Professional Email Marketing Built Just for Mac Users
On this week’s episode of AppStories, we take a look at how iOS 11 has changed not only the way we work, but also how it has impacted our use of lifestyle, health and fitness, media consumption, and other types of apps.
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In other emoji-related news, Slack today announced that they’re going to support new emojis (including those from Emoji 5.0 released in 2017) across multiple platforms. If you use Slack on a regular basis, you know that the company has been notoriously slow over the past couple of years in adopting the latest emojis despite having launched features based entirely on them.
As noted by Jeremy Burge at Emojipedia, however, better emojis on Slack have brought a deeper change for Slack users on non-Apple platforms:
Users of iOS or macOS will see the least change to design in this release, as Slack previously defaulted to using Apple designs on all platforms.
Apple’s emoji designs remain the set displayed when accessing Slack on any Apple platform.
Those using on Windows, Android, or any non-Apple platform will see a consistent set between: but it’s not what you might expect. Google’s emoji designs are being used for all non-Apple platforms now as shown by this alert:
And:
While Apple’s emoji font is entirely owned and copyrighted by Apple, Google’s emoji font (named Noto Color Emoji) is provided with an open source license which allows other projects to use this within the terms set out in the SIL Open Font License. Given this, it’s possible that Slack believes it is on firmer ground to be using Noto Color Emoji rather than embedding Apple emoji images on competing platforms.
Jason Snell argues that this move will lead to a different emoji experience for Slack users who access the service from non-Apple platforms:
The result is emoji fragmentation, where different users of Slack will see different versions of the same general concept. Also, users like my friend Erika might prefer one set of emoji designs to another, but they no longer have a choice in the matter.
That’s the bad news. The good news, at least, is that Slack is rolling out support for new emojis, including gender splits and skin tones, that it previously didn’t.
I wonder if Apple’s apparent push toward locking their emoji designs to the iOS ecosystem may have played a role in Slack’s decision to implement an open-source emoji set instead (see also: WhatsApp). Still, I’m happy that I can share all modern emojis on Slack; I’ll have to rethink some of my typical emoji reactions now.
Over the last several weeks, a few different emoji-related App Review stories have been shared by developers on Twitter. Though it’s common practice to use emoji throughout an app’s interface, Apple has begun rejecting some apps for just this reason.
Emojipedia founder Jeremy Burge researched the issue and summarized what seems to be a shift in Apple’s handling of emoji use. In a piece titled “Apple’s Emoji Crackdown” he walks through his current understanding of what’s permissible regarding emoji use, and what isn’t – though with the caveat that none of this has been officially addressed by Apple yet. He concludes:
It would be a shame to see emojis banished from all apps due to potentially over-zealous app reviewers.
Using an emoji as a core part of an app’s UI, or in-game character seems to be a fairly clear overstepping of the mark, and now that Apple has begun enforcing this, I don’t expect that side of things to change.
It’s understandable there is much confusion about this right now, especially as the Apple Color Emoji font until now has been treated by many as a font like any other. If…thought about as “a set of images created and owned by Apple”, the terms for what seems reasonable do shift.
Despite the lack of word from Apple on an official policy change, the signs don’t look good. Apple owns the rights to its emoji designs, and there is currently no way for developers to license those designs, so we may begin seeing a lot less emoji use in apps soon.
Initial orders of Apple’s new HomePod smart speaker will arrive on doorsteps and in Apple stores beginning Friday in the US, UK, and Australia. Today, reviews were published by several media outlets that have had about a week to test the HomePod. Apple also invited several journalists for a tour of its audio labs in Cupertino with Phil Schiller, hardware VP Kate Bergeron, and senior director of audio design and engineering Gary Greaves.
The consensus of the first wave of reviews is that the HomePod sounds fantastic. Apple has brought its engineering expertise and computing power to bear in a way that reviewers say produces remarkable sound for the HomePod’s size and price.
However, Siri’s limitations and the lack of support for third-party music streaming services also mean that the HomePod’s voice assistant features lag behind those of the Amazon Echo and Google Home. As a result, the HomePod’s appeal will likely be limited to people who already subscribe to Apple Music, use iOS devices, and care about high-quality audio.
Matthew Panzarino of TechCrunch:
Apple’s HomePod is easily the best sounding mainstream smart speaker ever. It’s got better separation and bass response than anything else in its size and boasts a nuance and subtlety of sound that pays off the 7 years Apple has been working on it.
As a smart speaker, it offers best-in-class voice recognition, vastly outstripping the ability of other smart speakers to hear you trying to trigger a command at a distance or while music is playing, but its overall flexibility is limited by the limited command sets that the Siri protocol offers.
Buy a HomePod if you already have Apple Music or you want to have it and you’re in the market for a single incredibly over-designed and radically impressive speaker that will give you really great sound with basically no tuning, fussing, measuring or tweaking.
Nilay Patel sums up what that means for everyone else:
The Apple engineers I talked to were very proud of how the HomePod sounds, and for good reason: Apple’s audio engineering team did something really clever and new with the HomePod, and it really works. I’m not sure there’s anything out there that sounds better for the price, or even several times the price.
