Apple’s Town Hall: A Look Back→

Jason Snell and Stephen Hackett have taken a look back at the products that Apple has introduced at their Town Hall venue since the iPod in 2001. Timely, because today’s Apple Keynote will also be held at Apple’s Town Hall.

Located at 4 Infinite Loop on Apple’s main campus, the Town Hall conference center was probably designed more for in-company meetings than for major events covered by worldwide media. And yet on numerous occasions over the years, it’s been exactly that.

Monday’s event in Town Hall could very well be the last hurrah for the old 300-seat venue, given that Apple is constructing a 1,000-seat auditorium in its new campus, due to open next year. Before it goes, here’s a look back at key public events in Town Hall, starting in late 2001.

Be sure to watch the accompanying video from Stephen Hackett which features clips from the various Town Hall media events.

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Great Watch Apps Are Great Complications→

Conrad Stoll (via Dave Verwer):

The best Apple Watch apps in my mind are the ones that include the most useful and frequently relevant complications. The watch face itself is the best piece of real estate on the watch. That’s park avenue. It’s what people will see all the time. The complications that inhabit it are the fastest way for users to launch your app. Having a great complication puts you in a prime position to have users interact frequently with your app while inherently giving them quick, timely updates at a glance. It’s an amazing feature for users, and the most rewarding should you get it right.

I don’t think that’s where Apple would like the Watch app ecosystem to be today, and it’s hard to argue against the greatness of complications when “full” apps are slow and barely usable. I also feel like I’m not too enthusiastic about Watch apps right now because (in addition to slowness) my most used iPhone apps don’t offer complications yet.

I also agree with Stoll’s last line – “when a user chooses to place your complication on their watch face that’s when you know you’ve built a great watch app”.

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The Art of the Apple Event→

Jason Snell:

People who aren’t journalists may not realize the neat trick Jobs pulled. Product announcements are basically press releases: They’re publicity. They’re arguably news, but they’re boring news — and a cynical writer could view them as free PR for the company putting out the press release. Rewriting a press release is one of the lower forms of journalism.

Covering an Apple event didn’t feel like that, and it still doesn’t. It feels like an event, and when you’re reporting on it, you’re not rewriting a press release — you’re covering something as it happens live, just as if you were in the White House briefing room during a presidential press conference. In the end, these Apple events are just product announcements — the brilliance is that the stagecraft makes them much more interesting to journalists and fans alike.

I’ve only ever been to one Apple event (coincidentally, where I also met Jason), and I couldn’t agree more. It was a product announcement, but it felt like a surreal movie premiere full of nerds. I loved it.

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Remaster: PlayStation VR Special with Shuhei Yoshida→

This week on Remaster, we’re covering all things PlayStation VR. First up Federico and Myke run-through all the news from the GDC presentation, and share their thoughts. Next up Shahid brings us an exclusive interview with Shuhei Yoshida, President of Worlwide Studios at PlayStation. We finish up the episode finding out exactly why Shahid few out to San Francisco for just one night.

This week’s Remaster is a special one. In addition to discussing Sony’s PlayStation VR announcements at GDC, Shahid flew to San Francisco to interview Shuhei Yoshida. It’s a very good discussion, with a lot of useful perspective to understand Sony’s position on VR.

You can listen here.

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Day One Adds IFTTT Integration

Great change for those who want to populate their journal entries with content from the web: Day One has launched their IFTTT channel today, which will let you create all sorts of automated recipes such as saving Instagram pictures to a journal, emailing a new entry to yourself, or logging check-ins from a third-party service.

Much as Day One 2 was criticized for ditching iCloud and Dropbox in lieu of its own sync, integrations like this are always better when the developers can fully control the sync platform they’re using. Thanks to Day One Sync and support for multiple journals, you can connect to IFTTT and set your recipes to save data into a dedicated journal separate from your main thoughts (something that bugged me a few years ago with a similar solution).

I’ve been playing around with the beta of Day One + IFTTT, and it works well. I have recipes to save liked tweets and YouTube videos to an ‘Internet’ journal, and I’m planning to build more soon. If you use Day One and IFTTT, this is a fantastic addition.

