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The Winter Festival Of Artisanal Software

Apple Tries to Clean Up Its Carbon-Spewing Ways With New Data Centers→

It’s an unusual trip in that its point is to give a reporter exposure to the way Apple works, a departure from the company’s usual maniacal secrecy. But when it comes to the environment, Apple consciously carves out an exception to its standard opacity. Part of the motive, of course, is generating a halo effect from good works. But Apple also hopes to inspire other companies and organizations to embark on similar ecologically helpful enterprises. Though it may not have always been the case, Apple has a good Earth Day story to tell.

Here’s that story: Apple is close to its goal of powering all its facilities 100 percent by renewable energy. Its corporate campuses and data centers are now at 94 percent renewable and rising. (In 2010 it was 35 percent.) The next step is to extend the efforts to its retail stores.

A fascinating insight into Apple’s environmental efforts from Stephen Levy at Wired, who was given the opportunity to tour an Apple solar plant and data center in Nevada with Apple’s senior vice president of environmental initiatives, Lisa Jackson. It’s no surprise that the tour given to Levy is a good news story for Apple, but equally interesting are the things that Jackson notes Apple has yet to achieve - in particular converting their retail stores to renewable energy (which is this year’s goal).

Also interesting (but not surprising), Levy was allowed to report on anything he saw, except “the manufacturer of the servers” in the Reno data center.

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Unread 1.2 Adds Image Viewer, New Gestures, And More

Originally released in February, Jared Sinclair’s Unread is an elegant and polished RSS reader for iPhone that made me switch from Reeder. As I concluded in my review:

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.

Available today on the App Store, Unread 1.2 adds a variety of fixes, design tweaks, and new features that make the app more powerful and faster to navigate without compromising its vision and the choices Sinclair made for version 1.0.

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Sloppy Swiping→

Josh Ginter on apps that implement sloppy swiping through loose gestures that can be activated anywhere on the screen:

Stretching your thumbs to the topmost corner or having to swipe from off screen to go back is not natural in any way. Mobile phone users often find themselves in situations where the precision of pressing a specific button is both inefficient and aggravating. Swiping from off the screen can also be aggravating, especially when using the iPhone with your right hand when on the move. I actually find inaccuracies with swiping from off the screen to be more annoying than having to button-mash to go back a menu.

I’m a fan of the system-wide Back gesture introduced with iOS 7, but I prefer apps (like Unread and Facebook Paper) that don’t force you to swipe exactly from the edge of the screen. I find that kind of gesture implementation comfortable, friendly, and natural.

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Directional: Espresso Game Recap→

This week Federico and Myke catch up on a bunch of follow up and listener mail, before discussing some upcoming games that have caught their interest over the last few weeks, like Tomodachi Life, Mario Kart 8, Below and Severed.

A fun episode of Directional in which we catch up on some recent game announcements; don’t miss the links in the show notes, and especially the Tomodachi Life video. Get the episode here.

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The Prompt: The Problem And The Solution→

This week, Stephen, Federico and Myke re-visit Carousel, Greg Christie’s departure from Apple and CarPlay. Then, Federico buys a shirt on the air and leads a discussion about boredom with apps, tinkering with setups and feature creep in apps and services.

This week on The Prompt, we discuss a topic that I’ve been thinking about for a long time: can software become boring? Why do we always want “more” and “new” from apps? How can developers balance the tension between simplicity and feature additions? To be continued, for sure.

Get the episode here.

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Dropbox Acquires Loom

With a notice posted on their website today, Loom, a photo storage and management service originally launched in July 2013, announced that they’ve been acquired by Dropbox and will be joining the company.

Often regarded as “what Apple’s Photo Stream” should have been, Loom was designed to keep one library of photos in sync across devices, with support for albums, full-res versions of the original files, and more. Built to let users delete media from their local devices, Loom featured support for both photos and videos, with automatic upload functionalities in a native iOS app and a desktop uploader for OS X.

From Loom’s original description:

We needed something that works seamlessly. A personal media library that is the same wherever you go, and there when you need it. Something effortlessly expandable, that can grow with your library, so you never run out of space. Easy to organize and manage, giving you complete control.

