This week, we throw themselves a selfie parade and I read an ancient Apple support document. Federico, Myke and I break down the rumors around Beats and iOS 8 on the iPad.
Don’t miss the After Dark, in which we try to pick a show title.
Sponsored by PDF Pen Scan +, by Smile
If the Mac App Store isn’t irrelevant to power users now, the time is quickly coming. Apple’s restrictions have strangled it.
Mark Gurman:
iOS 8 is likely to supercharge the functionality of Apple’s iPad with a new split-screen multitasking feature, according to sources with knowledge of the enhancement in development. These people say that the feature will allow iPad users to run and interact with two iPad applications at once. Up until now, each iPad application either developed by Apple or available on the App Store is only usable individually in a full-screen view.
I’m all for this feature, as long as it is easy to use.
While I think there are issues with split-screen apps on tablets, I think people can adjust. Things like keyboard focus may be weird at first, but it’s nothing that hasn’t been a problem on desktop UIs since the Lisa.
I would love to have a text document open next to a browser on my iPad. One reason I don’t use it much for writing is that moving between apps is slow. Even if iOS 8 doesn’t bring better inner-app communication, being able to see more will let many work faster on their tablets.
Gurman continues:
The feature is said to be designed with the 9.7-inch iPad display in mind, and it is unclear if the feature will work on the smaller-screened iPad mini. The feature is said to work exclusively in landscape mode, which allows for increased screen space. The feature may also be key to a larger-screened iPad, which Apple is actively developing for a launch either later this year or in 2015.
Differentiating iPad models by software would be new for Apple.
All Macs can run the same software, with the same functionality, except at the very high end of things. It is important to remember that iOS does fragment across devices of various ages, but a move like this is unprecedented. I’m not sure making the iPad mini a second-class citizen is the best idea.
Apple is gearing up to incorporate Near Field Communication (NFC) technology in the iPhone 6, according to a report from BrightWire citing sources familiar with the matter. The report also notes that Apple has struck a deal with China UnionPay to integrate the banking company’s services into Passbook and elsewhere.
Here’s Eric Slivka in March 2013:
China Times reports [Google translation, via Mac Otakara] that Taiwanese chip firm Chipbond has been selected to provide a number of components for the iPhone 5S, including the touch display driver as well as chips to support fingerprint sensor and near field communications (NFC) capabilities. The report suggests that Apple will use the fingerprint sensor functionality to enhance the security of NFC features such as mobile payments.
9to5Mac reports that it has reanalyzed the previously-obtained hardware code dump for Apple’s next-generation iPhone prototypes and discovered that the code makes reference to hardware components supporting near field communication (NFC) capabilities.
Following conflicting rumors about whether the iPhone 4S would include near field communication (NFC) technology (rumors that were eventually decided in the negative), Digitimes reports that Apple is indeed one of the vendors still expected to introduce NFC-enabled operating system software (and thus hardware) in 2012. Apple’s inclusion of NFC in next year’s iPhone would appear to come as part of a tipping point for the technology, with the technology’s prevalence in the smartphone industry set to increase from about 10% to over 50% in the span of two to three years.
Here’s Arnold Kim in January 2011:
According to this source, Apple has already made prototype payment terminals intended for small businesses to scan NFC-enabled iPhones and iPads. These terminals could be subsidized or even given away to encourage adoption.
Apple has been hiring NFC experts as well as applied for several patents on the technology. A couple of previous reports have also pegged the next generation iPhone as having NFC technology built in.
Apple’s interest in Near Field Communication (NFC), the short-range wireless technology that supports such services as “tap and go” credit card payments, has been well-established, but a new report claims that Apple maybe be planning to include the technology in the fifth-generation iPhone to allow Mac users to essentially keep a portable version of their Mac on their iPhone and wirelessly allow any compatible Mac to run as if it was their own Mac.
How marvelous is the tiny marble on which we live and die.
I’ve written about the week our son was diagnosed with brain cancer a couple of times.
In 2011, I outlined the two years of treatments Josiah received after his diagnosis. A month after publishing the piece I trespassed to visit his old hospital room, an event that will forever be linked to my longterm battle with depression.
Josiah finished chemotherapy almost four years ago, and his MRIs since then have been stable.
Stable is a funny word. Unlike some cancer patients, Josiah’s tumor can’t be shrunk by treatment. It’s more or less the same size as it was after his initial operation five years ago.
In fact, today marks the five-year anniversary of Josiah’s tumor being found. His pediatrician sent us for an ultrasound after voicing a concern about his head circumference, and the next day we were told to drive to across town to the children’s hospital without taking the time to go home and pack a bag first.
That frantic drive kicked off not only a weekend of MRIs and surgery, but a journey that our family is still on.
Five years is a big deal. When people talk about survival rates in cancer circles, five years is the timeframe usually in question.
