We’re a few days away from an Apple event where we’ll presumably learn a whole lot more about the Apple Watch. So to get ready, Dan Moren just added a bunch of new answers to our Apple Watch FAQ. Including one featuring this guy!
And if you haven’t read our FAQ yet, consider this some fun pre-event reading.
Another month, another appearance by me in iMore’s weekly The Network column… this time I wrote about the features and philosophies that I think are most important in the Apple Watch:
Truly, this is an exciting time to follow Apple.
With the company set to hold a media event on Monday — six months to the day since Tim Cook first stood on the Flint Center stage and unveiled the Apple Watch — we’re about to move out of our current period of vaguely-informed speculamalation and into the era of somewhat more informed speculification. At that point, we’ll be perilously close to the time when the Apple Watch really ships, and pundits can actually start complaining about the real product rather than jousting with straw men wearing extremely expensive timepieces.
My point is, are we there yet? No? Okay, then, with a very short amount of time to go before we know incrementally more about the Apple Watch, here’s my wish list for the next six months of the Apple Watch. You know, when we can actually use the thing.
Today Microsoft announced Office 2016 for Mac, which is available as a free download. The final version will arrive this summer for subscribers to Office 365.
Office 2016 for Mac shares an unmistakably Office experience-but it is also thoughtfully designed to take advantage of the unique features of the Mac. The new apps offer full retina display support with thousands of retina-optimized graphics, full screen view for native immersive experiences, and even little Mac affordances like scroll bounce.
I spent a little while with the new apps this morning, and they look great. It’s a bit too early to judge speed—Word felt sluggish me, while Powerpoint felt speedy—but it’s nice to see a new version Office on the Mac after five years.
March 5, 2015 9:34 AM PT
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
I’d consider myself an early adopter of Passbook. When the feature debuted back in iOS 6, I took every opportunity to find apps that supported it and try them out. It’s now been years since I had to print out a plane boarding pass or movie ticket.
But, to my dismay, my wallet is still full of cards. And it’s not just the credit and debit cards1, but the occasionally used cards that I have to carry around with me. My health insurance cards, my library card, public transit cards for at least three cities. While I could swap cards in and out of my wallet only when I expect to use them, the annoyance factor of not having them and needing them keeps me toting a slightly beefy billfold.
Apple Pay’s a pretty good system when it comes to those payment cards, but it would be great if Apple allowed us to more easily digitize cards that use either a barcode–as my library card does–or an RFID chip of the sort in my transit cards.2
Not all of this responsibility is on Apple, of course; third parties can offer Passbook integration in their own apps, and some have already done so. AAA, for example, lets me add my ID card to Passbook via its app, meaning I don’t have to carry it around anymore. But there are plenty of places, such as my local library, that seem unlikely to develop their own apps; a system that let me scan barcodes from my library card or the key tag I use for my gym would save me a lot of trouble.3
Honestly, just the ability to scan barcodes or even simply take a picture of a card, much in the same way that Apple Pay can identify a card using the iPhone’s camera, would let me remove four or five cards from my wallet. A few states are already looking at providing ways to get your driver’s license on your phone, too.
At this point, I’m still a little wary of using my phone as a full-fledged replacement for my wallet. What if it runs out of juice? What if I drop it and the screen becomes unusable? These are the kind of things you don’t have to worry about with a conventional wallet. Then again, there are advantages, too: If my phone gets stolen, it’s a lot harder to pull my private information out of it than it is from my wallet.
Honestly, all I want is to get to the point where I can leave my house without my wallet for convenience–say, if I go for a run–or where I don’t have to freak out if I accidentally forget my wallet at home. We’re getting closer by the year, but we’re not quite there yet.
[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.]
March 5, 2015 7:43 AM PT
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Following up on last week’s Wish List item on contact management, reader Angus asked about AutoFill, and pointed out that if you have multiple email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, and so on, there’s no explicit way to set a default.
That’s true, and it’s definitely annoying. For a long time, Safari on OS X insisted on automatically giving forms an email address that I rarely used. Under Yosemite it seems to have been better, but I decided to investigate and see if I could find a rhyme or reason to its madness.
My address card has seven email addresses in it, along with two phone numbers, two IM contacts, and two physical addresses. In each case, I made sure that the information I generally wanted filled was the first entry in each section.
