A Profile of Apple’s Impact on Employment in the US, Starring Austin→

Many of Apple’s hardware products are built overseas, but that’s only part of the story. The New York Times takes a look at Apple’s impact on jobs in the United States, focusing special attention on Austin, Texas where Apple fills a seven-building complex of tech support specialists, microchip engineers, supply chain managers, and people who work in Apple Music, the App Store, and Maps:

Apple’s overall contribution to the American economy is significant. Beyond the 80,000 people it directly employs in the United States, it says 69 supplier facilities in 33 states manufacture parts that go into its products. Hundreds of thousands of software developers also write apps for iPhones and iPads.

Technical support call center employees earn around $30,000 per year, but the average in Austin is around $77,000. Asked by The New York Times whether it planned to expand operations in Austin, Apple said:

“Apple has created over two million jobs in the United States since the introduction of the iPhone nine years ago, including explosive growth in iOS developers, thousands of new supplier and manufacturing partners, and a 400 percent increase in our employee teams,” the company said in a statement. “We made the unique decision to keep and expand our contact centers for customers in the Americas in the United States, and Austin is home to many of those employees. We plan to continue to invest and grow across the U.S.”

Apple’s Austin offices have grown a lot over time, but don’t get much attention despite their size. The New York Times’ article is an interesting overview of the breadth of Apple’s impact on the US economy and peek inside Apple’s Texas offices.

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Daylite: A Business Productivity App for Mac and iOS [Sponsor]

Daylite is a business productivity app for Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

Organize you and your team’s contacts, calendars, projects, tasks, emails, notes, and new business opportunities all in one app.

Track sales and set reminders for follow-ups. See a full history of all emails, calls, and notes for each customer. Customize your own pipelines to track sales and projects. View your whole team’s calendar to make scheduling meetings simple. Daylite even integrates with Apple Mail so you can update customer info, set tasks and reminders, and add appointments to your calendar – all without leaving Mail.

Automate lead generation from online web forms with Daylite & Zapier integration. When someone fills out a form on your website through Google Forms or Wufoo, a new contact and business opportunity are creating in Daylite. You can then segment leads for specific email campaigns and track all of your communication with them in Daylite.

Always have your business info no matter where you go. Daylite is a native app so you can access your information on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad even when you don’t have an Internet connection.

Read how businesses all over the world are becoming more efficient with Daylite.

Our thanks to Daylite for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Six Months with CarPlay

One hallmark of most Apple products is the tight integration between hardware and software. By controlling everything from the device to the apps running on it, Apple can design unique experiences that competitors have a hard time matching. Nothing highlights the advantage of that hardware/software interplay better than one of the few products where it’s missing – CarPlay. It’s the exception that proves the rule.

Don’t get me wrong – I prefer CarPlay to any auto manufacturer’s entertainment system that I’ve used, but the projection of a custom iOS interface onto my Honda’s laggy touchscreen reminds me every time I poke at it that I’m seeing a mirage. It looks like an Apple product on the surface, but the resemblance is only skin deep. As soon as you interact with CarPlay on Honda’s hardware, the spell is broken. Siri goes a long way to help maintain the illusion, but it’s a bridge too far that makes me long for an integrated solution that isn’t hamstrung by the Honda’s hardware.

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Apple Holiday Ad 2016: Frankie’s Holiday→

Apple holiday ads have become a tradition and some of the best spots each year. Who can forget the Emmy-award-winning ‘Misunderstood’ from 2013, featuring what appeared to be a sulking teenager who was really making a movie about his family’s Christmas gathering? This year, Apple has released ‘Frankie’s Holiday’ featuring Brad Garrett, one of the stars on the hit TV show ‘Everybody Loves Raymond.’

Garrett who is over 6’8” plays Frankenstein, not a character that jumps to mind when you think about Christmas. The spot opens with Frankenstein recording a music box playing a holiday tune using Apple’s Voice Memos app. Frankenstein leaves his mountain home for the town in the valley below. As he leaves, he picks up a package that he takes with him.

A large group is gathered in the town square around a Christmas tree. They are startled to see Frankenstein who walks to the base of the tree, opens up the package he brought along with him, and removes Christmas lights that he screws into his neck. As the bulbs light up, Frankenstein plays the music he recorded on his iPhone, ‘There’s No Place Like Home for the Holidays, and begins to sing. One of the bulbs goes out and it seems like Frankenstein is going to give up on his performance when a little girl helps him by fixing the misbehaving light and joining Frankenstein and the rest of the crowd in singing the song.

Frankie’s Holiday starts out unsettling and confusing because of the unusual choice of a lead character, but when the scene switches to the town square the ad quickly becomes funny, concluding with a heart-warming message of acceptance and inclusion and the message “Open your hearts to everyone.’

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Apple Will Replace iPhone 6s Batteries in Phones That Unexpectedly Shut Down→

Apple has determined that a ‘very small number of iPhone 6s devices may unexpectedly shut down.’ The problem affects a limited range of serial numbers manufactured between September and October, 2015. If you’ve experienced unexpected shutdowns, contact an Apple Store, authorized service provider, or technical support. If your iPhone qualifies Apple will replace the battery free of charge. If, however, your iPhone needs other repairs that would impair the replacement of the battery, like a cracked screen, those repairs must be completed for the standard applicable fees before the battery is replaced. In addition, if you paid to have your battery replaced before the replacement program began, you can request a refund from Apple.

This is the second repair program announced in the recent past. Less than a week ago, Apple instituted an iPhone 6 Plus repair program for phones that lose touch sensitivity. That program carries a $149 repair fee because Apple says the problem is caused, at least in part, by dropping the phone repeatedly on a hard surface.

