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Canvas, Episode 10: Third-Party Email Clients→

Fraser and Federico (particularly Federico) drop serious knowledge on 3rd party iOS mail clients.

I forgot to link Canvas’ episode 10 on this website last week, but it’s a great one: we went deep on third-party email clients for iOS, why you should use them, and what categories of clients are out there today. You can listen here.

Sponsored by:

  • Airtable: Organise anything you can imagine.

What are they good for? Where do they have hard limitations? Which ones are the best? Federico makes his picks and explains how these clients can hook into other parts of your workflow to really enhance your mail processing on iOS.

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Igloo: An Intranet You’ll Actually Like [Sponsor]

In this day and age, there’s no shortage of ways to collaborate. You can use shared FTP drives, company-wide chat apps, or maybe you can use the one that thing that’s been neglected for a while: your corporate communications portal. While each app might serve a purpose, the sheer volume (and fragmentation) can be overwhelming for people at work these days.

That’s why you should try Igloo. It combines department spaces, team calendars, corporate file sharing, internal communications capabilities, social features, and plenty more—easily.

At Igloo, they think your way is the best way, they just want to support you, and make your way better.

Work has evolved and your tools should too. Never email yourself a file again. Bring your company into the 21st century - send your IT guy to try Igloo Software for free.

Igloo is an intranet you’ll actually like.

Our thanks to Igloo for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Twitter Gives Tweets More Room to Breathe

Twitter announced some big changes today that are designed to encourage conversations and media sharing. The 140 character limit of a tweet becomes a more significant constraint as you add more ‘@names’ to a conversation or attach media to a tweet. The changes announced by Twitter, which go a long way toward addressing those constraints, will be rolled out over the coming months in Twitter’s own app and will be available to third-party Twitter clients.

Replies

Large group conversations on Twitter are hard. The more people you add to a thread, the fewer characters you have left to communicate with the group. With the upcoming change to replies, ’@names’ of up to 50 people will no longer count toward the 140-character limit of a tweet. The tweet will still be seen only in the timelines of the people @replied, but eliminating ‘@names’ from the character count should facilitate conversations among more people. I am happy to see this change overall, but I wonder whether Twitter has gone too far by allowing up to 50 ‘@names’ in a single tweet.

The change to ‘@names’ will also eliminate the quandary about what to do when you want to start a tweet with someone’s ‘@name’ that is not a reply. With the changes announced, these tweets will be treated like any other tweet and be visible to all of your followers, eliminating the need to use the convention of a period before an ‘@name’ to ensure that everyone who follows you sees the tweet.

Media

When Twitter rolls out the changes announced, photos, videos, and GIFs will not count against the 140 character limit of a tweet, which should encourage the use of more media in tweets. The existing limits of four photos, or one video or GIF per tweet still apply. Links that are pasted into a tweet and not generated by attaching media will also still count against the 140-character limit.

Retweets

Finally, Twitter announced that you will be able to retweet your own tweets. Though this struck me as strange at first, it eliminates the need for things like the ubiquitous ‘ICYM’ tweets and will allow you to share an @reply, which would normally only be visible to its recipients, with all your followers.

Archiving a Website for Ten Thousand Years→

Glenn Fleishman, writing for The Atlantic:

Hi.co, a website that allows its users to post “moments” with a photo and annotation, plans a similar trip to the distant future. The operators, Craig Mod (who has also previously written for _The Atlantic) _and Chris Palmieri, announced today that the site will freeze service in September 2016. However, all posts present in the site’s database at that time will be microprinted onto a two-by-two-inch nickel plate. The entire site—2,000,000 words and 14,000 photos—should fit on a single disk. Several copies will be made and distributed across the globe; the Library of Congress has already been secured as a repository. The plates have a lifespan as long as 10,000 years, and they may be viewed with a 1,000-power optical microscope.

That’s certainly one way to go about digital preservation. This was a truly entertaining read – make sure to check out the links about time capsules and the Rosetta Disk.

