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A Database of Intentions→

Speaking of Pinterest, I enjoyed this interview at The Atlantic with co-founder Evan Sharp:

And they are just getting started. They’ve got 30 billion pins now, half of them in the last six months. They’ve got 750 million boards. A full 75 percent of their traffic comes from mobile devices, and according to researchers, they’re the top traffic source to retailers’ websites and an important secondary source after Facebook for some media sites, like Buzzfeed.

In this wide-ranging interview, Evan Sharp talks here about what Pinterest is now, what it could become, the potential the company has to make money, and how Pinterest competes (or doesn’t) with Google and his old company Facebook.

I use Pinterest to collect videogame gadgets I want to buy, and I’ve been impressed with the discovery features powered by the enormous database of pins collected and categorized by users over the years. (YouTube videos and animated GIFs also look much nicer on Pinterest than other services.)

I can’t wait to see how the Safari extension for iOS 8 will make pinning even easier and more natural.

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Automating iOS: A Comprehensive and Updated Guide to Launch Center Pro

Note: The following is a complete update of our original Launch Center Pro guide published in April 2014. It has been rewritten and updated for the latest 2.3 and 2.3.1 versions of Launch Center Pro with new sections, actions, videos, and more.

Released in December of 2011, Launch Center (the predecessor to Launch Center Pro) was one of the first apps to put the spotlight on URL schemes and actions. Promising the ability to launch “actions” instead of just apps, Launch Center leveraged URL actions to minimize the number of taps it took to complete common tasks on a variety of iOS apps.

In those days, URL schemes were a fairly obscure facet of iOS, and few apps supported them. App Cubby (the developers of Launch Center and Launch Center Pro, now known as Contrast) wanted to change that. With Launch Center 1.2, they introduced the “Supported Apps” list: a list of apps supporting URL schemes with quick links to load actions from those schemes into Launch Center.

A few months later, in June of 2012, App Cubby released Launch Center Pro. The evolution of Launch Center, Launch Center Pro substituted the old list view for a 3x4 grid of large, easily tappable actions.

Where Launch Center had clearly been a utility, Launch Center Pro was a second home screen. Tapping icons in a grid is natural to every iOS user, and LCP took advantage of that to feel instantly familiar. As the slick new app made waves in the tech community, awareness and support of URL schemes began to grow. Launch Center Pro was the spark that would ignite the fire for URL schemes and iOS automation.

In the following months the iOS automation landscape grew as new players entered. Pythonista brought powerful Python scripting to iOS, and Greg Pierce’s x-callback-url specification was gaining steam among third-party apps. In January, 2013, Pierce released Drafts 2.5 (Drafts for iPad 1.5), adding custom URL actions via an action menu and powerful support for x-callback-url. This placed Drafts among the front runners for the most powerful iOS automation and inter-app communication possible on iOS. The rest of 2013 would not slow down the pace. Drafts, Launch Center Pro, and Pythonista continued to iterate and improve.

August 2013 brought Editorial, a new app by the same developer behind Pythonista, which revolutionized the field all over again. Not to be defeated, Agile Tortoise answered with Drafts 3.5, and App Cubby became Contrast as they released Launch Center Pro 2.0 and (soon after) Launch Center Pro for iPad. In May of 2014, Editorial 1.1 made waves once again, and was quickly followed by the huge Launch Center Pro 2.3 update (more on that later). Right now we have the next update to Drafts to look forward to, hopefully including the intriguing new action builder Greg Pierce has teased on Twitter.

Watching these developers fight it out has been an awesome experience. The intense, unceasing competition has brought iOS automation incredibly far in a ridiculously short amount of time. The power of these apps, the increasing support of URL schemes from third party developers and the attention from many independent websites such as MacStories, Unapologetic (my personal website), Geeks With Juniors, I Miss My Mac and many others which latched onto the idea and fostered it in the early days, have grown the field from a ridiculed thought (no one can do real work on an iPad!) to a subject often discussed in the tech press. Moreover, after this year’s WWDC, the new Extensions coming in iOS 8 could redefine the field once again, and I can’t wait to see how these developers will evolve their apps to compete in this impending new era of iOS automation.

