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“Why You Got a New Phone?”→

A great piece by Matt Drance.

This is a thought I wish I had in my article on iOS 7:

The emphasis on text is also striking. More than just content, text has replaced iconography in many cases. Look at Camera: the modes — VIDEO, PHOTO, SQUARE, PANO — are represented by text for the first time ever on iOS. This to me is proof that “clarity” has taken top priority. iOS is available in a number of countries and languages, which means every piece of text has to be localized (translated) many times over. This isn’t only time consuming, it’s disruptive to UI design: a short word in English is not necessarily short in German, and suddenly things don’t fit on screen anymore. I attended many meetings at Apple where people cringed at changing a word shortly before release, because it meant a whole new round of localize-then-build-then-test.

Apple still hasn’t seeded a developer beta of iOS 7 for iPad. Looking at one of the official screenshots posted online (the Music app, mirrored here), I wonder if more Apple apps for iPad will also prefer text over icons in tab bars.

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Skype Launches Video Messaging→

Today, Skype has officially introduced a new feature called Video Messaging, which allows users to send video files to other contacts. Video Messaging, rolling out today to every platform (including iOS and OS X),  is aimed at letting users “record and share a personal video message, even when your friends and loved ones are not available”. Video Messaging is free for all Skype users.

Skype Video Messaging adds another great way to keep in touch with friends and family during life’s most meaningful moments. Send a video message to your friends and family today—it’s easy. You can capture a fleeting memory, create a heartfelt reminder or simply tell a friend or family member “wish you were here” even when they aren’t online.

Skype videos can be up to three minutes long, and they can be recorded directly from Skype’s apps. In a promotional video, Skype shows how users can record and re-record videos on the iPhone, previewing them before sending them to someone. Videos will be played inline on Skype for desktop computers, and users can also reply to a video message.

Updates to Skype for iOS and OS X will be released today to support video messaging. In the meantime, Skype has posted an official announcement and FAQ here.

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Apple Posts Letter On “Commitment to Customer Privacy”→

Apple has today posted a lengthy public statement on how they handle customer data following allegations of involvement in the NSA-operated PRISM surveillance program. In the letter, Apple reiterates that they don’t provide any government agency with direct access to their servers, and that only the “narrowest possible set of information” is provided to the authorities after a court order and an evaluation of Apple’s Legal team.

Apple writes:

From December 1, 2012 to May 31, 2013, Apple received between 4,000 and 5,000 requests from U.S. law enforcement for customer data. Between 9,000 and 10,000 accounts or devices were specified in those requests, which came from federal, state and local authorities and included both criminal investigations and national security matters. The most common form of request comes from police investigating robberies and other crimes, searching for missing children, trying to locate a patient with Alzheimer’s disease, or hoping to prevent a suicide.

Apple also explains that they don’t mantain a “mountain of personal details about our customers in the first place”.

For example, conversations which take place over iMessage and FaceTime are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them. Apple cannot decrypt that data. Similarly, we do not store data related to customers’ location, Map searches or Siri requests in any identifiable form.

Apple’s letter is available here, and it’s linked directly on Apple.com’s front page as well.

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Automattic Acquires Poster for iOS

In a post (via 512 Pixels), developer Tom Witkin has announced that his WordPress client for iPhone and iPad, Poster, has been acquired by Automattic – the company that is also behind WordPress.com (among other products). He writes:

I’m elated to share that I, along with Poster, will be joining Automattic. I’ll be working with the mobile team where I’ll be both designing and coding.

Following the acquisition, Poster has been removed from the App Store and is no longer available for sale. According to Witkin, the best features of the app will be incorporated into the official WordPress app over time. Poster isn’t listed in Automattic’s gallery of products.

Poster is one of my most used apps on the iPhone and iPad. I have developed several workflows for it, which leverage the app’s advanced features such as support for URL schemes, custom fields, and integration with browser bookmarklets.

It will be interesting to see which Poster features Automattic will decide to bring over to WordPress, and how. Automattic also acquired popular note-taking tool Simplenote earlier this year, and the service has continued to work albeit with no major additions or changes yet.

For now, I will keep Poster installed on my devices, as I believe it provides a superior posting experience than the official WordPress app. I am sad that we’ll never see a proper iOS 7 version of Poster, though.

The New TweetDeck for OS X

TweetDeck used to be this sort-of all powerful Twitter console before Twitter bought it, dumbed it down in some aspects while improving it in others, and changed the icon from yellow to blue. It’s only a 2-star app on the App Store, but I don’t think it’s given enough credit. The changes rolled out around the same time that Twitter’s own iOS app went through the same kinds of changes, and I was receptive to it since I thought the TweetDeck refresh was generally more accessible to the public. I haven’t used TweetDeck much in the meantime, so I’m looking at today’s refresh as a returning user with some familiarity of the previous version.

TweetDeck 3.0 is still a web app, acts like a web app, and will misbehave like a web app. Expanding and collapsing the new sidebar currently breaks the interface — right clicking and reloading the app fixes the missing sidebar.

Otherwise, it’s fairly solid. TweetDeck is known for its multiple columns, and filters have been reintroduced through drop down menus that are quite nice. Per column, you can adjust what users you see, only view tweets that contain a certain keyword, or exclude a hashtag of your choosing. You can even receive alerts for tweets that match your query. My impression of TweetDeck is that it’s not an app I’d want to use all the time as it’s optimized for following events like a big media campaign or something like the WWDC Keynote.

