Category: Apps

I had a very rocky experience with iCloud Photo Library in late 2015:

I imported my photos and uploaded my 70GB photo library to iCloud. Everything went very smoothly, so I turned on iCloud Photo Library on my iPad.

Aaaaaand it all exploded.

Apple Support eventually got me up and running, but it took a while for me to fully trust the system.

The reality is that iCloud Photo Library is pretty great when everything is working smoothly.¹ Photos show up on my devices quickly, regardless if I snapped them with my iPhone or imported them from an SD card on my iMac.

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Screens, my favorite VNC client for the Mac, has been updated to version 4.0.

The update brings the Mac app up to date with its iOS cousin, supporting features like Curtain Mode to hide your remote actions from a user who is physically with the controlled computer and one-click passwords.

Screens 4 includes drag-and-drop file sharing and Touch Bar support as well.

Screens is available on the Mac App Store, directly on the developer’s website and on Setapp.

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This is good news, but that cut is still going to be felt as fewer and fewer apps use the paid-upfront model.

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Holy moly.

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One of macOS’ best tricks is the ability to print anything to a PDF. This is accessible from any system print dialog box:

Apps can put their own items in that services menu, but selecting “Save as PDF…” will let you pick which folder you to save your newly-minted PDF to.

Most of the time, I’m creating a PDF with this method to upload to something like Freshbooks. I just want to save my receipt to the Desktop as quickly as possible. Waiting for the Open/Save window just slows me down.

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Update: Apple “clarified” its position a few days later.

A few hours ago, Apple emailed members of its iTunes Affiliate program:

Starting on May 1st 2017, commissions for all app and in-app content will be reduced from 7% to 2.5% globally. All other content types (music, movies, books, and TV) will remain at the current 7% commission rate in all markets. We will also continue to pay affiliate commissions on Apple Music memberships so there are many ways to earn commissions with the program.

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Apple has introduced a JavaScript library to play Live Photos on the web:

By including the LivePhotosKit JS script on your page, you can create players by simply adding declarative markup to your HTML. As the page loads, LivePhotosKit JS will determine what player instances are on the page and initialize them. You can use any HTML tag that supports child nodes.

At minimum, each tag requires the following data attribute: data-live-photo. Doing this allows LivePhotosKit JS to find the DOM elements to be initialized as players.

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One of my favorite indie Mac development studios is celebrating twenty years in the business: Here’s Cabel Sasser:

No, your eyes do not deceive you. Some of you may not know that we founded our company in 1997, but it’s true. We’re older than Facebook, older than Twitter, older than Google, and somehow still kickin’.

Every year is a little different, and last year was for sure — a little bit quieter on the software front (at least publicly), and a whole lot louder on the launch-of-a-major-multi-platform-video-game front.

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To celebrate Autism Acceptance month, the iOS App Store team has put together a new collection:

Now more than ever, autistic people can share their voices with the world. With the help of amazing apps, they can learn, play, and communicate. Through the power of books and podcasts, they can tell their stories. During Autism Acceptance Month, we celebrate how their unique experiences enrich us all.

This is great. Not only will it be a helpful resource for those in this community, but for us outside of it as well to learn more about it. I love seeing Apple do stuff like this.

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You should read this article by Federico Viticci:

Workflow as an app is an incredibly good acquisition for Apple, but there’s a deeper subtext here. Workflow represents a movement from a large number of users who enjoy working from iOS devices so much, they want to optimize the experience as much as possible. Workflow’s goal wasn’t to merely provide a capable alternative to the Mac’s AppleScript and Automator; Workflow wanted to eclipse legacy scripting environments and usher iOS users into a new era of mobile automation. There’s the Workflow app and team – technically impressive and absolutely talented – and there’s the bigger theme behind Workflow.

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First released as part of iOS 9.3, Night Shift slowly shifts the color temperature of your screen to be warmer as the evening goes on. Some claim that this may help you sleep better, as blue light is harsher and can disrupt your sleep cycle, but the science is out on that.

I don’t know if it actually doing anything helpful, but I’ve enjoyed Night Shift on my iPhone and iPad over the last year. I often am wrapping up the day one of these two devices pretty close to bedtime, and I find the warmer tones pleasing. It may be the placebo effect, but using up a device without — ahem, watchOS team — is jarring.

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Matthew Panzarino, writing at TechCrunch:

Apple has finalized a deal to acquire Workflow today — a tool that lets you hook together apps and functions within apps in strings of commands to automate tasks. We’ve been tracking this one for a while but were able to confirm just now that the ink on the deal is drying as we speak.

Workflow itself has been acquired, and is now free on the iOS App Store. The team behind it, led by Ari Weinstein, will be working for Apple.

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