Campbell ran companies like Intuit and worked in key jobs at Apple, Claris and Go, and also served on a plethora of boards, including Columbia University, Intuit and Apple. He had been a longtime adviser to Google execs including Page and Eric Schmidt —and really just about every major tech executive you could think of at some point. Andreessen Horowitz’s Ben Horowitz featured him in his book “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” and Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr just referenced him as a key adviser in a recent decision to change his role at the firm.
Campbell was an Apple marketing VP back under John Sculley, then became the head of the Claris software division. He served on Apple’s board from Steve Jobs’s return in 1997 to his retirement in 2014, where he was long considered one of Jobs’s closest allies.
My favorite might be this one from FiveThirtyEight, which puts Curry’s record number of three-pointers in a season (402 was the final number) in context. Curry broke the record (his own, from last year) with an increase of 40 percent. That’s like someone hitting 102 home runs, scoring 129 goals, or throwing 77 touchdown passes. Most all-time records are broken; this one was shattered.
During these first two weeks, MLB fans spent 20 percent more minutes per day, on average, watching live video on iPad compared with the 2015 season, when multitasking was not available. (MLB says that any form of multitasking behavior was counted here, not just spilt screen viewing.)
In addition, fans who were using the new multitasking features and watching live video of MLB games in the At Bat application were spending 162 minutes per day on average consuming MLB.TV on iPad. That’s an increase of 86 percent from the 2015 season.
I’m one of those fans. I’m now able to keep a baseball game going in Picture in Picture while doing other things on my iPad. It’s pretty great.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
The 9.7-inch iPad keyboard overlaid on the 12.9-inch iPad keyboard.
Anyone who writes as a part of their profession—whether it’s technology articles, novels, business documents, you name it—cares about typing. Typing is how we put one word after another, and computer keyboards are the best tool yet devised to allow us to do that1.
The importance of typing has always been one of the problems with using an iPad as a device to get work done. Typing on glass offers limited tactile feedback compared to physical keys, and the iPad’s 9.7-inch screen is too small to fit a full keyboard. You can attach a Bluetooth keyboard (or with the advent of the iPad Pro models, a Smart Keyboard) and improve your typing speeds dramatically, but the ergonomics of using a keyboard with an iPad counteract the iPad’s small size and ability to be used just about anywhere.
When I first began using the original, 12.9-inch iPad Pro, I was skeptical of its software keyboard. Years spent with the original-sized iPad had trained me that while I could write long documents on the software keyboard, I could save a lot of time and effort by attaching an external keyboard. But over the time, as I use the 12.9-inch iPad Pro’s keyboard more, I started to appreciate it.
The 12.9-inch iPad Pro’s software keyboard is full sized. Which is to say, the main keys are the same size and location as a standard physical keyboard—a feat possible on the 12.9-inch model because its display is 10.4 inches wide. The display on 9.7-inch models only have 7.8 inches of width to work with, and as a result, the keys are slightly smaller and crammed more closely together. More importantly, there’s very little room left over for modifier keys, forcing the layout into three layers (regular text input, a number-and-symbol keyboard, and another keyboard for less common symbols).
The 12.9-inch keyboard offers tab and caps lock keys and a wide shift key, plus six additional symbol keys on the main key layout. And, most importantly, the big keyboard provides an entire extra row of 14 keys at the top of the screen, including numbers, more symbols, and the ability to generate 14 more symbols by holding down the shift key.
Now, this larger keyboard isn’t without its flaws. The top row of keys is only half the height of the other rows, and as a result, I find myself missing the delete key all the time. It might also be nice if it offered a Command key, so that I could use iOS 9’s expanded set of keyboard shortcuts from the software keyboard.
Once I started using the large software keyboard, I began to appreciate just how much better it was than the one on the smaller model. When I reviewed the 9.7-inch iPad Pro, one of the reasons I found myself preferring my large iPad Pro was its superior software keyboard. And while I praised the 9.7-inch Smart Keyboard as being less bulky and more convenient than the larger model, there’s no denying that its shrunken-down keyboard slows me down.
