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Netflix for iOS Updated with Picture in Picture Support

I’ll give this one a “finally”. It’s been months since Netflix competitors like Hulu and HBO Now have been updated to support iOS 9’s excellent picture in picture feature, and now the most popular streaming service has followed suit on the day after iOS 10 was announced.

Better late than never though, so I’m pleased that I’ll be able to take advantage of PiP in another place after updating to the latest version of Netflix for iOS.

Now I can keep binging American Horror Story while collecting screenshots for my iOS 10 overview.

App Review Guidelines: The Comic Book→

Well this is an odd one. Yesterday after the 2016 Apple Design Awards, Apple handed out to attendees a physical comic book titled “App Review Guidelines: The Comic Book”. The comic is 36 pages long, and presumably is being used to try to drum up interest in reading through Apple’s freshly rewritten App Store Review guidelines.

The comic book is available in PDF form here, and reportedly will be followed up by a motion comic book coming later. The motion comic will be available through the Madefire Comics & Motion Books app.

Apple is certainly starting to get creative in its efforts to get developers to read through the review guidelines before submitting apps. When you’re reviewing over 100,000 apps per week, I guess you do what you can to try to stop time-consuming, guideline-breaking apps before they even get started.

You can follow @MacStoriesNet on Twitter or our WWDC 2016 news hub for updates.

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Safari 10 Will Disable Flash and Other Legacy Plug-Ins by Default→

Announced this morning on WebKit.org, the new version of Safari shipping with macOS Sierra this Fall is going to disable legacy plug-ins such as Flash, Java, Silverlight, and QuickTime by default.

From the WebKit blog post:

The WebKit project in particular emphasizes security, performance, and battery life when evaluating and implementing web standards. These standards now include most of the functionality needed to support rich media and interactive experiences that used to require legacy plug-ins like Adobe Flash. When Safari 10 ships this fall, by default, Safari will behave as though common legacy plug-ins on users’ Macs are not installed.

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Connected, Episode 95: RelayCon WWDC 2016→

The Relay FM family comes together in San Francisco to discuss the WWDC announcements, in front of a live audience.

Last night in San Francisco, we recorded a very special episode of Connected featuring multiple segments – with some fantastic co-hosts – on the announcements from WWDC and more. You can listen here.

RelayCon San Francisco wouldn’t have been possible without our amazing sponsors. Thanks to Cards Against Humanity, Textexpander, from Smile, MacMiniColo, Dash, and MacPaw.

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Apple Announces macOS Sierra

In yesterday’s keynote to kick off this year’s WWDC, Apple announced the newest version of their Mac operating system. The most obvious change here is in the name, which, for the first time in over a decade, no longer includes OS X. Instead, rebranded to match the rest of Apple’s modern line of operating systems, their desktop version is now dubbed macOS.

The company has not, however, dropped the famous locations in California naming scheme, this year choosing to go with the Sierra Nevada mountain range.

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Apple Announces watchOS 3

Apple this morning announced watchOS 3, the next version of the Apple Watch’s operating system, at their WWDC keynote event. A big focus of the release revolved around much needed speed improvements throughout the system, but the announcements also emphasized improvements in health and fitness, accessibility, and messaging. There was also a pretty large overhaul of some of the main functions of previous versions of watchOS, including a complete change in the features tied to the Watch’s Side Button.

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2016 Apple Design Award Winners Announced

Each year at WWDC, Apple celebrates developers and the very best apps on its platforms with the Apple Design Awards. These award-winning apps are held up by Apple as raising the bar in design, technology, and innovation. Each app combines rich functionality and high performance, taking advantage of the latest features in Apple’s operating systems to provide unique experiences that enrich the App Store and customers’ lives. As Apple explains it in the WWDC app, the purpose of the Apple Design Awards is to ‘recognize state of the art iOS, OS X, watchOS, and tvOS apps that reflect excellence in design and innovation.’ For the second year in a row, the awards included a special category to recognize the accomplishments of student-developers.

The event, which in recent years has capped off the first day of WWDC, did so again, but this year the ADAs were held in the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium for the first time, as were the opening keynote and Platforms State of the Union. This year’s award ceremony also marks the first time that the ADAs include Apple TV apps.

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tvOS Updates for Developers

Also included in today’s tvOS announcements was the introduction of several new developer APIs for tvOS apps. These APIs are available for developers immediately through the tvOS developer beta, so users will hopefully be able to start seeing their benefits in various tvOS apps soon after the official release of the new operating system this Fall.

The biggest new features that developers will have access to are the following:

ReplayKit

This one may sound familiar because it came to iOS last year, but now tvOS is picking up the framework as well, which will allow developers to more easily build in support for live recordings of users’ tvOS games. These gameplay videos can then be shared with others after the fact, but the API also allows gameplay to be streamed live while the user is currently playing the game. ReplayKit combined with Apple’s (hopeful) new support for MFi game controller-only games, could start to bring more advanced games and attract more advanced gamers to the Apple TV system. Even more so because the new tvOS also includes support for up to 4 MFi Game Controllers to be connected and playing a game at the same time.

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In New tvOS, Apple Allows Game Developers to Require MFi Controllers→

In Apple’s updated Apple TV developer documentation for the new version of tvOS coming this Fall, one line in particular has stuck out to developers in the document about MFi Game Controllers:

When designing a tvOS game, you may require the use of an MFi game controller, but where possible you should also support the Siri Remote.

This line does need to be taken with a grain of salt since these are the preliminary release notes for the just-released beta, and therefore the rules could be changed at any time between now and the Fall. But with that said, it is striking that the line would make its way back into the documentation if it weren’t going to be there to stay. I say “back” because similar language actually existed in the initial tvOS documentation last Fall, but was changed to reflect that under no circumstances would apps be allowed in the store unless they had some sort of support for the Siri Remote rather than solely supporting MFi controllers.

Polygon covered this topic last year, and discussed that Apple may in the future decide to loosen the reigns on this policy and let some MFi controller-only apps into the store.

We’ll have to keep watching through the summer to see for the sure, but it looks like there’s a new glimmer of hope that games with more advanced controls will be able to get into the Apple TV App Store without needing to neuter their control scheme to support a Remote that is not at all optimized for playing games.

You can follow @MacStoriesNet on Twitter or our WWDC 2016 news hub for updates.

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