This week, Stephen, Myke and Federico talk about some Italian history, TeleText’s current state in Sweden and then answer listener questions.
Q&A episodes are always fun, and you can listen to this week’s Connected here.
Speaking of Connected, we launched our new t-shirts earlier today. I love the new design – longtime listeners will instantly get the inside joke – and we’re doing a limited run. Get yours here and make sure to beta test it for a few weeks before any judgement.
Ahead of the Apple Watch release next month, Apple has begun approving the first wave of Watch apps from a selected group of developers. Here’s Juli Clover, reporting for MacRumors:
As of today, several popular iOS apps have been updated with built-in Apple Watch apps, including Evernote, Dark Sky, Things, and Target.
Additional apps with Apple Watch support will be rolling out over the course of the day, giving us a first look at how many of the apps on the device will function. We’ll be updating this post with a list of Apple Watch apps that are available as they come out in the App Store.
See iDownloadBlog for a running list of the updated apps.
I received two Watch app updates on my iPhone – Evernote and Lifesum. In both cases, the apps are indicative of the kind of functionality that will be enabled in the initial group of Apple Watch apps. Evernote will let you dictate new notes, view existing ones, set reminders and receive notifications, and even search for notes in your account. Lifesum will bring “simple” food tracking to your wrist, plus suggestions, exercise reminders, and daily tips to live healthy. I’m curious to see how iPhone apps will bring a subset of their functionality to the Watch, and especially how quickly I’ll find a balance between useful notifications and annoying interruptions.
I also think timing is interesting. For the first time in several years, a new Apple product will be reviewed by people who have access to third-party apps from the App Store. When the iPhone launched, there was no App Store; when the iPad launched, reviewers didn’t have access to public downloads from the iPad App Store.
That won’t be the case with Apple Watch, and this is a clever choice from Apple. Because the Watch is many things, it needs apps to offer a more complete picture of its potential. By approving the first Watch apps this week, reviewers (and customers at the try-on sessions in the retail stores) will get access to a selection of third-party apps that can show how the Watch will integrate in everyday life through the apps they already use.
Smart move, and good timing.
Nice Instapaper update released today: the app’s extension has been sped up (again), Instant Sync has been added (it uses silent notifications on iOS to fetch new articles in the background), and you can now get through your read-later list with speed reading. I’ve never been a fan of speed reading, but I like how Betaworks integrated it as a feature inside Instapaper. The extension is much faster in the new version, and it seems to be on par with the speed of Pocket’s share extension.
Along the lines of integration, Instapaper 6.2 also lets you generate textshots for Twitter directly from the app. There are some excellent touches in how Instapaper handled textshots: they’re generated via software (so you won’t end up with images cluttering the Camera Roll) and they preserve the current font and theme selection.
Furthermore, Instapaper also attempts to guess the best aspect ratio to avoid truncation on Twitter. All this, I think, makes it one of the finest implementations of textshots to date. Bonus points for making it easy to tweet a text selection with the Share button of the copy & paste menu.
Betaworks keeps doing good work on Instapaper. Version 6.2 is available now on the App Store.
Periscope, Twitter’s latest acquisition, has launched today on the App Store. For those who haven’t been following the news, Periscope is a company that Twitter bought before the rise in popularity of Meerkat, a live streaming app. Periscope also lets you live stream video from your iPhone, but, according to early reviews, it’s cleaner, faster, and obviously more integrated with Twitter’s social graph – which was unceremoniously cut off from Meerkat.
Mat Honan has a good story on Periscope:
Fire up the app, launch the camera, and the app tweets out a message (if you want it to) that you have gone live. Simultaneously, a notification fires off — with that little look-at-me whistle — to everyone following you on Periscope. As they join in, they can comment on what you’re doing. And because it has super-low lag time — or latency, to use the term of art — people watching can comment on your actions more or less as they happen. It means that people watching the video can change the course of what’s happening. They can chime in with questions or comments, and all the while tap-tap-tap on the screen to send a stream of hearts to the broadcaster. Don’t want comments? Fine, you can turn them off. If you choose, you can let the video live on Persicope’s servers afterwards, where it will stay for 24 hours before disappearing forever. Or you can choose to let your video be purely ephemeral, living only in the moment and then gone forever. It is delightfully fun.
Joanna Stern’s article, however, really hit close to home for me:
Maybe I should be thankful. Periscope’s biggest promise lies in those times when life is far from boring. Whether it be a breaking news situation or a friend’s traumatic experience, there are times when peeking in and watching a live story unfold makes the most sense. While it’s bound to be abused, this new way of communicating could bring us closer than any photo or recorded video could.
I experienced that this week. My friend Drew Olanoff, who has been suffering from Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, just had a stem-cell transplant. He’s been using Periscope to stream (or “‘scope”) from his hospital room, updating his friends and followers on his progress. Every day, he shows the board that lists his blood stats and flips the camera around—by tapping on the screen—so we can see how he looks.
Like Joanna, I don’t know if my life is exciting enough to warrant a daily dose of live streams. But then again, before Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, most of us didn’t think we’d be inclined to share so much about our daily lives either. Reading how Drew is using Periscope reminds me of when I was stuck there doing a stem cell transplant, and how I wished I could update all my friends and readers at once in a simple, natural way. Sure, I could send selfies to different iMessage threads and I could tweet text and pictures, but the idea of a real-time live stream is much more powerful. And Periscope is pretty cool: I came across some questionable streams in the Home tab, but the app is fast, polished, and, indeed, a window into the world of others.