Last week I was writing a story on a warm, summery day—rare for early April, even in sunny California—and I was despairing about being inside rather than in my backyard. I ended up sitting out in the backyard and writing the story on my iPad Pro’s software keyboard, sitting under a redwood tree in a hammock. I kept the iPad flat in my lap and typed as I would on a laptop keyboard2. And I was shocked at how fast my typing speed was when I really focused on the large software keyboard—not hardware keyboard speeds, but noticeably faster than my experience with the smaller iPad software keyboards.
To quantify this experience, I decided to take a typing test with TapTyping, an app recommended by Fraser Speirs on the typing episode of the Canvas podcast. I took the test, which involves three different sessions of typing a few random sentences, on both iPad Pro models, using their software keyboards as well as their Smart Keyboards. I also took the test on the 12.9-inch iPad Pro with Apple’s Magic Keyboard attached via Bluetooth.
The results were pretty much as I expected. I was slowest on the 9.7-inch iPad’s software keyboard, at 80 words per minute. The 9.7-inch Smart Keyboard didn’t fare as well as I thought—once I was forced away from the letter keys for punctuation I lost track of the geography of the keyboard and made a bunch of mistakes. The software keyboard on the 12.9-inch iPad Pro clocked in at 96 words per minute, and I once would never have believed that I could type nearly 100 words per minute on a software keyboard. Attaching the 12.9-inch Smart Keyboard boosted my score to 104 words per minute. And typing full speed on the Magic Keyboard, I managed 116 words per minute.
Or to look at it another way, by foregoing a physical keyboard and typing with the smaller iPad’s software keyboard, I gain the benefit of portability and flexibility at the cost of 31 percent of my typing speed. On the 12.9-inch model, it’s only a 17 percent sacrifice.
I know that dictation technology has come a long way, and I use it on my iPhone, but I just can’t write via speech. ↩
I can’t endorse the long-term ergonomics of this approach, but it was pleasant enough for a half-hour writing session. ↩
I’m sitting in a coffee shop while I wait for the dealer down the street to finish repairs—of the expensive variety, naturally—on my car. It’s a perfect storm: brakes that need replacing, scheduled service, and a baleful yellow “check engine” light that came on the other day.
And I ask myself, as I sit here: why the heck would Apple want to get into the car business?
Rumors of the company entering the automobile business have been rampant for years now, with many positioning an Apple Car against the media darling that is Elon Musk’s Tesla. I certainly wouldn’t bet against Apple being capable of building an electric car—the company has shown time and again not just ingenuity and wherewithal, but the ability to succeed in well-established markets. But designing and building a car, difficult as those processes are, is just the beginning.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
My good friend Casey Liss was casting about for an answer to the question that has perplexed many an iPad user: if they use a Bluetooth keyboard–such as Apple’s Magic Keyboard or my favorite, the Logitech K811–how can they still access Apple’s emoji picker from said keyboard, without resorting to tapping the screen? Apple’s own Smart Keyboards have a dedicated key for switching the onscreen keyboards, but others, not so much.
Good news! There is a way. On any Bluetooth keyboard, just hit Control-Spacebar to bring up an onscreen keyboard switcher. (Make sure the cursor is in a text field; it doesn’t seem to work otherwise.) You can then either hit Control-Spacebar to switch between various keyboards, or use the Up and Down arrows on the keyboard.
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a way to navigate the emoji picker via an external keyboard, so you’ll still need to use the touchscreen for that part. It would be nice to see that functionality added along with, say, a search box or something. Maybe in iOS 10.
