David Bowie Emojis Included in iOS 10.2 Beta→

Sheldon Pearce, writing for Pitchfork:

The latest iOS update for iPhone will feature “male and female singer” emoji’s based on the cover of David Bowie’s 1973 album, Aladdin Sane, _The Sun_ reports. It is a part of a profession selection that includes firefighters, painters, doctors, scientists, pilots, and more. Take a look at the male and female singer emojis below via Emojipedia. iOS 10.2 also includes updated versions of previously released transportation and food emojis.

Great nod to Bowie. I love that Apple is including this in a keyboard millions of people will use every day.

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Talkshow Will Shut Down on December 1

Talkshow, which launched about six months ago, will be shutting down effective December 1st. The service allowed groups to have text-based conversations in public. It quickly became a place to assemble panels to comment on live events or just discuss a particular topic. The discussion was limited to the host and guests, but people observing the Talkshow chat could submit questions.

In an email to users and post on Medium, Talkshow says:

While we have enjoyed the conversations that have happened on Talkshow, and are grateful for the community that has formed around the product, we don’t see it getting big enough to have the impact we had hoped for.

Talkshow’s shutdown is happening in stages over the next month. Talkshow is being removed from the App Store today. On November 8th, active Talkshows will end and tools will be made available to export existing shows. Finally, on December 1, the service will be turned off, which means the app will no longer show existing, inactive Talkshows, even in browsing mode.

Twitter Automates Customer Service Direct Messages→

Twitter revealed two new features for businesses that use direct messaging as a customer service channel – welcome messages and quick replies. Welcome messages are automated responses to customers who direct message companies. Quick replies present customers with a series of choices to reduce text input and, according to Twitter, are designed to work alongside welcome messages to speed up the customer service process.

Twitter’s Advertising Blog explains that:

These features are designed to help businesses create rich, responsive, full-service experiences that directly advance the work of customer service teams and open up new possibilities for how people engage with businesses on Twitter.

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Instapaper Premium Features Are Now Free

In August, Instapaper was acquired by Pinterest. Today, Instapaper announced that it is making its premium features free to all users. Previously, full-text search, unlimited notes, text-to-speech playlists, and speed reading were premium features that cost $2.99 per month or $29.99 per year. In an email to premium subscribers, Instapaper said:

Now that we’re better resourced, we’re able to offer everyone the best version of Instapaper.

Instapaper is also eliminating all advertising from its website. Premium subscribers will receive a pro rated refund of their current subscriptions.

According to The Verge, which spoke to Pinterest:

Pinterest says it has “no new monetization plans to share at this time” for Instapaper. The decision to drop subscriptions, Pinterest says, was simply a matter of the app being “better resourced,” so that it can “offer everyone the best version.”

The battle among read-it-later services has been a long one. By making some of Instapaper’s most powerful features free, Instapaper should be better positioned to compete against its main rival, Pocket.

Annotable Adds Wide Color Support and Haptic Feedback on iPhone 7→

Nice update to Annotable, my favorite image annotation tool for iOS: the latest version has brought support for wide color (pictures you edit will be saved in wide color without changing their color profile back to sRGB) as well as haptic feedback on the iPhone 7.

The latter is one of the most interesting third-party implementations to date: both in the app and the Photos editing extension, Annotable will give you feedback when you snap to the edges of a picture, when an oval becomes perfectly circle or a line perfectly vertical/horizontal, or when you’ve zoomed an image to fit. That’s a clever way to augment the user experience without cluttering the interface with visual messages, and it’s line with Apple’s adoption of the Taptic Engine for system haptics as well.

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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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