The Winter Festival Of Artisanal Software
Just back from E3 2016, Shahid shares his personal history with E3, and gives the lowdown on what was announced this year.
Shahid did an amazing job telling his E3 stories in the latest episode of Remaster. You can listen here.
Sponsored by:
Alongside some welcome improvements to their desktop client, Dropbox announced today they’re adding a document scanning feature to their iOS app:
With document scanning, you can now use the Dropbox mobile app to capture and organize scans from whiteboards, receipts, and sketches, so your ideas are right at your fingertips. Dropbox Business users can even search inside the scans.
The feature is detailed here, and it looks like it’s been integrated with the ‘+’ button to behave as any other file you’d manually import into Dropbox.
I don’t think of Dropbox as an app on my phone – it’s my online filesystem, which is why right now I’m struggling to imagine using it to scan documents. Essentially, I keep Dropbox on my iOS devices for two reasons: to share files with others and to grant other apps access to Dropbox. I don’t spend a lot of time in the Dropbox app itself.
However, it appears that Dropbox has done a nice job in streamlining the functionality as much as possible, and I like how they’re moving more and more features to Business-only users, so I’m going to give this a try.
With post-WWDC flu raging throughout Europe, most of the Connected crew talks about the winners and losers of WWDC including watchOS, macOS Sierra and the iPad.
I couldn’t join Myke and Stephen for Connected yesterday – I’m still recovering – but they had a fun episode about post-WWDC thoughts. You can listen here.
Sponsored by:
Marble by Mofily is a portable 2-in-1 USB-C docking & charging station that can expand USB-C to HDMI, DisplayPort, 4x USB, MicroSD, and charge 4x devices simultaneously with a built-in 60w AC adapter.
Marble offers a single compact way to connect multiple devices to your USB-C ported laptop, including the new MacBook and many more. Marble gives you all the functionality of having your devices nearby. It’s as though they are still plugged right into your computer. When it’s not connected to an AC outlet, you can still use Marble as an on-the-go multifunctional hub for your laptop. The power supply of the USB ports will automatically switch from AC to laptop.
Safety has always been Mofily’s priority, which is why they built Marble with advanced protection technology. Marble protects all your plugged-in devices from overcurrent, overvoltage, overtemperature and short-circuiting, giving you a stable power supply and peace of mind.
For details on how to get a Marble – plus photos, videos, and more technical information – you can check out their campaign on Indiegogo.
Our thanks to Mofily for sponsoring MacStories this week with Marble.
It’s easy to make fun of Engage, the analytics app launched by Twitter today. Using terminology like engagement, influencers, and verified users, Twitter isn’t doing itself any favors. But here’s the thing, Twitter is different things to different people. For some it’s a public forum for chatting with friends. For others, Twitter is a broadcast medium. For still others, Twitter is all about marketing. Engage is designed to help you maximize the reach of your tweets through analytics. If that’s not your thing, you may view the app as useless, but that doesn’t mean it should be dismissed out of hand.
What Engage does, it does well. This is not a replacement for your Twitter client, including because it pops up an alert offering to track your tweet stats in real-time after every post. Engage is more akin to a tool like Google Analytics.
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 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.
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.
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.”
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?’
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.
