently. Text editors are tools, and I’m always curious to see whether the market is offering new ones to get the job done with faster, smarter techniques. As Gabe said, fiddling often gets a bad rap, but my fiddling with text editors has actually allowed me to find apps that facilitate the only process that matters: typing words on a screen.

In the past year, I have taken a look at several text editors. I compared my favorite ones – picking Writing Kit as my go-to editor and research app – but I also kept WriteUp on my iPad’s Home screen, as the app received some interesting updates including iCloud support and swipe text selection. For the past two months, though, I have found myself coming back to another text editor that I had been previously recommended by various Internet pals: Nebulous Notes. And in spite of my publicly stated praise for Writing Kit, I have been getting lots of writing done with it – so much that I haven’t used any other app for my posts and notes. Read more

Session Videos From The One More Thing Conference Now Available For Purchase

For those of you who weren’t able to go to the ‘One More Thing’ conference back in May, the full sessions have been put together in video format and are now available for $49. It includes sessions from both days and for every one of the 17 iOS developers that spoke at the conference, including Raphael Schaad of Flipboard, Shaun Inman, Justin Williams of Second Gear, Loren Brichter of Atebits, Neven Mrgan of Panic and a whole slew of other, excellent, speakers:

  • Winter Wong - Quoord Systems
  • Lee Armtrong - Pinkfroot
  • Julian Lepinski - Debacle Software
  • Matt Rix - Magicule
  • Adam Kirk - Mysterious Trousers
  • Igor Pušenjak - Lima Sky
  • Kepa Auwae - Rocketcat Games
  • Dave Howell - Avatron Software
  • Karl von Randow - Tap Tap Tap
  • Layton Duncan - Polar Bear Farm
  • Jeff Broderick
  • Sebastiaan de With - Double Twist

For everyone who told us they wished they could come to the conference but couldn’t make it – this is for you. We’re making the full videos from both days of the One More Thing 2012 Conference available for download! It’s only $49, and you can come back to watch or download the videos again at any time up until the next conference. They’re all 720p, H.264 and encoded for most iOS devices.

If you want a taste of what the conference was like, the Q&A session of the main conference is also available for free.

Craig Federighi and Dan Riccio Promoted to Senior Vice Presidents→

Craig Federighi and Dan Riccio Promoted to Senior Vice Presidents

With a press release, Apple today announced that Craig Federighi, Vice President of Mac Software Engineering, and Dan Riccio, Vice President of Hardware Engineering, have joined the executive team of the company as Senior Vice Presidents. Both will report directly to CEO Tim Cook.

As senior vice president of Mac Software Engineering, Federighi will continue to be responsible for the development of Mac OS X and Apple’s common operating system engineering teams. Federighi worked at NeXT, followed by Apple, and then spent a decade at Ariba where he held several roles including vice president of Internet Services and chief technology officer. He returned to Apple in 2009 to lead Mac OS X engineering. Federighi holds a Master of Science degree in Computer Science and a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Riccio, as senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, will lead the Mac, iPhone, iPad and iPod engineering teams. He has been instrumental in all of Apple’s iPad products since the first generation iPad. Riccio joined Apple in 1998 as vice president of Product Design and has been a key contributor to most of Apple’s hardware over his career. Dan earned a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1986.

In the same press release, Apple has also announced that Bob Mansfield, who announced his retirement in June, will remain at Apple to “work on future products”, also reporting to Tim Cook.

In the past two years, Craig Federighi joined other members of Apple’s executive team on stage for product announcements and demoes. In June, Federighi appeared at Apple’s WWDC keynote in San Francisco to demonstrate the latest features of OS X Mountain Lion, released a month later.

Apple’s Leadership webpage has already been updated with the new profiles of SVPs Federighi and Riccio.

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