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iWatch Potential→

iWatch Potential

Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini, Apple employee #66 and founder of the Human Interface Group, has published a great post on the potential of the “iWatch” – a so-called smartwatch Apple could release in the near future (via MG Siegler). While I haven’t been exactly excited by the features offered by current smartwatches – namely, the Pebble and other Bluetooth-based watches – the possibilities explored by Bruce made me think about a future ecosystem where, essentially, the iPhone will “think” in the background and the iWatch will “talk” directly to us. I believe that having bulky smartwatches with high-end CPUs won’t be nearly as important as ensuring a reliable, constant connection between lightweight wearable devices and the “real” computers in our pocket – smartphones.

The entire post is worth a read, so I’ll just highlight a specific paragraph about health tracking:

Having the watch facilitate a basic test like blood pressure monitoring would be a god-send, but probably at prohibitive cost in dollars, size, and energy. However, people will write apps that will carry out other medical tests that will end up surprising us, such as tests for early detection of tremor, etc. The watch could also act as a store-and-forward data collector for other more specialized devices, cutting back the cost of specialized sensors that would then need be little more than a sensor, a Blue Tooth chip, and a battery. Because the watch is always with us, it will be able to deliver a long-term data stream, rather than a limited snapshot, providing insight often missing from tests administered in a doctor’s office.

Dealing with all sorts of blood, temperature, and pressure tests on a regular basis, I can tell you that data sets that span weeks and months – building “archives” of a patient with graphs and charts, for instance – has, nowadays, too much friction. Monitoring blood pressure is still done with dedicated devices that most people don’t know how to operate. But imagine accurate, industry-certified, low-energy sensors capable of monitoring this kind of data and sending it back automatically to an iPhone for further processing, and you can see how friction could be removed while a) making people’s lives better and b) building data sets that don’t require any user input (you’d be surprised to know how much data can be extrapolated from the combination of “simple” tests like blood pressure monitoring and body temperature).

The health aspect of a possible “iWatch” is just a side of a device that Apple may or may not release any time soon. While I’m not sure about some of the ideas proposed by Bruce (passcode locks seem overly complex when the devices themselves could have biometric scanners built-in; Siri conversations in public still feel awkward and the service is far from responsive, especially on 3G), I believe others are definitley in the realm of technologically feasible and actually beneficial to the users (and Apple). Imagine crowdsourced data from the iWatch when applied to Maps or the iWatch being able to “tell us” about upcoming appointments or reminders when we’re driving so we won’t have to reach out to an iPhone (combine iWatch vibrations and “always-on” display with Siri Eyes Free and you get the idea).

As our iPhones grow more powerful and connected on each generation, I like to think that, in a not-so distant future, some of that power will be used to compute data from wearable devices that have a more direct connection to us and the world around us.

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Horizon Integrates Weather With Your Calendar→

Horizon Integrates Weather With Your Calendar

Horizon

Horizon

My wish for a better iPhone calendar app was granted by Flexibits with Fantastical, but Horizon, a new app by Kyle Rosenbluth, is worth a mention. Horizon integrates weather information with your calendar, providing an elegant overview of events and weather forecasts in a clean interface.

Horizon’s main screen shows a list of the next few days in your calendar; you can swipe down on the month’s name in the title bar to bring up a 30-day overview of the current month. In month view, “today” has a gray indicator, and events are shown as thin colored lines: a day with only one event will have one line, while busier days will have multiple lines. You can tap & hold a day to quickly create an event, and you can swipe horizontally to switch to the previous or next month.

The core aspect of Horizon is how it mixes weather with event information. When creating a new event, the app uses Google location data (which I found to be the best provider here in Italy) to show a list of suggestions in a bar above the keyboard; once you’ve chosen a location, Horizon will fetch a weather forecast (up to 14 days out). The app was created for people who deal with appointments in multiple locations on a daily basis: by entering a single day’s view, you’ll see a list of all your upcoming events alongside their respective locations and weather forecasts. A colored bar at the top can be swiped to show more weather information for each event (a weather icon, temperature, and chance of rain).

