Continuing my exploration of iOS 8 technologies with a focus on extensions, a few days ago I came across WhatFont, the new iOS version of a popular desktop tool. As the name suggests, WhatFont lets you identify fonts in Safari easily and without having to go look at source code or style sheets.
WhatFont iOS 8 Extension Identifies Fonts in Safari
Spotify Year in Music 2014→
The year is about to end, and as usual Spotify has launched a Year in Music microsite for global and personal trends.
The global stats are cool, but largely unsurprising. What I really like is the breakdown of your personal listening habits by genre, artist, day of the week, season, and more. You can even see the split between desktop and mobile device streaming, and, if you’re a Premium subscriber, the location of your favorite artists on a chart.
I’m a big fan of Spotify’s use of data to improve algorithms, and this is another nice experiment. If you’re into this kind of visualizations, I also recommend the excellent Exist.io service, which supports Spotify (and many other wearable devices/apps).
As for my top songs:
Death Cab for Cutie and Tegan and Sara? Looks about right.
Apple Watch Website Update→
I missed this update to the Apple Watch website when Apple refreshed it last week (via TUAW). The Watch microsite has been updated with more details for timekeeping and fitness features, revealing more details about customizable complications, watch faces, fitness and activity tracking, and more.
Many watches include a few specialized functions — known in watchmaking as complications — that go beyond telling the time. But Apple Watch comes with a full range that can be added to most faces. Some complications are traditional, such as moon phases or sunrises and sunsets. And some are unique to Apple Watch, like stock quotes, weather reports, your next calendar event, and a daily activity tracker. When you tap a complication, Apple Watch opens the corresponding app.
Use the built-in speaker and microphone for quick chats, or seamlessly transfer calls to your iPhone for longer conversations. To mute an incoming call, just cover Apple Watch with your hand.
Apple Watch shows your daily activity at a glance. To see your progress and trends over longer periods of time, there’s Fitness, an Apple Watch companion app on your iPhone. You can view your activity history, workouts, and achievements by the day, week, or month. And the Fitness app can share your activity and workout data with the Health app on your iPhone, where it can be accessed by your favorite third-party health and fitness apps.
You can read our original overview of the Apple Watch here.
Goodbye, Drafts Widget (For Now?)
Powered By Extensions, Stacks Converts Currencies Inside iOS 8’s Safari
I live in Italy, but MacStories’ audience is primarily US-based, which has posed a few interesting problems over the years. One of them1 has been the constant conversion between currencies: I get paid in US Dollars, but I need to convert to Euros for my bank account; or, I often need to purchase products sold in USD, and I have to find the equivalent in my currency. I’ve now learned how to calculate currency conversions quickly by myself, and, obviously, I’ve tried a number of currency converters on the App Store. Lately, I switched to PCalc as my go-to calculator and currency/unit converter thanks to its custom keys.
Stacks 2.0, developed by WapleStuff (the same creators of Calzy), takes advantage of iOS 8’s new Extensibility features to provide one of the most unique and convenient ways to convert currencies I’ve ever tried. Stacks 2.0 integrates with Safari, using an action extension to convert currencies directly in a webpage you’re looking at.
Getting Started with JavaScript for Automation on Yosemite
Last month I wrote an article for MacStories on the extensibility and automation changes in OS X Yosemite. The second half was a basic overview of JavaScript for Automation (JXA) (the new addition to OS X scripting languages) joining AppleScript. Before writing that section of the article, I wanted to learn the basics of JXA in order to be sure that I understood what I was writing about and wasn’t just blindly summarizing the contents of the JXA release notes and WWDC Session Video.
Since JXA is so new, there obviously was not much information to go by. I’ve never gotten around to learning AppleScript, so articles based on the classic OS X automation language were not much help either, although I’m not sure how much they would apply anyway. The result was quite a few wasted hours trying to figure out some of the most basic parts of JXA, such as proper syntax of method calls, which method calls worked with which apps, and how to identify UI Elements in order to trigger them with UI automation. Eventually I was able to figure these things out, so now I’m back to share what I learned.
