Apple Shares ‘Creativity Goes On’ Video on YouTube→

Apple today published a new video on YouTube that shouldn’t be missed. It’s called “Creativity goes on,” and it celebrates the resilience of humanity amidst a pandemic and self-quarantine.

The video shows how people around the world are using Apple devices to express themselves and connect with each other. One example shows an elderly man and presumably his grandson playing chess together, with the grandfather connecting over FaceTime on the child’s iPad. Another features a person following an instructional yoga video that’s playing on their Mac. The soundtrack for the whole thing is lovely, evoking Apple’s traditional sentimental holiday videos. It’s well worth 98 seconds of your time.

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Apple and Google Partner for COVID-19 Contact Tracing

Today Apple announced a special partnership with Google to develop contact tracing technology designed to reduce the spread of COVID-19 in the coming months. The plan involves two steps:

First, in May, both companies will release APIs that enable interoperability between Android and iOS devices using apps from public health authorities. These official apps will be available for users to download via their respective app stores.

Second, in the coming months, Apple and Google will work to enable a broader Bluetooth-based contact tracing platform by building this functionality into the underlying platforms. This is a more robust solution than an API and would allow more individuals to participate, if they choose to opt in, as well as enable interaction with a broader ecosystem of apps and government health authorities. Privacy, transparency, and consent are of utmost importance in this effort, and we look forward to building this functionality in consultation with interested stakeholders. We will openly publish information about our work for others to analyze.

Additionally, Apple has published draft technical documentation covering their joint work with Google.

This marks only the latest of several efforts Apple has developed to help fight the spread of COVID-19. The company developed an app and website, in partnership with the CDC, to help people with symptoms know what they should do. Additionally Tim Cook has been tweeting periodic updates about the masks and face shields the company has sourced and developed to send to first responders. Today’s partnership with Google, however, may be the most significant effort to date.

The World Health Organization explains how contact tracing – which involves keeping track of anyone who has been in contact with an infected person – can help limit the transmission of disease. Although current social distancing policies are a strict form of containment, well-implemented contact tracing could help prevent the need for such drastic measures in the future.

I’m glad that Apple and Google are collaborating on this effort, and that it will be privacy-first and opt-in. Anything that can be done to minimize the spread of COVID-19 is a good thing.

Highlights for iPhone and iPad: An Excellent Companion for Researchers

I wish I had Highlights for iOS and iPadOS when I was a lawyer. Back then, it wasn’t unusual for me to review PDFs of legal documents that were hundreds of pages long. Unfortunately, the digital tools I had for annotating those documents were primitive. So instead, I typically fell back on marking up hard copies with highlighters and adding notes in the margins.

Highlights is a PDF annotation app that’s been available on the Mac for a long time but is brand new on iOS and iPadOS. The app translates the analog process of marking up a PDF to the digital world very well by providing tools that demonstrate an understanding of the needs of students, researchers, and anyone who spends a lot of time with PDFs.

I don’t have the same PDF needs I once did, but as I’ve used Highlights the past couple of weeks, I’ve appreciated its flexibility and power, and I expect that anyone who works with lots of PDFs will too.

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The Beauty of the Apple Watch’s Solar Dial Face→

Jack Forster at Hodinkee has a wonderful deep-dive essay on the Solar Dial face on Apple Watch, which was added last year in watchOS 6:

Tapping the Solar Dial watch face will allow you to see whether it’s day, or night, or one of the various phases of twilight. You can also see how many hours of daylight there are. The color of the sky also changes depending on the time of day, and during the twilight hours, you get a very pretty transition from blue, to a deeper blue, to a lovely pale pink as the solar disk begins to sink below the horizon. You can rotate the crown to show you what time sunset takes place, as well as the various phases of twilight. You’ll also see, in yellow numbers in the sub-dial, how many hours it is from the current time to sunset, or other solar astronomical events.

