Apple Retail Chief Angela Ahrendts Leaving Company, Replaced by Deirdre O’Brien→

Apple has announced a major change to its executive team: Angela Ahrendts, the company’s Senior Vice President of Retail, is leaving the company this April. Stepping in to fill her big shoes is Deirdre O’Brien, whose title before today was Vice President of People; O’Brien is now taking on the role of Senior Vice President of Retail + People.

In her expanded role, Deirdre will bring her three decades of Apple experience to lead the company’s global retail reach, focused on the connection between the customer and the people and processes that serve them. She will continue to lead the People team, overseeing all People-related functions, including talent development and Apple University, recruiting, employee relations and experience, business partnership, benefits, compensation, and inclusion and diversity.

Ahrendts is one of Apple’s most visible executives, with regular appearance at keynote events and frequent interactions with Apple retail staff through in-house messaging. Her five years at Apple have made a significant impact on the company, as she oversaw both the introduction of the Today at Apple program and a new design language for Apple’s retail stores, which have grown more physically impressive and unique during her time.

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New Emoji List for 2019 Announced

Representations of what to expect from 2019's new emoji, created by Emojipedia.

Representations of what to expect from 2019’s new emoji, created by Emojipedia.

The Unicode Consortium, which is responsible for approving each year’s list of new emoji, has released the full details on 2019’s upcoming batch. According to Emojipedia, there are 230 new emoji in total. These include a sloth, waffle, skunk, sari, white and brown hearts, and much more. Among the most noteworthy additions is a group of emoji representing people with disabilities, which was actually proposed by Apple last March. These include a deaf person, person with cane, person in motorized or manual wheelchair, a guide dog, and much more. One other significant addition is newfound flexibility for the emoji of two people holding hands, which can now utilize varying skin tone and gender combinations.

Emojipedia has put together a great video previewing what each of these new emoji may look like when they arrive on our devices later this year.

The last two years, Apple has launched the newest emoji in iOS 11.1 and 12.1, respectively. If the company follows suit this year, we should expect to get our hands on these new emoji with iOS 13.1 some time in mid-to-late fall.

Hullo Pillow: Your Favorite Pillow Guaranteed [Sponsor]

Being comfortable is part of getting a good night’s sleep, and a big part of that is your pillow. Hullo Pillow is a buckwheat pillow that allows you to adjust its shape and thickness to perfectly support your head and neck reducing pressure on your muscles, nerves, and discs.

Buckwheat pillows, which have been used for centuries, are popular in Japan, and they’re a staple of fancy hotels that offer ‘pillow menus.’ If you haven’t tried one before, a buckwheat pillow is different from standard foam or down pillows. It’s a little like a bean bag that allows you to adjust the pillow’s shape and thickness to your liking.

Feather and foam pillows get hot, humid, and compress into a thin pancake requiring you to fold it in half or use multiple pillows to support your head and neck. That doesn’t happen with Hullo. The buckwheat keeps your pillow cool and shapes itself to the contours of your head and neck to give you the support you need throughout the night.

Hullo offers a more natural way to sleep too. Instead of resting your head on a sack of plucked bird feathers or petroleum-based foam, Hullo uses natural buckwheat grown and milled in the United States and a certified organic cotton case.

Hullo is so sure you’ll love your new pillow, you can sleep on it for 60 days and if it isn’t for you, send it back for a refund. Also, if you buy more than one pillow, you can save up to $20 per pillow depending on the size you order. Shipping is free, and 1% of all profits are donated to The Nature Conservancy, so your purchase is helping the planet too.

You deserve a comfortable night’s sleep. Go to Hullo Pillow’s website now to learn more, read customer reviews, and order a pillow today.

Our thanks to Hullo Pillow for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Apple to Celebrate Heart Month in February with Activity Challenge and Today at Apple Sessions

Apple announced this morning two ways it plans to celebrate Heart Month in February. First, a new Activity Challenge for Apple Watch users will run from February 8-14, rewarding those who close their Exercise ring each day of that week-long period with a special badge and iMessage stickers. Second, Apple will be utilizing its retail Today at Apple sessions to educate consumers on their heart health.

In recognition of Heart Month, Apple will host special Today at Apple sessions, “Heart Health with Apple,” in stores in New York, Chicago and San Francisco with celebrity fitness trainer Jeanette Jenkins, Sumbul Desai, MD, Apple’s vice president of Health, Nancy Brown, CEO of the American Heart Association, Jay Blahnik, senior director of fitness for health technologies, and Julz Arney and Craig Bolton from the Apple Fitness Technologies team. Attendees will hear a discussion about heart health and participate in a new Health & Fitness Walk, which was co-created with Jeanette for participants to take a brisk walk with Apple Watch around their community.

These special sessions will be limited to a single session each in the three listed cities, with Apple Union Square hosting on February 11 at 6:00pm, Apple Williamsburg on February 21 at 4:30pm, and Apple Michigan Avenue hosting the final session on February 27 at 6:00pm.

