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Microsoft Flow Adds iOS App

Back in April, Microsoft jumped into web service automation with the introduction of Flow, a business-oriented, Zapier and IFTTT-like service for creating workflows that connects disparate web services like Dropbox, Google Drive, Slack, Mailchimp, GitHub, Twitter, SharePoint, and Salesforce. Yesterday, Microsoft released an iOS app called Microsoft Flow that, according to the Microsoft blog, allows users to ‘manage, track, and explore your automated workflows anytime and anywhere.’

I have spent a little time with the Microsoft Flow app and it works as advertised, but is limited. Unlike IFTTT’s iOS app, Flow does not let you create workflows, though Microsoft says that feature is will be added in the coming months. In addition, the complex workflows that are possible in Zapier are not possible with Flow. For now, Flow is limited to doing things like turning workflows on and off, reviewing history reports of workflows that have run, receiving workflow push notifications, and evaluating error messages for workflows that fail.

Flow has a long way to go before it approaches the power of Zapier or its app has the depth of IFTTT’s, but it’s good to see Microsoft bring Flow to mobile devices and remains a service worth watching.

Microsoft Flow is available on the App Store as a free download.

The Iconfactory Celebrates Its Twentieth Anniversary

The Iconfactory is celebrating its 20th anniversary this week with a special website that shows off the evolution of its website, icon, and animations through the years, chronicles major events in the company’s history, and much more. I got a sneak peak at the site after my WWDC interview with Craig Hockenberry and this isn’t something you want to miss. It’s a fascinating exploration of the evolution of web and icon design over the past two decades.

Exify provides photographers with pages of metadata.

Exify provides photographers with pages of metadata.

In addition to the 20th anniversary site, the Iconfactory released a new photography app for iOS called Exify, that provides photographers with several pages of metadata for any photo on your iOS device. Whether it’s a histogram, location data, or data about where the camera was focused, Exify can display it. Exify also includes extensions that let you add watermarks and copyright data to images nondestructively, get data about an image from within Photos or another app, and magnify images.

Apple’s ‘Differential Privacy’ and Your Data→

Andy Greenberg, writing for Wired, has a good explanation of differential privacy:

Differential privacy, translated from Apple-speak, is the statistical science of trying to learn as much as possible about a group while learning as little as possible about any individual in it. With differential privacy, Apple can collect and store its users’ data in a format that lets it glean useful notions about what people do, say, like and want. But it can’t extract anything about a single, specific one of those people that might represent a privacy violation. And neither, in theory, could hackers or intelligence agencies.

And:

Differential privacy, Roth explains, seeks to mathematically prove that a certain form of data analysis can’t reveal anything about an individual—that the output of an algorithm remains identical with and without the input containing any given person’s private data. “You might do something more clever than the people before to anonymize your data set, but someone more clever than you might come around tomorrow and de-anonymize it,” says Roth. “Differential privacy, because it has a provable guarantee, breaks that loop. It’s future proof.”

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WWDC 2016 Developer Reactions: The MacStories Interviews

Over the course of WWDC I recorded interviews with fifteen developers and other people from the Apple community (sixteen including one pre-WWDC interview) about their reactions to the announcements made at WWDC and their work. The interviews, which are embedded below, grew out of The MacStories Lounge Telegram channel, where Federico and I have posted short audio updates for the past few months. I didn’t get a ticket in the WWDC lottery this year, but there was never a question in my mind that I would fly out to San Francisco for the week because I go for the people and geeky conversations as much as to learn what’s new. Thinking about those conversations it occurred to me, ‘why not record some of them to share with MacStories readers?’

Interviewing the Workflow team.

Interviewing the Workflow team.

What I recorded over the course of the week are the same sorts of conversations that happen all over San Francisco during WWDC, whether it’s in line for a session at Moscone, over a meal with friends, or yelled at the top of your voice in a noisy bar at night. It was fun to see the many common threads that emerged from the interviews over the course of the week. Everyone had their own unique take on the events and interests in things that are relevant to their own projects, but there were also many reactions to WWDC that were common to most of the people to whom I spoke.

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On iPad Features (Or Lack Thereof) at WWDC 2016

In my iOS 10 Wishes story from April1, I wrote:

I heard from multiple sources a few weeks ago that some iPad-only features will be shipped in 10.x updates following the release of iOS 10 in the Fall. I wouldn’t be surprised if some iPad changes and feature additions won’t make the cut for WWDC.

I didn’t have high hopes for major iPad-specific features to be announced at WWDC. Still, I was disappointed to see the iPad return to the backseat2 after last year’s revitalization. Every time Craig Federighi ended a segment with “it works on the iPad, too”, it felt like the iPad had become an afterthought again.

After WWDC, I strongly believe that Apple has notable iPad-only features in the pipeline, but they won’t be available until later in the iOS 10 cycle, possibly in early 2017.

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Game Day: Human Resource Machine

With WWDC just finished, I figured what better game to try than Human Resource Machine, a puzzle game with a development angle that has been available on the Mac and Windows since last Fall, but just debuted on iOS earlier this month. Human Resource starts out simply. You play Human Resource as a nameless worker tasked with moving boxes from an inbox conveyor belt to an outbox conveyor belt. The 41 levels become challenging quickly, but are a lot of fun and cleverly introduce programming concepts in a way that requires no prior knowledge of programming.

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TestFlight Update Allows Developers to Push iOS 10 Betas→

Chance Miller, writing for 9to5Mac:

Following the release of the first developer beta of iOS 10 earlier this week, Apple today has update TestFlight with support for the latest iOS version. As announced on the company’s developer website, developers are now able to build apps for iOS 10, watchOS 3, and the latest version of tvOS.

Being able to push betas of apps with iOS 10 features means that developers will be able to perfect the implementation of things like SiriKit and the new notification and widget features on iOS.

I remember struggling last year to try beta apps updated for iOS 9 ahead of the public release. It’s good to see Apple is doing better this year and letting developers push betas built against the new SDKs right out of the gate. This is the way it should be.

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App Launching on Apple Watch→

Conrad Stoll:

The significance of complications being the best way to launch apps is why swiping between watch faces is so valuable. It allows users to literally switch their context on the Apple Watch. One day this could presumably happen automatically, but at least it only takes one swipe to switch from your primary daily watch face to one with the type of information you want to have at a glance in another context.

[…]

I love using the Stopwatch and Timer apps while I’m cooking or brewing coffee, but I don’t want their complications visible during the rest of the day. The ability to swipe left and bring up an entire watch face devoted to them and any other complications relevant to cooking is a game changer for me.

Prescient realization by Stoll about the implications of the new Apple Watch swipe-to-change-face feature. While Apple emphasized the Dock during the keynote as the new best way to switch between apps, maybe that crown will really go to Complications on various watch faces.

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iOS 10: Our Complete Overview

At yesterday morning’s keynote event in the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, Apple took the wraps off of the latest revision of their mobile operating system. The tenth version of iOS opens up the system to a bold new world of integrations, APIs, and surprising customizability. It modernizes core apps that were growing long in the tooth, takes ambitious leaps forward with computer vision and contextual predictions, and enriches the user experience of such system tentpoles as notifications and the lock screen.

iOS 10 marks the beginning of a new era of iOS in many different ways. With a solid, mature core to build on, Apple is now feeling free to reach out into new areas that it has never before explored with its most popular operating system. We’ll have to wait for real world testing and future betas to see if they’ve truly delivered, but the promises of iOS 10 are some of the most ambitious Apple has ever pursued with “the world’s most advanced mobile operating system.”

So let’s take a look at the features Apple has planned for hundreds of millions of users next Fall.

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