Brian Mueller’s CARROT series of apps serve up healthy doses of snark along with the weather, fitness, tasks, and alarms. It’s a style that is immediately recognizable and adds an element of humor and fun that give his apps personality. That unexpected game-like quality, combined with utility and productivity apps, is what makes Mueller’s apps stand out from the crowd. Watching the family of CARROT apps grow over the years, it’s not surprising at all that Mueller has taken what feels like the next logical step and made an iOS game. A.S.I. brings CARROT, the star in his apps, to life in a sprawling and fun sci-fi sendup of artificial intelligence and tech culture.
Game Day: A.S.I.
Rejected Apple Intern Applicant Reimagines the Music App→
Jason Yuan, writing for Medium’s Startup Grind:
Earlier this year I applied and interviewed for a graphic design internship at Apple Music (an opportunity of a lifetime), and was turned down with a very kind letter stating that although they liked my work, they wanted to see more growth and training.
At first, I was frustrated — Northwestern University doesn’t offer any sort of undergraduate graphic design program, so whatever growth they were looking for would have to be self taught…
…but as soon as I came to this realization, I became inspired to embark on what became a a three-month long journey to the holy grail — the iOS app that Apple Music deserves.
We don’t often link to concept pieces, but Yuan’s work is well worth a look. Besides the clean, elegant visual updates found here, one of the most interesting segments in the piece concerns a proposed new music discovery method called ‘My Sampler.’ The idea is that users can sample short clips of songs and either swipe down to add a song to their library or swipe up if they don’t like it. Yuan does a great job of showing how this type of gamification through gestures could be a welcome addition to the iOS Music app.
PDF Expert 6 Adds Powerful Editing Tools and More
Readdle released a major update to PDF Expert today. Version 6 incorporates powerful PDF editing tools, in-place cloud-based editing and annotation, document-level assignment of passwords, and more. PDF Expert was already one of the premier PDF apps on iOS, but free alternatives have given it a run for its money recently. The new features in PDF Expert 6 should help maintain its status as a favorite for many PDF power users.
Beddit Sleep Tracker Acquired by Apple→
Beddit, which makes a sleep sensor that collects sleep and other health data and sends it to companion iPhone and Apple Watch apps, was acquired by Apple. According to Beddit’s privacy policy:
Beddit has been acquired by Apple. Your personal data will be collected, used and disclosed in accordance with the Apple Privacy Policy.
Since the introduction of the Apple Watch Series 2, Apple has placed renewed emphasis on the health and fitness tracking features of the Watch. One notable hole in Apple’s lineup of built-in health and fitness apps has been the lack of a sleep tracker. With Beddit, Apple fills that gap and presumably adds a team of engineers that can help it develop additional sleep tracking capabilities in-house.
The Beddit 3 Sleep Monitor is available on Apple’s online store.
Connected, Episode 141: The Espresso Debacle→
The band is back together just in time to talk about Federico’s new iPhone case, the Echo Show, Phil Schiller’s comments on App Store upgrade pricing and more.
We’re all back on Connected this week with a variety of topics, including Amazon’s latest addition to the Echo family. You can listen here.
Sponsored by:
Timing 2 Makes Time Tracking on Your Mac a Pleasure
Timing 2 for Mac is out today. I’ve been a long-time user of Timing, and have had the pleasure of beta testing the new version for a while now. It’s an excellent update to a great tool.
Timing is an app that runs on your Mac and tracks everything you do. Sounds creepy at first, but the data is completely safe, and the tracking is only for your own productivity purposes (never uploaded anywhere). By helping you see how you’re spending your time, you can start to change behaviors. Plus – because it can intelligently associate activities with actual projects – it serves as a detailed work timer for your paid projects.
Timing 2 comes in three versions: Productivity ($29), Professional ($49), and Expert ($79). No recurring payments needed, you own the app and you own your data. Some of the features I’ll be talking about are from the Expert version, so be sure to check the feature list before you purchase one of the other versions.
