This Week's Sponsor:

Copilot Money

The Apple Editor’s Choice Award App for Tracking Your Money. Start Your Free Trial Today

Apple Names Jeff Williams Chief Operating Officer, Phil Schiller Adds App Store Responsibilities→

This morning, Apple announced some major changes to its executive team:

Apple today announced that Jeff Williams has been named chief operating officer and Johny Srouji is joining Apple’s executive team as senior vice president for Hardware Technologies. Phil Schiller, senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, will expand his role to include leadership of the revolutionary App Store across all Apple platforms. Apple also announced that Tor Myhren will join Apple in the first calendar quarter of 2016 as vice president of Marketing Communications, reporting to CEO Tim Cook.

Jeff Williams has been with the company since 1998 and has overseen the entire supply chain since 2010. Johny Srouji joined Apple in 2008 to lead the development of the A4, the company’s first system on a chip.

Also of note, Phil Schiller is now taking additional responsibilities for the App Store:

Cook continued, “In addition, Phil is taking on new responsibilities for advancing our ecosystem, led by the App Store, which has grown from a single, groundbreaking iOS store into four powerful platforms and an increasingly important part of our business. And I’m incredibly happy to welcome Tor Myhren, who will bring his creative talents to our advertising and marcom functions.”

And:

With added responsibility for the App Store, Phil Schiller will focus on strategies to extend the ecosystem Apple customers have come to love when using their iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV. Phil now leads nearly all developer-related functions at Apple, in addition to his other marketing responsibilities including Worldwide Product Marketing, international marketing, education and business marketing. More than 11 million developers around the world create apps for Apple’s four software platforms — iOS, OS X, watchOS and tvOS — as well as compatible hardware and other accessories, and customers have downloaded more than 100 billion apps across those platforms.

The App Store has long been criticized by the developer community for lacking proper accountability and a public figure in charge of the platform. It’ll be interesting to see how the App Store platforms will evolve and adapt following Schiller’s extended role.

Permalink

Pigment Brings Adult Coloring Books to iPad Pro with Apple Pencil Support

I first heard of the adult coloring book trend from my friend Myke, who described on various podcasts and Slack conversations how coloring mandala-like patterns helps him concentrate and relax while doing something else. In a peculiar case of Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, I then started hearing about the popularity of adult coloring from a lot of people – all of them, apparently, owners of physical books with empty artistic designs which need to be filled with color.

While I don’t own any adult coloring books myself, I’ve been intrigued by the trend enough to do some research. The origin story of the modern adult book coloring trend goes somewhat like this: Scottish artist Johanna Basford convinced British publisher Laurence King to order an initial run of ‘Secret Garden: An Inky Treasure Hunt and Coloring Book’. Since its release in 2013, the book has sold over two million copies worldwide. As noted by The Atlantic, adult coloring also started spreading in France when, in 2012, publisher Hachette released Art-Thérapie: 100 Coloriages Anti-Stress’. It was so successful, Hachette had to launch a full series, which has sold more than three and a half million copies so far. The New Yorker has a great primer on the rise of adult coloring books and the initial work of Johanna Basford and Hachette.

In another piece for The Atlantic, Julie Beck described adult coloring as offering the “relief and mindfulness without the paralysis that a blank page can cause”; the constraints of objects designed by others with the sole purpose being coloring them helps a lot of people relieve stress and engage a part of their brain that can either take their mind off daily concerns or, like Beck noted, use multitasking to relax.

Evidence – both factual and anecdotal – indicates that adult coloring has now turned into a global, lucrative phenomenon: mainstream media are talking about it, 5 out of 10 of the top books on Amazon are adult coloring books, and, if you go into a bookstore today, there’s a good chance you’ll find a section dedicated to books filled with patterns of flowers, natural landscapes, exotic objects, animals, and more.

Back in November, I half-jokingly sent a tweet in response to John Gruber saying that the first developer to figure out how to make an adult coloring app with Apple Pencil integration would find success on the App Store. I don’t know if they’re going to make “millions” as I quipped, but California-based studio Pixite – specialized in photo apps for iOS and Android – is following the path I imagined. Today, Pixite is launching Pigment, an adult coloring app for iPhone and iPad that, however, is best enjoyed with the closest digital equivalent of a physical book: an iPad Pro paired with an Apple Pencil.

Read more

The First Spotlight Interface Is Still the Best→

Riccardo Mori:

From Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard onwards, while the Spotlight menu and find-as-you-type list of results on the upper right corner of the desktop remained essentially unchanged, this neatly organised window disappeared, and the Show All option simply triggered a new Finder window with the search results amassed in an unorganised fashion. If you didn’t find what you were looking for in the first results Spotlight displayed from the Search menu on the top right, you’d have to perform more organised searches with various filters and criteria directly from a Finder window. But the overall approach was less clean and clear than under Mac OS X Tiger. On the other hand, Spotlight got better as an app launcher and new features were introduced, like the ability to do quick calculations from the Spotlight search field itself.

When the Spotlight interface was finally redesigned with the release of Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite, it was great to see that Apple was revisiting that kind of search interface, with a panel front and centre, and with the results organised in categories in a similar way as it was under Tiger. Since I upgraded from Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks to 10.11 El Capitan avoiding Yosemite completely, I only started using this new Spotlight interface in recent times. And I have mixed feelings about it.

