Posts in Linked

Tim Cook on the iPad Pro and PCs→

Tim Cook, speaking to The Telegraph about the iPad Pro:

“Yes, the iPad Pro is a replacement for a notebook or a desktop for many, many people. They will start using it and conclude they no longer need to use anything else, other than their phones,” Cook argues in his distinctly Southern accent (he was born in Alabama). He highlights two other markets for his 12.9 inch devices, which go on sale online on Wednesday. The first are creatives: “if you sketch then it’s unbelievable..you don’t want to use a pad anymore,” Cook says.

The second is music and movie consumers: the sound system and speakers are so powerful that the iPad appears to pulsate in one’s hands when one plays a video.

In a separate interview with The Independent, he noted that he’s only travelling with his iPhone and iPad Pro for his European tour that will see him deliver a keynote speech at the Bocconi university in Milan tomorrow:

Along with the Pencil, there’s a keyboard cover. Cook says it’s different from rival keyboards because with none of those would you say it “came from the same parent” as the tablet itself. “Now all of a sudden you have a keyboard that has been perfectly designed for the iPad, it’s integrated and then you’ve got the software with split view and it’s inherently very productive. I’m travelling with the iPad Pro and other than the iPhone it’s the only product I’ve got.”

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Apple Music’s Connect and Its Video Embed Option→

Jordan Kahn, writing for 9to5Mac on Apple Music’s somewhat hidden video embed option:

While we’ve known it has been hosting videos for artists using its own video player inside Apple Music, Apple quietly started adding an embed button to the video player that takes it out of Apple Music and makes it sharable across the rest of the web. The feature is notable for a few reasons and could mean big things to come for Apple, video, and its relationship with YouTube and other competitive music and video services…

The new sharing option began appearing sometime in recent weeks as new videos from Drake and the company’s latest Apple Music ad featuring Kenny Chesney included an embed button on Apple’s usual video player. It’s currently hidden, only appearing on the videos in some locations and only when videos are copied from raw webpage code, but it looks to be something Apple could really exploit.

I’ve come across Apple Music embeds a couple of times already when reading news on some music blogs I follow, and I thought they were part of special publisher or artist features (here’s an example, which I can only watch on OS X). It’s interesting to imagine how video embeds could signal a proliferation of ad-free music videos available anywhere, hosted by Apple.

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The Case for Emoji Search on iOS→

Jason Snell, writing for Macworld on the need for a better way to search for emoji on iOS:

While Apple is doing great at displaying emoji, it could do a much better job of letting us input them. The other morning, I was browsing through my Twitter feed on my iPad and wanted to reply to a particular tweet with a bit of an inside joke involving the German flag. (Sorry, Germans.) In my bleary post-sleep haze, I ended up sending the flag of Belgium instead. I don’t know what I was thinking—those countries are close geographically but their flags are as different as horizontal and vertical strips can make them.

This has been in the back of my mind for a while as well, and I completely agree. I especially struggle to find emoji flags too – are they in alphabetical order? – and, like Jason points out, there should be ways to search emoji or autocomplete them as you type.

Of course, either option would add complexity to the iOS keyboard: an autocomplete syntax would be tricky to explain to non-techie users, and displaying a search box inside the emoji picker would still revert to the QWERTY keyboard to type an emoji’s name. With over 1600 emoji available on iOS and more coming every year, I wonder how Apple is approaching this problem.

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App Store Gets New Shopping Category→

Rene Ritchie, writing for iMore:

Apple’s App Store for iPhone and iPad is adding a new category—Shopping! It’s no secret that there’s been an explosion in online shopping and iOS has driven a lot of that growth. Thanks to an incredibly rich ecosystem and empowering technologies like Apple Pay, there’s no better way to compare prices, check reviews, and grab deals when on the go than iPhone, and no better place to sit back, browse, share, and check out than on iPad. And that’s probably why Apple is moving shopping apps out of Lifestyle and into a category all their own.