Timing tracks more than just what app you’re using. It will record what websites you visit, what documents you open, what folders you work in, and every way you spend time on your Mac. You can even add in notes about what you did while you were away from your Mac.
Timing 2 does a brilliant job of grouping tasks together and automatically assigning “keywords” to add new tasks to groups. You can also assign tracked tasks to projects, and do fine-grained editing on the criteria Timing uses to determine the purpose of the time it tracked.
Keywords and manual assignment of activities can be grouped into categories such as “Research” or “Podcasting.” As a result, you can easily see what activities you spent the most time on – and possibly realize that you’re not focusing on what you thought you were.
Timing also provides automatic suggestions for blocks of time that might belong together. It makes it easy to group activities and reap the benefits of manual time tracking with the ease of automation.
Then you get the reports. Timing 2 has truly upped its game in the data visualization section. Beautiful and useful graphs showing your most active times, most productive times, the type of work you spent your time on, and a pie chart of your most-used apps. Keep in mind that all of this is gathered automatically – you don’t have to configure anything to start getting detailed overviews.
When you edit a task, you can even assign a productivity rating to it. For me, an app like VLC gets a 25% productivity rating. A quarter of the time it’s active I’m watching something educational, but 75% of the time is probably less than productive. Now when I get reports, time tracked in VLC can automatically contribute to my overall productivity rating without unduly distorting it, and without me having to go in and manually mark each video as “productive” or “not.”
Timing 2 is the result of a solid year of development by Daniel Alm, who left his job at Google to work full time on it. In the process he’s turned a useful tool into an indispensable one for freelancers and productivity nerds. If that sounds interesting, go check it out!
Apple Announces Date and Time of Its WWDC Keynote Event→
Following the announcement in February of WWDC’s dates and location for this year, Apple today has notified members of the press that the conference will kick off with a keynote event, as has become tradition. Jordan Kahn writes for 9to5Mac:
The keynote is scheduled for 10AM PT on June 5, the first day of the conference, and will likely play host to new product unveilings as well as our first previews of Apple’s operating systems, iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS, as well as new developer tools to go with them.
June 5 is coming up quickly, and our team will be present in San Jose to witness Apple’s announcements firsthand. We’ll provide all coverage from the keynote, as well as the conference as a whole, on our site here.
Snapchat Adds Magic Eraser, Emoji Brush, Limitless Snaps, and More
In an update released today, Snapchat has added a slew of new tools to enhance the creation and sharing of Snaps.
The Magic Eraser is a tool for removing unwanted objects from a picture. You can use it by tapping the scissors icon, then the stars icon. The tool works very much like the Repair Tool found in Pixelmator, the powerful photo editing app. Simply tap and drag on the part of the image you’d like to ‘erase,’ and after a couple seconds of work Snapchat will remove the object. When it works properly, what’s left in the absent object’s place will blend in nicely with the rest of the photo. As with all tools like this, the reliability can vary depending on the particular photo and object.
A second new tool is the Emoji Brush, which lets you draw with emoji on an image like you might draw with a standard colored brush. Tap the brush icon, then the heart emoji, to pull up the emoji picker. Currently only a select few emoji are available to choose from, including the heart, fire, star, flower, and a few others. If you tap and hold on the bottom of the emoji lineup, it will expand to temporarily reveal a variety of colored heart options.
Additional changes in the app include the new Loop tool, which lets you set a Snap to loop until your friend taps forward to the next Snap. This pairs nicely with the new option to remove a time limit from your Snap, so friends can view it as long as they’d like before moving on. Once the Snap is closed though, it will still delete as usual.
Amazon Launches Redesigned Alexa App for iOS
Alongside the announcement today of a new Echo product coming soon, the screen-equipped Echo Show, Amazon has launched a redesigned Alexa app for iOS. The new app’s highlight feature, apart from a much-improved interface, is the addition of messaging functionality.