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Tim Cook’s Big Week in India and China: Context and Timeline

It may not have made the front page headlines, but Apple just concluded a significant week-long tour of India and China. Tim Cook has made numerous trips to China in recent years, but this was the first time that Cook visited India on an official trip as CEO of Apple. The trip also comes at a crucial time for the company as it begins to make big strategic moves to attract more Indian consumers, and at a time when Apple’s growth in China last quarter screeched to a halt after a period of huge growth.

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Airmail 3 Review

When Federico reviewed Airmail 1.1 last month, I liked what I saw. I downloaded Airmail and started playing with it. I appreciated the ability to customize nearly every aspect of the app, but it wasn’t sticking because I couldn’t do the same on the Mac.

Like a text editor, my email client is the kind of app for which I prefer a consistent feature set and setup on iOS and OS X. While I was tempted to go all-in with Airmail, the very advancements that made it so attractive on iOS held me back because most of them were unavailable on the Mac.

This changes today with Bloop’s release of Airmail 3 for Mac, which brings Airmail’s best iOS features to the Mac. If you work on both platforms regularly, deal with a lot of email or email accounts, and want to customize your email client to match the way you work, the combination of Airmail 3 for Mac and Airmail 1.1 for iOS is a terrific choice and one to which I am now fully committed.

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VSCO to Lead iOS Photography Sessions at Apple’s New Union Square Store→

As we highlighted yesterday, among the components of Apple’s new Union Square store are Creative Sessions that will be held in what Apple has dubbed ‘The Forum.’ Today, VSCO announced a partnership with Apple highlighting iOS photography:

From May 26th until July 7th, Apple Union Square will host four Creative Sessions, each led by an established photographer from the VSCO community. Each photographer will share their story, inspiration, and creative process, and will lead a hands-on lesson based on their unique style and techniques.

VSCO is the maker of a popular iOS photo editor of the same name.

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Monument Valley’s Second Year→

Fascinating look at the second year of Monument Valley – particularly after a cameo on House of Cards and a promotion on the App Store:

Underwood turned out to be a great pitch man, one of several reasons why Monument Valley was actually more successful in its second year of existence, compared to the first. According to developer Ustwo, the game has been downloaded more than 26 million times to date, and more than 23 million of those downloads came in the second year after it released. “We’ve actually had to spend a lot of time maintaining the game,” says Dan Gray, head of studio at Ustwo Games, “and finding new opportunities for people to find out about it.”

For the second year in a row, Ustwo has released a detailed infographic that showcases how well the game performed on various platforms. While year one showed that it was still possible for a premium game to make money on mobile, year two shows just how huge of an audience you can reach by offering your game for free — the biggest reason behind _Monument Valley_’s enduring success wasn’t a fictional US president, it was the lack of a price tag.

The difference in downloads between the first and second year on iOS is remarkable, but even more impressive is the performance in China.

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Apple Promotes Alternate Conferences and Events Surrounding WWDC

Apple’s history with events scheduled around WWDC has been stormy. In 2013, CocoaConf scheduled an alternative conference for developers who were unable to get a ticket to WWDC called CocoaConf Alt. The conference was set to coincide with WWDC until CocoaConf organizers received an email from the Intercontinental Hotel that they could not hold the conference due to a contractual conflict with Apple. More recently, AltConf (originally AltWWDC and changed) planned to stream the 2015 WWDC keynote and State of the Union presentations at the Metreon Theater across the street from Moscone West. Initially, Apple threatened legal action, but ultimately, agreed to allow AltConf to stream the sessions that Apple streamed itself.

That bit of recent history makes today’s news that Apple is affirmatively promoting alternative conferences all the more welcome. Not only is Apple promoting AltConf, but also Layers, a fantastic design-centric conference that I attended last year and highly recommend.

In addition to alternative conferences, Apple is promoting a couple of high-profile community events – the Beard Bash, hosted by The Loop and iMore, and The Talk Show Live, hosted by Daring Fireball.

Apple’s acknowledgement of some of the best events surrounding WWDC is welcome and the sort of thing that gets me excited for WWDC.