Reuters’ Julia Love has published a look into the design process behind Apple’s Campus 2, based on interviews with a number of current and former workers on the massive architectural project.
Unsurprisingly, Love discovered that Apple’s attention to detail on the campus mirrors its attention to detail on consumer products.
Apple’s in-house construction team enforced many rules: No vents or pipes could be reflected in the glass. Guidelines for the special wood used frequently throughout the building ran to some 30 pages.
Tolerances, the distance materials may deviate from desired measurements, were a particular focus. On many projects, the standard is 1/8 of an inch at best; Apple often demanded far less, even for hidden surfaces.
Based on outside evidence, the completion of Campus 2 seems to be drawing near, so we can expect to hear more details about the project – and hopefully receive inside glimpses from Apple itself – over the next few months.
After years of being accused of apathy toward the harassment and abuse that takes place on its platform, Twitter has so far marked 2017 with a stronger commitment to creating a safer environment for everyone.
Last week, Twitter announced a change to the way abusive tweets could be reported. Previously, if a user had blocked you, it would be impossible to report that user’s tweets as abusive or harmful, but that’s no longer the case.
Stopping the creation of new abusive accounts:
We’re taking steps to identify people who have been permanently suspended and stop them from creating new accounts. This focuses more effectively on some of the most prevalent and damaging forms of behavior, particularly accounts that are created only to abuse and harass others.
Introducing safer search results:
We’re also working on ‘safe search’ which removes Tweets that contain potentially sensitive content and Tweets from blocked and muted accounts from search results. While this type of content will be discoverable if you want to find it, it won’t clutter search results any longer. Learn more in our help center.
Collapsing potentially abusive or low-quality Tweets:
Our team has also been working on identifying and collapsing potentially abusive and low-quality replies so the most relevant conversations are brought forward. These Tweet replies will still be accessible to those who seek them out. You can expect to see this change rolling out in the coming weeks.
These changes follow a series of tweets at the end of last month by Twitter’s VP of Engineering, Ed Ho, who claimed the company is committed to “moving with more urgency than ever” to make Twitter a safer place. Ho tweeted again as today’s changes were announced and reinforced that these actions represent just the beginning, and more changes would be made to the service in the coming days.
Today Beats revealed in a tweet that its BeatsX Earphones will be available for purchase this Friday, February 10th. BeatsX come in a variety of color finishes, including the previously announced white and black. CNET also reports that gray and blue finishes are in the pipeline, though it’s unclear whether they’ll be available at launch or a later date.
Announced in Apple’s September keynote alongside Apple’s AirPods and two other Beats products, Beats Solo3 and PowerBeats3, Phil Schiller described BeatsX as “affordable, light, comfortable headphones for all throughout your day.”
BeatsX contain the same W1 chip found in those other products, which improves power efficiency and enables easy connections with Apple devices. Unlike those other products, however, BeatsX did not see the light of day in 2016; they stand alone in being delayed into 2017.
BeatsX are the lowest cost earphones Apple announced in September, barely edging out AirPods’ cost with a $149.95 price tag, nearly $10 less than AirPods. BeatsX claim better battery life than AirPods, with up to 8 hours on a full charge versus AirPods’ 5 hours. BeatsX may also appeal to anyone who is uneasy about the possibility of wire-free AirPods getting lost more easily.
Research is an inherently messy, non-linear process. In a traditional note-taking app, text, links, and images quickly wind up a disorganized mess, and moving items around with cut and paste is cumbersome. Milanote is a free-form note-taking web app designed to bring order to the chaos.
Apple posted a new video to YouTube called One Night on Earth. The video, which is part of Apple’s ‘Shot on iPhone 7’ series, features photographs taken all over the globe on one particular night, highlighting the iPhone 7’s low-light capabilities. The mashup of user-created shots is set to Snowfall, a beautiful jazz piece by the Ahmad Jamal Trio.
I would love to see iOS 11 bringing subtle touch down animations to standard system elements, such as navbar buttons, table view cells etc. By doing it to the default components, third party apps would be affected by it as well. This would make for a consistent and more compelling experience when touching iOS. And that sense of stiffness would be replaced with a much more fluid experience.
I like this idea. Apple Music’s new play button has a great touch-down state – I wish more parts of iOS followed the same approach.
A few months ago, I decided to remove Google AMP support from MacStories due to the obfuscation of our permalinks by the AMP plugin. There was a good discussion about publishers’ AMP concerns, including a story on The New York Times.
Today, Google has announced that they’re introducing a new feature that makes it easier to see a publisher’s full URL and copy it. Here’s Alex Fischer, writing on the Google Developers Blog:
Today, we’re adding a feature to the AMP integration in Google Search that allows users to access, copy, and share the canonical URL of an AMP document. But before diving deeper into the news, let’s take a step back to elaborate more on URLs in the AMP world and how they relate to the speed benefits of AMP.
And:
In addition to the above, many users have requested a way to access, copy, and share the canonical URL of a document. Today, we’re adding support for this functionality in form of an anchor button in the AMP Viewer header on Google Search. This feature allows users to use their browser’s native share functionality by long-tapping on the link that is displayed.
Google is also hoping that browsers will add support for a new Web Share API (which sounds nice as long as it can only be manually activated by the user; I can imagine websites abusing programmatic activation of the system share sheet).
I’m still not going to re-enable AMP in the short term, but I’m glad to see Google is listening to publishers and iterating quickly.
When Splitter Critters by Canadian game studio RAC7 caught my eye, I initially wrote it off as a game for young kids. I think it was the paper cut-out art style that made me jump to that conclusion. Digging a little deeper, I realized I was wrong. Splitter Critters is a game that anyone who likes puzzle games will enjoy. What’s more, its gameplay is truly innovative. I should have known better; this is the same team behind Dark Echo, a pioneering game from 2015 based on exploring a strange world through sound.
Shifting the environment to save the aliens.
The object of Splitter Critters is to guide a group of aliens back to their spaceship. The aliens wander back and forth, trapped by the terrain. You need to create a path back to their ship, which is where the clever gameplay mechanics come in. Swiping your finger across the screen tears the environment in two. The world can be split at any angle, which opens up nearly endless possibilities. You can then shift the two pieces to alter the world around the aliens doing things like lowering a cliff on which they are trapped to a lower level where their spaceship sits. There is an element of the classic game Lemmings in Splitter Critters and the way you guide the aliens to a goal, but how you do that is so unique that the utility of the comparison is limited.
As you progress through the levels, new challenges arise. Pits of water, creatures that want to eat your aliens, lasers, and other obstacles need to be avoided. Levels are made even harder by the fact that the number of times you can adjust the background is limited, so you need to be thoughtful about your approach.
Splitter Critters’ artwork makes the creatures and their planets feel like paper cutouts, which fits perfectly with the game mechanics. I also like how the little aliens bleat as they wander around, and enjoyed the atmospheric soundtrack.
What I’ve found the most fun about Splitter Critters, though, is its deceptive simplicity. The puzzles are challenging, and the mechanics add a fresh, new approach. With millions of games on the App Store, many of which are casual puzzle games, that originality is rare, which makes Splitter Critters a must-try for anyone who enjoys this kind of game.
This week Fraser and Federico change gears and focus on Read Later services.
A different episode of Canvas this week – we talked about the best apps and services to save articles for later, including Apple’s own Reading List and some alternative power-user methods. You can listen here.
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