Journal, a new iPhone app available today, helps users reflect and practice gratitude through journaling, which has been shown to improve wellbeing. With Journal, users can capture and write about everyday moments and special events in their lives, and include photos, videos, audio recordings, locations, and more to create rich memories. On-device machine learning provides private, personalized suggestions to inspire journal entries, and customizable notifications help users develop their writing habits. With the new Journaling Suggestions API, third-party journaling apps can also suggest moments for users to write about. Journal and the Journaling Suggestions API are available with the release of iOS 17.2.
Category: Apps
Beeper Mini is (Kinda) Back ⇢
This whole saga reminds me of when Palm tried to get the Pre to sync with iTunes back in the day.
Apple Kills Beeper Mini ⇢
It took less time than I expected, but Apple has responded to the recent news that part of iMessage had been reverse-engineered, opening the door to blue bubbles on Android. Here’s David Pierce:
A few days after the team at Beeper proudly announced a way for users to send blue-bubble iMessages directly from their Android devices without any weird relay servers, and about 24 hours after it became clear Apple had taken steps to shut that down, Apple has shared its take on the issue.
iMessage Reverse-Engineered for Android Users ⇢
The folks behind Beeper — in partnership with a high-school student — have reverse-engineered Apple’s iMessage system and have shipped it in an Android app. Here’s a bit from the Beeper blog:
Now you can send and receive blue bubble texts from your phone number. As soon as you install Beeper Mini, your Android phone number will be blue instead of green when your iPhone friends text you. It’s easy to join iPhone-only group chats, since people can add your phone number instead of your email address. All chat features like typing status, read receipts, full resolution images/video, emoji reactions, voice messages, editing, un-sending, and more are supported.
Kino ⇢
The folks behind Halide are making a new video capture app for the iPhone, named Kino. What Halide is to RAW photos, Kino should be for log video.
The Future of Castro ⇢
After the very bad week the Castro app had, there’s a new blog post up sharing more details:
First and foremost, we sincerely apologize for the app downtime and any distress it has caused. Initially, we had believed it was a quick backend fix, but unfortunately, the issues turned out to be more complex than anticipated, requiring extensive work.
During this time, there were rumors circulating about Castro’s future. We want to make it clear that any communication or publication regarding the app’s future is not official and does not represent Castro’s views.
Castro on the Outstro?
Castro has been a popular iOS podcast app for many years, but right now things look grim.
The cloud database that backs the service is broken and needs to be replaced. As a result, the app has broken. (You can’t even export subscriptions out of it, because even that function apparently relies on the cloud database.) “The team is in the progress of setting up a database replacement, which might take some time. We aim to have this completed ASAP,” said an Xtweet from @CastroPodcasts.
Bridges ⇢
Bridges is a new app out by Jonathan Ruiz, designed to collect, organize and then use links. It’s great for creating collections that you want to share later on social media, in a blog post or in the notes for a podcast episode. It’s a one-time purchase of $3.99 for the iOS and iPadOS app, and the Mac app is the same price. No subscriptions. Check out Ruiz’s blog post for more.
Breaking 50 Million Home Screens ⇢
This week’s Under the Radar includes an absolutely bonkers story from Underscore. I’m sure the situation was wildly stressful, but it made for some great podcasting.
Word Turns 40 ⇢
From its humble beginnings, Word has gone on to become one of the most popular office tools in the world, and pretty much everyone is familiar with it in one way or another. So, to celebrate its 40th birthday, we decided to take a look at how we got here and also share where we’re going.
Tonya and I have a long history with Word. Although we primarily used WriteNow at Cornell University during our undergraduate years from 1985 through 1989, we often helped users with Word while working in Cornell University’s public computer rooms. Two years after we graduated, a college friend of Tonya’s encouraged her to apply for a job at Microsoft. She was hired and spent the next two years doing phone and online support for Word 4 and Word 5. (So many people considered Word 5 to be the pinnacle of the app’s history that Tonya later penned two April Fools’ spoof articles about it: “ Microsoft Word 5.1 for Mac OS X,” 1 April 2003, and “ Microsoft Word 5.1 Returns… to the iPad,” 1 April 2011.) She also helped edit the manual for Word 6, Microsoft’s first attempt at a cross-platform version. I applied for a position as a Word program manager and got an interview but was not offered the job due to my lack of design skills, a rejection I took as a compliment, given my low opinion of Word’s interface.
Generative AI Fill in Photoshop Feels Like Magic
A few years ago, I took a Halloween photo that I really like. It’s of my wife Merri, dressed as a hot dog:
I recently wanted to use it as a wallpaper on my iPhone, but its landscape nature didn’t really play nicely with the modern lock screen.1 Then I remembered that Photoshop has a bunch of AI tools, and after some tinkering with its generative fill feature, I had something that worked pretty well:
Teaching Cyberdog New Tricks ⇢
Cameron Kaiser has written the most in-depth article I’ve ever read about Apple’s long-defunct Cyberdog product. The dive into OpenDoc is just a sweet bonus.