Stephen Hawking and SwiftKey→
Fantastic story from the SwiftKey blog:
SwiftKey built a personal “language model” for Professor Hawking based on his extensive works – including documents not published in the public domain. The software learns from him to ensure it predicts contextually relevant words. It is also able to analyze the content of the specific book or lecture that he might be working on, further tailoring its predictions and autocorrections.
SwiftKey estimates that their technology has “roughly doubled” Professor Hawking’s speech rate – all because SwiftKey can understand how he uses language. I found SwiftKey’s predictions and personalizations based on social accounts to be impressive in their iOS 8 custom keyboard, but this is a whole new level (and SwiftKey says they’ve been collaborating closely with Intel for this, too).
A Great App for Recording Podcasts→
Allen Pike writes about an idea he had for a professional app dedicated to recording podcasts and interviews remotely to replace Skype:
Okay, so, crazy idea: why doesn’t our team at Steamclock build a Mac app that solves all of these problems? A replacement for Skype, Call Recorder, and all that crap, specifically designed for recording high fidelity interviews? Something that takes the pain out the process, but results in a higher quality end product? A polished, professional tool for people that take podcasts seriously?
Last winter I started investigating exactly this. I spoke with various podcasters whose work I enjoy, and they were incredibly enthusiastic. One said, and I quote, “Take all my money. No, really, this sounds amazing, like an app of my dreams, and I love it.” Okay, that’s a good sign. Every podcaster I talked to about the idea, even ones who weren’t doing double-enders, had various awesome feature ideas. I was giddy with excitement.
It’s sad that there may not be a huge market for a small independent studio to build this kind of product. I’ve been podcasting with Myke and Stephen for over a year now, and working around Skype’s limitations and connection problems is always a pain. Skype wasn’t meant to handle podcasts with multiple guests, but it somehow became the de facto standard because, at least on OS X, it’s still easier to host a Skype call with integrated audio and chat than use FaceTime Audio and Messages for the same task.
And let’s not even mention recording podcasts on iOS without having to use separate hardware or multiple devices. Perhaps someday there will be an app specifically built for podcasters. Like Allen writes, I would pay so much money for that.
ICONIC: A Photographic Tribute to Apple Innovation [Sponsor]
I’d like to tell you about a very cool coffee table book – it’s a book about Apple.
Back in 2009, a guy named Jonathan Zufi collected and photographed pretty much every single product Apple has ever made since 1976 and produced this stunning coffee table book. It’s called ICONIC: A Photographic Tribute to Apple Innovation.
If there was ever a perfect gift for the Apple fan – or history buff – this is it. 350 beautifully designed pages and hundreds of fantastic photos of basically every product Apple has ever made – every desktop, laptop, iOS device, printer, and even the old gaming devices, it’s all in here and I guarantee you’ll see some products that you didn’t even know Apple made. There’s an amazing chapter about prototypes and there’s also a chapter on packaging – all the boxes that came with all this amazing technology.
I personally own a copy of the original ICONIC book, and it’s indeed stunning. The book feels great, photographs are professional and well laid out – I had no idea some Apple products existed, but ICONIC provided a great visual intro.
ICONIC includes a foreword by Steve Wozniak and hundreds of amazing quotes from other Apple pundits – it’s really something.
The book comes in a few different versions including a version in a book case that looks like an old Apple floppy drive, and a new ‘UItimate Edition’ that ships in a white clamshell with an embedded glowing standby light that pulses just like the old sleep indicators on the MacBook Pros. It’s really worth seeing so visit iconicbook.com and take a look.
You can order the Classic Edition at Amazon, but if you decide you want the Classic Plus, Special, or Ultimate Editions then enter the code macstories when you check out for a 10% discount.
My thanks to ICONIC for sponsoring MacStories this week.