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]
Years of use, which are based on first owners, are assumed to be four years for MacOS and tvOS devices and three years for iOS and watchOS devices. More information on our product energy use is provided in our Product Environmental Reports. [emphasis added]
Interestingly enough, the written versions have been “MacOS” not “macOS”, though many–myself included–thought the company would want to standardize it with iOS, watchOS, and tvOS. One reason they might not? “Mac” is still a specific, trademarkable term, while watch, TV, and the letter “i”…not so much.
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]
If you didn’t know, there are Apple Watch rumors: http://www.tomsguide.com/us/apple-watch-2-rumors,news-21165.html
Some people don’t think much of 3D Touch: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/04/08/snell-3d-touch
Some people do: http://www.imore.com/peek-pique-or-power-3d-touch-preview
Now there’s Disney Crossy Road: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/disney-crossy-road/id1046593064?mt=8
Moltz had a nice experience again with Night Sky: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-night-sky/id475772902?mt=8
We all like Super Stickman Golf 2: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/super-stickman-golf-2/id585259203?mt=8
It’s not that much like Desert Golfing: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/desert-golfing/id902062673?mt=8
Dan’s been playing Tom Clancy’s The Division: http://www.amazon.com/Tom-Clancys-Division-Xbox-One/dp/B00DDXILBQ/ref=sr_1_1?s=videogames&ie=UTF8&qid=1460601261&sr=1-1&keywords=the+division
HTC’s new phone supports Airplay for some reason: http://mashable.com/2016/04/12/htc-10-airplay-support/#_l2YQaJ0IZqA
Apple pulled some apps for NSFW content: https://www.macstories.net/news/apple-pulls-third-party-reddit-clients-for-nsfw-content/
Dan has some views on in-app purchases: http://www.macworld.com/article/3050390/ios/could-apple-pay-clean-up-the-in-app-purchase-mess.html
Here’s an interesting Apple Watch travel case and stand: http://www.macrumors.com/2016/04/07/twelve-south-timeporter-apple-watch-case/
Our thanks this week to Mack Weldon (https://www.mackweldon.com). Mack Weldon makes glorious underwear to hold your bits in the way they deserve, anti-microbially. It is truly awesome stuff. So go to mackweldon.com and use the promo code “REBOUND” to get 20 percent off your order.
Our thanks also go to Harry’s (harrys.com). Harry’s sells premium shaving products for much less than those crappy blades that you have to get someone to unlock from a cabinet. Get $5 off your first order with coupon code “REBOUND”. Don’t wait, get the shave you deserve.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Edovia’s Screens is one of my indispensable iOS apps, if for no other reason than it brings much of the power of the Mac to my iPad and iPhone, no matter where I am. The screen-sharing app’s major 4.0 update is replete with features, many of which I didn’t even know I wanted until I saw them, as well as a design overhaul.
While the purple/white aesthetic stays, Screens’s interface has been simplified. There’s now just a single top-level screen showing you all your saved connections–even better, on the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, you can use 3D Touch on the iOS app icon to quickly jump right into a session, no waiting.
My very favorite new additions, however, are both password related. For one thing, there’s now even better integration with 1Password–you can access the extension from the Action menu and send any of your stored passwords back to your remote Mac. But my true love is the new One-Touch Password feature. When you reach the login screen of your Mac, you can tap and hold on the Action menu in Screens’s toolbar, and it will automatically type your saved password into the the text box, saving you the time of entering it via your iOS keyboard. Brilliant.
Screens 4’s redesigned toolbar and Action menu.
There a bunch of other improvements as well: everything from the ability to group connections into folders to Spotlight integration and multitasking support on the iPad. All of those just go to making Screens an even better version of itself.
Screens 4 is a free update for existing users of the iOS app; if you’re buying it new, it’s $20.
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]
Of all the conventions of traditional computers that iPhones and iPads flout, perhaps the biggest is the concept of saving documents to files and folders. So much of the personality of the Mac is defined by the Finder, an app devoted entirely to organizing the files and folders on your various local and networked storage devices.
iOS has gradually moved toward allowing users to take a more sophisticated approach to document management over the years. With iOS 10 it’s time for Apple to extend that support even further.
