Canvas, Episode 4: Photo Editing→

In this show, Fraser and Federico look at four major applications for iOS: Photos itself, Pixelmator, Adobe Lightroom Mobile and Snapseed. All of these are very powerful applications for serious photo editing on iOS, each with their own particular strengths.

We also look at apps which provide Photo Editing Extensions. These are small bundles of features that can be accessed directly inside the editing view of the Photos app itself.

In episode 4 of Canvas, Fraser and I continued our Photos series with photo editing feature and apps. You can listen here and check out the links below.

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Connected: We Didn’t Stream Live and There Was No Showbot→

The whole gang is back this week to discuss Stephen’s semi-smart watch, Federico’s annual iPad checkup and more.

Don’t let the seemingly sad title of the latest Connected fool you: in the latest episode, we’ve talked about changes in the iOS 9.3 beta, Apple and the FBI, and the backstory of my iPad article from earlier this week. You can listen here.

Sponsored by:

  • PDFpen, from Smile: The Swiss Army Knife for working with PDFs.
  • Igloo: An intranet you’ll actually like, free for up to 10 people.
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Watch WWDC Sessions and Tech Talks Videos on Apple TV→

Following yesterday’s release of the Apple TV Tech Talks videos, I came across this project by Aaron Stephenson that lets you watch WWDC sessions and Tech Talks on the Apple TV itself. You’ll need Xcode to install it, but, if you’re a developer, it’s a good way to watch videos on the big screen and take notes/try code on a Mac – WWDC sessions go back to 2011 and you can mark videos as favorites, too.

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Spark Launches on iPad

Since my original review in May 2015, Readdle has been steadily improving their email client for iPhone, Spark, with changes that addressed many of my initial complaints. Over the past 10 months, Spark has received support for HTML signatures, the ability to select multiple messages and send multiple attachments; it’s even been updated with customizable swipe gestures and better handling of attachments from cloud services. And in the aftermath of Mailbox’s demise, Readdle (cleverly) rushed to update Spark with full-featured snooze options reminiscent of Dropbox’s email client.

What Spark hasn’t gained over the past year is a clear business model and an iPad version. The good news is that at least one of these omissions is being rectified today with the launch of Spark for iPad, an expansion to the bigger screen that I’ve been testing on my iPad for the past month.

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The Apple Case Will Grope Its Way Into Your Future→

Farhad Manjoo, writing for The New York Times:

Consider all the technologies we think we want — not just better and more useful phones, but cars that drive themselves, smart assistants you control through voice or household appliances that you can monitor and manage from afar. Many will have cameras, microphones and sensors gathering more data, and an ever more sophisticated mining effort to make sense of it all. Everyday devices will be recording and analyzing your every utterance and action.

This gets to why tech companies, not to mention we users, should fear the repercussions of the Apple case. Law enforcement officials and their supporters argue that when armed with a valid court order, the cops should never be locked out of any device that might be important in an investigation.

But if Apple is forced to break its own security to get inside a phone that it had promised users was inviolable, the supposed safety of the always-watching future starts to fall apart. If every device can monitor you, and if they can all be tapped by law enforcement officials under court order, can anyone ever have a truly private conversation? Are we building a world in which there’s no longer any room for keeping secrets?

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Apple Posts Apple TV Tech Talks Videos→

Apple:

Over the past few months, developers around the world learned how to design and develop apps and games for Apple TV directly from Apple experts. Now you can share in the experience by watching all the session videos from the Apple TV Tech Talks.

Good starting point for developers who are considering tvOS apps, and useful for
those who have already launched TV apps, too. You can watch the videos here.

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iOS Tip: Export PDFs from Print Preview with 3D Touch

Printing to PDF with 3D Touch.

Printing to PDF with 3D Touch.

Note: this tip was first shared with Club MacStories members over a month ago in issue 16 of MacStories Weekly. We are sharing it today as a one-off sample. Subscribe now and don’t miss out on more iOS tips and workflows.

A hidden option of iOS’ Print feature I’ve recently discovered is a way to export a PDF file from the Print preview screen using 3D Touch. I haven’t been able to replicate it without 3D Touch on the iPad, which makes the option available exclusively on the latest iPhones.

When viewing a page you want to save as PDF – say, a webpage in Safari or a note in the Notes app – open the share sheet, find the Print extension at the bottom, and tap it. This will open a Printer Options screen with a page preview in the lower half. You can swipe on pages to scroll through them, but what I didn’t know is that you can also press lightly on a page and then pop it open to get a Quick Look preview of the PDF file that’s going to be printed. Because it’s a PDF file, you can share it with other apps and action extensions, saving it elsewhere.

You can also generate PDFs from the Notes app.

You can also generate PDFs from the Notes app.

Thanks to this hidden feature, you’ll be able to share PDF files generated natively by iOS with other apps, including Dropbox and Workflow, without having to save the PDF to iBooks. I wish this could also be done on an iPad.

AfterPad’s Apple TV App Catalog→

We all love our Apple TVs, but nobody loves searching for apps and games on it. The Apple TV is a box with a tremendous amount of power, but it often feels like that power is locked behind a confusing and inaccessible app store.

This catalog aims to change that. AfterPad provides a web frontend for searching and browsing the Apple TV store, as well as curating the best of the best into an Editor’s Choice section geared towards power users.

Terrific work by Kevin MacLeod at AfterPad. Until Apple comes up with a solution to link to tvOS apps and browse its App Store on the web, the Apple TV App Catalog will be useful to look up app details, prices, and screenshots.

(And I’m pretty sure he coded all of this on an iPad Pro, which is even better.)

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