The Powerful Code Editor for iPad and iPhone — Now Free to Try
On this week’s episode of AppStories, we dive into our collections of iOS and Mac utilities and discuss some favorites.
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Being comfortable is part of getting a good night’s sleep, and a big part of that is your pillow. Hullo Pillow is a buckwheat pillow that allows you to adjust its shape and thickness to perfectly support your head and neck reducing pressure on your muscles, nerves, and discs.
Buckwheat pillows, which have been used for centuries, are popular in Japan, and they’re a staple of fancy hotels that offer ‘pillow menus.’ If you haven’t tried one before, a buckwheat pillow is different from standard foam or down pillows. It’s a little like a bean bag that allows you to adjust the pillow’s shape and thickness to your liking.
Feather and foam pillows get hot, humid, and compress into a thin pancake requiring you to fold it in half or use multiple pillows to support your head and neck. That doesn’t happen with Hullo. The buckwheat keeps your pillow cool and shapes itself to the contours of your head and neck to give you the support you need throughout the night.
Hullo offers a more natural way to sleep too. Instead of resting your head on a sack of plucked bird feathers or petroleum-based foam, Hullo uses natural buckwheat grown and milled in the United States and a certified organic cotton case.
Hullo is so sure you’ll love your new pillow, you can sleep on it for 60 days and if it isn’t for you, send it back for a refund. Also, if you buy more than one pillow, you can save up to $20 per pillow depending on the size you order. Shipping is free, and 1% of all profits are donated to The Nature Conservancy, so your purchase is helping the planet too.
You deserve a comfortable night’s sleep. Go to Hullo Pillow’s website now to learn more, read customer reviews, and order a pillow today.
Our thanks to Hullo Pillow for sponsoring MacStories this week.
Apple announced this morning two ways it plans to celebrate Heart Month in February. First, a new Activity Challenge for Apple Watch users will run from February 8-14, rewarding those who close their Exercise ring each day of that week-long period with a special badge and iMessage stickers. Second, Apple will be utilizing its retail Today at Apple sessions to educate consumers on their heart health.
In recognition of Heart Month, Apple will host special Today at Apple sessions, “Heart Health with Apple,” in stores in New York, Chicago and San Francisco with celebrity fitness trainer Jeanette Jenkins, Sumbul Desai, MD, Apple’s vice president of Health, Nancy Brown, CEO of the American Heart Association, Jay Blahnik, senior director of fitness for health technologies, and Julz Arney and Craig Bolton from the Apple Fitness Technologies team. Attendees will hear a discussion about heart health and participate in a new Health & Fitness Walk, which was co-created with Jeanette for participants to take a brisk walk with Apple Watch around their community.
These special sessions will be limited to a single session each in the three listed cities, with Apple Union Square hosting on February 11 at 6:00pm, Apple Williamsburg on February 21 at 4:30pm, and Apple Michigan Avenue hosting the final session on February 27 at 6:00pm.
Health is an area of growing importance to Apple, as the evolution of the Apple Watch over its life has shown. Because of that, educating users on heart health via Today at Apple seems like a natural move for the company. And it’s a safe bet we’ll start seeing more health-focused sessions introduced in the future.
In writing about Workflow (then) and Shortcuts (now) for a living, at some point I realized that if I wanted to build more complex shortcuts to either deal with web APIs or store data in iCloud Drive, I had to learn the basics of parsing and writing valid JSON. The format is behind most of the web API-based Shortcuts I have shared here on MacStories1 and is one of the techniques I recently explained on Club MacStories when I built a shortcut to save highlights from Safari Reading List. The beauty of JSON is that, unlike XML, it’s cleaner and more readable – provided you have a dedicated viewer that supports syntax highlighting and/or options to navigate between objects and inspect values. There’s no shortage of such utilities on macOS, but this is the kind of niche that still hasn’t been fully explored on iOS by developers of pro apps. That changes today with the launch of Jayson, created by Simon Støvring.
Readers of MacStories may be familiar with Støvring’s name – he’s the developer behind one of the most powerful and innovative pro apps of 2018, the excellent Scriptable for iOS. For this reason, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Jayson, a project that was born out of Støvring’s personal frustration with the lack of a modern JSON viewer for iOS, has that same spark of innovation and integration with native iOS functionalities that set Scriptable apart last year. If you do any kind of work with JSON on your iPhone or iPad, you need Jayson in your life, and here’s why.
Apple and Facebook try to outdo each other in who can have the more terrible week, and Stephen test drives the iPhone XR.
In this week’s episode of Connected, we discuss at length the latest Facebook privacy scandal and share our thoughts in the aftermath of Apple’s recently discovered FaceTime bug. You can listen here.
