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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Igloo: An Intranet You’ll Actually Like [Sponsor]

Igloo is a social intranet. It’s built with easy-to-use apps, like shared calendars, task management, file sharing and more. It’s everything you need to work better together, in one very configurable cloud platform.

With Igloo’s responsive design, your intranet already handles a range of devices, it will even work on your iPhone 6 or 6 Plus right from the start. It’s customizable, responsive, and lets teams work better together. Sharing files, coordinating calendars, providing status updates, and managing projects — almost everything you can do on your desktop, you can do on your phone.

We all struggle with productivity. We are constantly pressured to accomplish more, and to do it quicker. There is no one definitive way to accomplish that, and we have all devised our own little method to make things work. At Igloo, we think your way is the best way, we just want to support you, and make your way better.

Try Igloo for free with up to ten of your favorite coworkers. Igloo, an intranet you’ll actually like.

Our thanks to Igloo for sponsoring MacStories this week.

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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Twitter Removing the 140 Character Limit from Direct Messages→

With a post on the Twitter Developers forum yesterday, Product Manager for Direct Messages Sachin Agarwal has announced that Twitter will be removing the limit of 140 characters from DMs this summer:

We’ve done a lot to improve Direct Messages over the past year and have much more exciting work on the horizon. One change coming in July that we want to make you aware of now (and first!) is the removal of the 140 character limit in Direct Messages. In order to make this change as seamless as possible for you we’ve included some recommendations below to ensure all your applications and services can handle these longer format messages before we flip the switch.

When I first read this, I felt skeptical. Much of Twitter’s appeal to me lies in the streamlined approach to short messages that fly by in the timeline. But, some of my most important conversations over the years have started from Twitter DMs. From this standpoint, it’s surprising that Twitter hasn’t put more thought in the DM product as a messaging platform, alienating users who were looking for a direct, nimble communication system – and pushing them to other services.

The strength of Twitter DMs is, for me, the existing graph between users (people I’m interested in), speed, and the lack of baggage from email. Lately, I’ve come to like the ability to easily share links and pictures in DMs as well. I don’t know if raising the character limit to 10k characters will by itself improve DMs, but Twitter is wasting an opportunity with DMs, so maybe their new CEO could use this as a starting point.

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Julie Adenuga, Apple’s New DJ→

I’m fascinated by Apple’s choice to pick Julie Adenuga as the DJ for Beats 1 in London. I wasn’t familiar with her work before, but she seems exactly like the type of music expert and entertainer that could make Beats 1 an important part of Apple Music. The Fader profile on her contains a lot of interesting details:

Adenuga’s radio career began at Rinse FM in 2010, shortly before the UK pirate station got its official FM status. Along with her BFF Sian Anderson—now a BBC Radio 1Xtra DJ—she took a gamble on asking the station managers for a show, despite having zero experience. “We didn’t have a clue what we were doing,” Adenuga remembered in her official Rinse bio a couple of years ago. The pair went in to record their first show armed with nothing but great taste in music and a willingness to chat for hours. A producer showed them how to operate a CDJ on the fly, because they couldn’t mix; “we’d just stop and start tunes. We had no DJ experience, but we just played the music and were talking rubbish. It worked. Luckily.” Bringing the rare combination of fire music selections and a banging sense of humour to the station, Adenuga and Anderson hosted a show called Mewzik Box from 2010 - 2011, taking a weekly 11am - 1pm slot.

Noisey has also a good article on Adenuga’s career.

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Connected: We Should Start a Bank Rumours Website→

(Mostly) live from San Francisco, the guys talk about all things WWDC 2015, including new versions of OS X and iOS, improvements to the iPad and the introduction of Apple Music.

In this week’s Connected, I talk about the potential for Search in iOS 9, discuss the implications of iPad multitasking, and share my thoughts on the Apple Music introduction. It’s a good one. You can listen here.

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iOS 9 Content Blockers→

Benjamin Mayo, writing for 9to5Mac:

Ad blocking extensions have been possible on Safari for Mac for a long time, but plugin architecture for Safari on iOS is much more limited. With iOS 9, Apple has added a special case of extension for ad blockers. Apps can now include ‘content blocker’ extensions that define resources (like images and scripts) for Safari to not load. For the first time, this architecture makes ad blockers a real possibility for iOS developers to make and iOS customers to install and use.

This has been, for me, the most puzzling new feature in iOS 9. Why is Apple doing this? Is the demand for ad blockers on iOS so high to justify the creation of a new extension point in Safari (and tons of questionable ad blockers coming to the App Store)? Could this be related to shady ad networks still finding ways to automatically redirect web views to the App Store?

The most plausible explanation I’m coming up with is that Apple wants to make it easier to develop third-party content filters (not necessarily ad blockers, like curbi) for parental and educational purposes without workarounds (like MDM and VPN certificates), but I’m not sure.

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