This Week's Sponsor:

TRMNL

The E-ink Companion For Your Favorite Tools

Learning from iOS 8’s iMessage Changes→

Scott Hurff put together a good overview of the changes in the Messages app for iOS 8, nicely illustrated with animated GIFs. He concludes that Messages for iOS 8 shows Apple has considered the ways their customers use the app and iterated accordingly:

Apple’s iMessage announcements can teach us a lot about the value of knowing our customers. It’s not enough to build products based on rumor, anecdote or speculation. We have to know exactly how and why our customers do what they do, and in what context they’ll be using our products.

Messages was especially lacking in terms of attachments and group conversations, and I’m glad to see that fixed.

I was initially surprised to see voice messages getting such a prominent spot in the app but, considering how popular audio snippets are among WhatsApp users, I think the addition makes a lot of sense.

Permalink

iOS 8 APIs→

Mattt Thompson:

The announcements from iOS 8 & OS X Yosemite alone would have made 2014 a bellwether year for the Apple platform, with Extensions, Continuity, SpriteKit enhancements, SceneKit for iOS, Metal, Game HealthKit, HomeKit, Local Authentication, and a brand new Photos framework. Not to mention the dramatic improvements to Xcode & Interface Builder, a revamped iTunes Connect, TestFlight, Crash Reports, and CloudKit. And oh yeah—Swift.

The kicker? Apple has graciously relaxed its NDA for new technologies, meaning that we don’t have to wait to talk about all of the shiny new toys we have to play with.

This week, we’ll take a look beneath the headline features, and share some of the more obscure APIs that everyone should know about.

If you’re a developer, this is an excellent look at some of the “obscure” APIs that Apple is including with iOS 8 but that they didn’t mention publicly last week. I’m particularly interested in the possibility to share tasks between apps and the fact that GPS metadata can be easily excluded from images (I use an app for that). The improvements to M7-powered data are also impressive.

Permalink

iOS 8 Improvements for Education→

Fraser Speirs, writing at Macworld, has an overview of why iOS 8 will bring important improvements for education:

Overall, I’m delighted that iOS has come out of a slightly awkward stage in its development. iOS 6 and iOS 7 really didn’t move the platform forward in substantial ways that had obvious impact on users. iOS 8 promises to take the experience of the serious iOS user to a whole new level. I can’t wait to see what developers do with it.

For context, Speirs implemented the first whole-school, one-to-one iPad program – also featured by Apple.

Permalink

Unread for iPad Review

I first reviewed Jared Sinclair’s Unread, a fast and elegant RSS reader for iPhone, when it came out in February, making it my go-to RSS app on my Home screen:

I approached Unread thinking that it was an app designed for people who subscribe to a handful of feeds and just want to read a few articles every day. What I found is an app that works exceptionally well with hundreds of feeds, that has great custom typography and interface choices that don’t look out of place on iOS 7, and that tastefully implements modern gestures, sharing controls, and iOS technologies.

For me, Unread provides a better reading, syncing, and sharing experience than Reeder. While it lacks some of the features that Reeder gained over the years, Unread’s debut shows an app with focus, flexibility, attention to iOS 7, and the capability of scaling from dozens of unread items to several hundreds articles. Some people will complain about the lack of a compact mode to disable article previews in the main list; combined with thumbnails, I realized that this feature helps me pay more attention to articles in my RSS feeds.

Today, Sinclair has released Unread for iPad, a new version of the app sold at $4.99 on the App Store. Unread for iPad is heavily influenced by its iPhone counterpart, and fans of the iPhone version will be instantly familiar with it.

Read more

Explaining iOS 8’s Extensions→

If you’re looking for a more technical overview of extensions in iOS 8, Andrew Cunningham has a great one at Ars Technica:

A simple way to summarize all of this: Apple doesn’t want one app to be able to get into another app’s sandbox. Extensions are like little sandboxes-within-sandboxes that facilitate communication between different apps while never sharing all of their containing app’s data directly with the host app.

It’s good to know that Apple is making iOS more flexible and powerful while keeping an underlying model designed for security, performance, and user control.

One of the questions I’ve received over the past few days is whether enabling a lot of extensions in iOS 8 could cause issues similar to the ones found in, for instance, Safari for OS X with multiple browser extensions installed. Based on what Apple has shown, the answer shoule be “no”: the technology is different, extensions will run in separate sandboxes, many of them will be user-triggered, and iOS will check memory usage and stop them if necessary (as Andrew notes, older devices will likely suffer for this).

It’ll be interesting to see how developers will take advantage of extensions this Fall.

Permalink

UI Workflows for Editorial→

Since my review of Editorial 1.1, I’ve been keeping an eye on the workflow directory and I’ve come across some great UI workflows worth linking to.

  • Crop Image: “Custom UI to crop images and save the output to the Camera Roll” (More details by Philip Gruneich in his blog post. I love this idea.)
  • Move Line: “Indent, outdent or move line up/down using arrows in popover UI”
  • Sidebar Notes: “Shows a “Notes” sidebar next to the document (on iPhone, it’s shown in an accessory panel instead of a sidebar)“
  • List Folder: “Shows a popover with a list of files in a configurable folder”

Editorial users are coming up with amazing ideas to enhance the app, and I can’t wait to see what Ole does with extensions on iOS 8.

Permalink

JavaScript for Automation on OS X Yosemite→

As detailed by Apple in a technical document, OS X Yosemite will add JavaScript support for scripting and automation:

The JavaScript OSA component implements JavaScript for Automation. The component can be used from Script Editor, the global Script Menu, in the Run JavaScript Automator Action, applets/droplets, the osascript command-line tool, the NSUserScriptTask API, and everywhere else other OSA components, such as AppleScript, can be used. This includes Mail Rules, Folder Actions, Address Book Plugins, Calendar Alarms, and Message Triggers.

From the developer session video’s description:

With OS X Yosemite, application scripting support has been added to another popular language, JavaScript. JavaScript for Automation (JXA) extends the standard JavaScript environment provided by the JavaScriptCore framework with support for querying and controlling all of the scriptable applications running in OS X. JXA scripts are supported at all layers of the system and can be invoked from the command-line, from the system-wide Script Menu, and can even be distributed as code-signed applications.

This is an interesting change for automation on OS X going forward, and JavaScript will be available alongside AppleScript in the Script Editor. You can watch the session video “JavaScript for Automation” here or in Apple’s WWDC app.

Permalink

Apple’s Advantage→

Kyle Baxter, writing about Apple’s Health app and HealthKit, both announced at WWDC:

Second, Apple takes this relationship very seriously. iOS makes it very clear when applications are requesting access to our personal data. Apple has worked quite hard to make sure that the user decides what and how much they want to share.

I don’t think Google or Facebook could announce that they are going to collect their users’ health data and optionally send it to their doctors without some reasonably large amount of criticism and fear of abuse. The reason is obvious: their primary business is utilizing user data to generate revenue, so why couldn’t they do the same with health data?

I agree. Apple highlighted the importance of user privacy several times during the keynote, and I appreciated many of the tech-related choices behind that – such as disabling network access for third-party keyboards by default.

Permalink