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Editorial 1.1 Teaser→

In post published yesterday on the Editorial forums, developer Ole Zorn shared more details on Editorial 1.1, announcing some features he’s been working on for the update, such as the ui module, which will allow users to create custom interfaces inside Editorial:

It’s not just a module, there’s also an integrated visual editor for setting things up without code, and in Editorial there’s also a way to build UIs around workflows, without having to write Python at all (though you can also mix and match). Before you get the wrong idea: This is in no way a complete wrapper around UIKit or some kind of Cocoa bridge, so you won’t be able to do a all the things you could do in a native app, but it provides a (hopefully) easy-to-use and pythonic way to create UIs that look and feel “at home” on iOS, and it’s possible do some relatively advanced stuff with custom drawing and touch handling.

For Editorial, I tend to think of this as a “plugin” interface that allows the creation of workflows that are nearly indistinguishable from native features. Obviously, this won’t be for everyone, and there will definitely be a learning curve, but given what I’ve seen this community come up with, I’m pretty confident that it will enable some people to really push the limits of iOS text automation (and others to reap the rewards via shared workflows).

I can’t stress this enough – the new module fundamentally reinvents the way you can build visual workflows in Editorial, and I can’t wait to share more about the workflows I’ve been working on.

Make sure to check out Ole’s post for screenshots of Editorial 1.1 on the iPad and iPhone.

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Pioneer To Add CarPlay To Five Of Their Existing Aftermarket Consoles

Update [April 17]: 9to5Mac has noticed that Apple has updated their CarPlay website with a section highlighting that Pioneer and Alpine will also support CarPlay. This confirms previous reports that Alpine will also begin selling a CarPlay compatible console later this year.

Pioneer has announced that it will bring Apple’s CarPlay to five of its existing aftermarket dash consoles via a firmware update. The update will be available early this summer, making Pioneer the first manufacturer to offer CarPlay on an aftermarket console system.

Pioneer’s years of expertise integrating smartphone connectivity into the automotive environment has provided us the opportunity to be among the first to offer CarPlay to drivers,” said Ted Cardenas, vice president of marketing for the Car Electronics Division of Pioneer Electronics (USA) Inc. “By providing an aftermarket option, Pioneer’s 2014 in-dash multimedia systems give many iPhone owners the ability to add CarPlay to their current vehicles.”

The Pioneer consoles that will support the CarPlay firmware update include the AVIC-8000NEX ($1400 SRP), AVIC-7000NEX ($1200 SRP), AVIC-6000NEX ($900 SRP), AVIC-5000NEX ($750 SRP) and AVH-4000NEX ($700 SRP), all of which are currently available from retailers today. Reports from Nikkei earlier this week suggest that Alpine Electronics will follow suit by launching their own CarPlay-compatible console in the Fall, with an expected price between $500 and $700.

CarPlay, which was formally announced last month after an initial introduction at WWDC last year, is an infotainment system designed so that cars can integrate with iOS devices and allow drivers to reply to messages, answer phone calls, listen to music, and more. Although CarPlay comes with support for touchscreens and control knobs featured in most cars, Apple has also placed focus on CarPlay’s Siri support. Drivers can use Apple’s voice assistant to control music playback and ask for directions with Maps, compose new text messages, make calls – all while staying focused on the road as much as possible.

[Nikkei, via MacRumors]

Apple Is Not Here To Entertain You→

Jason Snell offers a great take on the tech press’ obsession with an Apple iWatch:

So in the end, why do we want Apple to make an iWatch? Because it’s fun to see new products from Apple. Because we want to try one out and see if we like it. Because we like to buy new gadgets. Because we want to complain about how Apple got it wrong. Or because we’re residents of the financial sector and see everything in the context of growth, like a predator that can’t see the prey standing still right in front of it.

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Brilliant UI Details In Carousel→

Even more ingenious is the way Carousel surfaces photos it thinks you’re most likely to want to see. To start, the app scans every photograph in your collection for human faces. Based on the qualities of the mugs it detects, it assigns each picture a “smile score.” The one with the highest ranking for a given event is displayed with a double-size thumbnail, serving as a sort of hero shot for that subset of pics.

Wired’s Kyle Vanhemert talked to Gentry Underwood about some of the UI details in Carousel – as I wrote, there are some fantastic touches in the app. The way thumbnails are generated and deployed is quite clever.

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Screens 3 for Mac Review

Since 2010, I’ve been using Edovia’s Screens for all my VNC needs: an elegant client with a polished interface and just the right amount of options, I’ve always been a fan of Edovia’s focus on elegance and simplicity combined with touch controls.

The iOS app has changed quite a bit over the years: notably, with iOS 7 Edovia took the opportunity to completely redesign Screens with a cleaner UI and updated gestures, adding on-disconnect actions, hot corners, and trackpad mode with subsequent updates that continued to strike a good balance between feature additions and intuitiveness. I don’t need to access dozens of Macs remotely every day – I only log into my local MacBook Air (when I’m in bed or in another room) and my remote Mac mini – but I know that Screens for iOS has everything I need.

Screens 3 is Edovia’s latest update to their Mac client, originally released in 2011. A free update for existing Screens 2 customers, Screens 3 is available both on Edovia’s website and the Mac App Store at $34.99, but only the Mac App Store version can offer iCloud sync across devices; because of this limitation, I recommend buying Screens from the Mac App Store.

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Xcode Plugins→

Indeed, significant progress has been made in recent years to break open the developer workflow, from alternative IDEs like AppCode to build tools like CocoaPods, xctool and nomad. However, the notion that Xcode itself could be customized and extended by mere mortals is extremely recent, and just now starting to pick up steam.

Xcode has had a plugin architecture going back to when Interface Builder was its own separate app. However, this system was relatively obscure, undocumented, and not widely used by third parties. Despite this, developers like Delisa Mason and Marin Usalj have done incredible work creating a stable and vibrant ecosystem of third-party Xcode extensions.

If you’re an iOS or OS X developer and have been looking for ways to customize Xcode, Mattt Thompson has a great roundup of Xcode plugins. I had no idea it was possible to add a Sublime Text-like mini map to the app.

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The Prompt T-Shirts→

If you listen to The Prompt and you’ve ever wished you could express your appreciation for the show in a very visible way, well, we now have t-shirts.

We’re excited to announce the world’s greatest t-shirt. With a two-sided color design and printed on black, it celebrates the culture surrounding Apple and a community that’s bigger than any country or accent. We’ve been testing the design for a while now, and we really like it.

All orders and shipping are being handled by Teespring, so there’s no doubt about the quality of the product and the service. The best part? They’ll be at your door well in time to pack for WWDC.

Get yours on Teespring today, and you’ll have it by WWDC.

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Asking Users For iOS Permissions→

Brenden Mulligan has an interesting post on various ways to ask users for permissions to access photos, contacts, and notifications on iOS. Brenden and his team experimented with different user flows and designs for Cluster, and what they ended up using seems like a good balance to me: there are multiple dialogs, but they’re often contextual and they explain to the user how data will be accessed before making a decision.

The “trick” of showing a custom permission dialog before the real iOS one seems to be a common trend these days – I’ve seen it in Facebook Messenger and other apps, and the general idea is that the user will be prepared when iOS will pop up the permission dialog to grant access to private data. There are many ways to approach this problem (dialogs integrated with welcome tutorials, custom dialogs with screenshots, etc), but I agree that making permission-granting contextual to a user-initiated action is much better than a deluge of permission dialogs on an app’s first launch.

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