Kickstarting Season 3 of Welcome to Macintosh→

Mark Bramhill, the creator of Welcome to Macintosh: a Tiny Show About a Big Fruit Company, has launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund Season 3 of his highly-regarded podcast about Apple and the community that surrounds it. Bramhill’s show seemingly came out of nowhere in early 2015. In a sea of Apple-themed podcasts, Welcome Macintosh set itself apart by being short and tightly edited. Each episode of seasons one and two focused on a single story or theme from Apple history like skeuomorphism and the time Song a Day Mann made Steve Jobs dance onto stage at the antenna-gate Apple event.

Bramhill previews some of what he has planned if the Kickstarter succeeds:

In one episode, I pitch an emoji for adoption in the international Unicode standard, following it all the way from a concept through the bureaucracy of the emoji-industrial complex. In another, I trace the surprisingly dramatic past of an app that was on the forefront of the MP3 revolution. And there are a whole bunch of others. Beginning next summer: eight brand new episodes for Season 3.

The kind of show that Bramhill produces is time consuming, hard work, and it takes money. So for Season 3, Bramhill has launched a Kickstarter. He is trying to raise $10,000 to cover everything from file hosting, to travel expenses. The campaign is off to a good start and includes some nice perks for backers like vinyl stickers and t-shirts. Mark is a natural storyteller. Check out the past episodes of Welcome to Macintosh and the short episodes he will be releasing during the Kickstarter campaign. I bet if you do, you’ll find yourself on his Kickstarter page backing Season 3.

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Daylite: A Business Productivity App for Mac and iOS [Sponsor]

Daylite is a business productivity app for Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

Organize you and your team’s contacts, calendars, projects, tasks, emails, notes, and new business opportunities all in one app.

Track sales and set reminders for follow-ups. See a full history of all emails, calls, and notes for each customer. Customize your own pipelines to track sales and projects. View your whole team’s calendar to make scheduling meetings simple. Daylite even integrates with Apple Mail so you can update customer info, set tasks and reminders, and add appointments to your calendar – all without leaving Mail.

Automate lead generation from online web forms with Daylite & Zapier integration. When someone fills out a form on your website through Google Forms or Wufoo, a new contact and business opportunity are creating in Daylite. You can then segment leads for specific email campaigns and track all of your communication with them in Daylite.

Always have your business info no matter where you go. Daylite is a native app so you can access your information on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad even when you don’t have an Internet connection.

Read how businesses all over the world are becoming more efficient with Daylite.

Our thanks to Daylite for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Siri and the Suspension of Disbelief→

Julian Lepinski has a thoughtful response to last week’s story by Walt Mossberg on Siri’s failures and inconsistencies. In particular, about the way Siri handles failed queries:

Apple’s high-level goal here should be to include responses that increase your faith in Siri’s ability to parse and respond to your question, even when that isn’t immediately possible. Google Search accomplishes this by explaining what they’re showing you, and asking you questions like “_Did you mean ‘when is the debate’?_” when they think you’ve made an error. Beyond increasing your trust in Siri, including questions like this in the responses would also generate a torrent of incredible data to help Apple tune the responses that Siri gives.

Apple has a bias towards failing silently when errors occur, which can be effective when the error rate is low. With Siri, however, this error rate is still quite high and the approach is far less appropriate. When Siri fails, there’s no path to success short of restarting and trying again (the brute force approach).

The comparison between conversational assistants and iOS’ original user interface feels particularly apt. It’d be helpful to know what else to try when Siri doesn’t understand a question.

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Remaster, Episode 20: The PlayStation VR Review→

The PlayStation VR is finally out. Federico, Myke, and Shahid share their views on the hardware, the experience, and the launch lineup.

Sony’s PlayStation VR platform launched earlier this week, and we’ve been playing with several launch titles for the past few days. On the latest Remaster, we discuss our impressions of the hardware, the gaming experience, and its future potential. You can listen here.

Sponsored by:

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Game Day: Invisible, Inc.

iOS gaming is epitomized by games with short, simple interactions, which is why arcade and puzzle games dominate the platform. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that – it plays to the strengths of the iPhone where most iOS game are played. But the success of Apple’s smallest iOS device doesn’t have to be at the expense of its bigger cousin, the iPad. With lots of power under the hood, a big battery and a gorgeous screen, the iPad has a lot to offer as a gaming platform. Yet, games that take advantage of the iPad’s strengths feel few and far between.

Earlier this month, Klei Entertainment, the Canadian studio behind Don’t Starve, released Invisible, Inc., an iPad-only turn-based stealth and strategy game that demonstrates what’s possible on the iPad. Invisible isn’t a new title. The game debuted on the PC and Mac in 2015 and earlier this year on the PS4, but this is Invisible’s first appearance on a touch-based device.

