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This week Fraser and Federico take another pass at managing tasks on iOS, this time looking at implementing Getting Things Done with OmniFocus on iOS.
If you’re an OmniFocus user, or if you’ve been considering the app, you don’t want to miss this week’s episode of Canvas. You can listen here.
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Homescreen.me, which we first covered in June, has today received a big update which significantly enhances the utility of the website. Préshit Deorukhkar writes:
Ever wondered how your Homescreen has evolved over time? What if you could go back in time and see which apps you were using a month ago? Well, now you can.
You can now browse all your Past Homescreens on the site. All the screenshots that you’ve uploaded since you signed up here are available for your perusal. So go ahead, take a trip down memory lane.
I love this feature, and although I’ve only uploaded four Home screens to Homescreen.me so far, I look forward to regularly uploading my Home screen and seeing how it changes over a longer period of time. I’m still hoping that the folks at Homescreen.me implement a reminder system that sends me an email once a month reminding me to upload a new Home screen. But until that happens, I’ve created a recurring reminder in Due.
The other big new feature to come to Homescreen.me is the ability to follow your favorite users. Home screens from the people you follow will appear on the Timeline page of Homescreen.me. Also, because Homescreen.me is a website that you may only visit occasionally, you’ll also get an email notification for when someone you follow posts a Home screen.
Earlier today, Spotify unveiled Release Radar, an algorithmically-generated playlist updated Friday and designed to recommend new music. Like Discover Weekly, Release Radar tailors suggestions dynamically for your tastes, with the difference that it highlights newly released music from the past few weeks instead of anything you might be interested in. Essentially, Release Radar aims to be Discover Weekly for new song release.
The Verge has more details on how Spotify approached Release Radar after the success of Discover Weekly:
“When a new album drops, we don’t really have much information about it yet, so we don’t have any streaming data or playlisting data, and those are pretty much the two major components that make Discover Weekly work so well,” says Edward Newett, the engineering manager at Spotify in charge of Release Radar. “So some of the innovation happening now for the product is around audio research. We have an audio research team in New York that’s been experimenting with a lot of the newer deep learning techniques where we’re not looking at playlisting and collaborative filtering of users, but instead we’re looking at the actual audio itself.”
As a Discover Weekly fan, I think this is a fantastic idea. Discover Weekly has brought back the joy of discovering new music into my life, but the songs it recommends aren’t necessarily fresh. I can see Release Radar complement Discover Weekly as the week winds down with songs that I don’t know and are also new.
Already in today’s first version of Release Radar, I’ve found some excellent suggestions for songs released in the past two weeks. Spotify has their personalized discovery features down to a science at this point.
Conversely, I’m curious to see what Apple plans to do with their Discovery Mix feature of Apple Music announced at WWDC (shown here with a screenshot). Discovery Mix still hasn’t become available after four betas of iOS 10. I’m intrigued, but also a little skeptical.
Nice update to Google’s custom keyboard for iOS released today on the App Store:
Gboard is already available in English across the U.S., Europe, Canada and Australia. Starting today, Gboard is ready to start sending GIFs, searches, emojis and more for our friends who speak French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal) and Spanish (Spain).
Gboard’s emoji search is the best way to search for any emoji I’ve tried on iOS. iOS 10’s predictive emoji suggestions aren’t even close to the Gboard’s emoji features. I was hoping iOS 10 would have proper emoji search – maybe next year.
But I’m surprised that Google hasn’t shipped an actual multilingual keyboard to type in two languages simultaneously. You have to switch between international layouts inside Gboard – just like in Apple’s current keyboard for iOS 9. By contrast, iOS 10’s upcoming multilingual keyboard is downright amazing, and I can’t go back to keyboards without multilingual support now.
First rumored by Bloomberg last week, Apple has updated its Apple Store app to include personalized product recommendations that use customers’ buying history to make suggestions. Contrary to rumors, the recommendations are not part of a separate ‘For You’ tab in the Apple Store app. Instead, product recommendations and local Apple Store events are included under the app’s ‘Discover’ tab. In addition, Apple has unified the Apple Store iPhone and iPad apps into a single Universal app that is available to download free from the App Store.