Health is an area of growing importance to Apple, as the evolution of the Apple Watch over its life has shown. Because of that, educating users on heart health via Today at Apple seems like a natural move for the company. And it’s a safe bet we’ll start seeing more health-focused sessions introduced in the future.

Inspecting JSON Files on iOS with Jayson

In writing about Workflow (then) and Shortcuts (now) for a living, at some point I realized that if I wanted to build more complex shortcuts to either deal with web APIs or store data in iCloud Drive, I had to learn the basics of parsing and writing valid JSON. The format is behind most of the web API-based Shortcuts I have shared here on MacStories1 and is one of the techniques I recently explained on Club MacStories when I built a shortcut to save highlights from Safari Reading List. The beauty of JSON is that, unlike XML, it’s cleaner and more readable – provided you have a dedicated viewer that supports syntax highlighting and/or options to navigate between objects and inspect values. There’s no shortage of such utilities on macOS, but this is the kind of niche that still hasn’t been fully explored on iOS by developers of pro apps. That changes today with the launch of Jayson, created by Simon Støvring.

Readers of MacStories may be familiar with Støvring’s name – he’s the developer behind one of the most powerful and innovative pro apps of 2018, the excellent Scriptable for iOS. For this reason, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Jayson, a project that was born out of Støvring’s personal frustration with the lack of a modern JSON viewer for iOS, has that same spark of innovation and integration with native iOS functionalities that set Scriptable apart last year. If you do any kind of work with JSON on your iPhone or iPad, you need Jayson in your life, and here’s why.

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Connected, Episode 228: Oh No, Ovo!→

Apple and Facebook try to outdo each other in who can have the more terrible week, and Stephen test drives the iPhone XR.

In this week’s episode of Connected, we discuss at length the latest Facebook privacy scandal and share our thoughts in the aftermath of Apple’s recently discovered FaceTime bug. You can listen here.

Sponsored by:

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Revisiting Evernote: Checking in with the Former Note-Taking King

Evernote is still alive. The popular note-taking app celebrated its tenth birthday last summer, but the last few of those years haven’t been easy, with two CEO transitions and sizable layoffs at several points. Still, the core product keeps pushing forward.

I last reviewed Evernote in early 2017, when version 8 of its iOS app launched as a major redesign. I concluded then that one of the service’s greatest strengths, particularly when compared with competitors like Apple Notes, is that Evernote strives to be more than just a note-taking app. It’s a solid way to take notes, but it also aims to make those notes easily accessible, to create connections between notes, and ultimately serve as a valuable aid to productivity.

Though Evernote has retained a large user base all these years later, and in fact became cash flow positive nearly two years ago, there are a lot of former users who left the service long ago and haven’t looked back. Personally, while I’ve kept an eye on Evernote over the years, I never put its recent updates to the test – until recently, that is, when I set out to revisit the popular note-taker.

As part of checking back in on Evernote, there were three core features I wanted to focus on evaluating: Templates, Context, and Dark Mode. These are some of the major developments Evernote has touted in its last few years of work, and they make for an interesting case study on the company’s future direction.

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Facebook Receives Retribution from Apple for Violation of Enterprise Program Guidelines→

Facebook is in the news again, and unsurprisingly it’s not the good kind of publicity.

Yesterday Josh Constine of TechCrunch exposed a “Facebook Research” VPN that Facebook has been using to harvest extensive phone data from users age 13 to 35 in exchange for payment from the company of up to $20/month. The practice was made possible by Facebook’s enterprise developer certificate from Apple, but after the story came to light, Apple swiftly responded by revoking that certificate from Facebook and publicly condemning the company’s misuse of Apple’s Enterprise Developer Program. That action caused the immediate end of the Facebook Research initiative on Apple platforms, but it also has reportedly brought widespread consequences throughout the entirety of Facebook’s company operations. Tom Warren and Jacob Kastrenakes, reporting for The Verge:

Apple has shut down Facebook’s ability to distribute internal iOS apps, from early releases of the Facebook app to basic tools like a lunch menu. A person familiar with the situation tells The Verge that early versions of Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and other pre-release “dogfood” (beta) apps have stopped working, as have other employee apps, like one for transportation. Facebook is treating this as a critical problem internally, we’re told, as the affected apps simply don’t launch on employees’ phones anymore.
[…]
Revoking a certificate not only stops apps from being distributed on iOS, but it also stops apps from working. And because internal apps by the same organization or developer may be connected to a single certificate, it can lead to immense headaches like the one Facebook now finds itself in where a multitude of internal apps have been shut down.

This is more than a slap on the wrist, but it seems like a fitting response to Facebook’s blatant abuse of the Apple enterprise agreement. My main hope is that it causes Facebook to think twice before implementing any similarly shady initiatives in the future.

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