This week Federico and Myke clear house with some of the remaining stories and interesting tidbits from E3. They also have an extended look at what games they’ve been playing recently.
A lot of links and interesting reads in the show notes. Also, Myke reviews Tomodachi Life, Nintendo’s quirky new life simulator for the 3DS. Get the episode here.
Andy Baio shares thoughts (with mockups) on what he’d like to see on the App Store for social recommendations:
My hope is that Apple, and every other app store, can take a page from the last decade of the social web. Give its users a public identity, an incentive to share what they love, and the ability to find and follow others like them.
These are some interesting ideas – especially for indie game developers – and I agree. Social recommendations and “developer notifications” could drive significant traffic to apps recommended by people you trust (your friends) or developers you trust (the ones that make apps you already use), albeit with a different set of questions (how many notifications do you want to receive? How often? From which developers?).
I also think, though, that before social recommendations Apple needs to educate users on the idea of sharing quality apps/games and recommending them to their friends. In this regard, I believe that Explore is going to be an important addition: curated collections and sub-categories will help in communicating the richness and quality of selected App Store content that can be lost in the Top Charts that most people see as an indication of “what’s cool”.
Writing at AnandTech, Joshua Ho details the manual camera controls that iOS 8 will add for third-party developers:
For the longest time, iOS had almost no camera controls at all. There would be a toggle for HDR, a toggle to switch to the front-facing camera, and a toggle to switch to video recording mode. The only other tool that was accessible would be the AE/AF lock. This meant that you had to hope that the exposure and focus would be correct, because there was no direct method of adjusting these things. Anyone that paid attention to the WWDC 2014 keynote would’ve heard maybe a few sentences about manual camera controls. Despite the short mention in the keynote, this is a massive departure from the previously all-auto experience.
From Apple’s description:
The AVFoundation framework makes it easier than ever for users to take great photos. Your app can take direct control over the camera focus, white balance, and exposure settings. Your app can also use bracketed exposure captures to automatically capture images with different exposure settings.
This means that, for developers, it’ll be easier than ever to build alternative, (possibly) pro-oriented camera apps without writing those controls manually as they will be exposed in the official APIs. It’s a big change.
Combined with the ability to delete photos from the Camera Roll and save edits back to the original files, Apple is making third-party camera apps first-class citizens of iPhone photography, which should result in better photos, more available storage, and a more fluid experience.
Brian X. Chen, writing for The New York Times about the effect of iOS 7’s Activation Lock on iPhone thefts:
For several years, cellphone theft has been a growing epidemic worldwide. But the police in New York, San Francisco and London say they are finally starting to see a dip in thefts of one of the most popular smartphones.
The reason? The attorney general of New York, Eric T. Schneiderman, and the district attorney of San Francisco, George Gascón, share the theory that phone thefts are dropping because of Apple’s addition of a so-called kill switch, a type of antitheft technology, in its iPhone in September.
This is great news, and I would like to see Apple push Find My iPhone even more in the future. I’m surprised every time someone tells me they don’t know what iCloud or Find My iPhone can do, or that a stolen iPhone can be visualized through the Find My iPhone web interface. It’s good to know that Apple’s tech is working and that more companies are adopting kill switches for mobile devices.
With summer here, the boys stay cool with topics ranging from Apple’s “new” iMac, Handoff and the Amazon Fire Phone.
On this week’s episode of The Prompt, we also cover features in the Messages app for iOS 8 that are reminiscent of WhatsApp, and I’m taught a lesson about buying groceries on Amazon. Get the episode here.
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Starting today, you can share and view animated GIFs on http://t.co/wJD8Fp317i, Android and iPhone. http://t.co/XBrAbOm4Ya— Twitter Support (@Support) June 18, 2014
Finally.
Animated GIFs will be shared with the same pic.twitter.com links the service uses for its native image uploads, and they will be animated inline.
Right now, clicking a pic.twitter.com GIF link in Tweetbot doesn’t open the GIF but redirects to the same tweet. It’s not clear at this point whether GIFs are supported in the Twitter API and if third-party developers will be able to display animated GIFs in their Twitter clients soon. Read more
May: 2014, Susan Kare walks us through some key points regarding the design of icons and symbols. Kare is an artist and designer and pioneer of pixel art; she created many of the graphical interface elements for the original Apple Macintosh in the 1980s as a key member of the Mac software design team, and continued to work as Creative Director at NeXT for Steve Jobs.
A great talk by Susan Kare at EG Conference, especially because of how she reflects on limitations and constraints of icon designs that occurr over time in spite of technology becoming more powerful. And I loved the anecdotes and photos of the original Macintosh icons and fonts.
Cassidee Moser writes about Hopscotch, a coding app for iPad:
Turbine Truck is a small iPad game made up of very basic mechanics. Players guide a cartoon truck across a 2D plane, smashing into as many oncoming cars as possible while evading the police. It lacks complexity and isn’t necessarily a grueling test of skill, but Turbine Truck remains notable for one reason: it was created by a child using Hopscotch, an iOS app with its own visual programming language used to teach kids the basics of coding and programming.
Hopscotch is impressive, and you should check it out on the App Store.
Here’s a strategy that you might consider trying: Prepare some tools which can, at the moment you’re ready, put all those tabs exactly where you need them so you can close those tabs. If most of those tabs are really your to-do list, line them up in one window and then get them into your actual to-do list. I’ve found that if your tools are easy to use, you’ll be more likely to make it a part of your routine.
Justin Lancy has created a great collection of tools to export browser tabs on a Mac. These tools include AppleScripts and downloadable Alfred and LaunchBar extensions, and they support apps like Evernote, OmniFocus, and Reminders – for both Safari and Chrome.
I have installed the Alfred extension to export a list of tabs to Evernote, and it works very well. Check out Justin’s tools for browser tabs here.