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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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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