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Connected: Seven Minutes of Empty Exercise→

This week, Myke, Federico and Stephen follow-up on a bunch of various topics before discussing Spotify, Flipboard and Jony Ive’s new job title.

On this week’s Connected, we also talk about consolidation and unbundling in web services and media companies. You can listen here.

Sponsored by:

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Google Inbox Now Open to Everyone→

In my review of Readdle’s Spark email app earlier today, I mentioned how I’ve been using Inbox for the past few months.

Since moving back to Gmail late last year, I’ve been using Inbox, Google’s alternative take on Gmail that wants to make email smarter and less intrusive. Inbox is fast, has push notifications, supports filters, and is trying interesting things with location snooze and inline previews of attachments and YouTube links. These features are exclusive to Inbox and the Google ecosystem, but at least they work everywhere because Inbox is available on iOS and the web.

And:

The idea of automatic email sorting is a solid one: we are inundated with a constant stream of messages on a daily basis, and yet most email clients tend to treat all messages equally, with the same notification settings and without any distinction for different kinds of email content they should be able to understand. Inbox is reimagining the entire system by applying Google’s smarts and user controls to messages and bundles, with laudable results. In the months I’ve spent using Inbox, I’ve come to depend on the automatic sorting in Updates and Low-Priority, which separates the wheat from the chaff and lets me see important messages at a glance. I can even set separate notification options for each bundle, which is a nifty way of dealing with incoming messages.

Inbox is Google’s alternative take on Gmail, and it does several interesting things. Besides automatic grouping in bundles, for instance, it allows you to create your own custom bundles that work like filters: they can be assigned a ton of different parameters (multiple from addresses, subject matches, keyword exclusion, etc.) and you can define whether messages that match a bundle should skip the inbox, be bundled in the inbox and with which frequency, and if you want notifications for those as well. Inbox also has location reminders, the ability to preview attachments without opening a message (great for taking a look at YouTube videos and images right away), and integration with Google Now. Inbox works on iPhone, iPad, and the web, but unfortunately doesn’t have a unified inbox, only works with Gmail, and doesn’t support iOS extensions at all.

Inbox was opened up to all users yesterday, including Google Apps customers (which I tried during the initial rollout). If you use Gmail and don’t have too many accounts, I recommend you check it out. Google’s algorithms can be amazing if you’re willing to let them scan your inbox all the time (the new Trips bundle is impressive), and, overall Inbox is simply refreshing when compared to the traditional Gmail app.

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Spark Review: Smart Email

I’ve had a complicated relationship with email over the years. Part of the problem has been the Sisyphean effort of third-party apps that tried to modernize email: the more developers attempted to reinvent it, the more antiquated standards, platform limitations, and economic realities kept dragging them down. I’ve seen email clients for iOS rise and fall (and be abandoned); I’ve tried many apps that promised to bring email in the modern age of mobile and cloud services but that ultimately just replaced existing problems with new ones. Sparrow. Dispatch. Mailbox. CloudMagic. Outlook. Each one revolutionary and shortsighted in its own way, always far from the utopia of email reinvention on mobile.

Spark by Readdle, a new email app for iPhone released today, wants to enhance email with intelligence and flexibility. To achieve this, Readdle has built Spark over the past eighteen months on top of three principles: heuristics, integrations, and personalization. By combining smart features with thoughtful design, Readdle is hoping that Spark won’t make you dread your email inbox, knowing that an automated system and customizable integrations will help you process email faster and more enjoyably.

I’ve been using Spark for the past three weeks, and it’s the most versatile email client for iPhone I’ve ever tried. It’s also fundamentally limited and incomplete, with a vision that isn’t fully realized yet but promising potential for the future.

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Todoist Comes to Apple Watch, Updates iOS 8 Extension

I’ve already written at length about my experience with Todoist and leveraging its powerful features for a more flexible todo list.

I’ve been using Todoist for over nine months now, and I continue to appreciate features such as filters and shared projects, which have allowed me to have a superior visualizations of tasks and to collaborate with others on big projects. And then, of course, there’s the work Todoist has done on its iOS app and third-party integrations, bringing natural language support and a handy extension to the iPhone and iPad and extending the service beyond its own apps to embrace solutions like Sunrise (see your tasks alongside calendar events) and IFTTT’s Do Note (type a new task and tap a button to save it).

I depend on Todoist and I genuinely like the service because it’s focused on doing, not fiddling. Today, that focus is becoming even more apparent with a new app for the Apple Watch and an updated extension that makes it even easier to save new tasks from anywhere on iOS.

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Pixelmator for iPhone→

With a universal update, Pixelmator has been released on the iPhone today. I took Pixelmator for a spin last year when it launched on the iPad, and, while I don’t need all the features of this app, I’ve been using it regularly to create simple image compositions and edit screenshots for the site.

On the iPhone, the Pixelmator team went with some interesting choices. The app feels a bit constrained on the smaller screen but you can still access all the tools from the iPad version. I like how you can view layers with a swipe on the left edge of the screen, and I appreciate the effort they put into rearranging menus when you switch to landscape (I tried the app on an iPhone 6 Plus – make sure to check out the Tools menu in landscape). As you can see in the screenshots above, I’m going to use the app until I figure out a way to automate Apple Watch screenshot generation with Pythonista or Workflow.

Pixelmator is one of the most impressive mobile adaptations of a powerful desktop app – and now you can use it on an iPhone too. $4.99 on the App Store.

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Bugshot Relaunches as Pinpoint

I was a fan of Marco Arment’s Bugshot when it launched in 2013. As someone who takes screenshots for app reviews on a daily basis, any tool that can help me annotate and edit those screenshots quickly is welcome. Evernote hasn’t been paying much attention to Skitch over the past couple of years, and even after they introduced iOS 8 support two months ago, they did so with unstable extensions that I still can’t use reliably.

This is why I’m thrilled to see that Bugshot has been relaunched as Pinpoint by Lickability, makers of longtime MacStories favorite Quotebook.

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Apple’s Jeff Williams on Native Apple Watch Apps→

July Clover, reporting for MacRumors on Apple’s Jeff Williams’ appearance at the Code conference earlier today:

On the topic of Apple Watch apps, Williams says third-party apps will get better when developers are able to release native apps and when access to native sensors is permitted. He gave an example of what a native Apple Watch app might do, suggesting an app like Strava will be more full featured as it would have direct access to sensors.

The native Apple Watch app SDK will be previewed at WWDC, according to Williams, suggesting full featured Apple Watch apps that can access health sensors, the Digital Crown, and more, will be available when iOS 9 is released to the public in the fall.

As assumed by many, the Watch SDK will give developers access to sensors. After trying the Watch for the past two weeks, it’s obvious that the only useful fitness app for me is Apple’s Workout because it’s the only one to use the heart rate sensor.

Eight years from now, I wonder if we’ll remember WatchKit as a very sweet solution, too.

(I love Steve’s comment on the “really complex update process”. It didn’t turn out to be that complex after all.)

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The Evolution of Apple’s Digital Hub→

For nearly a decade, iLife was the heart and soul of the Mac. The original Apple Stores were laid out into sections revolving around music and photography. Third-party digital cameras and camcorders graced official Apple product photography, and the Mac slowly became the go-to machine for creatives of all talent levels.

Writing at iMore, Stephen Hackett remembers Apple’s Digital Hub strategy. Looking back at all this, it’s amazing to recall how much stuff we used to have that’s been replaced by a phone with a bunch of apps. I’m glad that I got to witness this change.

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