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Craig Federighi on Why There Is No Touchscreen Mac→

CNET spoke with Craig Federighi after last week’s keynote, and one of the questions they ask him is whether there will be a touchscreen Mac (around 2:30 in the video):

Craig Federighi: At Apple we build prototypes around all sorts of ideas. So we certainly explored the topic deeply many years ago and had working models, but we decided it really was a compromise. For a device you hold in your hand like a phone or tablet it is very natural to rest your hand on the tablet and work that way. We think touch is at its best and we wanted to build, and have built, a really deep experience around a multi-touch first user interface. Grafting touch onto something that was fundamentally designed around a precise pointer really compromises the experience.

Those were carefully chosen words by Federighi. He does not say that there won’t be a touchscreen Mac, instead he notes that the simple addition or “grafting” on of a touchscreen to the Mac would be a compromise. Importantly, the compromise that he refers to is not one related to ergonomics, but rather the fact that macOS is currently designed around an interaction model driven by a precise pointer.

I agree with Federighi. I certainly wouldn’t want to see a Mac with a touchscreen bolted on, with no adjustments to the UI of macOS. But as someone who regularly uses the iPad Pro in a laptop-esque configuration with the Smart Keyboard, I see the value in having a touchscreen on a Mac, provided that there are also UI changes to macOS. I don’t expect this any time soon, but I do think it will happen.

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iOS 10.2 Beta Brings New Emoji, Wallpapers, and More

Apple has released the first iOS 10.2 beta to developers. The update includes:

  • new Unicode 9.0 emoji support (for a full list of the new emoji, check out this post on Emojipedia);
  • redesigns of existing emoji;
  • three new wallpapers, previously seen in Apple’s marketing materials for iOS 10;
  • a new celebration screen effect in Messages;
  • a widget for Apple’s built-in Video app;
  • a setting in the Music app to display star ratings that does not affect Apple Music ‘For You’ recommendations; and
  • a setting to maintain the Apple Camera app’s settings between uses.

New wallpapers.

New wallpapers.

New Camera settings, Celebration screen effect, and Video widget.

New Camera settings, Celebration screen effect, and Video widget.

The Music app's settings include star ratings.

The Music app’s settings include star ratings.

Apple’s Willingness to Embrace Its Past→

Jonathan Zufi, author of ICONIC, a coffee table book that celebrates the history of Apple products through beautiful photography, uses the October 27th Apple event to challenge a comment by Phil Schiller in 2012 that Apple is ‘focused on inventing the future, not celebrating the past.’

Although Steve Jobs shut down Apple’s internal Apple museum in 1997 and transferred its collection to Stanford, Zufi points out that Apple has begun honoring past products more often in recent years, especially where doing so highlights the innovations of current products. As Zufi observes:

People love reminiscing about the past, and there are still many Apple fans who love to celebrate the company’s rich product history — its successes and its failures. I’ve heard from readers who simply loved the fact that they sat down with [ICONIC and] a glass of wine and lost themselves for hours reliving these old machines, where they were in their lives when they first came across them, and how much has changed.

That’s why Phil Schiller’s comment about not celebrating the past always bothered me and I’m going to disagree with Phil on this — I’m certain Apple will continue celebrating their past as they blaze the future.

Selling the past short isn’t a prerequisite to embracing the future. Apple’s newfound willingness to look back feels like the mark of a mature company that’s as confident with where it’s been as it is with where it’s going.

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Outlook for iOS Adds Group Scheduling→

Microsoft has added a new group scheduling tool for Office 365 subscribers and users of the latest version of Exchange. Microsoft’s Outlook blog explains how it works:

Once you’ve created an event from your calendar and added your coworkers to the People field, tap the date picker. Times that work for everyone show in white, yellow indicates availability for one or more people in the group, and red indicates times with no availability. Next, tap the time picker and just drag and drop until it turns green—indicating everyone is available at that time.

After you have found a time that works for everyone and fill out any additional information about your event tapping the checkmark sends an invitation to each invitee and saves the event to your calendar.

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MacStories Guide: Design and Launch Your Own iMessage Sticker Pack on the App Store

The barrier to entry onto the App Store was already quite low, but with the launch of sticker packs in iOS 10, that barrier was substantially lowered. Now you don’t even have to type a line of code in order to launch a product on the App Store. This has been an exciting development and has enabled a whole new wave of creators to make products and launch them on the App Store.

I was one of them. I don’t know how to code, but I do have some design skills, and I wanted to see what it was like to create something for iOS and launch it on the App Store. So a few months ago I decided that I would make some sticker packs for iOS 10 – and that’s what I did. I brainstormed possible ideas, started designing some stickers and ultimately ended up publishing Birthday Celebration Stickers and an app bundle which included World Flag Stickers and a few other country-specific flag stickers.

The process of making and publishing these sticker packs was fairly straightforward, but I also encountered some unexpected hurdles. To help others who are excited about making their own sticker packs, I’ve written this guide, which I hope can make the process a little smoother.

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The End of the Mac Startup Chime→

The MacBook Pros introduced by Apple last Thursday no longer chime on startup or when NVRAM is reset. First discovered by Pingie.com, Stephen Hackett dives into the details on 512 Pixels, including a new Apple kbase article on resetting NVRAM.