According to technical reports by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that were filed in court, law enforcement intercepted and decrypted roughly one million PIN-to-PIN BlackBerry messages in connection with the probe. The report doesn’t disclose exactly where the key – effectively a piece of code that could break the encryption on virtually any BlackBerry message sent from one device to another – came from. But, as one police officer put it, it was a key that could unlock millions of doors.
This is exactly the situation we’re looking at here in the U.S. Senators Richard Burr (R-NC) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) have proposed legislation mandating that technology companies essentially provide such a backdoor for law enforcement. But the problem is that there’s no way to ensure that key remains only in the hands of the good guys. They say two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead, but if they’re both giant institutions, well, it gets a lot more complicated.
Another day, another vector in the information privacy wars. Microsoft is suing the government over the constitutionality of the gag order in the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which prevents the company from disclosing to its users when the government has read their email or other cloud-based data. Microsoft argues that the law is too broad and overused.
Over the past 18 months, federal courts have issued nearly 2,600 secrecy orders silencing Microsoft from speaking about warrants and other legal process seeking Microsoft customers’ data; of those, more than two-thirds contained no fixed end date. (In fact, of the twenty-five secrecy orders issued to Microsoft by judges in this District, none contained a time limit.) These twin developments–the increase in government demands for online data and the simultaneous increase in secrecy–have combined to undermine confidence in the privacy of the cloud and have impaired Microsoft’s right to be transparent with its customers, a right guaranteed by the First Amendment.
Tech companies have often circumvented the letter of the law in these cases via the use of warrant canaries, but once they’ve become, well, an ex-canary, there’s basically no more information to be gained. This is a serious issue for data privacy and security, and kudos to Microsoft for taking it on.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Have you ever felt that you were thirsting in a desert for something to read? Perhaps you should reach for…an Oasis.
Yep, Amazon’s newest version of the venerable e-reader is–as leaks earlier this week predicted–the Kindle Oasis. The major changes here are in the form factor: instead of the earlier version’s tablet shape, the Oasis is more of a wedge, with a bulge on one side intended to make it more ergonomic to hold. (You can do so with either the left or right hand, and the Kindle’s screen will rotate to accommodate.) Backward and forward page-turning is done either by the touch screen or by actual physical buttons on the side with the larger bezel.
The slim profile of the new Kindle Oasis
Amazon calls the latest version “the thinnest and lightest Kindle ever”; frankly, I just got a Paperwhite last week, which already feels pretty darn light, but the Wi-Fi-only version of the Oasis is 4.6 oz, compared to the 7.2 oz of the Paperwhite, so there you go.
Granted, you lose out on some of that weight-shedding by attaching the new included battery cover, which plugs into the Oasis and provides battery life on the order of months. (Good thing, too: because of how small the Oasis is, its internal battery lasts only about two weeks, according to Engadget.) It’s a bit Smart Cover like, right down to magnetic closures that snap it closed, automatically putting the Oasis to sleep. But it also weighs 3.8 oz on its own, bringing the whole shebang to 8.4 oz, or heavier than pretty much any of the previous models.
There’s also a new version of the E-Ink screen, though it retains the same 300 dpi as before; it does, however, have 10 redesigned LEDs for the backlight, up from the 6 on the Voyage and the 4 on the Paperwhite. That screen is thin, too: equivalent to a sheet of aluminum foil, but with a “chemically-reinforced” glass cover.
All of this comes at a price, naturally: $290. That’s $90 more than the next highest Kindle, the $199 Voyage, and $170 more than the Paperwhite, which is considered by many the e-reader to beat. Despite the improvements, the Oasis is still a single-function device, and in this day and age it remains to be seen whether consumers will pay a premium for an e-reader, no matter how fancy it is.
