Ryan Christoffel

684 posts on MacStories since November 2016

Ryan is an editor for MacStories and co-hosts the Adapt podcast on Relay FM. He most commonly works and plays on his iPad Pro and bears no regrets about moving on from the Mac. He and his wife live in New York City.

[email protected]

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After Two Years with Pinterest, Instapaper Regains Its Independence→

From Instapaper’s blog:

Today, we’re announcing that Pinterest has entered into an agreement to transfer ownership of Instapaper to Instant Paper, Inc., a new company owned and operated by the same people who’ve been working on Instapaper since it was sold to betaworks by Marco Arment in 2013. The ownership transfer will occur after a 21 day waiting period designed to give our users fair notice about the change of control with respect to their personal information.

We want to emphasize that not much is changing for the Instapaper product outside the new ownership. The product will continue to be built and maintained by the same people who’ve been working on Instapaper for the past five years. We plan to continue offering a robust service that focuses on readers and the reading experience for the foreseeable future.

Following Pinterest’s acquisition of Instapaper almost two years ago, there was a reasonable level of concern about what that change would mean for the popular read-it-later service. From an outside perspective, however, it seems like the transition has gone smoothly – which makes today’s announcement all the more surprising.

It will be interesting to see what changes this move brings in the short-term. In the immediate future, the company has already confirmed it’s working hard on making Instapaper available in Europe again. Looking further out, the service’s business model is a big question mark. Before Pinterest came along, Instapaper offered a premium subscription option that was later discontinued post-acquisition and its features made publicly available to all users. A new subscription plan may be in the works, likely with currently unannounced new features. Only time will tell what the future holds, but in any case, it’s always nice to see an app’s development team in full control of its product’s destiny.

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10 Years of App Store Controversies

The App Store is a wildly successful product. In 2017 alone it brought Apple somewhere in the range of $11.4 billion, and app developers pocketed $26.5 billion – an increase of 30% over 2016. To kick off 2018, New Year’s Day alone yielded $300 million of App Store purchases. With ever-more Apple devices in the world, the rest of 2018 is sure to end up in the record books.

When the App Store first launched in 2008, it was an unproven concept in the software market. Historically when you wanted to download software for your computer, you would usually visit the developer’s website, which handled both the payment and actual download. While it could be argued that smartphones at that time weren’t proper “computers,” the computer designation undoubtedly fit the iPhone. With its powerful operating system built on Mac OS X, the expectation from many developers was that, eventually at least, the device would gain access to native third-party apps through traditional means. Instead, the iPhone – and subsequently, the iPad – has remained a closed platform. And for 10 years now, the App Store has been that platform’s sole gatekeeper.

Apple’s vision for the App Store has always been driven by privacy and security. Rather than sending users out to a host of unvetted websites to find software that may or may not be what it claims, the App Store was a single unified market for approved, malware-free software to live. As a user, you could download any app in the confidence that it wouldn’t be able to bring harm to your device – and you could do so without providing your credit card details to anyone but Apple.

Apple created and has maintained the safety of its closed platform thanks to its thorough review procedures and guidelines. Every app on the App Store must follow Apple’s rules, which for the most part is widely accepted as a good thing. If an app’s aims are nefarious, it should be rejected by Apple and, hence, not allowed in public view. However, throughout the App Store’s life, there have regularly been controversial app rejections that stirred up the Apple community. Here are a few of those controversies.

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Affinity Designer Debuts on iPad as a Full-Featured Graphic Design Tool

Nearly one year ago, Serif released Affinity Photo for the iPad as a full-featured photo editing powerhouse. Unlike what companies such as Adobe do, where a Mac app like Photoshop is broken down into less powerful versions on iOS, Affinity Photo was brought to the iPad with no compromises whatsoever. Today, that same philosophy is bringing us Serif’s second major iPad app: Affinity Designer.

Where Affinity Photo focuses on photo editing, Affinity Designer is a vector-based illustration tool. And with full support for the Apple Pencil, iOS 11’s drag and drop, and system technologies like Metal, the app looks like the ultimate portable design studio.

For a limited time, Affinity Designer is available at a launch price of $13.99, 30% off the regular price of $19.99. If this kind of app in any way interests you, it looks like a steal at this price. One important note is that, similar to Affinity Photo, due to the power demanded by Affinity Designer, it’s only available on a select number of iPad models: all iPad Pros, plus the iPad Air 2, and the 5th and 6th generation iPad.

John Giannandrea, Former Google Executive, Is Apple’s Chief of Machine Learning and AI Strategy

Earlier this year The New York Times reported that Apple had made a big new hire: John Giannandrea, at the time Google’s Chief of Search and Artificial Intelligence. Today Giannandrea officially joined the ranks of Apple’s leadership page on Apple.com.

As part of Giannandrea’s employee profile, we learn his official title with Apple: ‘Chief of Machine Learning and AI Strategy.’ He reports directly to Tim Cook and oversees technologies related to Siri and machine learning.