Live streaming isn’t new. But this new take on the category – fast, integrated, mobile – comes at an interesting time. Periscope is free on the App Store.
Fun, polished new app by Mike Rundle: Filters is a photo editor for iPhone that includes over 800 effects, filters, textures, and overlays. Normally, I wouldn’t be interested in this type of app and I would say that 800 options are too much, but I like how Rundle structured navigation inside the app and how you can freely experiment, compare edits with the original photo, and save favorite filters for quick access.
I’ve spent a few minutes playing with the app today, and while I won’t use all of the filters it offers, I enjoyed looking at options (there are some great ones) and the little touches in the UI (Rundle is the designer and developer of the app, and this integration shows). Benjamin Mayo has a good review over at 9to5Mac.
Also: Filters is $0.99, with no In-App Purchases or other social gimmicks. Recommended.
Fun new app by Instagram, designed to create photo collages. From the company’s blog:
Today we’re announcing Layout from Instagram, a new app that lets you easily combine multiple photos into a single image. It’s fun, it’s simple and it gives you a new way to flex your creativity.
After Hyperlapse, Instagram continues to build dedicated utilities without cluttering the main Instagram experience (which has already gotten more complex over the years). I’d argue that photo collages are more mainstream than slow-motion videos, and Layout seems to lack the impressive technical feats of Hyperlapse. It’s polished, intuitive, and I like how it simplifies controls for resizing and mirroring, but it doesn’t showcase any breakthrough technology. It doesn’t need to, though, considering the popularity of slightly more complicated collage apps such as Diptic.
Nathan Ingraham writes at The Verge:
Layout is a determinedly simple app — choose your pictures, choose your layout, and make a few quick adjustments. That’s all it does, and its designers are happy to admit it. Even as Instagram’s flagship app has gotten more flexible, adding more granular editing tools to the filters it first became known for, the company wants to keep advanced techniques like Hyperlapse and collages in their own apps.
Curious to see if this will take off (my friends will be a fascinating testing ground).
Smart take by Craig Hockenberry on the rumor that Apple may be using an OLED display in the Watch:
I’ve always felt that the flattening of Apple’s user interface that began in iOS 7 was as much a strategic move as an aesthetic one. Our first reaction was to realize that an unadorned interface makes it easier to focus on content.
But with this new display technology, it’s clear that interfaces with fewer pixels have another advantage. A richly detailed button from iOS 6 would need more of that precious juice strapped to our wrists. Never underestimate the long-term benefits of simplification.
Another possible argument that would explain Apple’s long-term vision for the iOS 7 redesign.
Earlier today, Twitter announced that Foursquare will soon power location tagging across the company’s suite of apps. In a video shared today, Twitter showed how location data by Foursquare will be embedded into Twitter for iPhone to allow users to tag specific places instead of using Twitter’s previous (coordinate-based) location database.
Coming soon! We’re working with @foursquare so you can tag specific locations in Tweets: https://t.co/MwlLz5Pfvq pic.twitter.com/jATzXvbuV6
— Twitter (@twitter) March 23, 2015
This is an interesting move for a couple of reasons. First off, Twitter has chosen to rely on a third-party for a precise database of places instead of building its own from scratch – and they cleverly picked Foursquare, which has amassed an impressive collection of 65 million places in six years. I’m curious to see if Twitter will use this newfound power to enhance ads and offers on the service (imagine Foursquare-powered deals available in a Twitter card).
Second, Twitter needs to improve their local discovery features. With a richer collection of places, Twitter could unlock previously unseen contextual, local features that wouldn’t be possible with simple coordinates (think venues like concerts and museums or spots like a cafe in Rome).
Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley writes:
In addition to building the world’s most accurate place database, we’ve learned how to see buildings the way our phones see them — as shapes and sensor readings on the ground rather than boxes viewed from space. We’ve built software that can understand when people move through, stop within, and then move on from these shapes — whether the shapes are places, neighborhoods or cities. And we’ve built search and recommendation algorithms that get smarter as they learn about the shapes you choose to spend time in and the shapes you simply pass through. You’ll hear us talk about these things as “stop detection,” “snap-to-place,” “the Pilgrim engine” — they’re the pieces that make us confident that no matter where you’re standing in the world — whether it’s your own neighborhood or a far-away city you’re visiting for the first time — we can raise your awareness of the best experiences nearby and help you find places you’ll love.
Smart move from Twitter, and long overdue.
Steven Levy, writing at BackChannel on the upcoming Becoming Steve Jobs:
Though I have even less reason than Schlender to claim that ours was anything but a professional relationship, I believe I did get to see Steve as the man in full described in Becoming Steve Jobs. Though as with Schlender, Jobs and I had differences due to the diverging agendas of reporter and subject, we saw eye to eye on many things, including the amazing transformation that technology had on society, the importance of clear, simple design, and the greatness of Bob Dylan. And I am very thankful that, unlike Schlender (whose baffling refusal to see Jobs one last time seems to be tied to unique circumstances regarding not just journalism, but the writer’s health issues), I was able to properly say goodbye to Jobs in the last year of his life. Taking all this into account, I believe that Schlender and Tetzeli have indeed captured elements of Steve Jobs not found in the official biography.