Invisible is set in a future where the world is dominated by corporations. Your security team has been compromised and you have 72 hours to solve a variety of missions leading up to a counterstrike against your enemy. Each mission poses unique challenges and obstacles that require stealth and strategy. The missions are also necessary to collect gear you will need to make your final assault on your enemy’s base.

The turn-based nature of Invisible gives you time to consider the best way to get around guards, cameras, drones, and other obstacles, but at the same time, Invisible creates a sense of urgency. Each turn you take raises the alarm status in the facility you’ve infiltrated, which leads to further complications as you navigate your enemy’s defenses. Guards you take out don’t remain unconscious indefinitely either. Waste too many turns and guards start to come to and look for you. Add to that an ominous electronic soundtrack, and you’ve got a game with a nearly perfect level of intensity.

Invisible is a deep game that is worth playing multiple times. You can unlock ten different agents to take through the missions, which are procedurally generated, adding variety to each play-through. You will fail missions over and over, but Invisible gives you ‘rewinds’ to retry missions, learning the best way to navigate their threats. On top of that, there are five game modes, all of which adds up to hours of challenges that are never the same twice.

Klei’s experience with bringing desktop gaming to the iPad shows. Invisible feels perfectly natural as an iPad app. The choice to bring the game to iPad only for now was a smart one. The game benefits from the larger screen. Klei did the same with Don’t Starve, but eventually did bring that game to the iPhone too. I could see that happening here as well, but doing so would undoubtedly require significant effort to make the interface work on a smaller screen.

I would love to see more games of Invisible’s ambition and quality on the App Store. The success of a game like Invisible on iOS seems like a no-brainer. A high-quality game for $4.99 that would cost you $20 on another platform is a great bargain. Unfortunately, people have been conditioned to expect games on iOS that are free or maybe a dollar or two at most. That’s a problem for the future of gaming on iOS, but with releases of top-notch games like Invisible, Inc., I remain optimistic that there is still a place for premier games to carve out a place for themselves on iOS.

Invisible, Inc. is available on the App Store for $4.99.

Healthy Competition

One of the intriguing aspects of iMessage sticker packs is that they can be as simple as static images or as complex as full-blown apps. There’s a place for both, but it’s interesting to see innovation beginning to take shape as a differentiator among sticker sellers.

Health Stickers, by Krishna Kumar, is a good example. It lets you share your exercise and health accomplishments via stickers, whether that’s your step count, weight, heart rate, or something else. What’s cool about the app is that it pulls health data from Apple’s Health app with your permission. Share you step count with a friend in Messages and the sticker includes your current step count total. The stickers cannot update dynamically, but you can always resend a sticker to a recipient if you want to update your statistics. The step count in particular seemed high compared to Pedometer++, but for casual sharing, as opposed to precise measurement, the app has a lot going for it.

Health Stickers is available on the iMessage App Store as a free download.

Health Importer Makes It Easy to Move Health Data Between iPhones

I’m in a minority, but when I get a new iPhone every year, I like to start fresh without reinstalling from a backup. I talked about this before, but, essentially, with the vast majority of my favorite apps storing data in the cloud, starting with a clean installation of iOS is mostly a matter of redownloading and rearranging apps now. In the process, a fresh install of iOS allows me to re-evaluate which apps I actually use and which ones can go – something that helps me keep my devices lean and with plenty of storage available.1

There’s one aspect that bothers me every time I decide to install iOS without a backup, though: losing my Health data. In previous years, I was okay with backing up subsets of information to external web services such as Lifesum or the excellent Gyroscope: over time, however, the inability to look at my complete health history in Apple’s Health app has become a problem that made me reconsider my stance on not restoring from a backup every year.

Fortunately, Dan Loewenherz has come up with a solution that will allow me to continue my no-restore strategy for the foreseeable future. Loewenherz created Health Importer, a simple $2.99 utility that does exactly what you’d expect: the app restores a backup of the Health database, keeping old entries with every data point logged from your iPhone, Apple Watch, or third-party apps.

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Google Photos Adds Four New Features→

Google Photos has introduced four new features:

  • Google Photos uses faces in your most recent photos to suggest older photos with with the same person in them;
  • If you take a lot of photos of the same subject, like a child, Google Photos will create a card of the best ones from the past month;
  • Animations, which Google Photos already creates using photos, are also generated from videos now; and
  • If Google Photos detects that there are sideways photos in your collection, it will present a card with the photos that it thinks should be rotated.

This is what Google Photos does best. It finds connections and photos that would be like searching for a needle in a haystack if you did it manually with a big photo library.

Each of the new features are available on iOS, Android, and the web.

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