Stephen is back with an assignment for Federico and Myke, but first: changes come to Withings, auto-correct and Apple Music.
On this week’s Connected (which has, quite possibly, one of my favorite titles so far) we discussed the apps we use when we’re not working. That was fun. You can listen here.
Sponsored by:
Casey Newton has an interview with Evernote CEO Chris O’Neill, who took over the company 10 months ago.
Reading through the article, three things stand out to me: I like his attitude; they don’t need to raise more money; and, they seem to realize Work Chat hasn’t been a success.
So let’s talk about business. Evernote invested significantly in a feature called Work Chat, which allows for collaboration around individual notes. But it doesn’t seem like the company has gotten much of a foothold. How will you tackle the business market? Should we expect the company will orient itself more toward collaboration uses?
No. It’s important to not try to be all things to all people. You have Slack, you have Hipchat. That’s a well-served market. Let’s just politely say, collaboration and chat is well served. So I don’t see it as, we need to try to do everything. If we do well with frictionless capture of ideas, and world-class search and retrieval, I think we can partner with a lot of other players.
I want to believe there’s still hope for Evernote.
This week is sponsored by Marketcircle, the developers of Daylite.
Daylite is a business productivity app that organizes your contacts, calendars, tasks, emails, notes, projects, and new business opportunities – all in one app. It helps you stay on top of calls and meetings, prioritize your tasks, and track projects and new business opportunities on your Mac, iPhone, and iPad.
You can use Daylite on your own to manage your solo business, or use it within a team to schedule meetings, delegate tasks, and track projects together. Daylite is a native app so you don’t need an Internet connection to use it. Your information is stored right on your Apple device so it’s always with you. When you get an Internet connection, it syncs your Mac, iPhone, and iPad so you and your team are up-to-date.
Daylite is loved by consultants, real estate agents, lawyers, photographers, designers, and more. For many small businesses, Daylite is the lifeline of their business and “makes order out of what would otherwise be chaos”. Learn how small businesses use Daylite to stay organized and increase productivity on Marketcircle’s website.
Our thanks to Marketcircle for sponsoring MacStories this week.
I think in outlines. I suppose that’s because it’s what I was trained to do. You see, when I was in law school, we would make elaborate outlines of the subjects we studied to prepare for exams. So over time, I developed a knack for breaking down topics into their component ideas and imposing a hierarchy on them. Nowadays, I still make outlines, but they are usually simple ones that I create while taking notes or brainstorming ideas. I discovered OutlineEdit from Robin Schnaidt recently, and it immediately stuck with me. The speed with which I can get ideas out of my head, into an outline, and then move them around has made it a go-to tool when I’m working on my Mac.
Hazel is one of the first utilities that I install when I get a new Mac. Judging from the Noodlesoft forums, there are many people who use Hazel far more heavily than I do, but it is no less important to my Mac setup. By automating what would otherwise be repetitive file management tasks, Hazel helps keep me focused on more important tasks. Today, Hazel 4 was released with new features and refinements that bring new power and convenience to an already exceptional app.
It’s hard for me to disagree with the premise of Nilay Patel’s piece on Circuit Breaker about the Apple Watch: it’s slow.
If Apple believes the Watch is indeed destined to become that computer, it needs to radically increase the raw power of the Watch’s processor, while maintaining its just-almost-acceptable battery life. And it needs to do that while all of the other computers around us keep getting faster themselves.
I know what you’re thinking – you’re using the Apple Watch primarily for notifications and workouts, and it works well. I get that. But when something is presented as the next major app platform for developers and then every single app I try takes seconds to load (if it loads at all), you can understand why enthusiasm is not high on my list of Apple Watch feelings.
I didn’t buy the Watch for notifications. I bought it with the belief that in the future we’re going to have computers on our wrist. Patel is right here: the slowness of the Apple Watch is undeniable and it dampens the excitement for the Watch as the next big Apple platform.
I disagree, however, with his idea for another “choice” for Apple:
The other choice is to pare the Watch down, to reduce its ambitions, and make it less of a computer and more of a clever extension of your phone. Most of the people I see with smartwatches use them as a convenient way to get notifications and perhaps some health tracking, not for anything else. (And health tracking is pretty specialized; Fitbit seems to be doing just fine serving a devoted customer base.)
I’ve seen similar comments elsewhere lately. Even with the flaws of the first model, I think you’d be seriously misguided to think Apple would backtrack and decide to make the Apple Watch 2 a fancier Fitbit.