Joonas Kiminki got his iPhone stolen in Italy last month. After a couple of weeks, he received an email saying that the device had been found. The email turned out to be a well-designed, meticulous phishing attempt:
What strikes me the most is that everything seemed very “right” and professional. The email and the website content looked great, my phone really was an iPhone 6 and they even got the timezone right in the email.
The email raised no alerts on any email client I use, including Google Inbox, mail.google.com and Apple Mail. No web browser, mobile or desktop, show any alarms on the fake site. Google.com knows virtually nothing about the site, the email address or the (probably fake) US phone number the SMS was from. Very well done.
This is exactly what happened to my mother last week. Her iPhone was stolen in Italy in June, and after a month she received an email and SMS (in Italian) telling her that the iPhone had been located. Fortunately, she called me before entering her Apple ID credentials (she was about to).
Clearly, a criminal organization in Italy has set up an entire system to scam owners of stolen iPhones. I’m surprised that both Apple and Google are failing to recognize these email messages as spam.
Apple’s Shot on iPhone ad campaign has been around on billboards, in magazines, and on television since 2015. The campaign has featured both still photography and videos shot by customers on the iPhones, usually highlighting a specific feature of the iPhone camera or a specific theme, like Mother’s Day.
Today, Apple released a new Shot on iPhone television ad called ‘The Human Family,’ which according to Fast Company will air during the opening ceremony of the Olympics in Rio, Brazil on Friday. The ad features photographs and video taken by iPhone users of people from around the world with narration by poet Maya Angelou, who reads a version of her poem ‘The Human Family’ backed by a piano piece called ‘I Already Am a Great Matriarch’ by Rob Simonsen from the score of the Zach Braff movie ’Wish I Was Here’.
Back in January, I wrote a review of Moleskine Timepage, lauding it for its beautiful design and robust feature set.
After receiving other significant updates throughout the year, Timepage updated yesterday with a new Assistant, a contextually aware tool for keeping your schedule as organized as possible.
Through Assistant, Timepage can:
Each of these five notifications can be configured by heading into Assistant’s settings. From there, you can tap on the desired alert system and adjust items such as the time of your daily briefing or the prior notice for moderate or heavy rain. Included below are screenshots of the varying options under each piece of Assistant.
With the addition of Assistant, Timepage further stands out as a top calendar app for your iPhone. If you’ve yet to make the jump to Timepage, I strongly encourage you to check it out on the App Store for $4.99.
Earlier this week Apple introduced new and redesigned emoji as part of iOS 10 developer beta 4 and public beta 3. Among the new emoji are a pride flag, single-parent families, and more emoji featuring women. Apple also changed the existing pistol emoji from a realistic image of a gun to a water gun.
According to Jeremy Burge of Emojipedia, Apple’s change to the pistol emoji has been the single most poorly received emoji change since he started Emojipedia. The range of criticism has been wide and varied, but as Jeremy points out:
The real issue here is that emoji is bigger than Apple. Or to put it more succinctly, this is dangerous:
If Apple goes ahead with this change in the public iOS 10 release, one person could innocently tweet a toy and have that be seen by others as a weapon.
Burge proposes an alternative way to handle the situation without changing the meaning of the pistol emoji in a way that is inconsistent with other platforms – simply hide it so the pistol emoji isn’t available from the iOS keyboard.
I like Burge’s solution. Regardless of your view of whether there should be a realistic representation of a gun emoji on iOS, changing the meaning of the emoji is problematic when considered in the context of other vendors that use a realistic gun for the pistol emoji. Apple’s change only creates confusion that, as Burge rightly points out, could be dangerous.
For another great discussion of the changes to the pistol emoji in the iOS 10 beta, I also recommend Episode 102 of Connected, which does an excellent job of exploring the difficult issues Apple’s change raises.