Breaking the news of Giannandrea’s new role, Matthew Panzarino wrote for TechCrunch:

Apple is creating a new AI/ML team that brings together its Core ML and Siri teams under one leader in John Giannandrea.
[…]
The internal structures of the Siri and Core ML teams will remain the same, but they will now answer to Giannandrea. Apple’s internal structure means that the teams will likely remain integrated across the org as they’re wedded to various projects including developer tools, mapping, Core OS and more. ML is everywhere, basically.

The last two years especially, AI and machine learning have been heavy focuses of Apple, particularly on iOS. Giannandrea is a major hire for the company, and while it may take some time for his impact to be seen in user-facing products, bringing together Siri and machine learning teams under this new leader is a key step toward realizing future potential in an area that’s bound to grow more important as time passes.

New Videos Highlight the iPad’s Power and Flexibility in Common Situations

Today Apple launched four new 15-second ads, each of which highlights the iPad’s capabilities in common domains – travel, notes, paperwork, and portability – compared to common tools in those same settings.

Two of the ads showcase the iPad’s usefulness as a paperless solution in the workplace and at school. While other employees and students wrangle with messy desks full of disorganized papers, the iPad users in the ads access all their documents and books from the compact tablet. Another ad takes place on an airplane, where flyers have tray tables that are over-crowded with their meal and laptops – the iPad Pro user, however, simply collapses the Smart Keyboard and uses the iPad in tablet mode to free up more space. Finally, the last ad shows users packing overstuffed bags with items like books, while the iPad user easily throws their sleek device into a backpack.

Apple clearly wants to convey how the iPad can make people’s lives easier and more organized – a fitting message during a season packed with travel and back-to-school plans.

Before the App Store: the “Sweet Solution” of Web Apps and Developers’ Relentless Passion

Apple has a history of shipping 1.0 products that are amazingly great in some ways, and shockingly undeveloped in others. The iPhone, juggernaut of Apple products, was no exception. When it launched, the iPhone was a smartphone like no other, setting a new standard for what pocket computers could do. But in spite of its astounding achievements, one black eye on the product’s otherwise-stellar launch is that it offered no access to third-party apps.

The App Store as we know it today didn’t exist on the iPhone’s day one. On the path of creating a device that would change the world, Steve Jobs and his team neglected one important point: the developer story. Perhaps this was a problem of Apple’s own making – if the iPhone hadn’t been such an impressive product, there wouldn’t have been much demand for native third-party apps. But it was an impressive product, so the demand was substantial, leaving Apple with a big problem on its hands.

Developers, understandably, were excited about the potential of what they could do with the first product that lived up to its name as a true _smart_phone. Yet between the iPhone’s unveiling in January 2007 and its release nearly six months later, there was nary a hint of an iPhone SDK (software development kit). Instead, Apple shared what it infamously called a “sweet solution” for third-party apps on iPhone: web apps.

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Shortcuts App Beta Arriving through TestFlight Soon→

Today Apple updated the download page of its developer website with an option to request access to the TestFlight beta version of iOS 12’s Shortcuts app. This was first discovered by Steve Troughton-Smith:

The release notes for beta 1 of Shortcuts confirm that Workflow users who install the new beta will have their existing workflows imported into Shortcuts, as Federico previously noted.

Up until now, the Shortcuts app has made no appearance in existing iOS 12 beta releases. This was unsurprising because Shortcuts is going to be released as an App Store download, but it was unclear whether beta testers would be given the chance to gain access to the Shortcuts app before its public release. Fortunately, if you’re an Apple developer, the answer is officially yes.

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Apple Celebrates the App Store’s 10th Anniversary→

Next week the App Store turns 10. Ahead of that momentous date, Apple has published a new retrospective feature on what the last 10 years have been like:

When Apple introduced the App Store on July 10, 2008 with 500 apps, it ignited a cultural, social and economic phenomenon that changed how people work, play, meet, travel and so much more. Over the past decade, the App Store has created a safe place for users of all ages to get the very best apps and a vibrant app economy for developers of all sizes, from all over the world, to thrive. Today, customers in 155 countries are visiting the App Store more often, staying longer and downloading and using more apps than ever before.

While there have been many notable moments since apps first came to iPhone and later iPad, the milestones and testimonials below reflect some of the most significant over the past 10 years — defining how the App Store democratized software distribution and transformed how we live every day.

The article includes quotes from developers who have published their work on the App Store over the last 10 years, as well as from Apple executives, creators like Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto, and more. These quotes are framed within the following 11 topics of the App Store’s impact:

I. The App Store Opens Doors for Developers, Puts an All New Experience in the Hands of Customers
II. Mobile-First Businesses Thrive
III. Gaming Takes Off, Reaches New Fans
IV. In-App Purchase, Subscriptions Unlock Experiences
V. Streaming Entertainment Takes Off
VI. Creativity, Productivity and Education Soar Beyond Office, Classroom Walls
VII. Health, Fitness and Wellness Apps Surge in Popularity
VIII. Accessibility Apps Empower Communities
IX. Coding Inspires Future Generations
X. New App Store Features Encourage Discovery
XI. The AR Revolution Awaits

10 is a landmark year, and the App Store has a particularly warm place in the hearts of the MacStories team. We have some special celebration plans coming next week, and can’t wait to share them with you.

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