I still believe that, a few years from now, a tiny computer on our wrist will be the primary device we use to quickly interact with the outside world, stay in touch, glance at information, and stay active. All of these aspects are negatively impacted by the Watch 1.0’s hardware today. Looking ahead, though, what’s more likely – that Apple shipped a product a bit too early and then iterated on it, or that the entire idea of the Apple Watch is flawed and Apple should have made a dumber fitness tracker instead?
If anything, Apple’s only choice is to continue to iterate on the original Watch idea: your most personal device. Faster, more sensors, faster apps, smarter apps, a lot more customization options. Gradually and then suddenly, we’ll realize the change has been dramatic.
That, of course, doesn’t soften my disappointment for the state of the Apple Watch as an app platform today. But knowing how Apple rolls, it makes me optimistic for its future.
As I mentioned on Connected earlier today, I’ve been using both Spotify and Apple Music for the past few months. I prefer how discovery is more skewed towards indie artists and songs I don’t know in Spotify, but I keep Apple Music around because of its exclusives, colorful interface, and system integrations. I’ll write about this eventually.
One of the design decisions I couldn’t stand in the Spotify app for iPhone was its hamburger button and hidden menu that required far too many swipes and taps to navigate in the app. Interacting with the menu was slow, getting search to open quickly never worked, and it epitomized many of the reasons why several companies (including Apple) have been advising against using a hamburger menu with navigation hidden by default.
The good news today is that the classic tab bar is back in style at Spotify. Starting today, the company is rolling out a redesigned navigation experience on the iPhone (pictured above) with five tabs across the bottom – Home, Browse, Radio, Library, and Search in the middle.
There’s nothing exceptionally inventive about this design – it’s the good old tab bar you’ve known since the iPhone debuted nine years ago, with a docked mini player that’s highly reminiscent of Apple Music.
Everything old is new again, and, I have to say, I was looking forward to Spotify rolling out this design since I saw screenshots of an A/B test they ran a few weeks ago. While it was fun to experiment with various spins on the hamburger button for the past few years, I’ve seen several apps go back to a traditional tab bar design with navigation elements always shown. As it turns out, the tab bar is faster, it’s more intuitive, and it’s just more comfortable to reach on large displays.
The same applies for Spotify: navigating across sections is faster, and resetting a view to its initial state takes only a couple of taps (tap the tab bar icon to change view, and tap it again to go back to the initial screen). There are some instances in which a hamburger button with side menu makes sense, but I’m glad Spotify has gone back to a tab bar.
You can get the latest version of Spotify from the App Store. If you don’t see the tab bar yet and you’re based in one of the supported countries (I have an American Spotify account), try force-quitting and re-opening Spotify. That did the trick for me.
Marco Arment on the latest update to Overcast:
In the last few Overcast releases, I’ve been optimizing the sync protocol and decreasing the burden of each sync to both sides (my servers and your iPhones). In 2.5.2, we’ll reap some of the benefits with the first version of what I’ve been informally calling “quicksync”.
In short, syncing Overcast between multiple devices — say, an iPhone and an iPad — is now much faster and more accurate, making multi-device usage much more practical and compelling.
“I’ve been testing this for a few weeks…”, the saying goes, but it’s true. In my tests during the beta, quicksync made switching between podcast episodes on two devices faster and less annoying than before.
Quicksync worked well in my typical use case: I’m washing dishes and Overcast is playing through the iPad Pro’s speakers, which are louder; then, I have to go out and connect my iPhone to my car’s audio, resuming Overcast to the same episode. With quicksync, I no longer have to skip ahead to catch up with the iPad’s progress. Marco did good work here and I hope the servers hold up well.
Great piece by Steven Sinofsky, who has replaced his laptop with an iPad Pro. There are several quotable passages, but I particularly liked this one:
Most problems are solved by not doing it the old way. The most important thing to keep in mind is that when you switch to a new way of doing things, there will be a lot of flows that can be accomplished but are remarkably difficult or seem like you’re fighting the system the whole time. If that is the case, the best thing to do is step back and realize that maybe you don’t need to do that anymore or even better you don’t need a special way of doing that. When the web came along, a lot of programmers worked very hard to turn “screens” (client-server front-ends) into web pages. People wanted PF-function keys and client-side field validation added to forms. It was crazy and those web sites were horrible because the whole of the metaphor was different (and better). The best way to adapt to change is to avoid trying to turn the old thing into the new things.
This paragraph encapsulates what I went through for the past two years since I switched to the iPad as my primary computer. To this day, I still get comments from a few people who think “I’m fighting the system”. And we don’t have to look too far back in our past to find the opinions of those who thought the iPad Pro was a platform for people who “jump through more hoops than a circus elephant”.
I’ve been enjoying the wave of iPad enthusiasm that the iPad Pro caused, and I still believe we’re just getting started.