I then tested it using a quick and dirty HTML form, to which I added some additional fields of my own: street address, city, ZIP code, and a state dropdown (you can download my test form here).
Interestingly, though it nailed my name, email address, street address, city, ZIP code, and even state, the one thing it didn’t correctly fill was my telephone number. Upon further investigation, I thought maybe it was because the HTML field in question was called “telephone” while my number was labeled as “mobile.” So I tried changing the HTML field name to “mobile”–no dice. Then, on a lark, I changed the label of the primary phone number in my contact record to “home” instead of “mobile.” Bingo! It happily supplied that phone number.
So I tested this theory by changing the label on my preferred email address from “home” to “other.” Sure enough, when I triggered AutoFill again, it didn’t put in my email address. With a little further testing, I determined that it didn’t matter where in the contact record I had the preferred email address, as long as it was labelled “home.”
Keep in mind this testing was limited, and involved a single simple form. It’s possible AutoFill does some more complicated automagic finagling behind the scenes depending on how a given site labels fields, but my informal testing suggests that if you want AutoFill to use a certain set of information, label those as “home.” Hopefully that helps tame some of AutoFill’s peculiarities.
All that said, it’d be great if Apple did provide a more explicit way to choose what information AutoFill uses, or at least allowed some sort of manner for quickly switching between different sets of information.
[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.]
March 4, 2015 8:19 AM PT
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
We might be a little obsessed with the endless snowboarding iOS game Alto’s Adventure here at Six Colors world headquarters.
I’ve been playing it a lot, and enjoying it. During each downhill run, you pick up shiny gold coins that I always figured were just part of the game’s point system, as well as a nice nod to classic console games in the Italian Plumber genre.
One of the clever things about Alto’s Adventure is that at the end of every run, you can just tap a Try Again button1 and make another run down the mountain. You have to remember to tap the Home button if you want to change characters, view your stats, adjust your settings, or visit the Workshop.
For the longest time, I didn’t know what the Workshop was. Early on in the game I tapped on it and discovered it was a way to upgrade some of your equipment by spending coins. I rolled my eyes and immediately tapped the Back button.
Here’s the thing: Alto’s Adventure does not trade in-app purchases for coins. The only way you can earn coins in Alto’s Adventure is by playing the game. There are no shortcuts where you can pay $4.99 to get the Wingsuit, or $9.99 for 20,000 extra coins.
That’s when I realized just how poisonous the current App Store environment is when it comes to games. I assumed that Alto’s Adventure—even though I had paid $2 for it—was going to try to extract more money out of me in order to have a better in-game experience. It took me quite a while to realize that I was only expected to use the coins I had been collecting in the game, and that this “in-app purchase” mechanic was meant to reward my long-term use of the game, not vacuum cash out of my wallet.
Honestly, I wonder if the developers of Alto’s Adventure wouldn’t be better off finding some other mechanic to use for in-game upgrades. When it comes to iOS games, offering a shopping area where you can pay for goods in coins offers no delight—it has come to represent nothing but a cash grab.
Over on some site called Macworld, I discuss why I don’t think Pebble Time makes sense for iPhone users:
In the end, though, if I’m going to invest in a new smartwatch, and I’m an iPhone user, my money has to go to the Apple Watch. It’s being crafted to work seamlessly with iOS. If it’s not more reliable than the Pebble at relaying notifications to my wrist, I’ll eat my hat. Third-party app developers are rushing to embrace WatchKit, and I’d wager that on day one there will be vastly better third-party app support for Apple Watch than could have possibly existed for Pebble.
This is exactly the kind of story you’d expect from Federico Viticci at MacStories: Long, personal, and somehow also a deep dive into some of the best health apps for iOS.
Federico was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in 2011 and the disease and its treatment took its toll. Health that he took for granted before then was gone. And he used his iPhone to help him eat better and exercise more.
Stupidly enough, because I thought that “I was okay”, I fell into my old habits of careless eating, no exercise, and a sedentary lifestyle. If cancer couldn’t kill me, did McDonald’s really have a chance?
Seriously: how stupid was I – after all I had gone through, ignoring the wellness of my body just because I was done with treatments? If anything, my experiences should have taught me about the importance of taking care of myself, so I could be well and spend time with the people I love and doing the things I care about.