That is why we built Loom. We’re making it quick and easy for you to access and manage your entire photo and video library on every device, without taking up local storage space.

On April 9, Dropbox officially introduced Carousel, an iPhone and Android app aimed at replacing a device’s local Camera Roll with Dropbox photo storage. Carousel displays photos with a vertical grid of thumbnails reminiscent of Loom, and, like Loom, it supports both photos and videos stored in the cloud; unlike Loom, Carousel doesn’t have iPad or web clients for now, as it’s limited to an iPhone app with basic web sharing features. Loom allowed users to manage uploads on their computers with a desktop uploader, an option that is already available in the official Dropbox app for OS X with automatic Camera Uploads.

From Loom’s announcement:

We know this is a big deal. This decision was made with great care. We have worked hard on our product and feel that our vision aligns perfectly with Dropbox’s vision for Carousel. Dropbox has invested the past seven years focusing on building a secure home for your files. And now with Carousel comes a home for your photos and videos as well. We share the common goal of crafting a high quality product, always putting users’ needs first. After spending some serious time investigating if this was the right move for us, we realized that Dropbox has solved many problems around scaling infrastructure and at Dropbox the Loom team will be able to focus entirely on building great features with a fantastic user experience. We are enthusiastic about being able to contribute our ground level perspective to help craft a beautiful experience for our users. And at the end of the day, that’s what matters most to us.

Loom allowed users to set up a free trial with 5 GB of storage and the possibility to extend free space to 10 GB through referrals; the service had both monthly and yearly plans starting at $4.99 and $49.99 respectively for 50 GB of storage.

For existing Loom users, Dropbox has built a migration tool that will transfer photos from Loom to Dropbox; Loom storage will be converted to Dropbox storage for free users, while Loom Pro customers will keep the same storage on Dropbox for free, for a year. Existing Loom users will be able to continue using the service until May 16, 2014; users will also be able to request an archive of their libraries with original photos and videos in a .zip archive.

Loom marks the second acquisition by Dropbox in the past month – in late March, the company acquired social reading app Readmill for an undisclosed sum.

Photos+ 1.1 Adds Dropbox Support

Photos+, which I first covered in December when Second Gear launched it on the App Store, has today been updated to version 1.1, adding Dropbox integration and finding a new home at SilverPine Software.

Photos+ 1.0 was a simple Photos.app replacement with viewing features that supported EXIF metadata for location, time stamps, and more. From my original review:

Photos+ provides an alternative way to view photos you’ve taken on your iPhone if you don’t like the new Photos app of iOS 7. Photos+ doesn’t have any time or location-based sorting feature – it’s a mosaic of large photo thumbnails displayed in reverse chronological order (from newest to oldest). There are no settings, no filters to exclude screenshots from the list, and no special gestures to learn. As you scroll, you can tap thumbnails to open photos in full-screen; when you want to dismiss a photo, you flick it up or down like a card.

Photos+ 1.1 has kept the app’s straightforward approach and visualization of photos, but thanks to Dropbox integration it can now look for photos inside a Dropbox folder. Photos loaded from the Dropbox retain the same options of local photos: you can view metadata, share photos, and open a location panel to see where a photo was taken on a map. Obviously, the app requires a few extra seconds to load a full-resolution photo from Dropbox – thumbnails are loaded at a lower-res to speed up the experience – but everything else works just like the old app.

Unfortunately, I can’t use Photos+ 1.1 with my current Dropbox photo management workflow because the app doesn’t support sub-folders: the app can only load photos stored in a single folder (like the default Camera Uploads one in Dropbox), and this means that I can’t currently use Photos+as a photo viewer for my photo collection, which is organized in folders for years and sub-folders for months. I understand that most users who rely on Dropbox for photo storage and management usually keep photos in one folder, but I think it’d be nice to provide a setting to specify where and how the app should look for photos in your account (Carousel, released last week by Dropbox, shares a similar problem).

Photos+ 1.1 is available on the App Store.