I like how Horizon presents different data sets without cluttering the interface. The app comes with neat animations, a focus on current and future events (past days are hidden from the main list), and a night mode if you’re not into the default white color scheme. I highly recommend Horizon for people who wish to see calendar and weather information at a glance in a single screen. The app is $1.99 on the App Store.

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Instapaper Text Bookmarklet As Safari Reader Replacement On Chrome for iOS→

Instapaper Text Bookmarklet As Safari Reader Replacement On Chrome for iOS

Ever since I switched to Chrome as my primary browser on OS X and iOS, several readers asked me if I was missing the Reader functionality of Safari. Not really, because it was an easily fixable problem for me.

I use Instapaper to save articles for later. I like the app and like its text parser. However, few people know that the Instapaper Mobilizer – used by apps like Tweetbot – can also be used as a bookmarklet in any modern browser. Simply head over this page and install the Text bookmarklet; running the bookmarklet on a webpage will display it using Instapaper’s parser, but it won’t add it to your Instapaper account.

When I’m on Chrome for iOS and I stumble across a webpage I want to read without other elements besides text, I type “text” in the address bar and tap the Text bookmarklet (remember, you have to type bookmarklet names in Chrome). The nice thing about the Instapaper bookmarklet is that it’s fast, accurate, and because it returns a regular URL, the Chrome tab showing the parsed text will also be synced back to the desktop.

Last, a quick tip: when reading with Instapaper’s text view, you can tap & hold the top bar showing a webpage’s title to copy its URL (something that Chrome makes ridiculously hard to accomplish).

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Apple Announces 25 Billion Songs Sold On iTunes→

Apple Announces 25 Billion Songs Sold On iTunes

With a press release, Apple today announced 25 billion songs have been sold on the iTunes Store. The 25 billionth song was downloaded by Phillip Lüpke from Germany, who won a €10,000 iTunes gift card.

We are grateful to our users whose passion for music over the past 10 years has made iTunes the number one music retailer in the world,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services. “Averaging over 15,000 songs downloaded per minute, the iTunes Store connects music fans with their favorite artists, including global sensations like Adele and Coldplay and new artists like The Lumineers, on a scale we never imagined possible.

As detailed by Apple, the iTunes Store offers a catalogue of over 26 million songs in 119 countries. As we showed in our look at various entertainment ecosystems, Apple’s iTunes Store is the most popular one worldwide. The iTunes Music Store opened on April 28, 2003, which according to Wolfram Alpha is exactly 9 years, 9 months, and 9 days ago (3572 days).

Dividing by 3572 days, the iTunes Store averaged 6.99 million downloads per day, 81 downloads per second, and 4860 downloads per minute.

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Poster Adds Improved URL Scheme and 1Password Integration

Poster is my favorite iOS app to post articles to WordPress. I recently took a look at version 2.0 and the improvements developer Tom Witkin made to further streamline the app’s posting workflow. Today, Tom released another update that adds support for custom fields to the URL scheme and brings 1Password integration.

Like other apps have done in the past weeks, Poster now sports a 1Password button when setting up a new site that requires authentication. The button will take you directly to 1Password, searching for “wordpress” by default. Once you’ve found your login item, you can copy the password and go back to Poster. I believe this sort of non-forced integration is really nice and ultimately beneficial to the end user, as it makes using multiple apps for a single task less cumbersome. Read more

Instashare: Transfer Files the Easy Way

Instashare is a new iOS/Mac app by the folks over at Two Man Show, also known for their popular Finder style iOS app – iStorage 2. Instashare is a unique app for effortlessly transferring files between your iPhone or iPod touch and a Mac computer.

The iOS app is extremely well built. It has an interface consisting of three main pages that the user must swipe through to navigate the app. The first page displays the files you have available to share with other devices running Instashare; the second page gives you quick access to the photos in your Camera Roll; the third page is reserved for some basic settings, help documentations, and for the $0.99 In-App Purchase to disable ads. I made one transfer from my iPhone to my Mac, and immediately paid to remove ads because I knew this app would be a frequently used tool in my iOS workflow.