Definitely worth a read.
Welcome to Macintosh is a new podcast from Mark Bramhill in the style of 99% Invisible, Serial, and Myke Hurley’s new Inquisitive series. In other words, it’s more than just a few people having a conversation. The first episode is about skeuomorphism and features interviews with Dave Wiskus and Neven Mrgan.
Plus, it features a clip of Ricardo Montalban admitting to David Letterman that rich Corinthian leather1 was just something they made up.
Definitely worth checking out on iTunes or in Overcast or your podcast app of choice.
Last week the folks at Q Branch (John Gruber, Dave Wiskus, Brent Simmons) released Vesper 2.0051 with support for iPads and landscape orientation. I use Vesper as my jot-anything-down notepad, and am happy to have it sync with my iPad now.
The work that we did to support the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus left Vesper fairly close to being able to natively support the iPad — and to support landscape orientation on all devices.
At the same time, Q Branch has raised the app’s price to a $7.99 introductory level, which will rise to $9.99 in a couple of weeks. I asked John Gruber about this approach in email over the weekend.
You went down in price (“cheap”) and now you’re going back up. The way you phrase it on Daring Fireball, it makes it sound like this is not just a business decision—that lower prices were simply untenable—but also a bit of an attempt to start a trend. Is that accurate?
Yes, I hope so. I can’t speak for any other developers, but it blew me away in Panic’s annual letter when Cabel said that the revenue from their amazing iOS apps aren’t justifying the cost of building them.
Do the economics of an app like this just not work at those low prices? Does this also address the economics of the sync back-end, by pricing it as a premium app?
There’s a chicken-or-egg problem with some of this. Maybe the big problem with Vesper is that it was iPhone-only, and $2.99 would have suddenly worked great when we added iPad support. But I don’t think so.
The basic problem is that casual App Store users go for free apps first, and go for chart-toppers after that. And the only way to top the best-selling charts is with super-low prices. And the super-low prices don’t generate enough revenue to cover the cost of developing the app.
In most categories, and “notes apps” is certainly one, it’s not hard to find a “good enough” solution among the free choices, so most casual users never even consider a paid app. So I think it was a waste to try to entice them at $2.99.
Instead, we want to embrace the users who are looking for the best app, and who are willing to pay a fair price for it if they think Vesper might be it. Going low didn’t work; we lose nothing by trying to go high.
I would like to see other developers follow.
What I see is that among long-time Mac indie developers, almost all of them are still making the majority — often the vast majority, sometimes the entirety — of their revenue from Mac apps. That’s good business — the Mac market is willing to pay reasonable prices for apps. But it’s a lost opportunity for iOS as a platform. I think we’re lacking for good, deep quality apps on iOS.
At Mobile World Congress yesterday, Samsung introduced the Galaxy S 6. And yes, it looks like an iPhone 6, as Flo Ion reported from Barcelona for Greenbot:
This is the last thing I want to admit as an Android user, but apparently it’s how you sell smartphones today: Make the product appear just as posh and stylish as Apple’s iPhone, and consumers will flock to it in droves. It worked for Xiaomi in China, and now Samsung’s going to take a stab at it, too.
Gone is the cheap-feeling plastic back, replaced with a Gorilla Glass back that looks nothing like the one on the iPhone 6, but does call to mind the iPhone 4’s all-glass approach. By ditching the plastic back, which I always felt was the most disappointing bit of Samsung Galaxy hardware, Samsung is also ditching the SD card slot and access to the battery. For ages, one class of phone reviewer would endlessly complain that Apple didn’t offer storage expansion1 or a swappable battery2 on the iPhone. Now even Samsung has given up.
Samsung also seems to have scaled back its software approach, which was to toss a zillion stupid features into a release and pretend they were useful. The software on the Galaxy S 6 is, by all accounts, less cluttered and weird. The home button’s fingerprint sensor now works like the iPhone—you lay your finger on it and the phone unlocks, instead of swiping it. And Samsung’s introducing a new service called Samsung Pay that—well, you can figure out what that one does, can’t you?
