John
AppStories Episode 37 - Our Ideal Email Client
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Federico and John discuss the features that their ideal iOS and Mac email clients would have and what they are using now.
Matt Wilkinson Joins Beats 1’s Primetime Lineup→
Serenity Caldwell, reporting for iMore on a major change to Beats 1’s primetime lineup:
Apple’s Beats 1 radio service (part of Apple Music) is shaking up its weekday primetime programming starting January 8, bringing a new DJ to its daily lineup and moving around its primetime shows.
Matt Wilkinson, who formerly hosted Beats 1’s weekly Saturday alternative music show, will now join Zane Lowe, Julie Adenuga, and Ebro Darden as a weekdaily presence on the network — he’ll be broadcasting live from London from 6AM-8AM ET Monday through Friday, and will have Mike D of the Beastie Boys on to celebrate his new show on January 15.
Wilkinson’s deep music knowledge (he’s the former NME New Music Editor) is a solid addition to Beats 1’s regular programming.
Here’s Caldwell again on the significance the announcement:
This is the first time since Beats 1’s launch in 2015 that the primetime lineup has changed significantly: Adding another London voice at the 6-8AM ET slot will nix many of the replays and countdown shows formerly occupying that space; in addition, Julie Adenuga is moving from 3PM ET to 9AM ET, with Ebro Darden bumping up to the 3PM ET slot from the 6-8PM ET evening beat. Beats Creative Director Zane Lowe will continue to hold his flagship 12PM ET slot.
I haven’t listened to Beats 1 much over the past year, but I’m going to check out Wilkinson’s new show (to get an idea of Wilkinson’s style, you can listen to his last show of 2017 – Episode 128 – here.)
Reverse-Engineering the iPhone X Home Indicator Color→
I noticed an unusual behavior of the iPhone X home indicator while working on my most recent app. The app’s background near the home indicator is purple. When the app launches, the home indicator is very light gray.
But something odd happened when I pressed the app’s “share” button, which opened a default iOS activity view (aka “share sheet”). When I hit the “cancel” button to close the activity view, the home indicator animated to a dark gray color.
Home indicator starts light, then a share sheet passing makes it dark.
Even though the background color was exactly the same, the light-colored activity view passing underneath caused the home indicator to change color. The only way to get the home indicator back to its original color was to leave the app and come back.
I had never seen this before, and it prompted my curiosity.
Fascinating study of the iPhone X’s Home indicator behavior. I had no idea that the indicator adapted to background color changes within the bar itself. Don’t miss the second (and more technical) half of the story with Gitter’s detailed color tests.
Connected, Episode 174 – 2017 In Review: I’ve Been Sitting on That Joke for Months→
We grade our predictions for 2017 before setting off on a trip down memory lane of the last twelve months of Apple news.
In the annual ‘year in review’ episode of Connected, we go through all the most important Apple and tech news from 2017 and discuss how they played out. This was a fun one to record. You can listen here.
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Pythonista 3.2 Syncs Scripts with iCloud, Supports Open-in-Place via iOS 11’s Files App→
For a long time, Apple’s App Store review guidelines prohibited apps from downloading executable code from the Internet. The company’s original stance resulted in IDEs that couldn’t sync scripts and programs across multiple devices – a serious limitation for the emergent movement of programmers embracing the iPad Pro as a portable workstation.
Fortunately, Apple started relaxing their rules earlier this year, allowing “apps designed to teach, develop, or test executable code” to download and run code. Pythonista, the popular Python IDE for iOS (and one of the best pro apps for iOS, period), has been updated this week with the ability to sync scripts with iCloud and edit external scripts in-place using Files’ document picker.
As someone who used Pythonista heavily for years and remembers previous rejections based on old App Store guidelines, this is fantastic news. I moved my existing script library to iCloud, which means all my code is now shared between the iPhone and iPad – no workarounds required. Pythonista now supports the iPhone X and drag and drop for importing scripts, but, even better, the app can open scripts and edit them in-place (saving changes back to the original location) just by opening them with the built-in Files picker. This feature makes it possible to, say, use Pythonista as an editor for script files stored in GitHub repositories and managed by Working Copy – all entirely on iOS, and natively integrated with Files.
Version 3.2 of Pythonista gets rid of the most annoying limitations imposed by the old Apple, another sign that the company’s approach to professional iOS software has changed over the years. While I don’t use Pythonista nearly as much as I did a few years ago (you can imagine why), I plan on playing around with Pythonista 3.2 over the next couple of weeks.
iOS 11 X and iOS 11 Classic→
In his review of the iPhone X, John Gruber astutely points out that the device effectively runs a fork of iOS 11:
There were always two things and only two things on the front face of an iOS device — the touchscreen display and the home button. In fact, the iPhone X changes iOS in more fundamental ways than even the iPad did. In terms of the role between the display and the home button, the iPad really was — and remains today — “just a big iPhone”.
The iPhone X, however, creates a schism, akin to a reboot of the franchise.
Apple hasn’t called attention to this, but effectively there are two versions of iOS 11 — I’ll call them “iOS 11 X”, which runs only on iPhone X, and “iOS 11 Classic”, which runs on everything else.
The fundamental premise of iOS Classic is that a running app gets the entire display, and the home button is how you interact with the system to get out of the current app and into another. Before Touch ID, the home button was even labeled with a generic empty “app” icon, an iconographic touch of brilliance.
This is a great way to think about the evolution of iOS going forward. As I noted last month, the iPhone X will reshape the entire iOS ecosystem over the next few years. Consequently, it’ll also make it more challenging to review a new version of iOS, as we’ll have to account for deeply different variations of the same features.
Enabling Hidden Settings in Things
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Feed Hawk
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How Far Ahead of Apple Maps Is Google Maps?→
Another fantastic essay by Justin O’Beirne, this time focused on explaining one of Google Maps’ strongest advantages over Apple Maps: the ability to use data to create more data.
With “Areas of Interest”, Google has a feature that Apple doesn’t have. But it’s unclear if Apple could add this feature to its map in the near future.
The challenge for Apple is that AOIs aren’t collected—they’re created_. And Apple appears to be missing the ingredients to create AOIs at the same quality, coverage, and scale as Google.
This is a perfect example of Google’s institutional approach to data collection paying off in the long term, giving them a substantial lead over the competition. O’Beirne’s visual comparisons between Google Maps and Apple Maps are just brutal.
Yes, Apple Maps may be “prettier”, but when you’re going somewhere, or need to find a specific point of interest, I bet you don’t care about “pretty”. You just want your map to tell you where to go, or show you accurately where you’re meant to be. Google is objectively ahead here, and Apple Maps’ slow evolution is concerning. There’s an interesting parallel here between Apple Music and Apple Maps: both nicer iOS apps than Spotify and Google Maps, and both far behind in terms of intelligence of the service itself.
As I wrote earlier this year:
Speaking from personal experience, Google Maps has considerably improved in my area in the past year, while Apple Maps has remained essentially the same. Which isn’t to say that Apple Maps is bad – Google simply has an edge over local business information and they’re evolving at a faster pace than Apple. To me, Apple Maps looks and feels nicer; Google Maps seems smarter and it has modern features I’d like Apple to add.