Unfortunately, Apple’s audio engineering team wasn’t in charge of just putting out a speaker. It was in charge of the audio components of a smart speaker, one that simply isn’t as smart as its competitors.
That’s really the crux of it: the HomePod sounds incredible, but not so world-bendingly amazing that you should switch away from Spotify, or accept Siri’s frustrating limitations as compared to Alexa.
At the end of last year in my annual Must-Have Apps roundup, I covered lire, an RSS client for iPhone and iPad that, despite having been around for several years, had flown under my radar until its iOS 11 update.
I wrote:
I settled on lire, an RSS reader that’s been around for years and that never grabbed my attention before. lire has been fully redesigned for iOS 11, taking advantage of Apple’s large title design style to neatly indicate different folders and sections. In addition to a clean design that feels good on the iPhone X and iPad Pro, lire has two peculiarities: it supports all the most popular RSS services (including Inoreader) and it comes with its own text extraction tool to load the full text of truncated stories. The full-text option can be enabled on a per-site basis, and it works well in combination with caching for read articles. lire looks native to iOS in a way that the official apps by Inoreader, NewsBlur, and Feedly don’t, and it’s actively supported by its developer with frequent updates.
I’ve been using lire in combination with Inoreader since November; four months later, I still haven’t found any other RSS reader that mixes iOS 11’s aesthetic with support for all the most popular RSS services. Unlike other apps, lire looks native to iOS 11 and it lets you choose the sync service you prefer. Plus, the ability to load specific websites in full-text mode and a pure black theme make lire a fantastic reading experience on the iPhone X as well.
With today’s 3.0.32 update, developer Kunal Sood has brought deep integration with iOS 11’s drag and drop to lire, shipping one of the best implementations of the feature on both the iPhone and iPad. Which isn’t surprising considering that lire’s drag and drop enhancements have been directly inspired by Bear – already a terrific example of what developers can build with drag and drop in iOS 11.
Reliability is essential when it comes to email. Newton has you covered with rock-solid messaging, lightning-fast push notifications, sync across all your devices, and modern email management tools.
Life doesn’t just happen at your desk. Email streams in all day whether you’re working at your desk or out running errands. With Newton, you can keep on top of it all regardless of where you are because Newton works seamlessly across platforms.
What makes Newton stand out from the crowd is its simple, elegant design and flexibility. Newton supports all your email accounts whether they’re based on IMAP, Gmail, iCloud, Office 365, or another platform. The app also features modern functionality that you won’t find in many other email client. For example, with Newton, you can request read receipts and quickly find attachments. You can also schedule emails to be sent later, which is handy if you work unusual hours or with people across the world. Newton can even tidy up your inbox by putting things like newsletters to the side until you have time to look at them.
Newton works with your calendar too, eliminating the need to leave your messages when you want to add an event to your calendar. Other key features include integrations for saving email messages to Evernote, Trello, Todoist, Pocket, and other apps, snoozing messages, and sender profiles, so you know more about the people with whom you interact. It’s a powerful set of features that make it easier to manage your inbox by getting actionable items out of your email and putting them where they belong.
Harness the power of Newton to get control of your email once and for all. You can learn more on Newton’s website or go download it now and start your free trial immediately.
Thanks to Newton for sponsoring MacStories this week.
Editing RAW photo files can be intimidating for beginners. There are a seemingly endless number of adjustments that can be made, and it’s not always clear what each does. However, if you take the time to learn the tools and shoot RAW images on your iPhone or another camera, the results can be stunning.
Sebastiaan de With, the designer of Halide, an excellent RAW camera app for iPhone, has published the second in a series of articles about shooting and editing RAW photos. As de With explains at the outset of this second article in the series:
This guide will walk you through the basics of RAW editing and adjustment. Most of these pointers also apply to editing RAW files from other cameras, but some parts focus on iOS editing workflows and how to transfer your RAW files from your iPhone to your Mac or PC.
The remainder of the article is full of great tips and eye-opening examples of what can be done on a Mac or iOS to edit RAW photos. If you’re interested in photography on any platform, this is a must-read article. In an upcoming installment de With will cover advanced editing and editing with depth channels.
Apple has just published its financial results for Q1 2018. The company posted revenue of $88.3 billion. Apple sold 13.2 million iPads, 77.3 million iPhones, and 5.1 million Macs during the quarter.
“We’re thrilled to report the biggest quarter in Apple’s history, with broad-based growth that included the highest revenue ever from a new iPhone lineup. iPhone X surpassed our expectations and has been our top-selling iPhone every week since it shipped in November,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We’ve also achieved a significant milestone with our active installed base of devices reaching 1.3 billion in January. That’s an increase of 30 percent in just two years, which is a testament to the popularity of our products and the loyalty and satisfaction of our customers.”
Following the launch of a redesigned Microsoft OneDrive earlier this week that added drag and drop alongside integration with iOS 11’s Files app, the popular Office suite of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint has received similarly noteworthy updates by adding real-time collaboration plus the aforementioned drag and drop features.
