Category: Apps

On June 19, Twitter has said it will be disabling “streaming services,” which is how third-party apps like Tweetbot and Twitterrific can stream the timeline and send push notifications. The replacement, the Account Activity API is not available to third-party developers:

The new Account Activity API is currently in beta testing, but third-party developers have not been given access and time is running out.

With access we might be able to implement some push notifications, but they would be limited at the standard level to 35 Twitter accounts – our products must deliver notifications to hundreds of thousands of customers. No pricing has been given for Enterprise level service with unlimited accounts – we have no idea if this will be an affordable option for us and our users.

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Well, this is fun.

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Caroline Haskins, writing at The Outline, gets into why some weather apps seem to get things wrong so often:

Thousands of these events occur around the world each day, and there isn’t the human infrastructure to provide individual attention to each event.

This means that a large portion of weather forecasts on apps end up being dictated by computer models, which can’t explain their reasons for making a forecast. Users have no way of knowing whether their local forecast has been reviewed by a human.

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One of today’s announcements is that Pages can now be used for ebook creation, both on the Mac and on iOS.

The Pages update is out now, and I took the new Mac version for a spin. It’s pretty basic at this point.

It cannot open my iBooks Author file for my book on the iMac G3 and history of Mac OS X. I’m not super surprised by that, but as the future of iBooks Author is unknown, I’d like a way to know I can edit this file using Pages in the future.

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Craig Hockenberry has pointed out that today marks a decade since Apple first published the iPhone SDK for download by developers:

I don’t think it’s an understatement to say that this release changed a lot of people’s lives. I know it changed mine and had a fundamental impact on this company’s business. So let’s take a moment and look back on what happened a decade ago.

This blog post was a real joy to explore.

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The Rogue Amoeba staff:

Today, our internet radio tool Nicecast is being retired from active development. Nicecast is no longer available for purchase, and we do not plan any further updates. Nicecast will be supported on MacOS 10.10 through 10.13 until the end of 2018, after which it will be fully deprecated.

Nicecast has been around since 2003, and was designed to make it easy to stream audio to the web. The initial case of pirate Internet radio stations has all but died off, but many, many podcasters (including us at Relay FM) still use the app to stream shows live via our Icecast server. I’d love to see Rogue Amoeba roll that ability into Audio Hijack.

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Marco Arment:

Developing Apple Watch apps is extremely frustrating and limited for one big reason: unlike on iOS, Apple doesn’t give app developers access to the same watchOS frameworks that they use on Apple Watch.

Instead, we’re only allowed to use WatchKit, a baby UI framework that would’ve seemed rudimentary to developers even in the 1990s. But unlike the iPhone’s web apps, WatchKit doesn’t appear to be a stopgap — it seems to be Apple’s long-term solution to third-party app development on the Apple Watch.

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Alto’s Odyssey, the sequel to one of my all-time favorite iOS games is out today. I’ve played it for about an hour this morning, and I have to say, it’s really wonderful. It takes all the good things about the original and makes them better. I think you’ll love it; I know I do.

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Holy smokes:

For the full Twitter experience on Mac, visit Twitter on web. ???? https://t.co/fuPJa3nVky

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) February 16, 2018

I’m glad Twitter got rid of all of the Nazis and Russian bots on their platform before this.

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2018 will bring a bunch of new emoji, including a pirate flag! Emojipedia has posted some ideas on how these images may look. THAT LEG IS FREAKING ME OUT.

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Jeremy Burge had written up what seems to be an on-going change when it comes to iOS apps and how developers can use Apple’s emoji set:

It’s understandable there is much confusion about this right now, especially as the Apple Color Emoji font until now has been treated by many as a font like any other. If this is thought about as “a set of images created and owned by Apple”, the terms for what seems reasonable do shift.

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An unnamed writer, publishing as Instapaper on Tumblr: ¹

On January 28, 2008, Marco Arment announced a new side project called Instapaper. Ten years and billions of articles later, we’re thrilled to be helping our readers learn, research and experience the Internet removed from the typical distractions.

First, we want to thank all of our users. Whether you’ve been around since the Marco days, joined us when betaworks took over the development or signed up after our acquisition by Pinterest, thank you! We wouldn’t be anywhere without you, and we look forward to incorporating your requests into our 2018 updates.

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