This week, Myke, Federico and Stephen re-visit iWork and product screenshots, then discuss the iPad Air and Everpix.
Don’t miss our new Tumblr site, born on-air.
Sponsored by Squarespace (use code TALLYHO11 for 10% off) and Hostgator (use code PROMPT11 for 30% off)
Apple:
The new iWork applications — Pages, Numbers, and Keynote — were released for Mac on October 22nd. These applications were rewritten from the ground up to be fully 64-bit and to support a unified file format between OS X and iOS 7 versions, as well as iWork for iCloud beta.
These apps feature an all-new design with an intelligent format panel and many new features such as easy ways to share documents, Apple-designed styles for objects, interactive charts, new templates, and new animations in Keynote.
In rewriting these applications, some features from iWork ’09 were not available for the initial release. We plan to reintroduce some of these features in the next few releases and will continue to add brand new features on an ongoing basis.
Clearly Apple is listening to customer feedback. My questions is this: were these features planned all along, or is the company having to back-track on the direction it wanted to take iWork?
Casey Newton:
One day last month, the seven employees of Everpix gathered at their co-working space in San Francisco to discuss the company’s impending shutdown. Wayne Fan, one of the co-founders, opened a mock-up of the screen that the photo storage service’s customers would see once the company announced the news. The screen described the refunds that would be offered to the company’s 6,800 paid subscribers, assuming Everpix could come up with the money. No one knew if they would.
The immediate concern in the room was a forthcoming bill from Amazon Web Services, which hosts the 400 million photos stored with Everpix; the team estimated the bill would be about $35,000. “Our AWS bill is going to be due on the third. We’re not going to be able to pay,” said Pierre-Olivier Latour, who had the idea for Everpix four years ago after a vacation left him struggling to organize the hundreds of photos he took on the trip. Behind him, a poster advertised San Francisco’s minimum wage of $10.55 an hour, which he had been paying his employees for the past month. “Amazon is going to reach out to us saying, ‘Your card doesn’t work.’” He paused. “So that’s going to be fun.”
There’s been a lot written about this, but clearly the combination of solving an expensive, hard problem with an almost-free service is a bad one.
We’ve spoken a lot about Everpix on The Prompt, but I never really got into the service. Now I’m glad I didn’t, but it still sucks to see the little guys lose this round.
Apple:
We believe that our customers have a right to understand how their personal information is handled, and we consider it our responsibility to provide them with the best privacy protections available. Apple has prepared this report on the requests we receive from governments seeking information about individual users or devices in the interest of transparency for our customers around the world.
There’s some really interesting stuff in this PDF.
For more on the topic, don’t miss this article over on FOSS Patents.
Techi.com is a site dedicated to all things tech. From updates on Sony’s PS4 to reports on Google’s latest acquisition; whether you’re looking for the latest Apple product or looking for views on mobile web, Techi is the site to visit.
Techi.com’s news is sourced from thousands of sites from across the Internet, then curated by an editorial team with their finger constantly on the pulse of the industry’s most vital developments. You also get a quick summary of the news so you save time and read only what interests you most.
In addition to the best news curated from across the Web, Techi.com also offers exclusive original articles and stories featured in the Drudge Report, Reddit, NYTimes, Google news, and many more.
You don’t even have to visit daily. Just sign up for the daily newsletter and get the latest tech news direct to your inbox — with no fuss whatsoever — in time for that commute or mid-day coffee.
Don’t spend your morning sifting through RSS feeds looking for the hot news. Go for the instant solution: get it all from Techi.com in less time than it takes to make your coffee.
Dr Drang:
On last week’s episode of The Prompt, Federico went off on a rant about ugly iOS screenshots. He wasn’t complaining about the apps themselves being ugly, he was chastising those of us who post screenshots with status bars showing inconsistent times, signal strengths, and battery levels. And Lord help you if your battery icon is in the red.
His recommendation was Status Magic, a Mac app that cleans up the status bars in your iOS screenshots and makes them uniform. It looks like a nice app, but my thoughts gravitated toward a script using the Python Imaging Library.
The Good Snowman is our best fan.
Elia Freedman:
The basics of educational buying are pretty straight forward. Will the technology provide an appropriate educational environment for students? Can schools control the devices as much or as little as they’d like? Is the cost within the budget of the grant or purchasing agent who will spend the money? (I say this oddly only because in many cases it is not the school or district purchasing but the purchase is made through a parent organization, grant or other funding body.) Is there training (professional development) for teachers? Is there education materials available for the technology?
The iPad, iOS and App Store have nailed all of these.
Freedman goes on to discuss the iPad 2’s longevity. While it’s been mocked by tech reporters, he sees it as a bonus for decision makers in school systems, which can take years to evaluate a product. If that product — or its price — is always changing, it can be harder to come to a conclusion.
Mr. Marks lays down the law.
Federico Viticci:
If you search for common terms like “web,” “SMS,” or “movies” in the iOS 7 App Store you’ll see special search results for Apple apps like Safari, Messages, and iTunes with a large icon, a description, and a link to learn more or open an app (such as Safari). These results appear on the App Store for iOS 7 devices (I wasn’t able to display them on a Mac using iTunes) and, in my tests, they also worked for queries like “browser,” “messages,” “cloud,” “internet,” “Siri,” and “text”. I’ve tried several other queries, but I couldn’t see results for other apps like Reminders, Calendars, Mail, Photos, Music, or Notes.
I think this is a great addition to the App Store. While it may seem heavy-handed to power users, people who are new to iOS don’t always know what their devices can do out of the box.
I guess Nintendo doesn’t read Apple blogs.
This week on The Prompt, Federico, Myke and I talk about new apps, complain about the miserable service that is iWork for iCloud and think aloud about FaceTime Audio.
Sponsored by Squarespace (use code TALLYHO10 for 10% off)
I’m excited to purchase one on Friday.