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Apple Highlights 3D Touch in New iPhone 6s Ad

Apple aired a new iPhone 6s commercial today, focusing on the 3D Touch capabilities of the device and what the functionality brings with iOS 9.

Modelled after the first commercial for the iPhone 6s and carrying the same “The only thing that’s changed is everything” tagline, the ad highlights the peek and pop gestures of 3D Touch for apps like Mail, Messages, Maps, and Instagram. Jamie Foxx makes an appearance during a brief Apple Music segment, and Apple also showcases Home screen quick actions, Mail gestures, and peeking flight information.

It’s a fun, fast-paced ad in the style of the first one, and it does a good job at communicating the time savings granted by 3D Touch gestures. You can watch it below.

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Dropbox Launches ‘Paper’ Beta to Collaborate on Documents→

Earlier today, Dropbox unveiled Paper, an evolution (and a not so creatively named one) of the Dropbox Notes beta announced in April. Dropbox Paper sounds like a Google Docs and Quip-like product where you can create rich documents and collaborate with others in real-time.

David Pierce explains at Wired:

Paper feels like a cross between Google Docs and Medium. It’s an ultra-minimal text editor—every new document offers space for a title and a body, and nothing else to look at. You go to paper.dropbox.com (which right now won’t get you anywhere unless you’re in the beta), and just start typing.

There’s some basic formatting in the document—you can write in Markdown, or use sub-heds and bold text. But that’s all obscured, in the hope you’ll turn off your internal font freak and just start typing. You can add images, too, dragging and dropping them around the page or making one full-bleed on the page with a single click. If you write lines of code, it’ll automatically format and style them as code. Or create a to-do list, and assign tasks to other people by @-mentioning them in the document. Or paste a Dropbox-stored file in, and it’ll automatically be available to everyone shared on your Paper document.

I’m curious to see what Dropbox does here. The company is diversifying their offer now that cloud storage has become a feature, and they’re working on a mobile app to access Paper natively from iOS (right now, it’s web-only). Unlike Google, Dropbox gets iOS design and conventions, and they’re usually quick in adopting new iOS technologies every year (Google Docs still doesn’t support iPad multitasking on iOS 9).

The closest service that comes to mind when looking at Paper is Quip (which was also in the news today), but Dropbox has the advantage of building on an existing foundation of collaboration, files, email, and search. On the other hand, I don’t want to see Dropbox losing focus in trying to understand what’s next for them with too many experiments and semi-abandoned initiatives. I’ll be keeping an eye on this.

Side note: if you receive a link to a Dropbox Paper document right now, it’ll open with a Universal Link in the Dropbox app inside a web view. It works okay, but there needs to be a native app for this soon.

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Screenshot Markup and Loupes with PointOut for iOS

As I shared on Twitter last month and in the first issue of MacStories Weekly for Club MacStories members, I found myself having to call out areas of apps and system features in screenshots for my iOS 9 review.

What I wanted to achieve had long been possible with desktop apps such as Acorn and Napkin, but I had a surprisingly hard time finding apps which could add loupes on top of screenshots on iOS. I ended up using OmniGraffle with this workflow, but the process required too many taps. While I appreciate OmniGraffle’s powerful set of features, I don’t need all of them and I’d rather have a dedicated utility for this type of image markup.

Created by indie developer Demarca Marek Moi, PointOut is a free app for iPhone and iPad that supports multiple types of image annotations and canvas layouts. You can add pointers, borders, split the canvas in multiple sections (each zoomed on a specific image detail), and tweak colors and thickness for every element. It’s a powerful image annotation app with more options and controls than the simple (but also excellent) Pinpoint. But, I’m primarily interested in PointOut’s diagram-like loupe, added in the latest update and which matches exactly what I need for my iOS screenshots.

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Apple Announces New ResearchKit Studies for Autism, Epilepsy & Melanoma→

With a press release this morning, Apple announced new ResearchKit studies for autism, epilepsy, and melanoma:

Autism: Duke University and Duke Medicine are launching “Autism & Beyond” for parents with concerns about autism and other developmental issues. The Duke research team is looking at whether the front-facing camera on an iPhone can be used to detect signs of developmental issues at a much younger age. The app uses novel emotion detection algorithms to measure a child’s reaction to videos shown on iPhone. Duke is partnering with Peking University in China and other international partners to conduct the study.

Epilepsy: The EpiWatch app developed by Johns Hopkins is the first study of its kind to be conducted with Apple Watch using ResearchKit. The study will test whether the wearable sensors included in Apple Watch can be used to detect the onset and duration of seizures. During the first phase of this study, researchers will use a custom complication on the Apple Watch to provide patients with one-touch access to trigger the custom watch app to capture accelerometer and heart rate sensor data to capture the digital signature of their seizure and send an alert to a loved one. The app will keep a log of all seizures and the participant’s responsiveness during the event. The app also helps participants manage their disorder by tracking their medication adherence and by screening for side effects, while allowing participants to compare their condition with others in the research study.

