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Neil Cybart on ‘Apple Playing Offense at WWDC’→

Neil Cybart has an astute take on Apple’s announcements at WWDC 2015. The overall assumption that Apple is always making strategic moves for the future is quite apparent in new technologies like HomeKit, HealthKit, and Search.

I particularly agree with Cybart’s observations on News:

Apple’s News app isn’t so much a competitive jab at Facebook, but instead a hook for grabbing people’s attention. Apple’s description of the new app is quite clear: “News conveniently collects all the stories you want to read, from top news sources, based on topics you’re most interested in - so you no longer need to move from app to app to stay informed.” With News, Apple is trying to keep our attention just a little bit longer. Take a look at Facebook’s Instant Articles and Snapchat’s Discover to see what the war over attention is leading to. Technology companies are trying to shift commoditized news into a differentiated service meant to keep you within their properties.

This type of attention-holding strategy isn’t new. In brick-and-mortar retail, Walmart includes various stores within its stores, such as vision centers, fast food restaurants, and medical clinics in an effort to get you inside a Walmart. Similarly, Facebook wants people to spend more time within its apps by offering additional services, like news.

I don’t view Apple as necessarily trying to rethink news or put other companies out of business. Instead, it is looked at as a tool to enrich the iOS platform while maintaining a closer relationship with the user.

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Drafts 4.3→

A great update to Drafts was released earlier this week, and it’s got some interesting changes for users who manage a lot of notes or save bits of text in the same notes on a regular basis.

The Drafts extension can now offer to append/prepend whatever it receives (some text, a URL, etc.) to existing notes – useful to keep a running list of items without ending with multiple notes or having to merge them manually every time. This is useful for me when I want to assemble lists of links I can use for MacStories or Relay.

The Drafts Share extension (used from the Share sheet in other apps) now supports appending and prepending to inbox drafts as well as capture of new drafts. To use these options in the share sheet, tap the “Append” or “Prepend” buttons at the bottom of the window and select the draft to add the text to.

You can also run an action on multiple notes at once now:

When using the “Select” and “Operations” options below the drafts list, there is now a “Select All” option to quickly select all drafts in the current tab, and a “Run Action” operation to apply an action to multiple drafts. “Select All” is particularly useful to quickly archive all drafts in the inbox, for example. The “Run Action” operation lets you quickly select multiple drafts and run an action on them. When selecting this operation, the action list will be shown to select the action to run. Some actions (such as ones that leave Drafts) are not supported for multiple selections and will be grayed out in the list.

The most impressive aspect of Drafts is how Greg Pierce manages to keep the app simple and powerful at the same time with features that are there but not in the way. That’s an exercise of restraint and good design that can’t be appreciated in other apps. Drafts is $9.99 on the App Store.

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WebKit Blog on Safari Content Blocking Extensions→

I’ve been curious to know more about the reasoning behind content blocking extensions coming to iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan. The general assumption is that Apple wants to enable users to activate ad blockers on the iPhone and iPad, but I wanted to hear Apple’s public stance and details on the implementation.

The WebKit blog answers my questions with an in-depth post on content blocking extensions. First off, Apple engineers were unhappy with the current state of content blockers:

The reason we are unhappy about the JavaScript-based content blocking extensions is they have significant performance drawbacks. The current model uses a lot of energy, reducing battery life, and increases page load time by adding latency for each resource. Certain kinds of extensions also reduce the runtime performance of webpages. Sometimes, they can allocate tremendous amounts of memory, which goes against our efforts to reduce WebKit’s memory footprint.

It is an area were we want to do better. We are working on new tools to enable content blocking at a fraction of the cost.

​As for Apple’s motivation, they never mention “ads” in the post, but the focus on disabling trackers and making webpages faster by removing external scripts is fairly clear:

We have been building these features with a focus on providing better control over privacy. We wanted to enable better privacy filters, and that is what has been driving the feature set that exists today.

There is a whole universe of features that can take advantage of the content blocker API, around privacy or better user experience. We would love to hear your feedback about what works well, what needs improvement, and what is missing.

​Unsurprisingly, Apple built these new extensions differently than most content blockers for desktop browsers. Content blocking extensions won’t see the URLs of pages or resources being blocked:

A major benefit of the declarative content blocking extension model is that the extension does not see the URLs of pages and resources the user browsed to or had a page request.

​And:

WebKit itself does not keep track of what rules have been executed on which URLs; we do not track you by design.

User privacy is at the center of content blocking for both webpages and extensions. It’ll be interesting to see how many apps that just focus on blocking ads in Safari will be approved on the App Store (and how much they’ll leverage freemium models if so).

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Apple News and the Open Web→

Daniel Jalkut perfectly encapsulates my thoughts on why I want MacStories to show up in Apple News and take advantage of connecting with more people:

Whether it’s music, apps, podcasts, or, coming very soon, syndicated blog content, you’d have to be a fool not to try to get your work into their customer-facing channels. In the case of podcasts, and as it seems with “News,” doing so means providing a feed that points to content you own and which you store on your server.