This is a terrific analysis of the behavior and design choices of Spotlight for OS X Tiger and the latest El Capitan. I agree with Riccardo – the organization of results in the original interface still looks better.

Permalink

Copied: A Full-Featured Clipboard Manager for iOS 9

I first came across Copied a few days after its release in late October. Developed by Kevin Chang, Copied is a clipboard manager for iOS and OS X with iCloud sync and a polished interface – a fairly standard set of features, I first thought when looking at the app’s product page.

Over the subsequent couple of weeks, Copied played an essential role in helping me assemble my coverage of the iPad Pro, and it has since gained a permanent spot on my Home screen on both the iPhone and iPad. Copied has become my favorite way to quickly exchange bits of text and images between devices with iCloud, transfer URLs and templates I use for in-depth reviews and Club MacStories, and more.

On the surface, Copied may appear like another clipboard manager for iOS; however, several nice touches in the app break new ground in this category, and I consider Copied one of the best app debuts of 2015.

Read more

Apple and IBM Partnership Surpasses 100 Enterprise Apps→

In July 2014, Apple and IBM announced a partnership which would see the two companies collaborate to deliver specialized enterprise apps. Today, the two have announced that they have produced more than 100 iOS apps, as Ariel Bogle of Mashable reports:

Katharyn White, vice president of the Apple and IBM partnership at IBM Global Business Services, told Mashable the company was excited to hit the 100 app milestone, but said the number was secondary to the achievement of having an impact across 14 industries and 65 individual professions, from travel to telecommunications and healthcare.

“It’s even more powerful to see these are coming through amazing use cases,” she said. “Whether nurses or insurance agents, manufacturing managers or retail shop workers.”

Although they’re not revealing total customer numbers, some of these specialized enterprise apps have been deployed by companies including Coca-Cola Amatil, Japan Post and Scandinavian Airlines. As Gartner analyst Van Baker told TechCrunch, the appeal of this partnership to enterprise customers is that it “combines the dominant enterprise device vendor with a dominant enterprise software vendor”.

In 2016, the Apple and IBM partnership aims to add more apps to the suite as well as more users, she said, but also to add value to existing apps as their analytics improve. IBM is also developing products to take advantage of the iPad Pro’s larger screen size and multi-tasking capabilities.

Permalink

Slack Launches an App Directory and $80 Million Fund for Slack Integrations→

Casey Newton from the Verge, reporting on the new Slack App Directory and investment fund:

Slack is wrapping up a breakout year with a set of announcements designed to press its advantage as a next-generation productivity app. The team-communication app, which now has 2 million daily users and 570,000 paying customers, has established an $80 million fund to invest in companies who build Slack apps and other products that rely on integration with the company. (The fund is backed by Slack along with venture capital firms Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, Spark Growth, and Social + Capital.) Slack has also set up an “app directory” where administrators can browse the 150 integrations that are now available — Twitter, Dropbox, Trello, and Google Drive among them — and install them on their team’s Slack instance.

We use Slack behind the scenes at MacStories and really enjoy using it – out of all the group messaging services we’ve used, it’s easily the best. Part of what makes Slack so great is the way you can integrate third party apps and services with Slack, and as you might imagine, Federico has a lot of fun with that. Which is why this latest announcement from Slack is exciting to us. Slack integrations are now easier than ever to find with the Slack App Directory, and there’s now another incentive for companies and developers to build Slack integrations with the introduction of the investment fund.

If you want to learn more, be sure to read The Verge’s report, or alternatively the announcement on Slack’s official blog.

Permalink

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

We all struggle with productivity. We are constantly pressured to accomplish more, and to do it quicker. There is no one definitive way to accomplish that, and we have all devised our own little method to make things work.

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.

How Adobe is Reimagining Photoshop for the Mobile Era→

Harry McCracken, writing for Fast Company:

What wasn’t instantly obvious, however, was exactly how to translate Photoshop into an experience that made sense on the iPad and other mobile devices. In 2011, Adobe released three “Photoshop Touch” iPad apps—Eazel, Color Lava, and Nav—which were complements to Photoshop in its full-strength form rather than stand-alone tools. Then in 2012, it introduced an app called Photoshop Touch, which took a smallish subset of desktop Photoshop’s features, stripped out most of their advanced features, and rejiggered the interface so it worked with touch input.

This year, the company started all over again. It discontinued development of Photoshop Touch—which was available for iPhones and Android devices as well as iPads—and announced that Photoshop’s future on the iPad and other mobile devices would henceforth involve smaller, specialized tools rather than anything that retained Photoshop’s traditional everything-and-the-kitchen-sink flavor.

Adobe has done a rather phenomenal job in its transition from boxed software to the subscription-based Adobe Creative Cloud, as its latest quarter’s record revenue figures clearly demonstrate. Over that same period, Adobe has also invested substantially in developing apps for mobile devices, and most significantly, the iPad. In fact earlier this year in May I looked at the number of iOS apps developed by Adobe, and at the time they had 50 apps in the App Store that had been updated within the last year (another 59 had been pulled from sale or not been updated in over a year).

As McCracken’s story makes clear, Adobe’s strategy for mobile devices isn’t about slimming down their flagship desktop products so that they can run on mobile devices. Instead, Adobe has focused on creating apps for specific tasks, whether it be Photoshop Fix for retouching photos or Photoshop Mix for combining and blending images and layers together. In that way, Adobe claims that they can offer a better mobile product, that can in some ways offer a better experience than on the desktop.

Permalink