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Earn a Special Workout Achievement with a 5K on Thanksgiving Day

If you woke up and put on your Apple Watch this morning, you may have received a notification about a new Activity Challenge. The notification explains that you will be awarded a special achievement if you complete a run, walk, or wheelchair workout of at least 5k on November 24th, Thanksgiving Day in the US. The workout can be recorded using the Apple Watch’s Workout app or any third-party app that records workouts to the Health app. According to 9to5Mac.com, the new Activity Challenge appears to be US-only.

In addition to receiving a special 3D achievement badge, the Activity app on iOS adds that if you complete the challenge, you will get an iMessage sticker that you can share with others. This is the first time that Apple has created a special activity challenge around a holiday or other event. I’m excited to see Apple introduce new workout challenges and try new perks like iMessage stickers for completing challenges. By mixing it up and keeping the achievements fresh, it should encourage Apple Watch users to use the Workout app more frequently.

‘Designed by Apple in California’ Brought to Life→

Stephen Hackett of 512 Pixels has created a beautiful video dubbed “Designed by Apple in California” Book: With Acutal Products, showcasing a wide variety of the hardware in Apple’s new book, Designed by Apple in California. Hackett, who owns an extensive collection of Apple hardware, filmed the gear side-by-side with the photographs in Apple’s book, bringing it to life in a way that the photos alone cannot.

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Game Day: RunGunJumpGun

RunGunJumpGun, by Canadian indie studio ThirtyThree Games, may be the hardest game I’ve played so far this year. The game requires precise timing and quick reflexes, which is something I’m not great at, but it balances the difficulty and gameplay so well, it’s more fun than frustrating. Instead of quitting the game exasperated, I found myself trying segments again and again each time my character died.

RunGunJumpGun has a crazy, colorful pixel art style straight out of a 90s platformer. You can tell that a lot of care has gone into every detail of each of the 120 levels. Everything around you is in constant, colorful motion, which adds to RunGunJumpGun’s complexity.

The game is an interesting synthesis of genres. Like an endless runner, your character moves to the right automatically. Get hung up on a wall and the scene overtakes you and you die. But RunGunJumpGun is more involved than a typical endless runner, adding elements of classic platformer games. Instead of just avoiding obstacles, you have to collect items to advance through the three worlds, fly to avoid things, and shoot your way through others.

You tap the left side of the screen to fly and the right side to shoot. It’s simple, but the fact that you can’t fly and shoot at the same time makes it hard to master the controls. Fly up avoid spikes and you can’t shoot. Start shooting at a barrier while you’re flying and you begin to fall. It requires a careful balance of both controls to make it through each level.

If you do hit a barrier, you die immediately. There is no concept of health, but dying doesn’t take you back to the beginning, just the last checkpoint you reached. That happens with a cool rewind animation that is so fast that it hardly feels like you died at all. You’re immediately thrown back into the game to try to advance further. The process is so seamless that I found I wasn’t bothered by having to repeat segments over and over until I made it to the next checkpoint or the end of the level.

RunGunJumpGun started life as a PC and Mac game on Steam. Developer Logan Gilmour told Engadget:

“We weren’t out to just make an infinite runner mobile game that’s run-of-the-mill,” said programmer Logan Gilmour. “We were hoping it would stand more among PC games than mobile games, but then play equally well on mobile.”

I haven’t played RunGunJumpGun on my Mac, but having played on my iPhone and iPad, ThirtyThree Games has definitely succeeded on mobile. I particularly liked playing on my iPad where I could tap on the far lower edges of the screen making it easier to see what was happening in the game.

RunGunJumpGun stands out among recent iOS game releases for its attention to detail and frantic pace. The game is undeniably hard, but also easy to get lost in for long periods. Even if twitchy, fast-paced games are not your thing, RunGunJumpGun is worth trying because it’s an example of one of the best games of its genre.

RunGunJumpGun is available on the App Store for $2.99. The Mac App Store version is $7.99.

AppleScript, the Perfect Adjunct to iTunes→

Kirk McElhearn, writing for Macworld on automation in iTunes following Sal Soghoian’s departure from Apple:

No application can do everything its users need, and none should offer everything they want. For this reason, AppleScript has long been the perfect adjunct to iTunes, which is already feature-rich (some say “bloated,” but I disagree), and doesn’t need more options and tools. Many of these AppleScripts are designed to tag files, edit their metadata to correct errors, improve consistency, and ensure that users can find the files they want, and help them efficiently use smart playlists.

It’s not clear whether the termination of Mr. Soghoian means the demise of AppleScript altogether, and particularly in iTunes, but many developers, iTunes users, and others are concerned by this decision.

You see, it’s all about freedom. Freedom to do things we want that Apple doesn’t think we need to be able to do. Freedom to explore. Freedom to discover new ways to link applications, to interact with files, to create our own solutions. We can’t expect apps to cater to all our whims, and tools like AppleScript and Automator allow us to go a step further and discover ways to do things that Apple never even considered.

Losing AppleScript and automation features altogether would be a horrific loss for the Mac. However, I don’t think that’s going to be the case. Like Jason Snell, I believe today’s Apple finds this stuff uninteresting and “vintage”; rather than removing it, I feel like they’ll stop pretending they care about it, just as they did for Dashboard. Which isn’t an ideal scenario either, but between two poisons, it’s the one I’d pick.

See also: Dr. Drang back in 2013, ‘When and why I automate’.

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