Miitomo Is a Strong Start for Nintendo’s Mobile Strategy→

Nadia Oxford, writing for US Gamer, shares some first impressions of Miitomo, Nintendo’s first iOS app that went live in Japan yesterday:

One of Tomodachi Life’s most appealing features made it into Miitomo, too: Outfit collection. Like its inspiration, Miitomo has tons of outfits and accessories for sale, and stock changes daily. You can also play a Pachinko-style game to win super-exclusive outfits. Which, by the way, is how I wound up blowing all my coins. I was trying to score a black cat ensemble. If Nintendo ever does get around to releasing Nintendo-themed costumes for the app’s Miis, I’m definitely going to live my life in perpetual Miitomo poverty.

Speaking of coins, there’s understandably been a lot of worry about how Nintendo will monetize Miitomo. From my angle, Miitomo is fair about in-app purchases. I was happy to see there’s no secondary “hard currency,” a staple of free-to-play games. Hard currency usually needs to be bought with real-world cash (though some games occasionally throw you a bone – or a diamond or gem, as the case may be), and often needs to be on-hand in order to acquire the game’s coolest accessories.

It sounds like Nintendo has thought this through – there are push notifications to keep you engaged a few minutes every day, there’s My Nintendo integration to unlock rewards, and you can even redeem DS games on the 3DS eShop by playing Miitomo on iOS. I still don’t know if this will catch on outside of Japan, but I’m curious to check it out.

See also: Jeff Benjamin’s video overview.

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Game Center Is Still Broken After Six Months→

Craig Grannell, reporting on a Game Center issue that has been around for the past few months:

When iOS 9 hit beta last summer, I heard concerns from developers about Game Center. Never Apple’s most-loved app, it had seemingly fallen into a state of disrepair. In many cases, people were reporting it outright failed to work.

And:

Additionally, some games freeze on start-up, because developers had quite reasonably expected Game Center would at least be functional. This makes for angry users, who can’t directly contact developers through the App Store and therefore leave bad reviews. Developers are now updating their apps to effectively check whether Game Center is broken, flinging up a dialog box accordingly, and at least allowing players access.

I’ve also come across this problem and heard about it from MacStories readers and game developers. There’s a thread on the TouchArcade forums that is over 50 pages long with hundreds of responses. This is bad for everyone – users and developers – and Apple should fix it soon.

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Tim Cook on Encryption, Public Safety, and Right to Privacy→

TIME’s Nancy Gibbs and Lev Grossman have published the full transcript of a Tim Cook interview that will be the subject of the magazine’s March 28 cover story.

It’s a lengthy interview, with Cook discussing a variety of issues related to the FBI’s requests in the San Bernardino case. Cook comments on his views on encryption in the modern technological landscape, how the US Congress should approach this debate, and why Apple views the FBI’s demands as a threat to civil liberties. It’s a great read with some fantastic passages.

The thing that is different to me about Messages versus your banking institution is, the part of you doing business with the bank, they need to record what you deposited, what your withdrawals are, what your checks that have cleared. So they need all of this information. That content they need to possess, because they report it back to you.

That’s the business they’re in. Take the message. My business is not reading your messages. I don’t have a business doing that. And it’s against my values to do that. I don’t want to read your private stuff. So I’m just the guy toting your mail over. That’s what I’m doing. So if I’m expected to keep your messages, and everybody else’s, then there should be a law that says, you need to keep all of these.

Now I think that would be really bad. I think it would be really bad because in order for me to keep them, I have to have a way to see them. If I have to have a way to see them and a place to copy them, you can imagine—if you knew where the treasure was buried at, and everybody else did, then it puts a bull’s eye on that target. And in the world of cyber security, the last thing you want is to have a target painted on you.

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Scanner Pro 7 Adds OCR and Workflows

Scanning apps have become a big category on iOS. There are a lot of great options and the quality and diversity of the category creates a healthy competitive atmosphere that means frequent updates and innovations, which are great for customers. Today, Readdle launched version 7 of Scanner Pro, which adds optical character recognition (OCR), distortion correction, and a cool new trick – workflows. With Scanner Pro 7 you can chain multiple actions together and fire them off with just one tap.

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