From Apple’s developer blog:

The new Shopping category is now available in all 155 App Store territories. This category makes it easy for iPhone and iPad users to find and enjoy apps that enhance the shopping experience—including mobile commerce apps, marketplace apps, coupon apps, and apps that incorporate Apple Pay.

Interesting that Apple has teamed up with some of the featured companies to run promotions to celebrate the new category. And it’s a smart move to do this before the holiday season, when millions of people will be buying gifts and browsing catalogues directly from their iPhones and iPads. Yet another example of just how much mobile has changed online commerce over the past few years – it needed its own App Store category.

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Connected: We Hugged a Lot→

Whilst Stephen is away tinkering with his new Android phone, Federico and Myke are here to talk about Twitter’s change from ‘faves’ to ‘likes’, Sunrise becoming part of Outlook, Apple TV apps, and what happened when your European hosts met for the first time.

A fun episode of Connected this week, especially following yesterday’s long-awaited encounter in London. You can listen here.

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Turning the iPhone 6s Into a Digital Scale→

Ryan McLeod, Chase McBride, and Brice Tuttle created Gravity, an iPhone app which ingeniously used the 3D Touch display of the iPhone 6s to turn the device in a digital scale and weigh objects with an accuracy of ~1-3 grams. Alas, the app has been rejected from the App Store:

With the force values linearly correlated to weight, turning any force into a weight was going to be as simple as recording the force of known weights and creating a linear regression. It’d even be possible to use some statistics to predict how well the calibration went (there are many factors that can throw off a calibration). We opted to use coins for calibration, with a framework that made it easy to internationalize in the future.
[…]
To make a long story short the final answer over the phone was that the concept of a scale app was not appropriate for the App Store.

We were—and still are—bummed to say the least, but we understand some of the reasons Apple might not be allowing scale apps at this time.

I understand why Apple may not be sure about an app that requires placing a spoon on screen. Still, I hope that, eventually, novel uses of 3D Touch like Gravity will be accepted on the App Store. Make sure to read the technical details behind Gravity (and watch the video as well).

See also: weighing plums with 3D Touch.

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Apple TV’s Siri Search to Include Apple Music Early Next Year→

Another of the criticisms mentioned in early reviews for the new Apple TV is lack of Siri search for Apple Music. In a statement sent to BuzzFeed, Apple has confirmed a software update will enable the feature early next year:

One of the most useful features of Apple’s new Apple TV is its Siri-enabled universal search. It’s something Apple TV owners have been asking about for years — the ability to quickly and effectively search across multiple video platforms simultaneously. And now that Apple’s enabled it for video, the company is working to extend it to music as well. In a few months, Apple TV owners will be able to tell the device to find a song or album the same way they’d tell it to find a movie.

Apple confirmed to BuzzFeed News that Siri is coming to Apple Music on Apple TV at the beginning of next year.

Hopefully Siri search on Apple TV will also be extended to the App Store.

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Nilay Patel’s Apple TV Review→

Speaking of Apple TV reviews and criticism to the setup experience, Nilay Patel explains in his review for The Verge:

Take setup again: yes, the tap-to-get-settings-from-an-iPhone feature is cool, but you can’t restore anything from a previous Apple TV, so when you first get started you have to head into the App Store and search for and download every streaming app you use. Then, once you’ve got them all, you have to authenticate all of them individually — even apps like HBO Go and Watch ESPN that require the same cable provider TV Everywhere username and password. And the iPhone Remote app doesn’t work with the new Apple TV yet, so you’re stuck either swiping around the onscreen keyboard or digging up a laptop to enter an activation code. It’s frustrating — I found myself reluctant to download new apps because I didn’t really want to log in yet again. If the future of TV is really apps, adding new apps has to be virtually frictionless.

That’s a fair criticism, and I’m surprised that Apple hasn’t figured out a universal “Download & Login” setup flow for TV apps yet. It also sounds like a typical American problem – the issue with cable bundles and provider logins applies to the States, but I’m not sure how it’d reflect, for instance, on European countries.

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