TweetDeck has live streaming for all of its columns, although direct messages don’t refresh in real time if you’re replying to someone and they reply back. Through the app’s settings you can adjust font sizes and column width, although you’ll likely have to pan across the trackpad with five or more columns on a MacBook. Columns can be used for just about anything from lists, to searches, to mentions. For example, TweetDeck gives me flexibility in watching replies to our MacStories Twitter account (or another blog’s if I’m interested in a response to a post), and that stuff will update in real time. There’s a column where you can customize Interactions as well, for keeping an eye on new follows, retweets, or favorites.

It’s not a native app, there’s a bug or two, but I can’t help but think there is some clear improvement over the last update. It continues to omit Facebook or LinkedIn integration (sorry folks — that’s probably gone for good), but a lot of new features have been added since. Custom filters per column don’t prevent the app from continuing to be relatively easy to use. My current complaint is that you still need a separate TweetDeck account (which is used for syncing columns and filter preferences), and you’ll need to authorize with Twitter on top of that.

You can download TweetDeck for free from the Mac App Store.

A Quick Rundown of Microsoft’s Office Mobile for iPhone

I can’t say I’m terribly excited about what Microsoft is offering in Office Mobile, but it’s a start. Now available on the iPhone, Office Mobile requires an Office 365 subscription, which will give you access to all of Microsoft’s Office apps on up to 5 PCs or Macs, 20 GB of SkyDrive storage, and 60 minutes of Skype calls for $9.99 per month or $99.99 a year for Home Premium.

Why you’d want it

Lots of iPhone apps can view Office files, but few render them properly. Office Mobile, with Microsoft’s layout engine, should at least be able to display your Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and Powerpoint presentations as they were intended. It also gives you a chance to make small edits on the go, but I wouldn’t use it to write a novel.

Some of the cool stuff to be found are features like Resume Reading, which automatically opens Word documents at the place you last left off on your PC. You can also flip through mini PowerPoint slideshows to practice your talking points before a big presentation.

But I wouldn’t bother

It’s basically the equivalent of Google Drive for the iPhone, which is to say it isn’t very good.

Office Mobile will aggregate Office files from your SkyDrive folder, which is nice, but the editing options offered are finicky. Microsoft prefers their own controls before iOS’ own standard actions, making editing a frustrating experience. Doing basic things like select text in Word or tapping on cells in Excel is a chore, and editing itself is complicated.

If you have an Office 365 subscription, it’s something extra that will give you the option to review files, leave comments, and fix typos when you’re away from your Mac or PC, but I don’t see this being a great incentive for jumping into the latest office apps if you’re content with iWork or an older Office suite.

Office Mobile is free to download from the App Store.

I Wouldn’t Mod the New AirPort Extreme→

9to5Mac ran a quick piece this morning about hacking the new AirPort Extreme. Apparently Apple kept the hard drive caddy in place for the new AirPort Time Capsule, but left out any internal connectors.

In the worst ‘case’ scenario, DIYers could use the USB port and wire a bus-powered 2.5 inch hard drive (up to 2TB currently) or SSD around inside the case.

Don’t do this. You don’t really save a lot of money (if any by the time you paid shipping for a new 2TB HDD and USB compatible cable), and then you’d be using up an available USB slot that could be used for other things, like even more storage or a USB printer. If you want a hard drive, just pay more upfront for the AirPort Time Capsule.

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Flatness and the Dimensionality of iOS 7→

David Cole, product designer at Quora, writes:

The big, obvious change to the look in iOS 7 is the flatness. This change is being characterized as a stripping away of dimensionality. I’ll propose something else is going on here: the move to flat screens actually affords a ramp up in dimensionality. When an individual screen gets flattened together, you can treat it as a single object that you can then manipulate and relate to other screens. This concept is at the heart of the biggest changes to the iOS 7 interaction paradigms.

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So What’s New With Apple’s MacBook Air?

 

Image credit: iFixit

Apple’s new 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Airs now last 9 and 12 hours on battery respectively, a 4 and 5 hour improvement over the previous generation. Lots of sites have started poking and prodding at the new machines, including iFixit, known for their great do-it-yourself gadget repair manuals.

iFixit’s (mid 2013) 13-inch MacBook Air teardown

Last year’s 7.3V, 6700 mAh battery has been supplanted by a new 7.6V 7150 mAh battery. Apple noted that Flash storage was 45% faster in this revision, and that’s due to the move from a SATA based solid state drive to a PCI Express based SSD. The AirPort card has also been updated to support 802.11ac. It’s still a very proprietary machine: RAM is soldered onto the logic board and many components aren’t meant to be user replaceable or upgradeable, despite otherwise easy access to its insides.

 Wired on how Haswell saves so much power

The MacBook Air is packing a big battery, but those substantial energy savings are owned to Intel’s latest round of fourth-generation processors, known as Haswell. The new Haswell chips in today’s MBAs are part of a special low-voltage series of chips designed specifically for Ultrabooks, which Intel claims is twice as energy efficient as the previous generation.

AnandTech quick and dirty benchmarks

Something to keep in mind is that the new Haswell chips in Apple’s MacBook Airs are officially Intel HD 5000 based and not Iris.

Macworld puts the new MacBook Air through read and write paces

Macworld has the most comprehensive benchmarks at the moment, showing that the new MacBook Airs get substantially better read and write speeds with their new PCIe based SSDs. However, Haswell is pretty much in line performance-wise with the last generation of processors.