Amazon’s major competitor is not really Apple–I don’t think most folks are trying to choose between a Kindle and an iPad–but itself. Sure, it keeps making its e-readers better and better, but is the $290 Oasis really that much superior to the Paperwhite I just bought? I’m not particularly feeling any buyer’s remorse over that one.
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]
Rather than a prompt, opt for an intriguing button, placed where it’ll catch the eye of someone in a mode of exploration—not the middle of editing or playing (Circa nails this). Remember, not everyone needs to be your advocate; fewer, but more exuberant reviews will quickly shadow many half-hearted ones. Fewer people will be nagged who wouldn’t leave reviews to begin with, and those who do will do so gladly.
Blackbox upends the usual iOS way of doing things in a number of ways, of which convincing users to rate the app is only just one. Ryan’s post is well worth a read, especially for developers trying to figure out how to get those reviews without raising users’ hackles.
And in reading this post, I realized that I forgot to open the app during my recent trip to the West Coast, which would have finished my last open puzzle. Gahhhhhhhh. ↩
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Searching for Seattle (vacations).
My family and I are traveling for a few days, visiting my mother in Arizona. My wife and I couldn’t remember how long it had been since the entire family had flown somewhere together.
These days, most questions that nobody around the table can answer can be solved by a quick search of the Internet—”Hey, Siri, how old is Michael Douglas?”—but personal-life trivia remains immune to the powers of Google.
But it turns out that I do carry a database of my travels with me wherever I go: my photo library. Whether you use iCloud Photo Library or Google Photos or Amazon, you’ve got a collection of items tagged with locations (at least the ones taken by devices with GPS data, including all iOS photos) and dates and times. It’s a personal travelogue and searchable database.
So I searched my iCloud Photo Library for Arizona and found the date of our last visit here, and searched around to discover our most recent family trip that involved an airplane. In the course of the conversation, we ended up asking ourselves a lot of those when-what-what questions: What year did we go to Pennsylvania, what year did we go to the Space Shuttle launch, and so on. I was able to answer all of those questions too.
If you’re someone who loves the mystery of unanswered questions and laments the era when a character actor would come on screen and you’d shout “Where have I seen that guy before?” and not ever figure it out, well, I’m sorry to bring you this news. If you’re someone who gets frustrated because you can’t remember if you visited Seattle in 2010 or 2011, or which year you went to Disneyland, remember this: Your photo library may contain all the answers you seek.
When Apple introduced 3D Touch with the iPhone 6s, I was impressed by what a great job the company did in implementing the feature. The careful detection of forceful presses on the screen, combined with feedback from the Taptic Engine, meant that I could activate 3D Touch when I wanted to, and I’d know when it happened.
Unfortunately, after six months of using an iPhone 6s, I’m afraid that I’ve completely stopped using 3D Touch, to the point where I forget it’s there. My opinion about how brilliantly implemented this feature is hasn’t changed a bit, but I feel like Apple needs to rethink the meaning of the 3D Touch in iOS 10 for it to be a more useful feature.
In the almost seven months since Apple announced the Apple Pencil, I haven’t once been tempted by the stylus. Yes, it’s an impressive piece of technology, and yes, I’ve seen some truly wonderful things accomplished with its help. But as someone whose artistic skills never progressed much beyond the doodling phase—and really, those doodles are nothing worth putting up on the fridge, much less venturing anywhere beyond the margins of a notebook—it just didn’t seem like the Apple Pencil was for me.
But something funny happened the other night, when I’d been thinking about some ideas for a book I was working on. Lately I’ve realized that I prefer the free-form nature of jotting things on paper, which allows me to easily make diagrams as well as write notes. It’s also a little more comfortable for, say, lounging on the couch and writing in a way that typing on a laptop or using the onscreen keyboard of the iPad isn’t.
Wouldn’t it be great, I mused, if I could just do the same jotting and doodling, but with my iPad?
Aw, crap. I think I just talked myself into an Apple Pencil.
