Dante D’Orazio:
The third-party iOS keyboard brings the past to life, and is complete with authentic iPod scrolling sounds. Fancy. Now you, too, can scroll through one letter at a time as you compose your next great tweet. Even better, the keyboard includes all of those hundreds of emoji included in iOS 8.3. Just keep on scrolling, you’ll find those dancing sisters eventually.
This keyboard is kind of the opposite of this idea:
Jason Snell:
They’re going to collide eventually. iOS is on track for version 9 this year, and if Apple continues incrementing OS X versions, we’ll be heading for 10.11. And, again barring any change in philosophy, in the summer of 2016 we’ll be talking about iOS 10 and OS X and things will get weird.
But this is an era where Apple appears to be amenable to change on many fronts. Tacking the lowercase letter i on the front of product names appears to be a thing of the past—hello, Apple Watch. (And while it would be bold for Apple to change the name of iOS to Apple OS, I can’t see it—it’s powering the iPhone and iPad, and those names aren’t changing anytime soon.)
Sam Soffes, the developer behind the new Redacted for Mac shares the number of downloads that the app had, while being the 8th top paid app in the US and top paid in app in Graphics category:
It’s pretty nuts that 59 sales is top paid on the Mac App Store in the US.
Ouch.
The Mac App Store has seen a lot of top-tier developers leave over the years, but this number is just pathetic. Clearly consumers aren’t using the Store in any meaningful way either.
Federico Viticci:
For some Apple observers, it’d be easy – and justifiable – to argue that Apple is “done” with improving iOS given the software’s maturity and sprawling app ecosystem. With long-awaited technologies such as action extensions, widgets, custom keyboards, folders for iCloud, and external document providers finding their way to iPhones and iPads, iOS has seemingly reached a zenith of functionality, an ideal state with no low-hanging fruit left to lust for.
Well, this is interesting:
Applebot is the web crawler for Apple, used by products including Siri and Spotlight Suggestions. It respects customary robots.txt rules and robots meta tags. It originates in the 17.0.0.0 net block.
User-agent strings will contain “Applebot” together with additional agent information. For example:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10 10 1) AppleWebKit/600.2.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0.2 Safari/600.2.5 (Applebot/0.1)
If robots instructions don’t mention Applebot but do mention Googlebot, the Apple robot will follow Googlebot instructions.
Craig Hockenberry writes about the dumpster fire that is Apple’s new networking subsystem. If you’ve been having network issues, discoveryd is probably the root of the problem.
There have been two interesting Watch-releated links to make the rounds the last day or so:
Every major release of OS X and iOS has brought a revision to Apple’s HIG, and with Apple Watch, the company has spun off a new version of it just for the wearable.
Band Design Guidelines for Apple Watch »
Turns out, Apple is going to allow other companies to make Watch bands. This document is an interesting read, and be sure to check out the dimensional drawings for the two sizes of Watch.
Sarah Perez at TechCrunch:
There aren’t a lot details being offered about the analytics service’s feature set at this time, but Apple says the service will offer developers the ability to track how often customers visit an app’s page on the App Store, find out how many users open the app over time, check on app and in-app purchase sales, create custom campaign links and follow the success of marketing campaigns, and understand which websites refer the most users.
With iOS and OS X on an annual release cycle, some Apple watchers have expressed a desire for a “Snow Leopard” moment this year.
But what does that phrase even mean? How does it apply today, six years after Mac OS X Snow Leopard was announced?
Released in 2009, Mac OS X Snow Leopard will best be remembered by this slide at its announcement:
That “0 new features” slide doesn’t tell the whole story, however.
Apple:
Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2015 second quarter ended March 28, 2015. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $58 billion and quarterly net profit of $13.6 billion, or $2.33 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $45.6 billion and net profit of $10.2 billion, or $1.66 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 40.8 percent compared to 39.3 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 69 percent of the quarter’s revenue.
Apple has updated its guidelines for marketing App Store apps. There are some real gems concerning Apple Watch:
Apple Watch is awkward to talk about, much less write about. Apple’s removal of articles before their product names isn’t anything new, but the whole collection business is a new world of hurt.
Scarlett Kilcooley-O’Halloran, writing for Vogue:
“We don’t think about what we do in those terms,” said Ive. “Our focus has been doing our very best to create a product that’s useful. When we started on the iPhone it was because we all couldn’t bear our phones. The watch was different. We all loved our watches, but saw that the wrist was a fabulous place for technology, so there were different motivations. I don’t know how we can compare the old watches we know, with the functionality and the capability of the Apple Watch.”