This week on my pop-culture podcast The Incomparable we celebrate Leonard Nimoy, who died Friday. We ponder what made us love Mr. Spock, discuss some of Spock’s finest moments, and even bring up some lesser known corners of the Nimoy canon. (Admit it, have you heard of “Baffled!“?)
My guests this week—who were kind enough to hop on Skype on a moment’s notice to eulogize one of our favorite actors and characters—are my friends Andy Ihnatko, Scott McNulty, and David J. Loehr.
Once again, my huge thanks to Automatic for sponsoring Six Colors this week (and for most of June).
Automatic is a small “connected car adapter” that you plug into your car’s diagnostic port. (Automatic works with most gas and hybrid cars released since 1996.) We took a long car trip this week, and my wife and I enjoyed looking through the Automatic data on our trip, the stops, the cost of the gasoline we used on the trip, and even information about when we used our brakes a bit too hard or drove a bit too fast.
Automatic does a bunch more, too, including integrating with other smart devices. Automatic normally costs $99.95, but readers of Six Colors get 20 percent off. Automatic ships in two business days for free, and there’s a 45-day return policy.
February 27, 2015 12:16 PM PT
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Yesterday, I decried the lack of certain features in iOS’s Contacts app, but a Twitter follower pointed out that I wasn’t quite correct about one of those. It turns out there is a way to “merge” contacts via iOS.
I put “merge” in quotes, because unlike the OS X feature, the contacts in question don’t seem to permanently meld together; the feature simply unites the cards as one for the purposes of viewing. Unlike OS X’s solution, iOS’s solution is non-destructive; you can separate the records at any time. Hence why it’s called “link” contacts instead of “merge.”
To link two contacts, open up any contact record on your iOS device and tap Edit. All the way at the bottom you’ll find a header for “Linked Contacts”; tap the “link contacts” entry and pick another contact record. The two cards will now be displayed as one entry, pulling all the information from both records.
You can see all the linked contacts on an entry–and yes, you can link more than just two contacts–by scrolling to the bottom of the contact record; tapping on any of those contacts will show you just the information from those cards. Perhaps most usefully, if you have multiple accounts from which you draw contacts–say iCloud and Google, or even Microsoft Exchange–and you have John Smith’s contact info in both places, you can link both of his cards across those services.
I couldn’t quite figure out what rubric it uses to determine which name or photo to display for the joint card, but if you tap on the linked contacts in edit mode, you can tell it which card’s info to use (see right).
To unlink an entry, go into edit mode again, scroll down to linked contacts, and hit the red icon to its left. That record’s info will once again be split off into a separate card.
Weirdly, this appears to be an iOS-specific feature. When I linked two versions of my own contact record, only iOS’s Contacts app showed them as one–they still showed up as two separate records on both my Mac and iCloud. And if you actually have duplicate records that you want to merge into one forever and ever, OS X is still the only way to go.
Thanks to Animesh Gupta for pointing out this feature.
[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.]
February 27, 2015 9:24 AM PT
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Leonard Nimoy died today. There is no single creative work that more influenced me as a child than “Star Trek.” Not only can I not remember life before “Star Trek,” I can’t remember life before knowing every episode of “Star Trek” by heart.
I really do believe that Spock, and Leonard Nimoy, was the biggest single reason for the show’s success—in the ’60s and through all the reruns that I saw in the ’70s. As Marc Cushman and Susan Osborn’s remarkable “Star Trek” history “These Are The Voyages” makes clear, Spock was a huge hit with audiences—despite the fact that NBC was initially cold on the character.
The famous Spock neck pinch—actually referred to in “Star Trek” scripts as the FSNP—was invented by Nimoy on the spot as a way to quickly resolve a scene when filming was running over time. The Vulcan “live long and prosper” hand sign was another Nimoy invention, adapted from hand gestures from his Orthodox Jewish upbringing.
The episode “This Side of Paradise,” written by Dorothy Fontana and featuring a blissed-out Spock under the influence of some wacky space spores, sealed the deal for many fans.
Spock’s death in “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” reduced me to uncontrollable crying in a movie theater. Nimoy directed two Trek movies, guested on “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” appeared in the two new J.J. Abrams features, and even guested (in retirement!) on “Fringe.”
Leonard Nimoy and my father were born the same year, 1931. Both were smokers and, as a result, struggled with COPD late in life. It contributed to their deaths. I took some solace knowing that Nimoy (and William Shatner, another 1931 birth) were still walking around out there, even though my dad was not. But… so it goes.