The end of the startup chime is a small thing, but as Hackett observes:

…the startup chime is ingrained into the experience of having a Mac, I’m sad to see it go. A Mac without the chime feels broken, even if I know it isn’t. I don’t power down my machines often, but I liked hearing the chime when I power them back up.

It’s tradition.

It’s like losing the Happy Mac all over again.

It makes me a little sad and nostalgic to lose the Mac’s familiar chime too. It’s not a big deal, but it’s one more link to the Mac’s origins that is gone, which feels like a loss.

512 Pixels has some great links to the history of the startup chime that are a good read while you’re pouring one out for the Mac’s familiar sound.

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How the Touch Bar Works→

Good overview of the Touch Bar and its developer API by Benjamin Mayo:

Developers can display pretty much whatever they want whilst their app is in the foreground; this includes swapping out views and buttons depending on the current window of their app (a compose window necessitates different Touch Bar accessory views than the inbox window). However, the Touch Bar does not allow persistent widgets, status items or similar features like always-visible news tickers. These constraints are unlikely to be lifted either; Apple is imposing the restriction so that the UI under the user’s finger isn’t constantly changing due to spurious notifications or text messages.

Apple wants the bar to display peaceful relatively-static UI based on the current task. Major changes to the Bar should only happen when the application state drastically changes, such as opening a new tab or beginning a new modal activity. To repeat: once an app’s window is not active, it loses its control to influence what is shown on the Bar. The system Control Strip sits to the right in a collapsed state by default, but can be disabled entirely in System Preferences if desired.

This makes sense to me: the Touch Bar is intended to be an extension of the keyboard that deals with input – it’s not a smaller Dashboard or a widget container. This means that apps like PCalc won’t be able to persistently display their controls in the Touch Bar unless they’re the frontmost (active) app.

The more I think about it, the more the Touch Bar feels like the natural evolution of QuickType and the Shortcut Bar from iOS – to the point where I wonder if we’ll ever get this kind of evolution on the iPad Pro as well (where the current app is always the frontmost one and system controls could use a faster way to be engaged than Control Center). Perhaps with a new external keyboard with its own embedded Touch Bar and T1 chip?

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Canvas, Episode 22: Workflow – The Basics→

This week Fraser and Federico begin a multi-part series on the iOS automation app Workflow.

For the next several weeks on Canvas, we’re going to focus on Workflow with a series of episodes aimed at covering the basics of the app, its automation features, as well as its more advanced aspects. In the first episode, we explain what Workflow is and its key principles. We have lots more to come, so stay tuned. You can listen here.

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Game Day: Eggggg

Eggggg, by Norwegian developer Hyper Games, bills itself appropriately enough as a platform puker. You play as Gilbert who jumps out a window and into a giant egg to escape his mean Aunt Doris who won’t let him go to a birthday party. The trouble is, Gilbert is allergic to eggs. They make him vomit – a lot. Thrown into a world of eggs and cyborg chickens, Gilbert uses what he’s got – his vomit – to propel him through each level. If Eggggg sounds odd, that’s because it is, but it’s also not as gross as you might expect, and it’s a whole lot of fun.

Eggggg draws inspiration from many sources. The levels are reminiscent of Mario platformers. Each is full of secret items to collect and hard-to-reach areas to explore. Eggggg only has 20 levels, but they are more complex and varied in their look and feel than most mobile games, which makes them a joy to replay.

When I first tried Eggggg, I immediately thought of Adventure Time. Eggggg shares a certain visual absurdity and bizarreness with the popular Cartoon Network show thanks to the fantastic artwork of Brosmind, a design studio based in Barcelona, Spain. But the visual style of Eggggg also harkens back to 90s cartoons like Rugrats. It’s an interesting mix of styles that feels fresh and works well in the game.

The sound design of Eggggg is just as fun and fits perfectly with the game’s style. The sound effects all started with mouth sounds recorded by Bendik Høydahl who has a great post on Hyper Games’ website that demonstrates how he recorded the sound effects. I also love that there’s a compilation of the effects on SoundCloud.

Eggggg’s game mechanics are simple, but a little different than you might have seen in other games – not different in a bad way, but they take some getting used to. You can tap on either side of the screen to send Gilbert in that direction. A second tap makes Gilbert jump. So, if Gilbert is running left, tapping the right side of the screen changes his direction and tapping again makes him jump. If Gilbert is already running to the right tapping just makes him jump. Fortunately, the first two levels of the game have no obstacles and are enough practice to get the hang of the controls before you start battling enemies.

Each level includes unique obstacles like chicken-spiders, buzzsaws, chickens in flying saucers, and more. You are timed as you race through each level, which gives you some incentive to go back and try levels again to see if you can beat your time and move up the Game Center leaderboards, though the game is just as fun when you take it at your own pace.

Platformers are hard to get right on mobile devices without joysticks and dedicated buttons. Eggggg’s controls took some getting used to, but I think Hyper Games made the right choice by avoiding dedicated buttons or simulated joystick controls on the screen. The blend of deep Mario-style levels, colorful artwork, and squishy sound effects come together to make Eggggg one of the best platform games I’ve seen on iOS. It’s definitely one worth trying.

Eggggg is available on the App Store for $1.99.