[…]

I give the Apple Watch Solar Dial a lot of credit for taking the properties of the smartwatch and using them to create a very captivating experience. The luminosity of the display and its ability, as night falls or sunrise dawns, to display different colors, as well as the general composition of the dial, makes for something much richer and far more emotionally evocative than the mere delivery of information. And too, it gives us a chance to reflect on what darkness and light have meant, and continue to mean, culturally and historically. There is something irresistibly compelling about having a little model universe on your wrist.

It’s remarkable how much attention to detail Apple gave to this watch face, including the intricate nuances of the different phases of twilight. I’ve never used the Solar Dial face before, but Forster’s piece has changed that, and I’m eager to see how the face transforms throughout the remainder of today.

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Connected, Episode 289: Let Me Remember My Opinion→

On this week’s episode of Connected:

This week, Myke talks about a sell on Cinema Displays, then the guys move on discuss Federico’s recent iPad article on modularity, the possibilities of widgets in iOS 14 and Stephen’s Mac Madness winner and picks.

You can listen below (and find the show notes here).

AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps
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Connected, Episode 289

AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

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Watchsmith Review: Create Your Own Apple Watch Complications

Watchsmith, the latest app from David Smith, was birthed from the inability to create third-party watch faces on the Apple Watch. As Smith has previously explained, while third-party faces may never be possible, several first-party faces already offer significant room for customization. The Infograph face, for example, contains eight different complication slots; if a rich array of third-party complications were available, you could build a highly customized watch face using the existing faces provided by Apple.

Watchsmith exists to provide that rich set of complications. The app offers 37 types of complications, each adaptable to different watch faces and complication slots, and all fully customizable so they can look exactly the way you prefer. Additionally, Watchsmith offers scheduling functionality to cause different complications to appear on your Watch at different times throughout the day.

Custom complications made with Watchsmith.

Custom complications made with Watchsmith.

In the absence of third-party watch faces, Watchsmith offers the next best thing: third-party complications that are highly customizable and can be optimized to your daily schedule.

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AppStories, Episode 157 – Research Tools→

This week on AppStories, we recap the MacStories’ iPad at 10 coverage and then compare notes on the research apps we use and approaches we take when working on a big project.

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AppStories Episode 157 - Research Tools

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Pixelmator Photo 1.2 Adds Cursor and Split View Support, ML Match Colors, and More

The Pixelmator team has released version 1.2 of Pixelmator Photo for the iPad with iPadOS cursor and Split View support and Pixelmator Pro’s ML Match Colors feature. The update also includes a new way to change the intensity of color and preset adjustments and a ‘Recents’ section for its filter tool.

Pixelmator Photo uses a custom cursor for tasks like cropping images.

Pixelmator Photo uses a custom cursor for tasks like cropping images.

The addition of cursor control is a welcome enhancement to Pixelmator Photo, which already supported keyboard shortcuts. Now it’s possible to make edits to a photo with a combination of the keyboard and either a trackpad or mouse without reaching up to touch the screen. Combined with the addition of Split View, Pixelmator Photo is far more powerful when used in combination with another app than it was before.

For example, when I’m working on an article and want to touch up a photo, I often use Pixelmator Photo to touch up any photos I plan to use. Before the update, if I was doing that with my iPad Pro in a stand, I would usually remove the iPad and edit with it lying flat on a table because it was easier than reaching up repeatedly to navigate Pixelmator Photo’s UI.

Editing images while I write in iA Writer.

Editing images while I write in iA Writer.

With cursor support, my iPad can remain in the stand while I edit. Better yet, with Split View, I can edit an image alongside the article I’m writing and use the app’s share sheet support to use a shortcut that uploads the final image to our CDN and returns a URL that I can paste into the story. The pairing eliminates the need to switch back and forth between Photos and my text editor, saving time. It’s worth noting that Pixelmator Photo does not support iPadOS’s multiwindowing feature, which I imagine could be valuable in some editing scenarios.

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