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Posts tagged with "iOS"

Hey Siri, Play Ball!→

The Verge reports today that Siri has been upgraded with a load of baseball facts, just in time for Opening Day:

Siri now has some more baseball smarts: it can answer questions about more detailed statistics, according to Apple, including historical stats going back to the beginning of baseball records. You can also get information on career statistics, and there’s now specific information for leagues other than the Majors — there are 28 other leagues, including the Minors, that are covered now.

I tested out a number of questions with Siri and, like Dante D’Orazio of the Verge, found that certain questions like “Who hit the most home runs ever in baseball?” tended to return either Google search results or in the case of the home run question above, the results for the 2016 season, not all time.

In case you were wondering, right now Troy Tulowitzki and Corey Dickerson are tied for the lead with one home run each.

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Capture Ideas Quickly and Easily With Yeti

Yeti is all about quick capture and effortless export. Yeti’s main interface is dominated by four colorful buttons that allow you to capture your thoughts with a note, a photo or video, audio, or a sketch. What you create is stored on iCloud Drive in one of a handful of non-proprietary formats that can be easily opened in other apps. And while Yeti does an admirable job of making it fast and easy to record information on your iPhone, the lack of support for capturing data from other devices or apps, will limit Yeti’s utility for some people.

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A Mysterious Bug is Causing Links to Fail on iOS

Over the weekend, 9to5Mac reported what appears to be a widespread iOS bug that causes links to fail to open. In some cases, long pressing links crashes the app containing the link. What’s worse, rebooting your iOS device or uninstalling third-party apps affected by the bug seems to only correct the problem temporarily.

Ben Collier has been doing some digging and it looks as though the culprit may be Shared Web Credentials, a means by which websites and apps can share login credentials. As Ben explains:

In iOS 9 Apple introduced Universal Links, these allow app developers to associate their website and app, so links to the website can open the app up automatically if installed. For example, following a link to a Guardian article opens up the Guardian app to that specific article instead of their website.

App developers put an app association file on their website which lists which types of URLs the app can open. When you install an app, iOS downloads this associated file and updates your own database of what URLs your installed apps can open. The website and app listing in iTunes are linked by the developer - so it prevents anyone from hijacking your website with their app.

When you tap a link in iOS, the system looks through the database of installed apps supported URLs to see if it matches a pattern an installed app can handle. If nothing matches it opens it up as a standard app.

9to5Mac has been able to replicate the bug by installing the Booking.com app, which until today, had an unusually large association file. The bug does not appear to be limited to the Booking.com app, but the unusual size of its association file lead to initial speculation that file size was the culprit. However, further investigation suggest that the problem may be with the Shared Web Credentials daemon itself and is either triggered by a large association file, or becomes corrupt regardless of the size of association files. Whatever the cause, let’s hope that a reliable workaround is found soon and that Apple releases an iOS update that fixes the problem.

We have reached out to Apple for comment regarding the bug and will update this post with whatever additional information we learn.

[Update: 2016-03-29] Based on follow up reports by 9to5Mac and Ben Collier, it appears that large association files are indeed the source of the bug that that causes links to fail to open for some iOS users. According to 9to5Mac:

Sources tell us that Apple is working with high-profile developers to help them understand and better use the universal links APIs.

9to5Mac also quotes a statement it received from Apple PR:

“We are aware of this issue, and we will release a fix in a software update soon.”

Whether the source of this quote is the same as the sources that reportedly told 9to5Mac that Apple is working with ‘high-profile developers’ is unclear.

9to5Mac also reports that the Wikipedia app and Eat24 apps may also trigger the link bug. Unfortunately, there is still no known workaround for the issue. Nor is there a way to tell which apps are affected before installing them.

Ben Collier, whose post yesterday pinpointed the source of the bug, has posted a fix that requires users to complete a dozen steps. The fix appears to be dependent on the timing of the steps, which means that it may require multiple attempts to get it to work.

DeskConnect Brings Fast File Transfers Between iOS and OS X

Before he co-founded Workflow, Ari Weinstein was the creator of DeskConnect. Originally born out of a hackathon, DeskConnect was a Mac and iOS utility to speed up the process of transferring bits of text and files between devices. Based on a cloud service and built with speed in mind, DeskConnect predated Apple’s Continuity efforts with AirDrop in iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite; when it launched in the summer of 2013, DeskConnect was featured by Apple on the Mac App Store and it ranked in the top charts for several consecutive days.

However, after Weinstein and Workflow co-founders Conrad Kramer and Nick Frey began working on the app that would later win an Apple Design Award, DeskConnect was put on the shelf so the team could focus on their powerful take on iOS automation. They never forgot about DeskConnect, though. With a major redesign and adoption of modern iOS technologies, DeskConnect’s comeback, launching today on the App Store, brings an even faster way to share documents, photos, and just about anything across multiple devices. After testing the new DeskConnect for the past couple of weeks, it’s impossible not to be impressed with its simplicity and speed.