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Evernote is still alive. The popular note-taking app celebrated its tenth birthday last summer, but the last few of those years haven’t been easy, with two CEO transitions and sizable layoffs at several points. Still, the core product keeps pushing forward.
I last reviewed Evernote in early 2017, when version 8 of its iOS app launched as a major redesign. I concluded then that one of the service’s greatest strengths, particularly when compared with competitors like Apple Notes, is that Evernote strives to be more than just a note-taking app. It’s a solid way to take notes, but it also aims to make those notes easily accessible, to create connections between notes, and ultimately serve as a valuable aid to productivity.
Though Evernote has retained a large user base all these years later, and in fact became cash flow positive nearly two years ago, there are a lot of former users who left the service long ago and haven’t looked back. Personally, while I’ve kept an eye on Evernote over the years, I never put its recent updates to the test – until recently, that is, when I set out to revisit the popular note-taker.
As part of checking back in on Evernote, there were three core features I wanted to focus on evaluating: Templates, Context, and Dark Mode. These are some of the major developments Evernote has touted in its last few years of work, and they make for an interesting case study on the company’s future direction.
Facebook is in the news again, and unsurprisingly it’s not the good kind of publicity.
Yesterday Josh Constine of TechCrunch exposed a “Facebook Research” VPN that Facebook has been using to harvest extensive phone data from users age 13 to 35 in exchange for payment from the company of up to $20/month. The practice was made possible by Facebook’s enterprise developer certificate from Apple, but after the story came to light, Apple swiftly responded by revoking that certificate from Facebook and publicly condemning the company’s misuse of Apple’s Enterprise Developer Program. That action caused the immediate end of the Facebook Research initiative on Apple platforms, but it also has reportedly brought widespread consequences throughout the entirety of Facebook’s company operations. Tom Warren and Jacob Kastrenakes, reporting for The Verge:
Apple has shut down Facebook’s ability to distribute internal iOS apps, from early releases of the Facebook app to basic tools like a lunch menu. A person familiar with the situation tells The Verge that early versions of Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and other pre-release “dogfood” (beta) apps have stopped working, as have other employee apps, like one for transportation. Facebook is treating this as a critical problem internally, we’re told, as the affected apps simply don’t launch on employees’ phones anymore.
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Revoking a certificate not only stops apps from being distributed on iOS, but it also stops apps from working. And because internal apps by the same organization or developer may be connected to a single certificate, it can lead to immense headaches like the one Facebook now finds itself in where a multitude of internal apps have been shut down.
This is more than a slap on the wrist, but it seems like a fitting response to Facebook’s blatant abuse of the Apple enterprise agreement. My main hope is that it causes Facebook to think twice before implementing any similarly shady initiatives in the future.
Apple’s ever-growing focus on services was on display during yesterday’s quarterly earnings call, and today the company is continuing that narrative by announcing a new partnership with American Airlines that enables Apple Music subscribers to stream music while flying, even without paying for in-flight Wi-Fi. From Apple’s press release:
Starting Friday, Apple Music subscribers can enjoy their access to over 50 million songs, playlists and music videos on any domestic American Airlines flight equipped with Viasat satellite Wi-Fi with no Wi-Fi purchase required. American Airlines is the first commercial airline to provide exclusive access to Apple Music through complimentary inflight Wi-Fi.
“For most travelers, having music to listen to on the plane is just as important as anything they pack in their suitcases,” said Oliver Schusser, vice president of Apple Music. “With the addition of Apple Music on American flights, we are excited that customers can now enjoy their music in even more places. Subscribers can stream all their favorite songs and artists in the air, and continue to listen to their personal library offline, giving them everything they need to truly sit back, relax and enjoy their flight.”
When it comes to hardware and software, Apple is famously known for maintaining a very closed ecosystem, but fortunately there’s mounting evidence that the company’s services approach will utilize a new playbook. Apple Music coming to Amazon Echo, AirPlay 2 and iTunes content being built into TV sets, and now this American Airlines deal demonstrate a desire to spread Apple services further than ever before.
As in past quarters, Jason Snell has prepared a transcript of Apple’s earnings call on Six Colors.
This quarter marked the first time since the iPhone was introduced that Apple saw a year-over-year revenue decline for the holiday quarter. It was also the first quarter since the company announced that it would no longer report unit sales for its major product categories. Although Apple reported less information than in the past, the earnings call included some interesting tidbits including some insights into the company’s services business and hints regarding the company’s anticipated video service, which makes Snell’s transcript a great resource for prognosticators and anyone who would rather read it than listen to the recorded version.