Today, Launch Center Pro (or “LCP”) has come incredibly far from its rudimentary beginnings. Once a simple app launcher held back by the lack of support for more advanced actions from third party developers, the expanding interest in URL schemes have let Contrast focus on beefing up LCP’s internal functionalities. While on the surface it looks deceptively simple, and no more than a reskin of its original design from June 2012, 2014’s Launch Center Pro is brimming with hidden power and advanced capabilities.

Since no single resource has previously existed to bring you up to speed from a total beginner to a Launch Center Pro power user, my goal is to provide one for you here. Whether you had never even heard of Launch Center Pro until reading this, or you’re a seasoned veteran of the app, this article will familiarize you with LCP’s full feature set.

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Finding Bluetooth Devices with an iPhone→

I was sent this article by Jeff Gamet about finding a lost Fitbit using your iPhone by my friend Stephen, and, while I don’t use a Fitbit, I thought it’d be interesting to try the recommended app for my Jawbone UP24. Jeff used BTLExplorer, a free app, to measure the signal strength of the Fitbit tracker and find it using his iPhone, but I didn’t like the outdated UI shown in the screenshot, so I went looking for similar apps on the App Store.

As it turns out, there are a lot of free apps to find BLE devices on the App Store. I ended up installing three of them, but I’m fairly certain you’d be fine with just one.

Bluetooth Smart Scanner shows device names, RSSI, and it can play sounds as it scans for nearby Bluetooth devices. It’s got a pretty basic iOS 7 design, it gets the job done, and I like the sound option.

LightBlue is similar to Bluetooth Smart Scanner, but it has a nicer interface with signal bars and lighter typography. It doesn’t have sounds.

BLE Discovery shows the same stats, but it comes with the ability to display a real-time graph for RSSI dBm and a three-second rolling average. You can tell it’s working by walking around a device you’re tracking and seeing the lines rise to “Strong signal” as you get closer.

This quick experiment taught me that there’s an abundance of BLE trackers on the App Store and that Jeff’s method works. To test the apps, I asked my girlfriend to hide my Jawbone UP24 while I was in the kitchen; when I walked into our bedroom, I started looking at numbers on the screen, which kept getting higher as I got closer to our dog. She had hidden the UP24 under a cushion the dog was sleeping on; he wasn’t pleased about my request to get up because I needed my fitness tracker back.

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Integrating Women Into the Apple Community→

Brianna Wu, writing for Macworld last week:

But it’s very hard for me to reconcile this consumer-facing Apple with the development company that put no women on stage this year for either the 2014 Worldwide Developers Conference keynote or the more-technical State of the Union. It’s difficult to connect this Apple I know and trust with the endless sea of white, male faces I saw at Yerba Buena Gardens during this year’s WWDC Bash. Women buy Apple products. We develop on Apple hardware. But we’re still not yet well-represented in Apple’s developer community.

We, as a community, need to keep talking about this and then act on it, because the future needs to be better. Also from Brianna’s article:

Getting women into entrepreneurial positions is also critical. My own company, Giant Spacekat, has quickly risen as a powerful voice for women in game development. Not only am I in a position of industry credibility, I’m able to speak to my experiences, to hire women and advocate for other women. There need to be more Giant Spacekats in the industry.

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Apple’s Diversity Stats and Message→

Tim Cook, writing on Apple’s Diversity webpage in regard to newly-published stats:

Apple is committed to transparency, which is why we are publishing statistics about the race and gender makeup of our company. Let me say up front: As CEO, I’m not satisfied with the numbers on this page. They’re not new to us, and we’ve been working hard for quite some time to improve them. We are making progress, and we’re committed to being as innovative in advancing diversity as we are in developing our products.

A short film is available here. See also: inclusion inspires innovation.

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Jean-Louis Gassée on App Store Curation→

Jean-Louis Gassée, in his open letter to Tim Cook:

Instead of using algorithms to sort and promote the apps that you permit on your shelves, why not assign a small group of adepts to create and shepherd an App Store Guide, with sections such as Productivity, Photography, Education, and so on. Within each section, this team of respected but unnamed (and so “ungiftable”) critics will review the best-in-class apps. Moreover, they’ll offer seasoned opinions on must-have features, UI aesthetics, and tips and tricks. A weekly newsletter will identify notable new titles, respond to counter-opinions, perhaps present a developer profile, footnote the occasional errata and mea culpa…

Good points, and not the first time Gassée has used the Michelin guide as an example of the human curation that could improve the App Store’s recommendations.

