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Learn to Code with Treehouse for the iPad→

Quick note: I’d link to a proper blog post, but I don’t see one on Treehouse’s site yet. The link will currently take you to the iTunes Preview page.

You need to have a subscription to use the app (starting at $25 per month), but this is a very cool bonus for those that are learning to code websites and are just starting down the path towards making their own iOS apps. Languages include HTML, CSS, Javascript, Ruby, Objective-C, and more. Treehouse has video tutorials, badges that you can collect as you progress through lessons, and a members forum so you can get help from Treehouse’s community of learners and self starters.

[via VentureBeat]

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The Prompt: Up Next Yesterday→

This week, everyone’s favorite international trio discuss a truckload of follow-up, then move on to talk about Apple’s developer site and quarterly results then Google’s new Nexus 7 and Chromecast TV dongle. Myke interrupts the show to find Federico’s alt rock band on MySpace. To wrap up, Chris Bowler files a report on Cloud.typography and Federico gives a tip about bookmarklets in Chrome for iOS.

Without a doubt, the episode recorded in the most original location to date. Get it here.

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EA And The App Store→

Jeffrey Grubb at VentureBeat:

The mobile-based future is here, and publisher Electronic Arts is reaping the rewards. EA reported today that it made more money through Apple’s App Store than any other retail distributor. That includes its own Origin digital-download service.

Here’s the thing: I don’t like EA’s shady practices (especially in Real Racing 3), I think that most In-App Purchase-based games should offer more value, but this is working for EA and others (see: Candy Crush Saga). And who’s to blame: consumers for being too credulous? EA and King? Apple? If anything, shouldn’t we be happy because Apple’s strategy is working out?

I, and thousands of old-school gamers like me, don’t like this modern idea of free-to-play games and nickel-and-diming players. I like to think that, eventually, Apple will start caring about quality games. But it’s when I read stories like EA’s that I conclude that, today, Apple doesn’t want to change In-App Purchases, at all.

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Apple Cyclicality→

Benedict Evans:

For the first two cycles Apple launched the new iPad in the June quarter and sales then rose in the September quarter (back to school?) and again in the Christmas quarter (presents) before falling in March (old product, new one coming). But then in 2012, iPad Mini rumours led to sales falling in September and then Apple launched the Mini and a 4th gen model in the December quarter. So sales shot up in the December quarter, held up well in March (newer product plus Chinese new year) and then slipped this quarter as it’s now a nine month old product.

Some solid analysis of yesterday’s Q3 results. The first chart really shows the seasonality of Apple products, and the inevitable decline of the iPod.

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Patrick Welker’s AppleScript and Keyboard Maestro Workflows for Lists→

This is an amazing collection of workflows and tips by Patrick Welker, who explains how he automates list creation and management using AppleScript and Keyboard Maestro. The post also contains a modification of my recent Mail workflow to automate senders and signatures.

The hidden gem in the article, however, is the following sentence:

Since I’m deeply in love with Keyboard Maestro and want to preserve the just fallen in love kind of feeling in our relationship for as long as possible, I created a one-action macro to trigger the TextExpander snippet

The things you do for the apps you love.

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Google’s Document On Data Compression In Chrome For iOS→

Last week, I wondered whether Google’s new data compression feature for Chrome for iOS was partially motivated by the inability to use the Nitro engine to speed up page load times. Today, I have stumbled upon the technical document that details how the data-saving process actually works – in short, it uses Google’s proxy to optimize web traffic sent by Chrome.

The proxy server receives the request initiated on the mobile device, initiates a request for the required resource on your behalf, and then optimizes each asset before delivering it back to the client. The content optimization is performed by our open-source PageSpeed libraries, which are specifically tuned for the Chrome Mobile browser. The rendering of the page, and all JavaScript execution, is performed by the client’s browser.

Of note, the transcoding of images from JPEG and PNG to WebP:

Over 60% of the transferred bytes, for an average page, are images. Hence, the proxy takes great care to optimize and transcode all images to the WebP format, which requires fewer bytes than other popular formats, such as JPEG and PNG. The proxy supports the new WebP lossless format for certain images, and also optimizes the perceptual quality of each image based on device screen resolution and pixel density of your device.

I’ve never been a fan of speed optimization through proxies personally, but I’m curious to try out Google’s implementation. The feature is still rolling out for Chrome users on iOS.

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Apple Q3 2013 Results: $35.3 Billion Revenue, 31.2 Million iPhones, 14.6 Million iPads Sold

Apple has published their Q3 2013 financial results for the quarter that ended on June 29, 2013. The company posted revenue of $35.3 billion. The company sold 14.6 million iPads, 31.2 million iPhones, and 3.8 million Macs, earning a quarterly net profit of $6.9 billion.

We are especially proud of our record June quarter iPhone sales of over 31 million and the strong growth in revenue from iTunes, Software and Services,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We are really excited about the upcoming releases of iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks, and we are laser-focused and working hard on some amazing new products that we will introduce in the fall and across 2014.

The company generated $7.8 billion in cash flow from operations during the quarter. Read more

‘How strange is Apple’s iMessage? The strangest.’→

Craig Mod has a few suggestions that would go a long way towards improving iMessage. He talks about conflicting IDs, unsynced histories (and someone else had to make an app to fix how terrible searching history is on the Mac), and the lack of proper profiles for the people you’re conversing with.

The biggest problem I have with iMessage is that it’s capable of but really poor at handling group conversations. Our issues revolved around the “Send and Receive” settings. For a group chat to really work, everyone has to be sending from the same address. More often than not, this was different between a Mac and iOS devices. If someone in the group was sending a message on their iPhone, the default was likely a phone number. If someone in the group was sending a message on their Mac, the default was probably an email address. Linking helps, but keeping track of all these settings is difficult. If one person in the group was sending from a different address, it would cause a new conversation to appear in iMessage (thus “splitting the thread”) for the receivers. For the sender, everything would appear to be the same. With a big group of people this became a daily annoyance because it became difficult to follow conversations when different instances or pieces of it showed up in different places. It’s a hard problem to describe, especially when receivers can opt to receive messages at multiple email addresses (and if the same person you’re conversing with decides to send you something to an alternative address, I believe the message should show up in the same conversation). The reality is that the settings are kind of a mess and talking about this stuff caused a lot of frustration and we eventually gave up.

And we won’t even get into the problems that the iMessage for Mac app has. But that was a mess for a whole different reason, the main problem being that it would lock up our Macs when they awoke from sleep as hundreds of messages were downloaded. This is why our team fled to Google Hangouts once those apps became available on iOS (more on that in a minute).

iMessage is fine for its intended use, as an SMS replacement for talking to friends or family one-on-one, but people are treating it as the next Aol. instant messenger. And can you blame people? Our expectations are measured by how fast iMessage is at sending messages. Today’s virtual keyboards allow us to rapid fire messages and hold conversations a lot longer than our T9 phones did years ago. The days of traditional slow texting are over.

Google Hangouts has its own problems. The iOS apps in particular aren’t terrible aesthetically, but they slow down and I get frustrated waiting for messages to be sent and received a lot. I’m mostly happy with the Chrome extension, except when I play video in the background and the app gets bogged down because of something intensive happening in the browser. The good thing is that we haven’t had a problem following conversations and Google’s history (especially for images) is fantastic. The bad news is that it’s the opposite of iMessage: Hangouts fixes the history and contact stuff, but isn’t very good with the sending and receiving part on mobile. It has a desktop app (Chrome extension) that works but mobile apps that struggle. Ugh!

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