Melanoma: Oregon Health & Science University is studying whether digital images taken on an iPhone can be used to learn about mole growth and melanoma risks and could help people better manage skin health by photographing and measuring mole size over time. Research participants will be able to document mole changes and share them directly with health professionals, and researchers will be able to capture images from tens of thousands of iPhone users around the globe to help create detection algorithms which can be used in future studies to potentially screen for melanoma.

ResearchKit continues to be one of Apple’s most important initiatives, and it’s great to see the sensors of Apple Watch are being used as well. According to Apple, more than 50 researchers have contributed active tasks in 6 months and more than 100,000 participants are contributing data to ResearchKit.

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Live GIF Lets You Generate Animated GIFs From the iPhone 6s’ Live Photos

Live Photos are one of the best features of the iPhone 6s. While not revolutionary from a technical perspective (they’re video files associated with an image), the simple and natural implementation of Live Photos is breeding a new type of medium – the moving photo that comes alive under your touch. Harry Potter-esque in their effect and delightfully blended with 3D Touch, I genuinely believe that Live Photos make for one of the best demos of a new iPhone in years.

There’s one caveat with sharing Live Photos, though: at least for now, unless you’re sharing with someone who has an iPhone or unless the app you’re using is able to convert Live Photos on the fly, there isn’t a way to export Live Photos to GIF or movie formats from Apple’s Photos and share the result with the world. This is what Live GIF, a new $1.99 app released today by Priime, wants to offer a solution for.

Live GIF launches to a screen that automatically filters your photo library to only show Live Photos in a grid. You can press firmly on a Live Photo to peek at the video, or you can tap on one to start the conversion process, which typically lasts a couple of seconds. When done, the app will show an animated GIF (without audio, of course) with two buttons to share as GIF or share as video. In both cases, you’ll be shown the system share sheet so you can send the converted file to any app or extension you want. Keep in mind that GIFs are saved with looping, while videos are saved without looping and include audio.

And that’s all Live GIF does. In my tests, the app never failed to generate GIFs and videos for my Live Photos, which I was able to share via iMessage, Slack, and upload elsewhere with other apps. Live GIF provides an important missing functionality for iOS 9.0 and the current version of Live Photos – and it can be especially useful if you’re planning to share Live Photos on the web or with friends who don’t have iPhones.

Live GIF is available at $1.99 on the App Store.

Tweetbot 4.0.2 Lets You Swipe Safari View Controller Away→

Well, that was fast.

A few hours after the release of Tweetbot 4.0.1 with 3D Touch, Tapbots has released version 4.0.2 of the app, which adds a swipeable Safari View Controller.

Thanks to a workaround by Paul Haddad, you can now dismiss Safari View Controller with swipe from anywhere along the left edge of the screen – on both the iPhone and iPad. The gesture works surprisingly well despite its non-standard behavior, and it fixes one major annoyance of Safari View Controller on iOS 9.

I hope that more apps consider this, as it combines the comfort of Tweetbot’s old web view with the benefits of Safari View Controller.

Update: Also in this release, you can set Safari View Controller to open in Safari Reader mode automatically for every webpage (if Reader is available). I previously wrote about the feature here, and it works well for Tweetbot if you primarily open articles to read in-app. Very nice.

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Raising $40k for Hours Cloud with a Private Crowdfunding Campaign→

Fascinating (and successful) experiment by Jeremy Olson and his team, who ran a private crowdfunding campaign to sustain the development of Hours Cloud – a web version of the excellent iOS app:

Despite the evidence against the idea, we tried it anyway and I am happy to report that the campaign has so far blown away our expectations.

We have shared the campaign privately with only 16,000 newsletter subscribers over the past few weeks and up to today it has already generated $38,428.00 from 378 backers — an average of $101.66 per backer.

It might not be Pebble but remember that this was a completely private campaign — no press and no virality potential. I’ll be watching results now that the campaign is public and will post an update once we have those numbers.

His post has a lot of interesting details on how and why they approached potential business customers with a private campaign, which is now open here.

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Apple Opens @AppleMusicHelp Twitter Account to Answer Support Questions→

Benjamin Mayo, writing for 9to5Mac:

Apple is continuing to expand its presence on social media services, today launching a brand new @AppleMusicHelp Twitter account to answer queries and support questions live over Twitter related to its Apple Music service. The account is manned each day of the week from 6 AM – 8 PM Pacific Time. Apple representatives will watch the account’s mentions timeline and try to help resolve people’s problems.

Good to see Apple valuing Twitter as a fast and efficient support system. There’s something to be said about the simplicity of asking a support question via Twitter versus opening a ticket or sending an email.

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