Posts in Linked

Apple’s Privacy and Cloud Services→

Thomas Ricker, writing for The Verge in response to Tim Cook’s speech on privacy and cloud services:

Arguably, Google Maps is better than Apple Maps, Gmail is better than Apple Mail, Google Drive is better than iCloud, Google Docs is better than iWork, and Google Photos can “surprise and delight” better than Apple Photos. Even with the risks.

If Apple truly cares about our privacy then it should stop talking about how important it is and start building superior cloud-based services we want to use — then it can protect us.

As John Gruber eloquently commented:

There’s much I would quibble with regarding Ricker’s piece, but his conclusion, quoted above, is spot-on. Apple needs to provide best-of-breed services and privacy, not second-best-but-more-private services. Many people will and do choose convenience and reliability over privacy. Apple’s superior position on privacy needs to be the icing on the cake, not their primary selling point.

This is a tricky scenario: is machine learning the only way to build intelligent services and client apps for the future? Google Photos is showing impressive results in recognizing places, objects, and people – but at the cost of letting Google’s cloud analyze your entire memories and visual history. It’s only natural for some people not to be okay with that today.

Will consumers start demanding that sort of intelligence going forward? Is there any way to build intelligence at scale without being creepy? Is privacy a product or a feature?

Permalink

Apple Support Document on HomeKit and Apple TV→

Following the launch of the first HomeKit devices yesterday, Apple has published an official page with a list of compatible products and a support document detailing the setup process for HomeKit.

In that document, Apple confirmed the long-rumored “hub” feature of Apple TV:

If you have an Apple TV (3rd generation or later) with software version 7.0 or later, you can control your HomeKit-enabled accessories when you’re away from home using your iOS device.

Sign in with the same Apple ID on your iOS device and Apple TV, and you’ll be able to use Siri commands to remotely control your accessories.

Earlier today, The New York Times reported that Apple won’t announce any new Apple TV hardware at its upcoming WWDC. Considering that HomeKit (which is rumored to get some stage time next week) can already work on the current-gen Apple TV, it’s no surprise Apple may prefer to sell the current model and wait to get the next generation just right. It’ll be interesting to see Apple’s plans for the Apple TV as a connected home hub unfold over the next few months.

Permalink

Clips 1.2→

Clips, developed by Clean Shaven Apps, is an app I use on a daily basis to copy multiple bits of text and move them between apps using a widget, an action extension, and a fantastic custom keyboard – one of the few keyboards I keep on my devices, in fact. I reviewed the app when it came out last September, and I’ve been using it since.

Today, Clips 1.2 has been released with a refreshed design, Apple Watch support, and a faster keyboard. While I’m not sure why I’d want to use Clips on my Watch, I believe it can be useful to those who use the app to store text they access frequently and not as a temporary holding place for clipped items. I’m a fan of the new dark design and the increased contrast between URLs and plain text, and I continue to appreciate the time the app saves me when composing articles, researching topics, and collecting a bunch of notes from different apps with just a few taps. Clips is the epitome of iOS 8’s extensibility features for productivity apps, and it’s one of my must-have utilities.

Clips 1.2 is available on the App Store.

Permalink

Pinterest Introduces Buyable Pins→

Mike Isaac, writing for The New York Times:

Pinterest, the online social bookmarking site, has long claimed to be a way to help people discover new things in the real world. Soon you will be able to buy those things, too.

The San Francisco-based company announced Tuesday that it will now let users purchase things from inside of pinned items, in what is its first foray into bringing e-commerce to the platform. The new product, named “Buyable Pins,” allows sellers large and small to essentially stick a “buy” button on items that they post to the site.

Buyable Pins will launch in the United States initially, and the service will support on Apple Pay on iOS.

Considering how Pinterest reinvented the wish list on mobile, it only makes sense for them to jump into the e-commerce business in a mobile-first fashion. Pinterest says that items will be “handpicked” and that they won’t make money off transaction fees, relying on promoted pins (ads) to let advertisers promote their products on the service.

They also made a great promo video for the new feature, which you can watch below.

Permalink

Microsoft Acquires Wunderlist→

In a blog post, popular task management service Wunderlist has announced they’ve been acquired by Microsoft. Wunderlist, like Sunrise, will remain an “independent” app for now, but it’ll likely be more closely tied to Microsoft services in the future.

Here’s Wunderlist CEO Christian Reber on the company’s blog:

Over the next few months as Wunderlist becomes a part of the Microsoft family, we’ll introduce a host of new features, continue growing the ecosystem of partner integrations and progress in delivering Wunderlist to billions of people. We are excited and can’t wait to share with you what we have been working on–watch this space!

The Microsoft blog has also motivated the acquisition and shared details about pricing going forward:

The addition of Wunderlist to the Microsoft product portfolio fits squarely with our ambition to reinvent productivity for a mobile-first, cloud-first world. Building on momentum for Microsoft Office, OneNote and Skype for Business, as well as the recent Sunrise and Acompli acquisitions, it further demonstrates Microsoft’s commitment to delivering market leading mobile apps across the platforms and devices our customers use – for mail, calendaring, messaging, notes and now tasks.

And:

Customers can expect the app to remain free in all of its existing markets. There will be no price changes for Wunderlist Pro or Wunderlist for Business customers and the service will continue to support a wide range of third-party apps and integrated services.

As I tweeted yesterday, I believe Microsoft has been doing some interesting acquisitions lately and Wunderlist meets the requirements for a cross-platform app that can integrate with other apps and services. Like Sunrise, Wunderlist has an API that allows other services and developers to plug into its platform to access a user’s tasks and projects – like Slack and Scanbot. Wunderlist wanted to build an ecosystem of apps for your todo list, and it’s easy to see how Microsoft could benefit from it.