Gassée doesn’t mention the upcoming Explore section of the iOS 8 App Store, and I believe that is going to provide an interesting mix of the classic category-based organization with curation through sub-categories and editorial picks for specific “app types”.

Unsurprisingly, Explore is going to replace Near Me in the middle tab of the App Store app for iOS 8: Near Me will be integrated into Explore, and it will likely extend as part of a new system to advertise apps relevant to your location on the Lock screen. Free of the limited scope of Near Me, Explore will enable the App Store team to offer a full-blown index of app categories that are easily accessible from a dedicated view.

It is my understanding that Explore will feature a mix of the curated app collections Apple has been building for the past couple of years and new filters for app types. Starting with the basic list of App Store categories, you’ll be able to drill down into more specific sub-categories with multiple levels of depth, such as “Music > DJs” or “Productivity > Task Management > GTD”.

While Apple may not be considering a full-blown, standalone App Store Guide as a regular publication, iOS 8’s Explore section is showing encouraging signs of new curation efforts that account for the incredible variety of the App Store’s catalogue, but it remains to be seen whether customers will take the time to explore the Explore section.

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Apple Debuts New ‘Your Verse’ iPad Adverts

Earlier today Apple posted two more iPad ads as part of their ongoing ‘Your Verse’ series. These latest two ads feature Detroit community activist Jason Hall and the Beijing-based electropop musicians of Yaoband. The ‘Your Verse’ series of ads tell stories about how different people use their iPad in their own unique ways, not only through a 30-second ad, but also through dedicated webpages that tell their stories in more detail.

Part of the ‘Your Verse’ webpages are dedicated to highlighting the apps used frequently by those featured in the ad. For Jason Hall that includes Prezi, Penultimate and Phoster.

It began simply enough. Just 10 friends on a Monday night ride. Soon it was 20. Then 30. In its second year, the ride grew from 130 to 300 cyclists in two weeks. As the numbers increased, Hall turned to his iPad and made it the command center for all things Slow Roll. “We use it for everything we do, from mapping to communicating to ordering new T-shirts,” he says.

For Yaoband they use iMaschine to capture various sounds that they use in their performances, whilst also using iMusic Studio and iMPC.

Inspired by the pulse of life in modern China, they started by capturing audio samples with iPad and turning them into progressive beats. Nothing was sacred as they flowed in and out of musical genres, mixing electronica with rock, rap, and traditional Chinese songs. “We were just like scientists in a lab, trying many formulas,” says Peter. “Every single song was a surprise, because it was always better than I imagined.”

You can view the full ads below, or view them on the ‘Your Verse’ pages for Yaoband and Jason Hall.

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Inside Apple’s Internal Training Program→

In “What Makes Apple, Apple,” another course that Mr. Nelson occasionally teaches, he showed a slide of the remote control for the Google TV, said an employee who took the class last year. The remote has 78 buttons. Then, the employee said, Mr. Nelson displayed a photo of the Apple TV remote, a thin piece of metal with just three buttons.

How did Apple’s designers decide on three buttons? They started out with an idea, Mr. Nelson explained, and debated until they had just what was needed — a button to play and pause a video, a button to select something to watch, and another to go to the main menu.

Update: In the original article I said that the Apple employees spoke “off the record” to Chen, this was a mistake and I apologise unreservedly for that.

Brian Chen of The New York Times has perhaps the most detailed look at Apple University to date after speaking to three Apple employees who agreed to speak about it, on the condition of anonymity. The entire article is fascinating and definitely deserves a read, but for those of you who aren’t familiar with Apple University, it is Apple’s internal training program. The program was started by Steve Jobs in an effort to embed Apple’s style of decision making into the company’s culture - as was revealed in Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography:

In order to institutionalize the lessons that he and his team were learning, Jobs started an in-house center called Apple University. He hired Joel Podolny, who was dean of the Yale School of Management, to compile a series of case studies analyzing important decisions the company had made, including the switch to the Intel microprocessor and the decision to open the Apple Stores. Top executives spent time teaching the cases to new employees, so that the Apple style of decision making would be embedded in the culture.

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