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Chrome for iOS Switches to Modern Web View API→

Big news from Google’s Chrome for iOS team today: the app has moved from the legacy UIWebView API to WKWebView, promising notable speed improvements and 70% less crashing.

Here’s Andrew Cunningham, writing for Ars Technica:

Chrome’s stability on iOS should also see a big improvement. The UIWebView process in older versions needed to run within the Chrome process, so if a complex or badly behaving page made UIWebView crash, it would bring the whole Chrome browser down. With WKWebView, Google can move the process for individual pages outside of the app, better approximating the process isolation that Chrome uses on other platforms. Now when a page crashes, you’ll see the standard “Aw, Snap” Chrome error page. Google estimates that Chrome 48 will crash 70 percent less than older versions.

Apparently, Google worked with Apple to fix some of the bugs that prevented them from using WKWebView in Chrome before iOS 9. Developers have long been positive about the benefits of WKWebView (see my story on iOS web views from last year) and it’s good to see Google moving to a faster, more stable engine.

I’m curious to know if Google’s dedicated search app has been or will be upgraded to WKWebView as well. I don’t use Chrome (I like the unique perks of Safari, like Safari View Controller and the ability to access webpage selections with action extensions), but I prefer the Google app for traditional Google searches – it has a native interface for the search box with handy suggestions and links to past queries. Not to mention Google Now, which I’ve grown to like to track shipments, get weather reports, and receive time to leave notifications.

An important note for VoiceOver users: today’s update seems to break support for this key accessibility feature in the app.

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Panic’s iOS Apps in 2015→

Cabel Sasser, writing for the Panic blog on their iOS apps and how they did on the App Store in 2015:

iOS Revenue. I brought this up last year and we still haven’t licked it. We had a change of heart — well, an experimental change of heart — and reduced the price of our iOS apps in 2015 to normalize them at $9.99 or less, thinking that was the upper limit and/or sweet spot for iOS app pricing. But it didn’t have a meaningful impact on sales.

More and more I’m beginning to think we simply made the wrong type of apps for iOS — we made professional tools that aren’t really “in demand” on that platform — and that price isn’t our problem, but interest is.

So, once again, we will investigate raising our iOS app prices in 2016, with two hopes: that the awesome customers that love and need these apps understand the incredible amount of work that goes into them and that these people are also willing to pay more for a quality professional app (whereas, say, the casual gamer would not).

You have to wonder if Apple should come up with new ways to incentivize the creation of these types of pro apps, or if Panic shouldn’t have lowered prices in the first place. Maybe it’s a bit of both.

I don’t think Panic made the wrong type of apps for iOS. Panic’s apps are fantastic pieces of software, and Apple should be proud of having them on the App Store. Panic’s commitment to their iOS apps is laudable, and their taste, unsurprisingly, impeccable. Coda 2 and Transmit are some of the finest productivity software you’ll find on the App Store.

As usual, I’m going to say that a possible solution lies somewhere in the middle. I’d like to see Apple improve the App Store with tools and developer relations that help companies like Panic, and I’d urge more developers to place the correct value on their apps. The Omni Group is a good example to follow here. It may sound old fashioned, but I think quality software deserves an appropriate price.

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Apple Q1 2016 Results: $75.9 Billion Revenue, 74.8 Million iPhones, 16.1 Million iPads Sold

Apple has just published their financial results for Q1 2016 for the quarter that ended in December 2015. The company posted revenue of $75.9 billion. The company sold 16.1 million iPads, 74.8 million iPhones, and 5.3 million Macs, earning a quarterly net profit of $18.4 billion.

“Our team delivered Apple’s biggest quarter ever, thanks to the world’s most innovative products and all-time record sales of iPhone, Apple Watch and Apple TV,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “The growth of our Services business accelerated during the quarter to produce record results, and our installed base recently crossed a major milestone of one billion active devices.”

“Our record sales and strong margins drove all-time records for net income and EPS in spite of a very difficult macroeconomic environment,” said Luca Maestri, Apple’s CFO. “We generated operating cash flow of $27.5 billion during the quarter, and returned over $9 billion to investors through share repurchases and dividends. We have now completed $153 billion of our $200 billion capital return program.”

For the first time, Apple has included supplemental material alongside its financial results, noting that “in constant currency, Q1’16 revenue would have been $5 billion higher”. “$100 of Apple’s non-U.S. dollar revenue in Q4’14 translates into only $85 U.S. dollars today”, the company noted in a document available here.