When Josiah was diagnosed, the doctors weren’t able to give us a survival rate. What he has is just too rare, they said. There were too many unknowns.
In a way, this lack of information provided a type of freedom. While Josiah’s cancer is certainly life-threatening, but not having a number to think about all the time is a weird blessing. Coupled with how well he’s done over the last couple of years, I sometimes forget about the whole thing.
I don’t know what the future holds. While the last half-decade has been full of mostly (relative) good news, I know that may not always be the case.
For now, however, I can look back over the five years and lose count of the ways Josiah has surpassed every estimate and projection doctors have made. The boy who wasn’t supposed to walk can ride a bike. The boy who wasn’t going to be able to see out of both eyes can run and jump. The tumor that was supposed to grow again hasn’t yet.
The anniversaries keep rolling around, and we keep getting years with our son to treasure.
I know we’re the lucky ones. I’ve seen way too many child-sized coffins over the last five years. Josiah has lost too many friends to this thing. So, while today we celebrate, I always come back to the old mantra:
Fuck cancer.
While Apple is clearly trying to make Macs work more like iOS devices, I hate the way that OS X Mavericks changed the way the Mac’s power button works on most machines.
If you want to keep the power button from immediately putting your computer to sleep, this article should make your day.
On this week’s Prompt, Federico, Myke and I deal with some follow-up before discussing our hopes for iOS 8, the dream that was App.net, all while restoring balance to the Force in the Apple ecosystem.
It’s a good one, folks.
Dalton Caldwell and Bryan Berg, on the state of App.net after its first major round of subscription renewals:
The good news is that the renewal rate was high enough for App.net to be profitable and self-sustaining on a forward basis. Operational and hosting costs are sufficiently covered by revenue for us to feel confident in the continued viability of the service. No one should notice any change in the way the App.net API/service operates. To repeat, App.net will continue to operate normally on an indefinite basis.
The bad news is that the renewal rate was not high enough for us to have sufficient budget for full-time employees. After carefully considering a few different options, we are making the difficult decision to no longer employ any salaried employees, including founders. Dalton and Bryan will continue to be responsible for the operation of App.net, but no longer as employees. Additionally, as part of our efforts to ensure App.net is generating positive cash flow, we are winding down the Developer Incentive Program.
Caldwell goes on to write that support and operations will be run by contractors, and that the more and more of the ADN codebase will be open sourced in the near future.
Honestly, this isn’t too surprising. I didn’t renew my paid subscription, and I heard from many, many people who made the same decision.
That said, I respect Caldwell, Berg and their team. I’ve had the pleasure of working with them over the last year or so on a couple of different things, and it pains me to read the letter. The idea and business model is still very attractive, no matter how hard it can be to pull off in a world of ad-supported content and freemium apps.
It closes this way:
We continue to believe in the usefulness of a sustainable social platform where users and developers are customers, and not the product being sold to advertisers. If this were a company without a clear business model, App.net would have disappeared long ago.
That, of course, was the dream of App.net, which was able to hit the ground running as it launched at a time of a growing unrest in the nerd community about Twitter. Clearly, however, that wasn’t enough to keep the needed number of people interested — or paying to use the service, despite the best of intentions. The good guys don’t always win.
Federico Viticci:
For users in the United States and “parts of Canada and Japan”, Google has added lane guidance, a turn-by-turn navigation feature that allows the app to show the lane to stay in or move to; lane guidance is often found on dedicated GPS devices, and it should enable Google Maps to provide drivers with more precise directions.
The update also brings Uber intergration, better location filtering and more.
While Apple’s Maps app rarely gives me issues, the day I can set Google Maps as the default app on my iPhone, I will.
Drafts is a starting point for all text on iPhone and iPad. Drafts launches ready to type and makes it easy to capture an idea, note, todo, status update or any other bits of text. After you have captured that text, the power of Drafts’ actions kicks in. Drafts actions allow you to do almost anything with that text, with a wide variety of customizable actions to integrate with Email, iMessage, Twitter, Facebook, Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive and any other apps on your device that support integration, like Fantastical and OmniFocus.
Drafts for iPhone and Drafts for iPad are available now at the App Store!
Steve Wozniak, on Gizmodo:
In 1967 or 1968, as a senior in high school, our electronics teacher (the best teacher of my life in many teaching regards) arranged for me to go to a company in Sunnyvale (Sylvania) to program a computer because I already knew all the electronics in class at school. Mr. McCollum did this for students with electronics abilities every year, finding local companies with engineers and projects that would let high school students come and and get some experience. I learned and programmed in FORTRAN on this IBM computer.
I first experienced BASIC in high school that same year. We didn’t have a computer in the school but GE, I think, brought in a terminal with modem to promote their time-sharing business. A very few of we bright math students were given some pages of instruction and we wrote some very simple programs in BASIC.
Woz’s work in BASIC changed the world. Without it, Apple would have never made it long enough to build the Mac OS.
via The Loop