More importantly, Wunderlist already integrates with Sunrise, allowing you to see tasks alongside calendar events natively.

I’m curious to see for how long Microsoft will keep these two apps as standalone services that don’t have the Microsoft brand or only work with Microsoft services. Sunrise, for instance, also supports Todoist, one of Wunderlist’s biggest competitors. Will Microsoft keep this third-party friendly approach as it keeps controlling more apps?

Permalink

Apple Revamps App Store ‘Games’ Category with More Curated Lists→

Sarah Perez, reporting on Apple’s latest tweak to the App Store curated picks, this time for the Games category:

Apple quietly made a number of changes to the way it features and organizes mobile applications in the iTunes App Store in May that are of particular interest to mobile game developers. Previously, developers relied on algorithmically generated sections highlighting new and trending titles as a way of having their games found, but now many of these lists are gone.

Now missing are lists like “New,” “What’s Hot,” and “All iPhone (Free & Paid),” for example. In their place, including for the first time ever in the Games’ subcategory pages, are editorially curated lists instead.

Games are the App Store’s most popular category, with 18 sub-sections for different game genres. I’ve argued in favor of more human curation on the App Store in the past, and Apple seems to agree that having human editors is the best (and only?) way to highlight good content with taste and thoughtfulness.

Some developers will always find ways to work around a system where apps are highlighted through algorithms; you can’t buy your way into a curated list unless you make a good app and Apple thinks it’s worth recommending to customers. Apple still has algorithm-based sections on the App Store (Top Charts, ‘Popular Games’ on the front page), but handpicking the best software is the right thing to do in a store with about 1.5 million apps. I’m glad that we’re seeing more of this.

Permalink

The Power of the Screenshot→

Then there is keeping things to remember later. I do this quite often now for posts. Yes, I could copy & paste the text into a note-taking app, but why not just screenshot the passage? It’s so much easier to do.

The same is true with sharing things. Aside from the aforementioned textshots, I often take screenshots of Tweets/Facebooks/Instagrams/etc, and share those with others on chat apps. Again, this is actually more seamless than copying and pasting a link. It also saves time on both ends as the receiver only has to load my image, not an actual website. (Facebook may be on to something.)

MG Siegler wrote about the power and convenience of screenshots on iOS.

It’s interesting to observe how taking screenshots has evolved culturally from a tool to capture app icons or Home screens into a way to share information quickly (despite its accessibility concerns) because most web services/messaging apps make it easy to preview images. Taking screenshots is also the most popular way to save controversial tweets or Facebook posts that eventually get deleted or edited.

The only time when I don’t share screenshots of Twitter conversations or web articles is when I’m using Slack, which automatically pulls in tweets and headlines when you paste links into a thread. I guess this also says a lot about eschewing slow web views in favor of nimble inline previews.

Permalink

“Google Photos Is Gmail for Your Images”→

The information gleaned from analyzing these photos does not travel outside of this product — not today. But if I thought we could return immense value to the users based on this data I’m sure we would consider doing that. For instance, if it were possible for Google Photos to figure out that I have a Tesla, and Tesla wanted to alert me to a recall, that would be a service that we would consider offering, with appropriate controls and disclosure to the user. Google Now is a great example. When I’m late for a flight and I get a Google Now notification that my flight has been delayed I can chill out and take an extra hour, breathe deep.

Steven Levy interviewed Google’s Bradley Horowitz about Google Photos. The article includes some fascinating details on how the technology behind it could be applied in the future. (Ads aren’t part of the plan – for now. It’s easy to imagine how they could be.)

I’m currently uploading years of photos to Google’s cloud because I’m interested in their search technology. I ran some initial tests on a first batch of photos, and machine learning was indeed impressive: the service organized photos by locations and people, but more importantly it let me search for common keywords like “fireworks”, “beach”, and “pets”. This, however, could also have negative repercussions, as Casey Newton noted in his story on Google Photos:

Google’s face detection is so powerful that I’m glad you have the option to disable it. It created an amazingly comprehensive photo album of my ex-boyfriend, and instantly reliving every holiday and road trip together just by tapping his face overwhelmed me. It’s magic, yes, but it can catch you off guard. (And it’s not perfect: a colleague who tried the service discovered that Google thought his wife was at least four different people.)

Finding photos and rediscovering memories is just as important – if not more important – than managing them. I believe that machine learning and deep neural networks have a huge potential to help us organize and retrieve information we’d forget otherwise, and Google is well positioned to tackle this. If anything, Google Photos makes for a good additional backup option after iCloud Photo Library.

Permalink

How Dropbox Remains Relevant→

We think of Dropbox as a service for synching our directories, but the real value they bring is in applying a level of thoughtfulness that no one really applied to files before. A lot of that is part and parcel with storing this stuff in the cloud, which affords many user benefits—including availability of one’s files to countless third-party apps. But a lot of it is very particular to Dropbox’s superb design of the user experience.

I agree with Khoi Vinh’s assessment of Dropbox’s strengths in the era of apps and hidden filesystems. My work depends on Dropbox: all my text files are on it (through Editorial); it’s the fastest way to share images across devices (I can’t get AirDrop to work reliably between my iPhone and iPad most of the time); and, it’s the backbone of the apps I use every day to publish articles and organize my research. I could work without Dropbox and use something like OneDrive or iCloud, but my workflow would considerably suffer. I’d be slower and live with the constant fear of losing control over files or, worse, the files themselves.

I also agree with the comment on the design of Dropbox. Features like versions, shareable links, and the recent addition of comments and recent files are all powered by a tasteful design that hides complexity and makes everything seem easy and seamless. I hope Dropbox continues to remain relevant.

Permalink