As long as I don’t have to relinquish control of my RSS feed and the words I write, I’m all for experimenting with aggregators that can bring our articles to different audiences. I’m intrigued by Apple News.

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Apple News to Have Human Editors, Curation→

Jordan Kahn, writing for 9to5Mac on a job listing that indicated Apple News is going to have human editors in addition to algorithms:

Apple’s job listing notes that News editors will be responsible for gathering “the best in breaking national, global, and local news.” They will also be working firsthand with publications to “drive relationships with some of the world’s leading newsrooms, ensuring that important breaking news stories are surfaced quickly, and enterprise journalism is rewarded with high visibility.” And Apple won’t just be curating stories from the big players. It also mentions a focus on surfacing original content from “the largest to the smallest” publishers. News editors will also track social media for breaking stories, according to the job listing, and “recognize and communicate key content trends to senior management.”

And here’s Dan Moren for Six Colors:

But what fascinates me here is the bigger message: that the most profitable and arguably most powerful technology company in the world firmly believes that technology alone simply isn’t good enough for these sorts of determinations. I don’t think it’s necessarily a view you’d hear espoused at the highest levels of Google, for example.

First thought I had: I’m curious to see how they will curate the Technology section in Apple News.

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Inside iOS 9 Search: Apple’s Plan for More Connected Apps

At WWDC 2015, Apple announced app search, a new feature of iOS 9 that will help users find content inside apps. Beyond the user-facing aspects of a new search page on iOS and proactive suggestions from Siri, however, lies a commitment to fundamentally rethink iOS’ relationship with apps and the web, with deep implications for the future.

With iOS 9, Apple wants to reimagine how information from apps is exposed to users. For a long time, iOS apps have largely been treated as data silos – utilities that kept gaining design improvements and powerful functionalities as iOS grew, but ultimately unable to bring their data outside the confines of their sandbox. Following in the footsteps of iOS 8’s adoption of extensions, Apple’s plan to further open up iOS is deceptively simple: just let users search for what they need.

Behind the scenes, the reality of iOS 9 search is going to be a little more complex than that.

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Editorial 1.2 Brings Powerful New Text Editing Features, More iOS Automation

If I had to pick one iOS app I couldn’t live without, that would be Editorial.

Developed by Berlin-based Ole Zorn, Editorial was the app that reinvented text automation in 2013 and that pushed me to start working exclusively from my iPad. Editorial is a powerful Markdown text editor that combines visual Automator-like actions with a web browser, text snippets, Python scripts, and URL schemes to supercharge text editing on iOS with the power of automation. I spend most of my days writing and researching in Editorial, and my workflow depends on this app.

Editorial also has a slow release cycle. Zorn likes to take his time with updates that contain hundreds of changes: Editorial 1.1, released in May 2014, brought an iPhone version and custom interfaces, making Editorial feel like an entirely new app. The same is happening today with Editorial 1.2, which adds support for the latest iPhones, iOS 8 integration, custom templates, browser tabs, folding, and much more.

Editorial 1.2 with iOS 8 support is launching right after Apple’s announcement of iOS 9, but the wait has been worth it. The new version builds upon the excellent foundation of Editorial 1.1, and the enhancements it brings vastly improve the app for users who rely on its automation features and Python interpreter.

Rather than covering every single change, I’ll focus on the 10 new features that have most impacted the way I get work done with Editorial on a daily basis.

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iOS 9 Picture in Picture→

Benjamin Mayo has a great summary of the benefits of Picture in Picture for iOS 9 on the iPad as compared to the Mac:

The thing about the iPad picture-in-picture implementation is that its actually better than how one would handle such a task on a Mac. On a Mac, trying to play a video in the corner whilst getting on with your work is difficult. Let’s take a video on YouTube playing in Safari. To play this in a corner of the screen on a Mac, you have to pull the window out into its own tab. Then, you have to manually drag the corners of the window to resize it and do your best to clip out all the unnecessary surrounding UI by hand. No doubt the window has a toolbar so you’ll probably have to do some awkward keyboard shortcut or hidden menu command to hide that as well.

Then you have to actually manage the window as you go on with your work. What do I mean by this? Well, with every other task you open you also have to make sure it doesn’t occlude the video playback window by dragging it out the way. The video can’t stay foremost so it’s actually really easy to lose the video amongst your other windows.

If you ever want to move the video from one corner to another, not only do you have to position the video on the screen, you also have to move all your other windows back over to the other side.

This mirrors my initial thoughts exactly. When I talk about the inherent complexities of desktop OSes, this is the type of issues I refer to. With an implementation built on years of distilling the experience to the simplest, iPad multitasking will make these differences even more obvious.

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