When I first tried Meet, Sunrise’s latest addition to their popular calendar app, I didn’t think it made much sense as a custom keyboard. Now, a few months later, Meet has become my favorite way to check on my availability from any app and create one-to-one meetings. With Meet, the Sunrise team has created one of the most innovative mobile calendar features I’ve seen in years.
Sunrise Launches ‘Meet’, a Custom Keyboard to Schedule Meetings
Horizon 3: Calendar + Weather
Originally released in early 2013, Horizon was a calendar app developed by Kyle Rosenbluth that integrated local weather forecasts with your calendar, giving you a more contextual representation of events that contained location information. Today, Horizon 3 has been released on the App Store with a brand new design, support for natural language searches, and a timeline view that still displays your upcoming events alongside weather conditions and locations.
Facebook Introduces Instant Articles→
Late yesterday Facebook launched Instant Articles, a new feature for Facebook’s iPhone app that will allow select media partners including the New York Times, National Geographic and BuzzFeed to publish articles on Facebook itself. For users, the big advantage is that Instant Articles will load much quicker than an webpage and Instant Articles can also include interactive elements.
As more people get their news on mobile devices, we want to make the experience faster and richer on Facebook. People share a lot of articles on Facebook, particularly on our mobile app. To date, however, these stories take an average of eight seconds to load, by far the slowest single content type on Facebook. Instant Articles makes the reading experience as much as ten times faster than standard mobile web articles.
Along with a faster experience, Instant Articles introduces a suite of interactive features that allow publishers to bring their stories to life in new ways. Zoom in and explore high-resolution photos by tilting your phone. Watch auto-play videos come alive as you scroll through stories. Explore interactive maps, listen to audio captions, and even like and comment on individual parts of an article in-line.
The Verge has a great in-depth look at Instant Articles, including a terrific 4 minute introduction video which also features Facebook’s Mike Matas.
Facebook is currently partnering with nine media organisations, but there’s no doubt more will be added over time. The launch partners are: The New York Times, National Geographic, BuzzFeed, NBC, The Atlantic, The Guardian, BBC News, Spiegel and Bild.
If you want to read an Instant Article yourself, just open the Facebook app on your iPhone, go to the Facebook page of one of the media partners and scroll until you see an article with a gold bookmark in the top-right corner. I’ve had a look at a few and they certainly load faster than a typical article would load, and they also look great, particularly with some of the new interactive elements.
Pedometer++ Hits One Million Downloads→
David Smith, on his app Pedometer++ hitting one million downloads on the App Store:
Pedometer++ has become one of the most important apps in my portfolio and probably the app I’m now most widely known for.
It also carries with it an attribute that I’ve never experienced with any of my other projects—a sense of doing genuine good. I have had countless reports of how it has help people get healthier, recover from injury or lose weight. These are the stories that really impact me as a developer. The thought that something I made in my basement can have extended and improved people’s lives is truly remarkable.
David’s commitment to the app through the years is equally remarkable. Pedometer++ is one of the apps that is helping me live a healthier lifestyle, and it improved so much since the original version (which we first covered here).
No Ecosystem Is an Island: Google, Microsoft, Facebook & Adobe’s iOS Apps
Apple doesn’t make a single Android or Windows Phone app, and makes barely anything for Windows. But Apple’s reluctance to develop on other platforms hasn’t stopped Google and Microsoft from bringing their own apps across to iOS. That shouldn’t be any surprise at all, given the different business strategies the three take. But what might be surprising is the extent to which Google and Microsoft have committed to bringing apps to iPhone and iPad users.
You are no doubt aware of the big apps from Microsoft (Word, Outlook and Minecraft) and Google (Gmail, Maps, Calendar), but the reality is that these two companies alone have over 150 apps available on the iOS App Store today. For good measure, I’ve also taken a look at the iOS development efforts from Adobe and Facebook, which are also significant.
NYT Now: Your Guide to the News [Sponsor]
Never know what news is the most important to read about? Do you spend too much time searching your social media accounts looking for reliable news? Head to the App Store and download NYT Now for free.