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MindNode 4.2 with Reminders Integration→

Nice update to MindNode, a great mind-mapping app for iOS and OS X, which can now attach tasks to items and (optionally) sync with iCloud Reminders:

Mind Maps are a great way to kick off a new project and Tasks are often a major part of this workflow. MindNode now offers native Tasks support. You can turn any child node into a task and check off completed tasks directly on the canvas. To help you stay on top of your tasks, MindNode will also show a task progress indicator on parent nodes that have children with tasks.

If you prefer Apple Reminders to manage your tasks, you can also export your Tasks to Reminders and MindNode will keep the completion state in sync with Reminders. For example when you mark a task as completed in Reminders, it will also be marked as completed in MindNode. This feature works across iOS and OS X.

Even better, if you use Reminders with 2Do, you’ll be able to work on a project with a tree structure in MindNode, then share to Reminders and complete tasks either from 2Do or MindNode. Clever integration – though it would also be useful to import lists from Reminders and visualize them as mind maps in MindNode.

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Barclays Confirms It Will Support Apple Pay by April→

Update: Engadget accidentally miscalculated the expected launch dates, that has now been fixed.

Barclays customers in the United Kingdom finally have a date for when Apple Pay will be supported by their bank, reports Matt Brian at Engadget.

After first declining to comment at launch, the bank quickly changed its mind and voiced support for the service. It then made customers wait months before offering an “early 2016” launch date at the end of last year. Following another few months of silence and hundreds of irate customers tweets, Barclays CEO Ashok Vaswani has confirmed that Apple Pay support will roll out by April at the very latest.

In an emailed statement to Barclays customer Oli Foster-Burnell, Vaswani said the service will go live “within the next 60 to 75 days.” Depending on the company’s plans, card support could be enabled between March 12th and March 27th. That’s stretching the “early 2016” launch touted last year, but it may be enough to stop some disappointed Barclays customers from switching to another bank.

Barclays will be the last of the big four UK banks to support Apple Pay. By way of a quick update, Apple Pay is now supported by 966 financial institutions in the US and 15 in the UK (not including Barclays). Apple Pay also launched in Australia and Canada – but only for those (limited) few who have a credit or debit card issued by American Express. American Express customers in Spain, Singapore and Hong Kong will also get Apple Pay sometime this year. But in a more substantial rollout, Apple Pay is set to launch in China early this year as a result of a partnership with China UnionPay. Unlike the American Express only roll outs, Apple Pay will launch in China with the support of 15 of China’s leading banks.

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Improving the iOS Emoji Keyboard→

Steven Aquino, writing at The App Factor:

What I’d like to see Apple do is not necessarily make the emojis themselves bigger — the keyboard only fits a finite space, after all — but rather change how they’re presented to the user.

Here’s my suggestion: Apple should take the magnification animation it already employs on the text keyboard and apply it to the emojis. Every time I press on, say, a smiley face, the face would “pop up” in the same manner a letter does when you press its corresponding key. Taking this a step further, it would also be helpful if you could use the magnification loupe (for moving the insertion point) to scrub through emoji. The only caveat here is that Apple would need to make the loupe larger, which is something I wrote about in my aforementioned article. As it is now, the current magnification level wouldn’t do much good to compensate for the small size of the emoji.

Looking at the emoji keyboard from an accessibility perspective, Steven’s suggestions make a lot of sense. Existing features such as Dynamic Type and Character Preview could also be used for emoji, but I like Steven’s loupe idea better.

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Ben Brooks on Moving to 2Do→

Ben Brooks has a spot-on comment on task managers after his move to 2Do:

That is: if you are using every part of the task management system when things are light, then problems will arise when things get busy. It’s not that OmniFocus was overkill for me, it’s that it was too rigid. That rigidity is great when I am suffering decision fatigue from the amount of work I have, but it is a burden when I am not suffering that fatigue.

Further: when you aren’t busy your task management system should be easy. The system should scale, not permanently be operating as if you are the busiest person in the world all the time.

At its core, this is what I love about 2Do: its flexibility makes it either extremely simple or incredibly advanced – or both at the same time if you just switch views in the app. Unlike other task managers, 2Do adapts to your needs.

(Side note: after Email to 2Do, I wouldn’t mind paying for all sorts of optional add-ons in the app.)

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Carbo: Digital Storage and Editing for Handwritten Notes

“Handwriting in the digital age.” It was such a claim, along with its feature in Apple’s productivity sale, that drew my attention to Carbo. From reading the app’s description, developers Creaceed seemed confident in the app’s handwriting altering and organization. After spending some time with Carbo and thoroughly enjoying the experience, I now understand their confidence.

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