Today, Apple introduced a new hardware recycling program called Apple Renew with an iPhone disassembly robot named Liam.
Liam takes apart iPhones detecting and removing parts, and separating materials so each can be repurposed. Examples of materials that Liam can recover from the video below include:
Apple today released watchOS 2.2, which includes notable enhancements in two areas. The first is a substantial update to the Maps app, which now includes a new dedicated screen with five buttons that makes it easy to navigate to your home or work, initiate a search, display your current location, or find nearby places powered by Yelp.
OS X 10.11.4, released today by Apple, fixes a number of bugs, including the inability of Safari to open Twitter short URLs. There are, however, several nice user-facing touches in 10.11.4 as well.
Ongoing Development In MacStories Weekly #21, I scratched the surface of the topic of expertise in the context of finding gaps in the App Store. Studying app categories, trends and new APIs that can open up novel types of apps is the kind of expertise that can help guide your decision about what app to build. But...
Member Requests Question: Hi, I made a switch from Evernote to Notes and from OmniFocus to 2Do after being influenced by MacStories. I am wondering a way to transform my emails to Notes as I used to do when working on Evernote. If possible, I need it on iOS not OS X. (Mauro Silva Jr, @drmaurojr)...
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.
Club MacStories members know that ‘attention’ is a topic near and dear to my heart that I’ve been writing about for the past month or so in my MacStories Weekly column, Ongoing Development. One aspect of attention that I haven’t covered yet is media attention. Today, in An Indie’s Guide to the Press, Curtis Herbert, maker of Slopes, a GPS tracking app for skiers and snowboarders, shares his experience and tips for dealing the press as an indie developer.
Hundreds of “I have an app…” emails hit the inboxes of the Apple-centric press every day. You’re not only competing for attention with other indies that have just as much passion about their app, though, you’re competing with the day-to-day news the tech sites have to write about. Readers trust these sites to filter out as much noise as possible. That is their job.
The most important thing I’ve realized about working with the press is that it’s all about finding the story. You have to answer the question why will their readers care?
Curtis’ advice is applicable to anyone pitching an app, not just indies. Every publication has a sense of who their readers are and what interests them. If you want to stand a chance of being heard through the noise, you need to understand that too.
As a developer myself who now writes at MacStories, two things have really struck me – the volume of pitches that MacStories receives on a daily basis, and the poor quality of many of them. Developers should heed Curtis’ advice. Doing so isn’t a guaranty that your app will be covered, but you will stand out from the crowd, which is the attention that gets your foot in the door in a way that many developers never achieve.
There was a time when I would download just about any photo editing app and give it a try. But like many things, I found that having too many tools led to paralysis of choice. I would want to edit a photo, but I couldn’t decide which app had just the right filters I was looking for.
These days I use the built-in Photos app for most of my photo editing, but I keep a handful of other apps around, and periodically add one or two to the mix on a trial basis. Not many of those trial photos apps stick, but recently I’ve been trying Black by Peter Stojanowski, which features ten attractive black and white filters based on classic film types and a few manual controls, and it’s stuck with me.
It can be easy to lose track of how technology changes lives. Apple takes great care to make products that are accessible, leading by example, and encouraging third-party developers to embrace accessibility, both at WWDC, and by maintaining APIs that make it easy to do so.
But the technical details are impersonal and abstract, which is why it is good to reflect on the real impact Apple’s efforts have on individuals. James Rath, a 20-year-old filmmaker who was born legally blind, made a short film about what the accessibility features across all of Apple’s products have meant to him since he and his family made an impromptu visit to an Apple Store in 2009:
Federico