Instashare’s UI is clean and intuitive to use. Simply hold your finger down on any file or picture and you will be presented with a list of any nearby devices to which you can drag and drop your file. The drag and drop functionality along with the animations and user interface are a complete home run. Read more

Instagram Launches Feeds On The Web→

Instagram Launches Feeds On The Web

Following the launch of profiles back in November 2012, Instagram today announced the public availability of “feeds on the web” – that is, the possibility to browse your Instagram feed (of people you follow) from any web browser.

Your Instagram Feed on the web functions much like it does on your mobile phone. You can browse through the latest photos of people whom you follow with updates as people post new photos. Like photos by double clicking on them or pressing the like button. Or, engage in a conversation around a photo with inline commenting. Browse through pages of the most recent images to keep up on what’s happening with the people you follow in realtime. And shrink your browser down to a single column for your feed to look more like your mobile feed. Simply put, we’ve brought a simple, powerful, and beautiful Instagram browsing experience to the web.

I like how the new web feeds maintain Instagram’s focus on simplicity. Photos in your stream are centered and the website is responsive if you resize your browser’s window, meaning that iPad owners will finally have a way to view their feeds without using a third-party app. Instagram has translated the popular “double-tap to like” command into a double-click, but that doesn’t work on the iPad’s Safari browser for now. However, it’s also possible to like a photo by hitting the dedicated “heart” icon above the comments.

There are subtle and elegant animations both when you like a photo with a double-click or through the heart icon. From the main feed, you can follow links to users’ profiles or single photos; when you reach the bottom of the feed, you can press “Load More” to continue viewing older photos.

You can read more about web feeds on Instagram’s blog.

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Control YouTube Videos with Your Mac’s Media Keys with Tube Controller

Out of habit I tend to reach for my media keys when playing music and videos. While Rdio has certainly spoiled me with its compatibility I’ve yet to learn that the rest of the world, the web mainly, doesn’t work with the three most useful keys on my keyboard. While trying to pause YouTube videos with the play / pause key can lead to some egregious overdubs, it’s always a little frustrating when it doesn’t just work.

Enter Tube Controller, a free app from the Mac App Store for anyone running Snow Leopard and beyond. Interfacing with Chrome and Safari, Tube Controller sits in the menubar and enables your Mac’s media keys to fast forward, rewind, and pause videos on YouTube. It’s simple and convenient. You can’t hide the menubar icon, but you can tuck it away with Bartender if you’d like.

Tube Controller does a few clever things. Rewinding and fast forwarding YouTube videos is interesting because it always feels like it works perfectly. That is to say in just the right increments. It isn’t an exact amount, but Tube Controller seems rewind and fast forward in roughly 3.5-percent increments based on some quick math and plentiful watching of various length videos. Some more complicated algorithm looks at the duration of the video and slightly adjusts where needed.

The app is also aware of iTunes and what it’s doing. If it’s in the background, Tube Controller will keep eyes on YouTube, letting you play and pause the video even when you’re browsing other tabs or jumping into different apps. Once iTunes comes into the foreground or you close whatever tab your YouTube video is playing in, Tube Controller directs the media keys to control iTunes instead. Apps that implement their own media key solutions like Rdio will override the controls.

Without the Flash Player installed, I’ve found Tube Controller doesn’t work with the YouTube 5 extension I have enabled on Safari. Others, in the app’s review section and on Twitter, have noted that Tube Controller also doesn’t work in a full screen view. I’ve personally had success with Chrome and both its full screen and presentation modes, as well as YouTube’s full screen video player in that browser.

I don’t know why you would watch two YouTube videos at once, but if you do, Tube Controller handles it pretty well. The last video you viewed takes precedence over the other. It doesn’t work on web pages with embedded YouTube videos, however.

Tube Controller offers to launch when you log on and there’s a few other settings such as keeping your Mac awake while YouTube is playing (although I don’t think my Mac has ever gone to sleep while YouTube is playing) and changing the color of the menubar icon from black to red. You can enable and disable its functionality manually if you’d like.

I’m keeping Tube Controller running in the background (it uses up a measly amount of memory) for the convenience of using my media keys with YouTube. It’s certainly recommended if your play / pause reflexes are anything like mine. Download it from the Mac App Store.

Side note: The developer doesn’t have a personal site or a landing page up, but you can check out some of his other work on Bipolar (a game also available on the MAS).