NYT Now is the fastest way to get caught up with the news, with headlines and story summaries that get readers caught up quickly. Designed for iPhone and on-the-go consumption, NYT Now offers a selection of the best articles from The New York Times, as well as stories from around the web curated and hand-picked by a team of NYT editors. NYT Now even includes a daily Morning Briefing, designed to prepare you for the day ahead.
The New York Times released version 2.0 of NYT Now today, which I’ve personally been testing for the past week and find excellent. The biggest news is that the app is now completely free with no need to pay a subscription and no cap on the number of articles you can read – it’s free and unlimited.
The app itself has received a refreshed user interface, with cards that indicate what an article is about and a sharing menu that supports iOS 8 extensions and even the ability to share articles with image previews on Twitter (see example). I find the app to offer a great mix of NYT content and editorial picks from the web: I’ve been discovering and saving articles through NYT Now, and I appreciate the variety and balance of topics and authors presented in the app on a daily basis.
Head to the App Store and download NYT Now or visit nytnow.com to learn more. Remember, it’s now completely free to download and use.
Our thanks to The New York Times for sponsoring MacStories this week.
Apple Announces New Environmental Initiatives in China→
In a press release from earlier today, Apple announced two new environmental initiatives in China. The first is a partnership with the World Wildlife Fund to increase the amount of responsibly managed forests in China, aiming to protect as much as 1 million acres of forestland.
“Forests, like energy, can be renewable resources,” said Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of Environmental Initiatives. “We believe we can run on naturally renewable resources and ensure that we protect—and create—as much sustainable working forest as needed to produce the virgin paper in our product packaging. This is an important step toward that goal and our commitment to leave the world better than we found it.”
The second initiative is a project to build two 20-megawatt solar farms that will generate up to 80 million kilowatt hours of electricity per year. In its press release, Apple also provided an update on their renewable energy progress, noting that 87 percent of Apple’s global operations today run on renewable energy.
“We’ve set an example by greening our data centers, retail stores and corporate offices, and we’re ready to start leading the way toward reducing carbon emissions from manufacturing,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “This won’t happen overnight—in fact it will take years—but it’s important work that has to happen, and Apple is in a unique position to take the initiative toward this ambitious goal. It is a responsibility we accept. We are excited to work with leaders in our supply chain who want to be on the cutting edge of China’s green transformation.”
Today’s announcement is just the latest in an increasingly long list of large projects Apple has undertaken to generate renewable energy and be environmentally responsible. I’d be fascinated to see if anyone in the renewable energy industry has done some research on just how significant Apple’s efforts have been, compared to other multinationals and governments.
Apple’s Spotlight Location Icons→
Fascinating look by Rusty Mitchell (via Sebastiaan de With) at Apple’s location icons, used in Spotlight for iOS 8:
In our iOS 8 UI Kit for Illustrator post, I mentioned becoming obsessed with finding all of Apple’s new Spotlight Location icons. I was excited to discover these icons because they are the first large-scale generalized set of pictograms created by Apple, and I was curious to see the depth of the set and how harmonious it is when viewed together. To date I’ve been able to locate 96 of these icons, but there are a few that I have seen in Maps that I haven’t been able to trigger in Spotlight. I’m sure there are still others that I have yet to find at all. In this post, I want to take a moment to highlight a little about the icons and then — since you can only search Spotlight for nearby locations — give some instructions on how to create a GPX file and use Xcode’s handy Simulate Location feature to search for location types that may not be available near you.
As Sebastiaan also notes, I’d love an in-depth look at Apple’s landmark icons used in Maps but absent from Spotlight results (here’s the Colosseum in Rome and Duomo in Milan, as shown in Apple Maps).
Redesigning Overcast’s Apple Watch App→
Great post by Marco Arment detailing how he redesigned Overcast for Apple Watch after he actually tried the device:
I’m much happier with the new app.
Trying to match the structure of the iOS app was a mistake. For most types of apps, the Apple Watch today is best thought of not as a platform to port your app to, but a simple remote control or viewport into your iPhone app.
My initial app was easier to conceptualize and learn, and it closely matched the iOS app. But it just wasn’t very good in practice, and wasn’t usually better than taking out my phone.
I wonder how many developers will go through the same process after using the Watch on a daily basis.