Watch Keypad Lets You Call Any Number from Your Apple Watch

Developed by Rob De Ruiter, Watch Keypad is a useful app for watchOS 2 that lets you call or text any number from your Apple Watch.

I know what you’re thinking – nobody really has to remember phone numbers in the age of cloud-synced contacts and address books. Thinking back to a decade ago, it’s odd to consider how many phone numbers I used to remember – dozens of them for close friends and family members – and compare that to today, as I barely know my own number. Still, there are times when I need to call a number that is not in my contacts list (and that I can’t tap directly in a webpage or in Maps). For those occasions, having the ability to do so from the Watch – which may be best when doing something else, such as cooking or chores – is a good option.

Watch Keypad launches fast and shows a keypad with numbers and buttons to delete and call. Upon each press, the app will play a sound and a subtle vibration to communicate input (sort of like PCalc does). Spinning the Digital Crown upwards will reveal a different set of keys (such as asterisk and clear), as well as a different button to send a text with the built-in Messages app. The app’s primary functionality – phone calls for typed numbers – is handled by the iPhone, which will initiate a call with the native Phone app and display the special green status bar when a call is happening. A list of recent calls is also available in the Watch Keypad app itself, both on the Apple Watch and iPhone.

Watch Keypad fixes a very specific omission – the lack of a keypad in Apple’s Phone app for Apple Watch. De Ruiter’s solution works well, and it’s only $0.99 on the App Store.

When a Dev Dies→

Craig Grannell has written about a topic that is very dear to me – app preservation in the age of the App Store. Specifically, he wonders what happens to an app when its developer passes away:

Recently, I was asked by a games mag you’ve probably all heard of to write about Apple TV and gaming, largely from a development standpoint. As ever under such circumstances, I went through my list of email and Twitter contacts, seeing this as a good opportunity to offer some exposure to indie developers whose work I’ve enjoyed over the years. One response came back very quickly, albeit from a name I didn’t quite recognise. The message was in fact from a developer’s wife; the person I was trying to get in touch with had died the previous week.

The developer in question was Stewart Hogarth, who’d lost his battle with congenital heart disease; he was just 34. We’d only been in touch a few times, but I’d been captivated a couple of years ago by his truly excellent 8-bit tribute I Am Level for iOS and Android. This was a smart, charming, entertaining title that married eye-searing Spectrum-style graphics, old-school single-screen platforming challenges, and modern mobile tilt-based controls. It was still installed on all of my devices, and it was strange and very sad to think that the person who created it was no longer with us.

I know that this topic is uncomfortable to discuss, but it’s an important one. If we want to treat apps as cultural artifacts more than ephemeral utilities – at least some of them – we need to talk about ways to preserve them.

I genuinely believe that, years from now, apps and games will be studied as interesting data points and references for our society, behaviors, and sociological traits. Today, quite paradoxically, in many cases it’s actually easier to preserve physical media than digital app store (lowercase, as it applies to every company) content and developers’ back catalogues. Servers that eventually disappear, expired contracts, apps that are no longer supported on the latest OS – it doesn’t make much sense to me that the rules and limitations of software make it harder to preserve apps than something which physically decays.

I continue to believe that app preservation is a topic worth discussing, and Craig is touching on an important aspect of it.

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Teddy Svoronos on Keynote’s iOS 9 Update→

Teddy Svoronos on changes to Keynote for iOS 9:

When using Split View, only the “main” app can use features like the microphone, camera, and, most relevant to this post, video out. This means that if you’re using Keynote as your main app while Airplaying or using a dongle to project your iPad onto an external screen, only the Keynote presentation will be visible to your audience. This means you’re free to keep OmniOutliner (pictured), Notes, or any other Split View-enabled app on the side of your screen while presenting. As someone who prefers to have my full outline available to me rather than slide-specific Presenter Notes, this is huge.

That does sound like a welcome improvement indeed. A month in, it’s clear that the biggest advantage of iOS 9 for iPad is the increased cooperation between apps. The updated iWork suite is a good example of this.

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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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