Apple Expanding Curation To More European App Store Categories

Apple's promotion for curated categories on the Italian App Store.

Apple’s promotion for curated categories on the Italian App Store.

As first reported by The Guardian today, Apple has expanded human curation on the European App Store to seven additional categories, adopting the same custom layout with curated sections and recommendations that was first introduced in the US Store in late 2012.

The Guardian notes that only five European categories were curated by human editors, with algorithms in charge of highlighting popular apps in other App Store categories for European customers:

iPhone and iPad owners visiting the productivity, photo & video, sport, music, lifestyle, health and travel categories will now see recommendations and themed collections of apps from Apple’s editorial teams.

Until today, only five App Store categories – games, kids, education, food and Newsstand – were curated. Homepages for other categories simply displayed lists of new and popular apps chosen by an algorithm.

To promote the increased curation efforts, Apple has included a banner on the front page of several European App Stores, pointing users to a section grouping curated categories. In each category, Apple highlights editorial recommendations, curated collections, themed sections, and “best new apps”. Typically, these app picks are refreshed on a weekly basis.

The refreshed category layout mirrors the work Apple has been doing on the US App Store, but it’s not indicative of the sub-categories that the company will launch with iOS 8. At its developers conference last week, Apple announced Explore, a new App Store section that will allow customers to browse location-based app recommendations, editorial collections, and brand new sub-categories for apps.

Launch Center Pro 2.3 Extends iOS Automation

Released today on the App Store, Launch Center Pro 2.3 is a major update to Contrast’s app launcher and automation tool for iOS that further enhances integration with online services, improves how actions are built and triggered, and that refines several aspects of an app that’s become a key piece of my workflow.

I’ve been covering Launch Center Pro since its humble Pro-less beginnings, and the app has changed dramatically over the years. What started as a simple launcher for apps graduated into a full-blown automation utility for URL schemes and native iOS features, which allowed us to create a complete guide to get started with the app on your iPhone and iPad.1

Launch Center Pro 2.3 brings important improvements that make the app an even better companion for common tasks and advanced workflows. The update is packed with features – David Barnard wasn’t joking when he said that it feels like a 3.0 release – and I believe that Contrast did a great job in integrating them with the rest of the app.

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Apple Adds ESPN Radio, Local NPR Stations to iTunes Radio

As first reported by AppleInsider, Apple has today added ESPN Radio and over 40 local National Public Radio (NPR) stations to its iTunes Radio service. The new stations are available in the iTunes Radio section of the Music app for iOS devices and they’ve started appearing on iTunes for desktop computers as well.

Unlike other pre-programmed DJ stations or music stations based on algorithmically-generated suggestions from iTunes, ESPN Radio and local NPR stations offer live programming for sports news, talk shows, and more. A first NPR station for iTunes Radio launched in March, when we noted that it marked an important milestone for Apple in their efforts to diversify content offered on the company’s radio service.

Apple launched iTunes Radio with iOS 7 in September 2013 but, so far, the service is only available for iTunes users in the United States and Australia. ESPN Radio is available on iTunes Radio here, while local NPR stations can be found through search.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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