I leave you with some Vulcan philosophy.
Peace, and long life.
I have been, and always shall be, your friend.
Infinite diversity in infinite combinations.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.
Live long and prosper.
Nice Mohawk’s new app, TypeSnippets, was released today. It’s a clever-but-simple keyboard extension for iOS 8 that lets you send commonly typed phrases by picking them out of a list.
There are other utilities that speed text input on iOS, such as TextExpander, and iOS itself has a text shortcut feature, but they require you to type in a key phrase that’s expanded out into something much greater. TypeSnippets’s approach is different because it’s visual—you pick the snippet you want to appear, rather than typing the right characters to trigger an expansion.
TypeSnippets is free (with support for three snippets); a $2.99 in-app purchase unlocks all current and future features, including forthcoming iPad sync.
February 26, 2015 9:14 AM PT
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
On Thursday Apple invited members of the media to an event at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater on Monday, March 9 at 10 a.m. The invitation, headed with colorful petal-shaped images, is titled “Spring forward.”
Six Colors will be on hand to report from the event and send you all the details.
February 26, 2015 8:46 AM PT
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Personally, I find Apple’s Contacts app on iOS a necessary, well, if not “evil,” then at least a necessary “meh.” It syncs with my Mac, it stores contact data, and is accessible systemwide and to third-party apps. All great, but the Contacts app itself needs some work.
There are two places in particular where I think Contacts falls down, but both those features can be grouped loosely under one heading: contact management.
If you want to access contact information on iOS, it’s easy enough: search via Spotlight or the app’s internal search, and tap on any of the contact information to send an email, text, or so on. Even entering contact info isn’t too hard.
But let’s take a slightly more complicated task. Say, creating a group of contacts. Ha ha! Trick question. You can’t create a group of contacts on iOS. Nor can you delete groups. Or assign people to groups. Pretty much the only thing you can do with groups on iOS is toggle whether or not contacts from specific groups are displayed.
If you want to do anything else with groups, you have to turn to Contacts on your Mac, or, if you don’t have a Mac, the Contacts web app on iCloud.com.
Now, I don’t use contact groups that much–but I’ll posit that’s in part because support for them on iOS is so shoddy. Yeah, I could spend more time creating them on my Mac–which even has the ability to make Smart Groups–but I can’t easily send an email or a text to a group, so what’s the point?
I hesitate to say “axe groups entirely” because I’m sure there are plenty of folks out there who use the feature. But Apple’s haphazard implementation isn’t doing any favors: it seems like the company should either go all-in or all-out.
Speaking of contact management, there’s a second capability that falls into this same gap. Contacts on OS X has a very handy feature that lets it not only look for duplicates automatically, but also manually merge contacts. None of those options exist in Contacts on iOS–and they’re not available in the iCloud web app either.
Duplicate-finding on iOS is, I think, not a pressing need. It’s a feature that gets used only occasionally, when you’re cleaning up your contacts–although an automatic process that notices when I’m adding a new contact that I already have some information for and offers to merge them would not go amiss.
But manual merging of contacts on iOS would be useful, not least because I sometimes find that iCloud has decided to create two separate records for someone, seemingly on its own. (Update: Though you can’t permanently merge contacts on iOS, you can link them together. Here’s how.)
Contacts is one of those areas that probably isn’t going to blow most people’s hair back, but it’s a feature that almost all of us use every single day. In fact, it’s so central that Apple itself has devoted an entire physical button to it on the Apple Watch. I’m hopeful that signals an increase in interest from the company, but I also know the merits of not holding my breath. We’ll have to see what iOS 9 brings.
[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.]
February 26, 2015 7:07 AM PT
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
I may have gotten a little caught up in Alto’s Adventure.1 In my quest to improve my (and more importantly, dear reader, your) virtual snowboarding skills, I reached out to Snowman‘s own Ryan Cash for some tips on upping your game. So whether you’re a beginner hitting the slopes for the first time or an experienced triple-backflip artist, there just might be something that you can take away from these suggestions.2
Now, if you’ll pardon me, I need to do a backflip over a sleeping elder if I’m ever going to move up in this world.
[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.]