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Scanner Pro 7 Adds OCR and Workflows

Scanning apps have become a big category on iOS. There are a lot of great options and the quality and diversity of the category creates a healthy competitive atmosphere that means frequent updates and innovations, which are great for customers. Today, Readdle launched version 7 of Scanner Pro, which adds optical character recognition (OCR), distortion correction, and a cool new trick – workflows. With Scanner Pro 7 you can chain multiple actions together and fire them off with just one tap.

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Turn Your Mac Into a Media Server With AirParrot 2 and AirParrot Remote

Shortly after reviewing AirFoil for Mac, which acts as a hub for routing audio to multiple devices and has an iOS remote control app, I heard that Squirrels was planning something similar for its AirParrot product. AirParrot 2 for Mac acts as a hub for sharing your Mac’s screen, apps, and media to devices like the Apple TV. With an update to AirParrot and the release of AirParrot Remote for iOS, you can now control the streaming of your Mac’s screen, apps, and media remotely from your iPhone or iPad.

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Wikipedia’s New Focus on Discovery

For a long time, Articles by Sophiestication Software was my favorite Wikipedia app on iOS. But Articles is showing its age because it hasn’t been updated since September 2013 when developer Sophia Teutschler took a job on the UIKit Frameworks team at Apple.

Wikipedia has had its own official app for years, but for much of that time it wasn’t very good. Apps like Articles filled the gap, presenting a cleaner, better-designed experience. After years of using Articles, I lost track of Wikipedia’s iOS app, but was pleasantly surprised when I downloaded the just-released version 5, which has evolved into a great all-around Wikipedia utility.

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Workflow 1.4.4 Brings More Image Automation, HTML to Markdown Conversion

As much as I like to use Workflow for every task I don’t want to perform manually, until last week there were still some things I couldn’t automate with the app. Those tasks were utterly specific: converting HTML and rich text back to Markdown (with my beloved html2text in Python), or assembling iOS screenshots with pretty device frames (with LongScreen). With the release of Workflow 1.4.4 today, I can finally integrate these two key tasks into Workflow’s automation, and I’m in love with the results.

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Drafts 4.6 Has Nice Refinements and a Few Treats for Power Users

Agile Tortoise’s development of Drafts never seems to slow down. Today, version 4.6 was released with a long list of new features and refinements. Here are my favorites:

  • Trash Can: Drafts now saves 30 days of deleted drafts in a trash can from which they can be restored, which makes writing in Drafts safer than ever.
  • Interface Enhancements: The Drafts editor has been refined to improve the readability of your drafts, especially on the iPad.
  • Automatic Dark Mode: Drafts can now monitor the ambient light in a room, and turn its dark mode on and off according to a brightness threshold that you select.
  • Box Support: Last year the MacStories team started using Box as part of our document collaboration workflow, which makes Box support especially welcome. Much like Drafts’ Dropbox and Google Drive support, you can now create files in Box, and append and prepend to existing Box files.
  • Today Widget: Drafts 4.6 debuts a redesigned Today Widget with a streamlined look.
  • Icons: Drafts has added many action icons, which I like because it makes it even easier to identify my Drafts actions.

There are also some treats in Drafts 4.6 for power users too:

  • Open in Drafts: Instead of opening Safari, you can set a URL action to open URLs in Safari View Controller, which keeps you inside Drafts. The Agile Tortoise blog includes a couple good examples of this that search Google and DuckDuckGo.
  • ‘replaceRange’ URL Scheme Action: When used with an x-success callback parameter in a URL scheme action, ‘replaceRange’ can replace selected text in a draft with the results of a URL scheme call to another app. This is powerful stuff, and means you can do things like send selected text to Agile Tortoise’s dictionary app, Terminology, to look up a synonym, select it, and return it to Drafts, replacing the originally selected text. A similar action works with my app, Blink, where the selected text kicks off a search. After you select an item from the results, Blink sends an affiliate link back to Drafts, replacing the selected text with the link. I have more detail, and a demonstration of the Blink action on squibner.com. Both of these actions work on any iOS device, but the first time I saw them in action with both apps running in Split View on an iPad Pro, I was blown away. Writers will love these actions.
  • Include Action: You can now incorporate one action into another by reference, which makes building actions more modular.

With version 4.6, Drafts continues its steady pace of innovation by continuing to redefine what a text editor can be, which is why it has been one of my go-to text editors for many years now.

Drafts 4.6 is a free update for existing customers, and $9.99 for new users.